One key limitation for vaccines is supply, as others have noted. That certainly doesn’t explain everything, but it does explain a lot.
This obstacle was, of course, completely foreseeable, and we proposed a simple way to deal with the problem, which we presented to policymakers and even posted on Lesswrong, by the end of April.
Thus beings our story.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get UK policymakers on board when we discussed it, and the US was doing “warp speed” and Congress wasn’t going to allocate money for a new idea.
We were told that in general policymakers wanted an idea published / peer reviewed before they’d take the idea more seriously, so we submitted a paper. At this point, as a bonus, Preprints.org refused to put the preprint online. (No, really. And they wouldn’t explain.)
We submitted it as a paper to Vaccine May 20th, and they sent it for review, we got it back mid-june, did revisions and resubmitted early July, then the journal changed its mind and said “your paper does not appear to conduct original research, thus it does not fit the criteria.” After emailing to ask what they were doing, they relented and said we could cut the length in half and re-submit as an opinion piece.
I think that your experience trying to get this published would be well worth reading in extended form. Do you think that any of the pushback you received was justified, looking at your submissions from an “outside view?” I.e. regardless of the merit of your idea, was there anything about the way you presented it, who you presented it to, or the credentials/evidence/effort backing the paper that might explain why you didn’t get it published until October? Is there anything you would have done differently?
I think it’s amazing that you made this effort, so I’m just hoping we can learn something for the future from this outcome.
From an outside view, this piece was a bit weird, but much more straightforward pieces have gotten similarly frustrating responses from top journals. If I was optimizing for publishability rather than impact, I would do things differently and likely be more successful, but that would avoid the entire goal. (You can always come up with an approach tailored to a journal, and work on finding results that they will like, but that’s part of the problem with the spate of poor science in the past decades.)
However, I definitely don’t think it is particularly anomalous for the submissions process to take months, since academia isn’t meant/set-up for rapid response publications. In general, for academic publications, rejections are slow, acceptances are even slower, and everything is uncertain. But I have learned on several occasions during 2020 that the top-journal publication process is even more dicey and frustrating than I expected, even when co-authoring with people who have done that type of publication repeatedly, and after successfully publishing many things in more niche journals.
Despite all of that, I don’t think that my initial selection of a higher tier journal was a mistake, a priori, since I think that it was the most likely way for it to get actually significant policy attention, and the final publication in F1000 was far less impactful, and not only because of the lateness. (But F1000 has a clearly superior publication model.)
One key limitation for vaccines is supply, as others have noted. That certainly doesn’t explain everything, but it does explain a lot.
This obstacle was, of course, completely foreseeable, and we proposed a simple way to deal with the problem, which we presented to policymakers and even posted on Lesswrong, by the end of April.
Thus beings our story.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get UK policymakers on board when we discussed it, and the US was doing “warp speed” and Congress wasn’t going to allocate money for a new idea.
We were told that in general policymakers wanted an idea published / peer reviewed before they’d take the idea more seriously, so we submitted a paper. At this point, as a bonus, Preprints.org refused to put the preprint online. (No, really. And they wouldn’t explain.)
We submitted it as a paper to Vaccine May 20th, and they sent it for review, we got it back mid-june, did revisions and resubmitted early July, then the journal changed its mind and said “your paper does not appear to conduct original research, thus it does not fit the criteria.” After emailing to ask what they were doing, they relented and said we could cut the length in half and re-submit as an opinion piece.
We went elsewhere, to a newer, open access, non-blinded review journal, and it was finally online in October, fully published: https://f1000research.com/articles/9-1154
I think that your experience trying to get this published would be well worth reading in extended form. Do you think that any of the pushback you received was justified, looking at your submissions from an “outside view?” I.e. regardless of the merit of your idea, was there anything about the way you presented it, who you presented it to, or the credentials/evidence/effort backing the paper that might explain why you didn’t get it published until October? Is there anything you would have done differently?
I think it’s amazing that you made this effort, so I’m just hoping we can learn something for the future from this outcome.
From an outside view, this piece was a bit weird, but much more straightforward pieces have gotten similarly frustrating responses from top journals. If I was optimizing for publishability rather than impact, I would do things differently and likely be more successful, but that would avoid the entire goal. (You can always come up with an approach tailored to a journal, and work on finding results that they will like, but that’s part of the problem with the spate of poor science in the past decades.)
However, I definitely don’t think it is particularly anomalous for the submissions process to take months, since academia isn’t meant/set-up for rapid response publications. In general, for academic publications, rejections are slow, acceptances are even slower, and everything is uncertain. But I have learned on several occasions during 2020 that the top-journal publication process is even more dicey and frustrating than I expected, even when co-authoring with people who have done that type of publication repeatedly, and after successfully publishing many things in more niche journals.
Despite all of that, I don’t think that my initial selection of a higher tier journal was a mistake, a priori, since I think that it was the most likely way for it to get actually significant policy attention, and the final publication in F1000 was far less impactful, and not only because of the lateness. (But F1000 has a clearly superior publication model.)