I specialise in a particular group of fossils which are extremely useful in determining the relative age of rock units in the upper half of the Cambrian System. There are not many of us around, with perhaps about dozen of us globally, with only two of us in Australia, the other one being in Adelaide. I write papers on this topic fairly regularly and submit them to a couple of journals. For whatever reason, some years ago, an edict came down from management that all papers submitted for publication anywhere had to go through a two stage process of internal approval; first with the project leader (which would have been my idiot immediate superior) and then to the division chief. It is useful to have someone check over whatever you write because, when you do it yourself, you tend to read what you expect to read, not what is actually written. For me, the way to get around this is to leave the text for a few days, then wade through it. That way, the text is not fresh in your mind, and you tend to read what is actually there, rather than what you expect to be there. So, with the lack of expertise in my field by anyone in the organisation, I basically ignored the directive for papers I wrote by myself, and sent them where I wanted, when I wanted. Nobody ever raised the matter with me, as I suspect they never knew they existed, being in such a specialist field, or they were quite relieved that they didn’t have to read some of my longer papers. The longest in recent years was about 40,000 words; it would have been a hard slog for those who didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
