> I'm not sure what to say here - politics definitely plays into biology publication

This is well beyond regular scientific politics; the attacks are now older than a lot of people working in the field. I don't know why you would expect random journals to be unaffected (where do you get cryobiologist reviewers who are unaffected or fearless?).

> I'm more inclined to believe the information on the article page than a general journal policy.

The journal policy which explains what the dates mean?

> Weirdly enough, all the articles in the most recently published edition of Rejuvenation Research (http://online.liebertpub.com/toc/rej/18/2) had at least some gap between receipt and acceptance.

So are you even objecting to anything besides a software bug?

> The authors only use two methodologies for preservation, which they explain in the methods section:

I don't understand your objection here. OK, so one protocol is still upcoming. I don't think this is that unusual since I see plenty of references to publications in press in papers I read - econ papers spend years as preprints, I regularly comment on drafts, fast moving areas often do this, work which has been turned into multiple publications does this all the time because different journals move at different rates etc. I don't think this is a big problem but even if it was, they also tested out the standard well-understood procedure you cannot possibly have any objection to, so what's with this 'only' business? That's the method one wants them to test - and they did. And it worked the same for preserving memories. Which is the point.

> Further, the slow-freezing result is a fairly cheap one to replicate; we're likely to see many people try it and they'll likely cite Alcor's work.

That seems unlikely. No one wants to go near cryonics for the political reasons I mentioned and there's no funding for it. I have been saying for at least 5 years now that I really hoped someone would run exactly this experiment with seeing if training survived, and it took that long for any study to be done - despite always being cheap to run. Sometimes being cheap to replicate doesn't matter.

> This is counter to what the authors state - they explain that the SafeSpeed method is actually slower than 'slow-freezing'. See page 11.

I don't see any such claim. I think you are again confusing different stages of storage and revival.

> This paper just isn't compelling enough to say that we've seen this occur definitively.

I find it compelling. None of your arguments goes to the root, and most are tangential: it's not a prominent journal because of the very well known politics involved, the dates are due to quirks of the website or acceptance process, the new protocol is not well-described but seems to work as well as the older methods and the older methods suffice to prove the point, and some confusion about the details doesn't obviate the core claim either. The worms were trained, were frozen, were revived, and remembered. Which of your criticisms defeats this? This isn't some mushy social psychology paper with n=15 and the authors could have tried a thousand different analyses to pull out a p<0.05; the worms either remembered or they didn't, there's not many ways to slice the data.