Gaberlunzie is intrigued to see that 'speed' does not seem to confound the peer review process yet, and judging by the collection of Google graphics on the subject, 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.'

Springer is currently boasting that publishing in the Journal of Supercomputing will mean an average review time of 4 months or less! Rapid online first publication once your paper is accepted - usually in 10-21 days! And then reaching millions of researchers at thousands of institutions and companies.

"The Journal of Supercomputing," adds Springer, "was one of the first Computer Science journals, and the editorial board  still comprises many of the field's leading lights."

Pardon Gaberlunzie, who has listened to debates on peer review among such scientific glitterrati as the Fraunhofer Institute, but four months seems remarkably slow to him, a whole season gone! And 10 days is not exactly the instant transmission for important developments, for which we constantly urge better broadband.

And while the board is undoubtedly a leading light, some might argue it,  with some exceptions, as very American-centric.

Peer Review as defined by Wikipedia.org (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal.

The work may be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform impartial review.

Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish; and significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among contemporaries.

Although generally considered essential to academic quality, and used in most important scientific publications, peer review has been criticised as ineffective, slow, and also misunderstood.

It also has a finger pointing to competitive academic bias working to exclude certain justifiable ideas and approaches.