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Comment by OopsCriticality | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps this problem is worse among biomedical journals? I've routinely had publications in ACS journals that go from submission to acceptance within two months, usually closer to one---I hear the same from colleagues.

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yeah, is worst for biomedical journals.

Yes, I'm not sure what other fields may be affected, but I can confirm that this is a huge issue in biomedical journals. It's especially a problem for bioinformatics, where the combination of multi-year publication latency and the typical fast pace of software development means that tools are often long obsolete by the time they are published, and this results in researchers relying on publications and choosing algorithms that are years out of date.

For example, if a researcher chooses an algorithm with a "fairly recent" publication date of 2 years ago, that paper may have been first written 3 years prior to that, after a 1-year process of developing the algorithm and another 2-year process of generating and analyzing a dataset that showcases the algorithm so they can get it published. So that "2 year old" algorithm is actually 2 + 3 + 1 + 2 = 8 years old. If the algorithm is in a fast-moving field like next-generation sequencing analysis, it is probably obsolete several times over (i.e. the tool that obsoleted it is already itself obsolete), if it isn't completely useless now due to increases in dataset size during the past 8 years (e.g. it can only handle 1 million sequences, but today's datasets are 100 million sequences).

Any bioinformatics programmer knows this, of course, and only relies on the publication record as a last resort for information about bioinformatics algorithms. But a biologist who has a dataset they want to analyze and is looking for an algorithm to use probably won't know this, and will end up selecting a hopelessly outdated algorithm as a result.

If you write a research result up as a blog article that doesn't stop you publishing it in a journal does it? You could use blogs to communicate and journal articles for more formal write-ups.

Most journals require that any research submitted to them must not have been published elsewhere. On the surface, this makes sense, especially in the pre-internet world in which scientific publishing developed. You wouldn't want to allow someone to submit the same paper to multiple journals to inflate their publication count. However, things like preprint servers and blog posts have become a gray area with respect to these rules, and different journals have different policies. I haven't heard of any paper being rejected due to a blog post being considered "prior publication", but I also wouldn't be surprised if I heard of it happening. But rejections due to using preprint servers definitely do happen fairly commonly. The idea of preprint servers is unfortunately still fairly new in the biomedical field and is just starting to gain traction in the past year or two, so many journals still don't even have an explicit policy on preprints, leading to surprise rejections.

Submit to Biorxiv [1]. Most journals have actually recently changed their terms to explicitly allow pre-print publication.

[1] http://www.biorxiv.org/about-biorxiv

Here's a useful list of the bigger journals and their stance on pre-publications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...

Just like leaking an album, blogging about a paper jeopardizes it's earning potential so its not commonly done. Earning potential in science is prestige, grants, jobs, etc.

Publishing/broadcasting whether its music, words, video, or code has always been about doing something first. Seems like human nature. Don't see that pyschology changing any time soon.

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