Academic publishing: Peer to peer ASK a researcher what annoys him most about scientific publishing, and slowness will come near the top of the list of gripes. It takes nearly six months, on average, for a manuscript to wend its way from submission to publication. Worse, before a paper is accepted by a journal, it is often rejected by one or more others. The reason need not be a fatal flaw in the research; sometimes the work is simply not splashy enough for outlets high up in the pecking order. But in the process, each journal's editors send the paper for peer review - appraisal by experts in the relevant field - in much the way that each prospective purchaser of a house commissions his own survey. And, unlike those multiple, parallel surveys, the reviewers do not even get paid for their efforts. Some publishers are at last beginning to twig that this is an awful waste of resources. Last month a number of them, including big ones like the Wellcome Trust, BioMed Central (BMC), the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the European Molecular Biology Organisation, said they would give authors of papers they reject the option of making referees" reports available to the other publishers. The practice is not unheard of within publishing groups. Genome Biology, BMC's flagship journal, which accepts just one paper in ten, passes 40% of the sound but humdrum sort it spurns to its less prestigious sister publications with reviews attached, says Matthew Cockerill, the group's managing director. Half of those end up in a BMC journal. But similar arrangements between competing publishers have not caught on. Other ways to speed up peer review are being tested, too. Rubriq, a company in North Carolina, plans to offer fast, independent reports to authors for a fee. This includes a reality check on just how far up the publication pecking order a paper might be submitted with a reasonable expectation that it will be accepted. To reviewers, meanwhile, it is offering payment for the job. The firm is in talks with publishers including BMC and PLoS. Damian Pattinson, the editorial director of PLoS One, the latter group's biggest journal, calls Rubriq's service "useful," though he admits that details of how it will work have yet to be sorted out. The customers of a Finnish firm, Peerage of Science, are not authors, but journals themselves; 23 have signed up so far. Publications in effect outsource the organisation of peer review to the company on the understanding that other clients can look at the results, too. Then, if the first customer rejects a researcher's offering, those others can choose quickly whether to snap it up instead. Peerage's fee is paid by whichever journal ultimately publishes the offering in question. The number of submissions to journals is outpacing reviewers" capacity to deal with them, says Mr Cockerill. Mr Pattinson agrees. PLoS One already churns through 4,000 papers a month, putting its referees under tremendous strain, he says. With luck, parallel processing of peer review in this manner will reduce the stress on the system, and thus the time frustrated researchers have to wait before their gems see the light of day.