Is there any justification for any of these practices other than tradition? Choosing titles that deliberately omit new taxon names. Slicing the manuscript to fit an arbitrary length limit. Squeezing the narrative into a fixed set of sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion). Discarding or combining illustrations to avoid exceding an arbitrary count. Flattening illustrations to monochrome.

The problem I find myself reading a lot recently about “portable peer-review” — posts like Take me as I am, and my paper as it is? by scicurious at Neurotic Physiology , which excellently diagnoses a terrible, wasteful problem in scientific publishing : What a waste! What a drag on the progress of science! What a ridiculous situation we’re got ourselves into, with our chasing-after-prestigious-journals games.

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In a comment on a recent Guardian piece (not mine, but a response to it), Peter Morgan asked: Don’t worry — you can be very confident . Reputable open-access journals arrange for their content to be archived in well-trusted third-party archives such as PubMed Central and CLOCKSS. See for example PeerJ’s blog about the arrangements they’re making or this statement from PLOS ONE.

After the authors’ own work, the biggest contribution to a published paper is the reviews provided, gratis, by peers. When peer-review works as it’s supposed to, they add significant value to the final paper. But the actual reviews are never seen by anyone except the authors and the handling editor. This is bad for several reasons.

It’s an oddity to me that when publishers try to justify their existence with long lists of the valuable services they provide, they usually skip lightly over one of the few really big ones.

Today, PeerJ announced that it will open for submissions on December 3rd — next Monday. That’s great news for anyone who cares about the future of academic publishing: it’s out to make dramatic changes to the publishing workflow, including an integrated preprint server so that people can read your work while it’s in review.

Four things: 1. From the start of 2013, the Royal Society is abandoning issues for its journals ( Proc. B , Phil. Trans. , Biology Letters and more) and moving to a continuing publishing model — as already used for their open-access journal Open Biology . Excellent news: in a post-print world, issues achieve nothing but the imposition of arbitrary delays.

When you start a blog, the natural thing is to want to feel that you’re in control of it, and that means controlling what can be posted there.  But that’s a mistake.  Moderation means that people can’t see their own comments, which is alienating; but more importantly, it means other people can’t see them, which in turn means that all discussion grinds to a halt until such time as you happen to moderate.

“But Mike”, you say, “What’s wrong with publishers making a profit?” Nothing is wrong with publishers making a profit.