The glacial pace of scientific publishing: why it hurts everyone and what we can do to fix it.

Is this you? Your Ph.D. student has just finished 5 years of spectacular work, the manuscript and figures go through 12 revisions, then your colleagues and friends provide input for the next 10 revisions, you submit the perfect “version 22” manuscript to a carefully targeted scientific journal appropriate for the manuscript, and then you wait. And wait. And wait. Months elapse, the student leaves the lab for a postdoc, and you forget that you even had a manuscript under review. Meanwhile, the student is passed over for competitive postdoctoral fellowships because the publication is in limbo, your tenure case is weakened, and the study section questions your productivity, and your grant is not funded. Why is it that in these days of instant information dissemination via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites, our scientific publishing system has ground to a medieval, depressing, counterproductive near-halt?