Yesterday I announced that our new paper on Barosaurus was up as a PeerJ preprint and invited feedback. I woke up this morning to find its third substantial review waiting for me. That means that this paper has now accumulated as much useful feedback in the twenty-seven hours since I submitted it as any previous submission I’ve ever made.

I just got the nicest decline to review ever: That’s how you retire from science: you get to work like normal people. Awesome!

Last October, we published a sequence of posts about misleading review/reject/resubmit practices by Royal Society journals (Dear Royal Society, please stop lying to us about publication times; We will no longer provide peer reviews for Royal Society journals until they adopt honest editorial policies; Biology Letters does trumpet its submission-to-acceptance time;

Here at SV-POW!, we are an equal-opportunity criticiser of publishers: Springer, PLOS, Elsevier, the Royal Society, Nature, we don’t care. We call problems as we see them, where we see them. Here is one that has lingered for far too long.

“The benefit of published work is that if they have passed the muster of peer review future researchers can have faith in the results”, writes a commenter at The Economist . Such statements are commonplace. I couldn’t disagree more. Nothing is more fatal to the scientific endeavour than having “faith” in a previously published result — as the string of failed replications in oncology and in social psychology is showing.

Gah! No time, no time. I am overdue on some things, so this is a short pointer post, not the thorough breakdown this paper deserves. The short, short version: Schachner et al. (2013) is out in PeerJ, describing airflow in the lungs of Nile crocs, and showing how surprisingly birdlike croc lungs actually are.

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.

I was reading Stephen Curry’s excellent summary of Monday’s Royal Society’s conference on “Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research”. One point that Stephen made is: As an analysis of the difficulties of Green OA, this is admirably precise.

There are a lot of things to love about PeerJ, which of course is why we sent our neck-anatomy paper there. I’ll discuss another time how its pricing scheme changes everything for Gold OA in the sciences, and maybe another time write about how well its papers display on mobile devices, or about the quick turnaround or 21st-century graphical design of the PDFs.

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.