In this edition of Blog Buzz, a great post sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole. Here we go!

Upon noticing a long delay between acceptance and publication of his paper in PLoS Computation Biology, Daniel Himmelstien analyzed the PLoS journal family for similar delays and found some notable patterns which are represented with great visuals in his post Publication delays at PLOS and 3,475 other Journals. He then looked at delays in 16 open access publications both in his field and in journals indexed in PubMed with usable data. In closing, he suggests a Yelp-type review site for publications in order to help authors make informed choices about where to publish.

There is a lively discussion in the comments, including similar studies focused on other disciplines (check out lags in Cell Biology Journals, for example), responses from people who have launched journal review sites, and more,  .

If you are an author interested in average publication times in particular journals or looking for journals in your field for potential publication, the MSK Library can help you find what you need with tools like PubsHub and JANE (learn more in previous posts about these resources here and here). Reach out to our Reference Team for help!

• The Supreme Court Decision on the Affordable Care Act is here. Slate reported on Robert’s two paragraphs demonstrating “judicial humility” and not undoing what the legislature intended to do. Some nice interactive coverage in the NY Times. Kaiser Health News lists continuing hurdles for the ACA.
• Another Supreme Court decision about marriage was announced as I wrote this post, and it seems important to include it as well. Interactive NY Times coverage here.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education has an overview of the plans and disputes surrounding NYPL’s iconic Schwarzman Building over the last few years called, The New York Public Library Wars. This fairly disheartening summary is by Scott Sherman of The Nation who has published a book on the subject.
• In more positive news for our city’s public library systems, a historic $39 million budget increase for fiscal year 2016 will restore six day service in NYC’s public libraries, more in Library Journal.

Some recent news from around the internet…

• For those unable to make it out to Chicago, the ASCO meeting videos are available online. Check out the free series of brief Highlights of the Day organized by specialty.
• Kevin Smith of Duke discusses attempts by publishers to control where authors may post and link to their own work during embargo periods. He then goes on to explain why this concept translates poorly into the real academic publishing world. According to Smith;

It appears that Elsevier is making a distinction between an author’s personal website or blog and the repository at the institution where that author works. Authors are, I think, able to post final manuscripts to the former for public access, but posting to the latter must be restricted only to internal users for the duration of the newly-imposed embargo periods. – See more

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