In an increasingly competitive market, journals are working hard to attract customers — not unlike recession-squeezed fancy restaurants — writes Juan Carlos López, editor of Nature Medicine, on the Spoonful of Medicine blog (http://blogs.nature.com/nm/spoonful/2009/02/we_want_your_paper.html). López reviews several new policies from journals that are meant to expedite the process of publishing research papers.

The most controversial policy from Journal of Biology allows authors to request a paper be published even if not all of the revisions suggested by the reviewers have been addressed. The paper would be flagged as such but, López says, potential reviewers might not be “very keen on lending a hand if [they] won't have a chance to engage in a dialogue with the authors”.

Although the appeal to authors of these new models of peer review is obvious, López fears that it will mean “that many scientists may shift into a 'complacent mode'”, in which they avoid doing difficult experiments. Even so, he sees the trend for journals to polish up their customer service to be generally more author-friendly as a positive one.