Then the mainstream media need to see your process, including the debates and deliberations. What about a public blog during the data processing stage? It would be fascinating to see the collaborative process, even if in general terms to hide the behind-the-scenes details. A record of meetings, who was in attendance, who gave reports, who raised issues, about what. Even if the public didn’t have access to the data, the software, etc., are there enough crumbs to show how diligently so many bright people are scrutinizing the problem?

Nature does allow you to put your paper on arXiV prior to it’s publication/acceptance. Read Nature’s embargo policy page: http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/policy/embargo.html where it says, “Neither conference presentations nor posting on recognized preprint servers constitute prior publication.”

The blinding process is one sided – the reviewers know who the authors are, but the authors don’t know who the reviewers are.

I also have only a few first-author papers under my belt, and have been very lucky about speed (last one was only two months from being submitted to being published in the journal online, three months to published on paper). This is somewhat unusual for astronomy (my results were observations that were interesting but uncontroversial), but a few months to at most a year seems typical. The linguistics example above is freaky. It would be very demotivating – no one would write a paper on anything that a new observatory might look at in the next couple years, because those new observations would be more interesting than whatever you wrote years ago that was finally being published…

… that are paper had finally been published online.

In fact, in the course of the review process we found that there was a minor software bug found, and we repeated the full end stage of the analysis.

As it turned out, the boat had very little effect on the final result but we needed to be sure.

The godparents read view our replies and then we arrive at the next draft. This part of the process can take many weeks depending on how much time the authors have two devote to the paper.

Following the presentation of the result, the collaboration has 48 hours before the papers [are] submitted to the journal.

(In the last paragraph above, it appears that “are” needs to be inserted.)

I mean, the introduction for instance is bound to refer to “our previous work[ref]“, so it’s not enough to just remove the names from the manuscript. And that doesn’t even touch upon how some subjects are so specialised that anyone qualified to review it, will know immediately who the author is.

Luis, it can take a very long time in physics as well (Physical Review Letters has gained some notoriety over the years, especially for a “letters” journal). However, all journals I know of allow you to put a copy on the preprint server (Nature only after publication, but they tend to be quick anyway). If there is a preprint server for your field, you should check which journals allow you to use it before publication. The culture of publishing preprints must grow organically, and the community has to force the hnd of the journals (especially the for-profit ones).

For illustration: in May I received the journal issue containing a paper I had first submitted in late 2005. This month, a proceedings volume is supposed to come out with a joint paper we submitted in March 2007 (the conference itself happened in Dec. 2006). One of my colleagues is organizing a workshop, for which she wanted to invite a very distinguished prof. who has just published a wonderful paper in the top journal of the field. The distinguished prof.’s response was: “sorry, but I can’t really contribute to this workshop — I haven’t worked on this topic since 2005, when I submitted the paper”.

If it wasn’t because I need the publications to get tenure, I’d be happy just uploading my papers to an online repository and then let interested people contact me with comments.