Journal with fast turn-around?

[somanygenes]

Hello community!

We're trying to decide where to submit a microbial biodiversity 454 methods paper. This is nothing earth shattering, but the study is sound, and should be fairly useful for the community. Our first choice would have been AEM, but after having two papers languish in (non)review for close to three months recently I don't think their turn-around is fast enough. We're considering: ISME, Molecular Ecology Resources, Microbial Ecology, Environmental Microbiology, PLoS one...

I don't really care about impact factor, but I'd prefer to publish in a journal with decent visibility for the meta-genomic/microbial diversity crowd. Speed of review is probably the most important factor at this point. Any ideas or knowledge of turnaround time is most helpful.

Thanks a million

[ECO]

You can be the first paper published in the entirely crowd-reviewed SEQanswers journal.

I say that in jest, but it's not actually that crazy of an idea. Hmm...

[brasj]

indeed ECO - perhaps some kind of a partnership with Plos (for example) would be a good idea.

[Simon Anders]

If you want to give the community early access to your results and give colleagues the opportunity to already cite you while you are waiting for the review process, you may want to consider depositing the paper on a preprint server (e.g., Nature Precedings)

You need to check first the policies of the journals you want to submit to, but you will find that very many of them are by now perfectly fine with preprints being available on the web.

(I write this because, being a physicist, I miss the speed of disseminating results via the ArXiv. In physics, it has become very common to put papers there in parallel with submission to a journal, and so, everybody gets informed about new results with much less delay -- provided you were willing to sift through the too many low-quality submissions that you find there, too. As genomics is such a fast moving target, it would be nice if people did the same here.)

In order to get people to find your preprint, you announce it here on SeqAnswers. This is how we got already many users for our DESeq software although the paper is still under review.

Cheers
Simon

[krobison]

PLoS One I believe is pretty quick -- they certainly were not bashful about reminding me that a review was a few days late.

[rglover]

Molecular Ecology Resources/Notes is SLOW. Reasonable turnaround in review, but the time from acceptance to publication is hitting > 6months.