You know when people are being mean. They always say use a title. Telegraph communities ed Shane Richmond takes issue with Neil Thurman’s – make that Mr Thurman’s – study on UGC, which is available here. He calls it flawed. It isn’t flawed, of course.

It was done at a certain point in time and things, understandably perhaps, have moved on. Call me a pedant, but I’d say a flaw implied a failure in methodology not a failure in time.

But Mr Richmond – maybe I should say Shane – has a point. Most of the work on this study was done between 2004-6. The dates are all scrupulously recorded. The delay is not because Neil works at snails pace, it’s because the work was done for submission to an academic journal, and academic publishing is a slow old business. If it had been commissioned by the Telegraph, it would have been available rather more swiftly.

Academics who want research careers need academic publication in peer-reviewed journals. People will often talk to academics only on the understanding that the work is not published for some time – especially where there are perceived issues of commercial rivalry.

And so one of the costs of thoroughly checked, impeccably conducted research is time. Things change. Matthew Gentzkow authored a fascinating (ok – for this non-economist – excruciating) study on pay walls that would have been a massive boon to the Washington Post if it had appeared a few years earlier than 2007, when it finally made it into the prestigious American Economic Review.

Does academia need to speed up? Personally, I blog – and I like the peer review process of an open and contested online space – so I guess that makes me a certifiable speed freak. But life is not always lived in the now…