Publish or perish.

When scientists bemoan the relentless pressure to publish or perish, they rarely spare a thought for the effect of this pressure on the publisher. For some reason, the publisher, and minions such as editors, are blamed for being the main barrier to the process of publication. At the same time, publishers are blamed for the ridiculous proliferation in journals of all kinds, especially those that nobody would ever want to read. And both accusations are true to some extent, but of course papers would never reach your desk (or screen) without publishers, and journals would never come into being without the contributory negligence of scientists who encourage publishers to believe that a new journal in their sub-sub-speciality is urgently needed, and encourage librarians to buy it.Having just returned from publishing into the world of research (though not to the bench), I can discuss these issues with apparent impartiality. But my sympathies are largely with my erstwhile colleagues, as they struggle with authors who are desperate to publish incomplete stories before their grant deadline, referees who promise speedy, thorough analysis of a complex question and then disappear to Hawaii, and underpaid secretaries who leave as soon as they are trained.Why, then, do some scientists go into publishing, and why do they stay there? This is a particularly important question given the number of hopeful editors who sidle up to me at meetings, or are sent to me by their advisors for career guidance. Stressful times aside, the excitement in editing is obvious: you see so many interesting papers, and you learn fascinating answers to questions you barely knew existed. Working at a journal that requires intelligence and decision-making from its editors must be one of the most interesting jobs available. The pace is very different from bench research — no meditative pauses while the centrifuge spins down, and the phone only stops ringing when you turn it off. But it's possible to feel that you’ve done something concrete at the end of almost every day — not always the case for bench work, at least for me. You have to be the right kind of person to enjoy an editor's lot, however. The difference between doing research and publishing was neatly explained to me by Miranda Robertson, then Biology Editor of Nature. She was interviewing me for a position on her team at the time, which may be why her words inscribed themselves indelibly on my brain. She pointed out that when you move from science into editing, the papers you work on will never be ‘your baby’ again — the most you can be is an efficient midwife, helping someone else's paper into the world with the minimum of fuss and danger.Of course, I had no idea what she meant at the time, but I learned. You get very involved in a paper as you shepherd it through the rocky stretches between submission and acceptance, and it's sometimes hard not to feel that you have just as much right as the authors to say what you think the paper means. When they insist on ungrammatical and clumsy prose instead of the elegant and readable alternative you offer them, or ignore an obvious follow-up experiment that you really want to know the answer to, you run straight into the midwife/mother distinction. It is my impression that most of the people who leave scientific publishing — at least in the very small sample that I know about — do so (as I did) because they want their effect on science to be more direct than the influence they can have by deciding which of the points made by a referee are important enough to delay publication. That's a lot of power, and sometimes a horrible responsibility. But it's not like the feeling of being able to try to figure something out for yourself. If you need that feeling, don’t go into publishing.And why is the relationship between science and publishing so angst-ridden? If we believe that there were once better times, then the sharpening competition in science has certainly increased the pressure to have a very long publication list. And of course the sheer volume of work being performed and published intensifies the fear that a paper might not be noticed unless it is published in a high-profile journal. The wish to publish rapidly and often and the wish to publish visibly are not wholly compatible for most people, and perhaps the fact that these contradictory pressures are both increasing over time goes some way towards explaining the increased vigour of complaints against publishers.The real worry, of course, is that the pressure to publish quickly leads to the publication of thin slices of salami, or ‘MPUs’ (minimum publishable units), so that a reader has to piece together several papers to get a complete story. The new policy adopted by many universities of considering only the top five, or ten, papers published by a scientist in the evaluation for hiring or promotion seems to me a hopeful development. But clearly not everyone agrees, or it would already have become the standard. Is there anyone out there who would like to tell me why?