[earthscienceman]

PNAS: Read It, or Not?

The reason people are down on PNAS is the way that members of the National Academy can, if they choose, sort of jam things into the journal through a side entrance. Here are all the details. The unusual thing about the journal is the existence of "Track I". Basically, a member of the NAS can publish up to four of their own papers per year. Each of these have to be submitted with the comments of two qualified referees, but the author gets to pick them. So a reasonable member should be able to get any sort of interesting or at least non-insane paper in there, by judicious choice of colleagues for review.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pnas-read-not

[mananaysiempre]

This is, in principle, the standard approach for a periodical of a scientific society, be it Proceedings of the Royal Society, Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Doklady Akademii Nauk, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They come less from a time of ubiquitous formal peer review and more from a time of communicating results in personal letters. In fact, as such societies were originally conceived as a sort of long-running conference crossed over with a social club, the journals were intended as little more than a streamlined way of publishing meeting minutes; that their names still suggest that everything within is supposed to accompany an oral presentation is not a coincidence. Over time, they more or less turned into standard peer-reviewed journals, but these traces of their original form still persist.

[canjobear]

We called the Track I papers “fake PNAS” in grad school.

[bryanrasmussen]

>So a reasonable member should be able to get any sort of interesting or at least non-insane paper in there, by judicious choice of colleagues for review.

An easy way to go get interesting papers in does not seem like a reason to be 'down' on it.