Ganley tells me that her team has just formalized a policy that they had been informally following on a case-by-case basis. For example, in February 2014, the journal Science published a paper describing the structure of a protein called UbiA. (Proteins are important molecules with complicated three-dimensional shapes, which can be very difficult to figure out.) Another team had independently been trying to solve the same structure, and five months later, PLOS Biology published their results. “The authors had done more analyses and there was still a huge amount of value to this work,” says Ganley.

Similarly, in 2015, the journal PNAS published a paper describing the genome of a tardigrade—an adorable animal that can withstand implausibly extreme environments. Two years later, PLOS Biology published a second such genome, in a paper that contradicts some of the conclusions from the first one. “I suspect other journals would have passed on this for reasons of it not being the first,” says Ganley. The new policy simply codifies the team’s stance—at least for papers that were scooped within a six-month window. Beyond that, they are still open to considering each new case as it comes.

The policy is a boon to early-career scientists, who have recently started their own research groups. “It takes quite a bit of time to get the experiments going,” says Miron. “There is always an undercurrent of anxiety that your best idea will be scooped and that you’ll have nothing to show for many years of work, with profound consequences for you and your staff. Knowing that well-respected journals like PLOS Biology are improving the system is so important for supporting new investigators in an otherwise very difficult period.”

It’s good for science education, too. It means that researchers at smaller institutions that mostly teach undergraduates, “do not need to shy away from pursuing potentially high-impact research, out of fear that a bigger lab will beat them to the punch,” says Alison Pischedda from Barnard College. “This means that undergraduate researchers at all schools can potentially be involved in exciting research.”

Michael Hendricks from McGill University says the concept is great, but he’s skeptical about its execution. In particular, the PLOS Biology editors wrote that they hope that scooped researchers will use the journal’s six-month protection window to “fully support and potentially extend the results of the first article.” That, Hendricks says, “is an implied expectation that you do substantial further work.” It creates much the same problem as the current publishing system—scientists must scramble to do more experiments because someone else got their work out first.

Ganley says the line was poorly phrased, and their intention is exactly the opposite. They think of the six-month window as a chance for researcher to “complete the work they were intending to do, rather than having a panicked reaction to being scooped and submitting there and then,” she says. “The intention is not to hold people accountable for replicating every piece of a prior study.”