We'd Like to Thank the Academy

Derek Lowe has a post at his In the Pipeline blog defending PNAS, which he says gets a bad rap from scientists. "The reason people are down on PNAS is the way that members of the National Academy can, if they choose, sort of jam things into the journal through a side entrance," he writes. But basic math shows that for non-academy members who are published there (those papers make up about 40 percent of the pub's content), the competition is downright brutal, Lowe says -- likely resulting in top-notch literature. He adds, "I think, myself, that the advantage of letting members publish unusual or possibly controversial work outweighs the temptation to fill the journal with junk."