Ron Vale: Accelerating Scientific Publication in Biology
Ron Vale makes excellent points in this Perspective (submitted to PNAS, but available on bioRxiv). Highlights include an imagined reply of a Nature editor upon receipt of Watson & Crick's DNA model manuscripts ("I regret to say that without such experimental evidence, we will not be able to publish your work in Nature and suggest publication in a more specialized journal") and his recommendation to use pre-print servers to disseminate work in the life sciences as is done in the physical sciences:
If widely adopted, a pre‐print repository (which acts as an umbrella to collect all scientific work and is not associated with any specific journal) could have the welcoming effect of having colleagues read and evaluate scientific work before it has been branded with a journal name. For grants, jobs and awards, physicists will read and evaluate science posted on arXiv. The life science community needs to return to a culture of evaluating scientific merit from reading manuscripts, rather than basing judgment on where papers are published.
