
New evidence for grain specific C4 photosynthesis in wheat - okket
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep31721
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a_bonobo
I don't understand why this is in Nature Scientific Reports - a relatively
new, small journal that has published some bad things in the past. If this is
true and well-supported it would belong into the 'main' Nature or Science
journal!

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adrianN
When you submit to Nature and they reject the paper, they suggest you try
again at Scientific Reports. Resubmitting there saves you some steps if you
had reviews for your Nature submission.

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semi-extrinsic
Actually, they first bump you down to Nature Communications, which is still
relatively prestigious. If it's rejected also there, you get bumped down to
Scientific Reports (where they've dropped "Nature" from the name). It's not
very prestigious and, like e.g. PLOS One, does not require a paper to be
particularly novel or groundbreaking. Unless your paper is truly bad, it will
get accepted at Scientific Reports if you can afford the publishing fee. Since
there have been several reports of essentially nonexistent peer review from
the journal, many people are a bit skeptical.

Since it's not very prestigious and kind of a last resort for authors, people
also tend to be a bit skeptical when papers published there are featured in
the mainstream press.

However, all scientists will readily acknowledge that the peer review process
can often be flawed, so "a bit skeptical" should not be taken as "outright
dismissal".

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Osmium
> Since there have been several reports of essentially nonexistent peer review
> from the journal, many people are a bit skeptical.

Speaking from personal experience (from our own group and also from a
colleague), their peer review is no better or worse than any of the other big-
name publishers.

And, in regards to the OP's comments, I wouldn't consider where a paper is
published to be a particularly good indicator of its quality, provided it's at
least a well-known/well-established journal (e.g. in the top-20 on Google's
rankings for a given field[1]).

I've been accepted and rejected by both prestigious and lesser-well-known
journals, and experienced peer review by both, and it's always been very
variable in quality. There also seems to be very little correlation between
how interesting/ground-breaking/mundane/boring the research is and which
journal it gets accepted into, and this mirrors the experience of a lot of my
colleagues.

The simple fact is that the big journals just get far too many submissions and
the research is usually too specialised to guarantee consistently-good peer
review, or even consistently good selection of what papers should even be
accepted.

[1]
[https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=e...](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=en)

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scentoni
That's interesting: "C3 angiosperms evolved more than 50 times independently
into C4 plants (Muhaidat et al., 2007"
[http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/155/1/56](http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/155/1/56)

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robbiep
Fascinating that they take the 'bred in' approach as opposed to suggesting GM,
as an article would have done 15-20 years ago - the scaremongers have won

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jakub_h
If "genetically modified" doesn't apply to this then it appears meaningless as
a useful term to me.

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cmrdporcupine
So what I take from this is that C4 photosynthesis could be arrived at through
marker assisted selection, i.e. traditional breeding, rather than through GMO.

