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I've been at Harvard and MIT for the last 10 years doing biomedical research and have published in Nature, Science, and Cell (top journals) numerous times. I can tell you academic publishing is completely f*cked with no hope.

Henry Kissinger said the only thing you need to know about academia,

"Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

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I was at a top 10 grad school till 2 months ago. An assistant professor here wrote a paper which was a minimalist increment over her PhD work. Something you would expect to see in PlOs One but got published in Cell. I know of people in lesser ranked and less prestigious schools who have trouble getting more impacting papers accepted.

What are you doing now?

> I can tell you academic publishing is completely f*cked with no hope.

Care to elaborate? Because in my experience (non-bio, non-med), this is not true. It's certainly not perfect, but overall the peer-review system (again, based on my experience with it) results in scientific progress.

What rate of progress? Academia is glacial.

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