| HN Mirror

Just FYI, as an author and reviewer for some of these journals, I would suggest that the value added by their news pieces can be compensated for (and not in a good way) by professional editors in pursuit of "impact". The review process becomes intensely political. As is well known, a suitably well-known senior author can get just about anything sexy enough accepted, and the referees can be easily overridden by an eager editor. Although the news divisions are editorially independent, they face a fundamental conflict of interest: biting the hand that feeds them is unlikely to lead to enhanced rations.

Nature and Science are less bad than, say, many Elsevier imprints. In most cases I feel like Nature or its daughter journal genuinely improved the manuscripts we sent them, at least the ones they published (and some they did not!). But this is also true of eLife and Genome Research. NEJM is wonderful to work with as an author, but in retrospect I sometimes wonder if they were too nice to us (Stockholm syndrome?) and have had this thought about some well-regarded specialty journals. In such cases, it is hard for the news staff to justify reporting on the underbelly.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I had a paper last year in a journal with an impact factor of 15* that was accepted in 15 minutes. It took longer to sign the copyright transfer agreements than to "review" the work. (I have the timestamps on the emails to prove it, although I'm not going to do that because one of my coauthors is an editor.) There's just no way that peer review was adding any value in that case. And yes, it has already been cited by other groups.

* Yes, IF is a silly metric. But the parallel is just too good to pass up. One minute per point of impact, I suppose.