Scientific publishing is getting slower, in part because authors often choose to submit a paper to successive journals until one agrees to publish (Nature 530, 148–151; 2016). As an unpaid academic member of the editorial board of Axios Review, a private, third-party review service, I wish to point out that a simple solution already exists for the time-wasting problem of 'journal shopping'.

Journals do not permit simultaneous submission to other journals, but organizations such as Axios Review — others include Peerage of Science and Rubriq — use peer review to assess the 'fit' of a paper to multiple journals and then pass it to the most suitable outlet (go.nature.com/dhg6hn).

This approach is based on the principle of parallelization — a solution to delays caused by serial events. Programmers use parallel processors to enable faster computation, for example, and parallel DNA sequencing has increased the output of genetic data. Early evidence suggests that parallelization also significantly shortens the review process: 85% of papers peer-reviewed through Axios Review, for instance, get accepted by the first journal.