For most scientists research brings many pleasures: exercising curiosity and ingenuity; the moment of discovery, sometimes an esprit de corps; showing that you were right, and so on. Anthropologists might say that it is a form of playfulness, the ‘scientific method’ being the rules of the game. Telling people about your results at conferences also has its bright moments: showing off; making new acquaintances and renewing old ones; a wider esprit de corps; globetrotting, all expenses paid. Communicating data and discussing results formally before that part of the academic world that you inhabit is a pain by comparison, even for the most gifted writer.  Have all avenues of enquiry and interpretation been exhausted? Is your paper a model of clarity, and will/can anyone read it? Is what you have to recount actually new and/or important? Have you missed something that has already been published? Have you committed plagiarism unconsciously. Are your references bang up to date? The anonymous peer-review system can be merciless, and so can journal editors. Writing up and awaiting reviews are among the most stressful periods in the professional lives of most researchers, because so many boxes have to be ticked to glide effortlessly into print.

The greatest of all literary bugbears is tailoring the style of your list of references to that of the target journal. Very, very occasionally the publisher will employ kindly sub-editors who make sure that all is well in this the most arcane of all academic rituals. The problem is that every academic publishing house and even different journals that each produces have subtly different rules for references cited, in the text and in the list at the end. There are so many permutations and combinations: a comma before the year; v. before volume number, including the issue or not, bold or plain font; journal name in full or one of several kinds of abbreviation; each author’s initials separated by a space or not (the former for the Journal of Geology if you have been wondering – ‘Their given names in full are separated by a space, so it is only polite’!). And there is much, much more in each journal’s ‘Information for Authors’. Quanmin Guo of the University of Birmingham (Correspondence, Nature, v. 540 22/29 December 2016, p. 525) makes the obvious point that every journal should conform to a uniform style – within vividly distinctive bindings what is the need for arcane house rules?

But there is another, more serious grouse about the vast majority of journals. If your institution or you as an individual cannot afford to subscribe to a journal you will inevitably come up against the ‘paywall’ when you try to read an article on line ($10 – 50 per article) even at a time when well-heeled academics are paying for their papers to be open-access (in most cases still behind the paywall for 6 months following publication). The irony is that less well-off researchers also cannot afford to make their work available to all.  Alexandra Elbakyan of Alamaty, Kazakhstan, set out to circumvent the paywall barrier to scholarly exchange, and succeeded in the foundation of Sci-Hub (Van Noorden, R. 2016. Paper pirate. Nature, v. 540, p. 512-513), which hosts about 60 million papers and encompassed about 3% of all PDF downloads in the last year (simply by pasting in a paper’s DOI. Alexandra has been widely praised and thanked, served with a writ for breach of copyright (by Elsevier), had Sci-Hub shut down by order of a US judge (there are proxies), and is currently incommunicado (except for encrypted e-mail) for fear of a demand for multi-million dollar damages. Chances are that she has opened a floodgate to future universal open access. In the meantime, unless I am hopelessly mistaken, there is a perfectly legal work around for you to get must-read papers shortly after they appear at no cost. Email the corresponding author (usually in the free online Abstract in a journals latest issue list of contents) and ask for an offprint in the form of a PDF ‘for the purpose of scholarly exchange’.