The main problems in science publishing are a) long delays from discovery to publication b) overreliance of trust and c) inequality in the reward and incentivisation system.     

Long Delays in Publishing Research

When researchers make a discovery or observation of scientific interest, it can take many years before it is published.  Researchers’ only possibility to publish and disseminate discoveries is to write a paper of on average about 20 pages, where they have to explain in a clean story what they have found, how they found it, why is it relevant and what are the implications.  The process of writing such a paper can last several months or years, after the research data are collected, before the paper is completed.  At which point researchers send it to scientific journals one at a time.
Each journal can take between 3 and 24 months (or sometimes longer) to review the paper.  The publication rate is very different among journals, but most renowned journals typically have very low publication acceptance rates (often less than 10%).  This means that upon rejection, researchers have to start the review and revision cycle again at another journal. As a result, several years can pass from when the first observation is made and its publication. This affects the dissemination and re-use of the discovery.  Moreover, scientific journals frequently reject articles without giving sufficient feedback to authors.
•          The high cost to publish peer reviewed research means researchers have a barrier to publish and therefore share knowledge with society and the scientific community.
Fear of Getting Scooped: The fact that their work needs be deemed novel at the time of publication means scientists often do not share their work before publication. They fear that someone might take their unpublished work and use it without giving due credit, or use it to make new discoveries before they have been able to extract all of the potential value from it. The current system typically only publishes full, positive stories and consequently, it takes a long time to finalise a study for publication.  Scientists therefore have to wait until they have sufficient observations to create a story or narrative before publishing.  Further intensifying researchers’ fear that others will beat them to the punch and take credit for their discoveries. This imposed stress may lead to selectivity bias, where only favourable results are ever presented. In extreme cases, this amounts to cases of research misconduct and fraud.
 
Closed Science: Such long delays in publishing, combined with the long times needed to make narratives from simple observations and the reluctance to share unpublished work, results in “closed science”.  Scientific progress necessitates  that everyone get free access to data, publications, and deliberations arising from scientific studies.  Fortunately, recent advances in information technology make it possible to implement some of the principles of Open Science, such that not only the access to read the contents of a publication is open but also access to data, code, protocols and reagents. Nonetheless, the widespread adoption of such technologies has been slow. One notable limitation is the current science publishing system, which arose at a time when ‘closed science’ policies of private data, confidentiality, and restricted access were the norm. Today, multi billion-dollar publishing companies actively perpetuate these ‘closed science’ policies, which lie at the heart of their business models.