According to the MLB and ESPN, the rules regarding the scientific review process are about to change for the better. Due to the slow, boring, and hard to stomach aspects of the painstakingly tedious peer review process, trust in science has been steadily declining for years. According to these new changes, the time to publish research findings or submit a grant proposal is expected to drop by an estimated two weeks! “Some of these changes are a long time coming, these major research institutions are so slow and boring that we can barely get a Nova special out there to get the kids interested,” NSF referee Isaiah Dorman commented. “My kids can hardly watch me approve a biotech proposal, they think the process is just so boring! If we want any of the next generation to have any interest in science, we really need to make it faster and more exciting!” So what are the changes?
Reviewer Clock
Surely to speed up the review of research papers, reviewers now can’t take forever deciding what changes they would like to see in a paper. Once a peer reviewer has received a paper to review they only have two weeks to review it or the paper is given an automatic approval with no marks. I know I’ve taken my kids to the lab to watch a group of researches review some papers only to have them ask me if it’s almost over three weeks into the process. There’s no chance they aren’t going to business school if that keeps up! Cutting down on this process will seriously make it for much more exciting and captivating science bringing in the younger generations!
Bigger Figures
Increasing the maximum size of the figures from 11 inches to 18 inches, these massive figures are sure to dazzle science fans and gain some new ones. Attempting to keep figures to one page, conservative voices in the scientific review process have been limited to the size a single page, a single 8.5 x 11inch piece of paper. By allowing for figures to be massive and drawn on huge posters or a whopping 15MB power point slides to be blown up on someone’s extra wide monitor, the NSF is simultaneously attempting to give researchers more space to work and create a more immersive experience. They’ve even started calling it, the scientific figures for the Metaverse!
No Defensive Shifts
Keeping research objectives on topic, shifts from one purpose to another will keep research in the bounds of the initial proposal while keeping off topic findings to the discussion section and follow on research. The NSF has found that keeping such papers on topic has made the research more offensive focused as researcher defenses can’t shift to another topic once they realize that their hypothesis was really a dumb idea when their data doesn’t match the expected conclusion.
No more Position Player Writing
Previously when a research project has been found to be an absolute slam dunk, experienced PhD’s have passed off the writing to younger and inexperienced grad students who really slow down the process. They take forever, don’t know what they’re doing, make mistakes which cause even longer review processes, and they make these exciting conclusions take forever! Maybe it gives those students a lot more experience but YAWN! it makes it SO SLOW! America doesn’t have the attention span to watch some young 20-something learn how to format something in LaTeX and keep us an extra month away from exciting research. Starting this season, the paper has to be 95% completed before passing it off to inexperienced grad students.
No Nitpick Offs
Now who doesn’t get a little impatient when they’re waiting for their favorite research team to finish publishing, when reviewer #2 keeps threatening to hold off their approval from some nitpicked issue with the margins of a graph, needing to include some prior research in the references or just make some scatter plot in their favorite color? Each reviewer will be limited to only three nit-picky comments before being threatened with a penalty of losing their co-author credit or citing their own research. Experts believe that this change is expected to drop nit-picky comments from dozens in a paper to only a handful. When they make the research into a PBS special, no one cares about the formatting!
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