Finally, finally, finally (that's 3 "Finally"s for 3 rounds of review), the manuscript for my primary project has been accepted for publication! I had 3 reviewers for this one, and while the first two were rather easy to please and had the same comments, and were satisfied early on, the third was quite loquacious and stubborn, and was the cause of the 3rd round. His diction and syntax were such that I feel fairly certain I know who it was (one of my boss' competitors in the area of my project), so that can at least partially explain the desire to delay publicaton.

Interestingly enough, during the quite long (many, many months) review process, another paper was published from a lab whose PI has interestingly similar diction, whose scope is interestingly similar to mine, and whose results are interestingly a bit different. But that's Scientia, after all. Flawed as the monster of academic publishing is, it's better than the alternative.

The journal is one of the Nature group's fairly well-known ones for my field (factor a bit above 7), which is par for this lab's output. During the review, because things were taking so long, we were tempted to publish in a newer, less prestigious journal (although still pretty good - impact factor above 5), but my boss let me decide and after all the work I put in I wasn't about to settle for a notch lower than I knew it could go to. Thankfully I was right, and now this will help justify to whoever my next employer is why I went so long without anything on my CV besides a couple of conference posters.

Of course, I'm not leaving here until I can publish the two other manuscripts I'm currently writing, one of which is waiting on a patent and the other whose wet work is only 25% done.

Lab meeting this afternoon and Boss meeting tomorrow morning. So much to do today..