Does it take too long to publish research? : Nature News & Comment

" ... Fraser's frustration is widely shared: researchers are increasingly questioning the time it takes to publish their work. Many say that they feel trapped in a cycle of submission, rejection, review, re-review and re-re-review that seems to eat up months of their lives, interfere with job, grant and tenure applications and slow down the dissemination of results ... But is the publication process actually becoming longer — and, if so, then why? To find out, Nature examined some recent analyses on time to publication — many of them performed by researchers waiting for their own work to see the light of day — and spoke to scientists and editors about their experiences.  The results contain some surprises. Daniel Himmelstein, a computational-biology graduate student at the University of California, San Francisco, analysed all the papers indexed in the PubMed database that had listed submission and acceptance dates. His study, done for Nature, found no evidence for lengthening delays²: the median review time — the time between submission and acceptance of a paper — has hovered at around 100 days for more than 30 years (see 'Paper wait'). But the analysis comes with major caveats. Not all journals — including some high-profile ones — deposit such time-stamp data in PubMed, and some journals show when a paper was resubmitted, rather than submitted for the first time ..."