When pointing the issues of the scientific publication, we found studies leading to Nobel Prize were rejected by prestigious journals. When pointing the issues of the Nobel Prize, we found the story of Carl Woese.

If you have not heard about Carl Woese, please definitely check this out: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/carl-woese/. What makes people think that he deserved a Nobel Prize which was never awarded to him? Well, he discovered a new life form, changing Darwin's "Tree of Life" from a fork to a trident structure.

In the 1960s, Woese wanted to develop a precise method to categorize microbes, instead of using the unreliable microscopic morphology. He became the first one to measure the relation between microbes by comparing their ribosomal gene sequences. In other words, he is one of the inventors of molecular phylogenetics. During his investigation, he and his lab associate George E. Fox found a group of microorganisms that could not be grouped together with either prokaryotes or eukaryotes. Woese understood immediately that this is a new life form that was never characterized by their microscopic morphology previously. They named it "archaebacteria", which was revised to be "Archaea" in the coming years.

Full of excitement, Woese figured out he was adding a new branch to the Tree of Life, which contained only prokaryotes and eukaryotes at that time. How the academic world responded to this textbook-changing discovery? The prestigious journals rejected his paper. Eventually the paper was published in PNAS (https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.74.11.5088) via Track 1 (recommended by a Member of Academy).

Years later when the concept of three-branched Tree of Life was well accepted, everyone took it for granted, like the textbook always said that from the very beginning. Woese's and Fox's contribution to biology was kind of downplayed, even though many later studies based on their findings were published in prestigious journals. There was even an argument that their findings could not be easily relevant to physiology or medicine, hence Nobel Prize skipped them.

I told this story not to blame scientific journal editors or Nobel Prize committee. Instead, I want to point out this as the blind spot of academic or even human nature: it is very difficult to accept paradigm-shifting new ideas or concepts. Academics wants to scrutinize a new finding before revealing it to public, based on the current cutting-edge knowledge. However, we may subconsciously filter out automatically any new idea that does not match the conceptual framework in our mind. How many world-changing new ideas have we all killed together through the current academic career process? I am not sure if I have done that often when I reviewed manuscripts.

Because of that, we need to have a flexible scientific publication system, allowing novel discoveries to be accessed, not hiding in the folders of computers until they are accepted by some impact factor-counting journals. We also need a better evaluation system other than peer review, so we won't discarding the brain child with the bath water. Pubmed indexing and community review mechanism (such as Review Commons, https://www.reviewcommons.org/) for preprint is a good start. Preprint highlights service (such as preLights, https://prelights.biologists.com/) is another good idea. Let's support them, use them, mention them, even in our own papers, my fellow academic researchers!