Perishing, Rather Than Publishing

Aardvarchaeology's Martin Rundkvist is looking for a new academic post and has found that the major complaint he's come up against from external referees is that he mainly publishes in a journal for which he is the managing editor. "So instead of me having a lot of publications plus a high-profile editorship among my qualifications, one tends to somehow cancel the other out in the eyes of the referees," he writes, wondering where he is supposed to publish instead.

Mike the Mad Biologist has a different rant against the science publication model -- time. He recently heard a speaker at a meeting discuss new software for DNA sequence data, but then learned from the speaker that the paper was at least a year away from being published. "But a year in my field (and many others, of course) might as well be the 22nd century. Keep in mind that this method is the result of federally-funded research. Yet this existing, functional breakthrough will be unilaterally embargoed to meet the demands of publication," he writes.