“. . . will be published elsewhere.”

This paper is short because it was intended only to announce Watson and Crick’s discovery, and because they were in a competitive situation. In January 1954, they published the "full details" of their work in Proceedings of the Royal Society. This "expound later" approach was common in science in the 1950s. In fact, Rosalind Franklin did the same thing, supplementing her short April 25 paper with two longer articles.

Journals today offer scientists a greater variety of publishing formats than journals in the 1950s. Nature now has more than five different options, most of which are subjected to a rigorous evaluation known as peer review. Since Watson and Crick largely presented a hypothesis instead of new data in this paper, Nature would likely have published it today as an "Analysis" paper—one of the journal’s shorter peer-reviewed formats. This paper was not peer-reviewed— Nature had no formal review process in the 1950s—but it would have been peer-reviewed if submitted today.

For many decades, conferences have also been an important forum for researchers to present their work. Watson reported his and Crick’s results at the prestigious annual symposium at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in June 1953. Meetings continue to be a significant part of the culture of science at Cold Spring Harbor.