The dominant model of journal evaluation emerged at the time when there were no open-access journals, and nobody has assessed yet whether this model is able to cope with this modern reality. This commentary attempts to fill the gaps in the common understanding of the role that 'impact factor' should play in evaluation of open-access journals. Fifty years ago, when computers were a rarity, librarians used index cards to keep records of library holdings. The cards were arranged into an author index and a subject index. To find publications related to the subject of his or her research, a researcher went to the subject index, drew the box with the cards on the subject, look at the long row of cards, and did not know where to start. Since the cards were ordered alphabetically, the seminal works on the subject were lost in the mass of less important publications.Pointing out that subject indexes were "limited in their attempt to provide an ideal key to the literature", Eugene Garfield proposed, in 1955, a new bibliographic tool -- a "citation index"[In 1960, Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), and started a bibliographic indexing service-the Scientific Citation Index, which has been continued since 1992 by the Thomson Reuters Corporation.In 1975, ISI began to publish Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which became later "the recognized authority for evaluating journals" . The logThe JCR summarizes citation data and delivers detailed reports that are supposed to be helpful for librarians, authors, editors, publishers and administrators . The mos(1) If a library is subscribed for two journals with roughly the same title, and cannot continue subscription to both of them, then the journal impact factor has a certain meaning for the librarian: it gives an argument for choosing the journal that should be removed from the library collection.(2) If the subject of an article falls within the scope of two journals, then the journal impact factor has a certain meaning for the article's author: it gives an argument for choosing the journal where to submit the article.(3) If the impact of a journal is higher than those of other journals in the same field of science, then the journal impact factor has a certain meaning for the journal's editor: it gives an argument for convincing a highly-cited scientist to give an article for the journal.(4) If the impact of a journal is higher than those of other journals in the same field of science, then the journal impact factor has a certain meaning for the journal's publisher: it gives an argument for convincing a librarian to subscribe to the journal.Should the meaning of the impact factor remain the same in the case of an open-access journal? Obviously, the impact factor of an open-access journal should not have a practical meaning for a librarian, as the libraries need not subscribe to the open-access journals. As to the other examples, the answer is not so obvious.Open-access journals have a number of features that make them different from the subscription-based journals. The most important of them is that the readership of an open-access journal is not restricted by subscription. This is a huge advantage in sense of dissemination of research results: each article may receive as wide readership as it deserves. It does not matter whether the journal impact factor is high or low: in any case, the articles published in an open-access journal are not less available for a broad readership than the articles published in Science or Nature.Another feature is that open-access journals are integrated to the information environment that is formed by search engines, social networks and other tools for harnessing internet power for quick "association of ideas". All these tools provide direct access to the articles. In this information environment, we read articles, not journals. To read an article, we need not open a journal and read the contents. We even need not read the journal title. Thus, again, it does not matter whether the journal impact factor is high or low: a search engine will find the article, and its position in the search list will depend on its relevance to the search query.In other words, the impact factor of an open-access journal should not have a significant meaning for an author, if the author strives for dissemination of research results.It would be credulous to believe, however, that dissemination of research results is the only purpose of a scientific publication. An article published in a peer-reviewed journal is a sign of scholarly recognition. Moreover, a publication in a high-rank journal is not merely a sign of recognition -- it is a sign of distinction. Hence, the rank of the journal, whatever it means, is important. Having no rank, received from JCR (or other relevant "authority"), an open-access journal would not attract the author who need such a sign of distinction as a publication in a high-rank journal.Shall open-access journals compete for the authors who seek distinction? If we are all agree that subscription-based journals should not be extinct, it would be prudent to reserve them for distinctive authors. Open-access journals have been introduced under the flag of research dissemination, and may thrive under this flag.Of course, we need some metrics to assess usability of a journal for disseminating research results. Bibliographic metrics are not very suitable for this purpose, as the number of citations received by an article depends on the quality of the article. It would be better to develop the metrics that would be less sensitive to the bibliographic quality of a journal and more sensitive to its quality as a medium for conveying research results. Since the websites of the journals published by BioMed Central look like web-portals to corresponding fields of science, it might be reasonable to use the metrics that are proposed for evaluation of web-portals .The brief analysis of the role that 'impact factor' should play in evaluation of open-access journals shows that this issue needs a critical consideration along the following four points:every research article as wide readership as it deserves.(1) The open-access business model has been introduced for solving the problem that could not be solved by means of the subscription-based business model -- that is, the problem of how to give (2) The value of an open-access journal as a tool for communicating research results may be more important than the bibliographic value of the journal as a collection of research articles.(3) The use of the journal impact factor for evaluating an open-access journal may obscure the role of the journal as an information and communication tool.(4) The journal impact factor should not play a crucial role in evaluation of open-access journals, if we all agree that the open-access journals are not to replace the subscription-based journals.It is worth noting here that CBM hopes to start reporting its impact factor in the future like many other journals published by BioMed Central. Meanwhile, authors and readers may retrieve bibliographic indicators of CBM impact from Scopus Journal Analyzer , and relProposing a new bibliographic tool, "citation index", Garfield argued that any comprehensive index to the literature of science may provide only a better starting point for a literature search than the one provided in the selective indexes. He wrote, "Proponents of classified indexes may suggest that classification is the solution to this problem, but this no means the case" . The newIn the later work , GarfielThe publications that cite the same key work form a well defined class. They are all somehow associated with the subject of this key work. Besides, the publications citing these publications also belong to this class. Hence, quite a large bibliography may be created starting from a single key work.The Figure Some articles published in CBM received more than 30 first-order citations. They may be used to generate bibliographies consisting of hundreds of entries. However, an extensive bibliography is not the purpose of every literature search. More than often, a literature search is to find a dozen of the most recent articles that somehow correspond to the completed research and hence could be cited to demonstrate the novelty and significance of the research result.In the example considered above Figure , 9 of 13'Citation surfing' may efficiently reduce the list of articles returned by citation analysis. Besides, not only articles but also the names of the editorial board members can be used as a starting point for 'citation surfing' (see Additional file In the earlier works of Garfield ,9, citatA demonstration of how CBM can be used as a starting point to a literature search. The file can be viewed by using Windows Media Player.Click here for fileA demonstration of how the names of editorial board members can be used as starting points for 'citation surfing'. The file can be viewed by using Windows Media Player.Click here for file


Evolutionary Applications is a fully peer reviewed open access journal. It publishes papers that utilize concepts from evolutionary biology to address biological questions of health, social and economic relevance. Papers are expected to employ evolutionary concepts or methods to make contributions to areas such as (but not limited to): medicine, agriculture, forestry, exploitation and management (fi sheries and wildlife), aquaculture, conservation biology, environmental sciences (including climate change and invasion biology), microbiology, and toxicology. All taxonomic groups are covered from microbes, fungi, plants and animals. In order to better serve the community, we also now strongly encourage submissions of papers making use of modern molecular and genetic methods  to address important questions in any of these disciplines and in an applied evolutionary framework. Theoretical, empirical, synthesis or perspective papers are welcome.Evolutionary Applications is a Wiley Open Access journal, one of a new series of peer-reviewed titles publishing quality research with speed and effi ciency. For further information visit the Wiley Open Access website at http://www.wileyopenaccess.comEvolutionary Applications are fully open access: immediately freely available to read, download and share. All articles accepted from 14 August 2012 are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. All articles accepted before this date were published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. The Creative Commons Attribution License permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and allows the commercial use of published articles. Copyright on any research article in a journal published by Evolutionary Applications is retained by the author(s). Authors grant Wiley a license to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. Authors also grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identifi ed. Further information about open access license and copyright can be found at http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/details/content/12f25db4c87/Copyright–License.html.All articles published by permissionsuk@wiley.com. Print reprints of Wiley Open Access articles can be purchased from corporatesales@wiley.com.Special requests should be addressed to


Toxins are ubiquitous in nature and as such they impact our daily life. Toxins may come from a wide variety of sources and influence a myriad of biological functions. Research on toxins may address their production, structure, chemical properties, biological activity, and economic impact. On the one hand, toxins may be used to decipher biological mechanisms, to favourably influence disease or to combat unwanted organisms. On the other hand, toxins may be a hazard jeopardizing health of humans, animals or plants.In view of the many aspects of research on toxins, it is not surprising that it attracts scientists from a wide variety of scientific disciplines. The significance of toxin-related research is illustrated by the more than two hundred thousand papers dealing with some aspect of toxins. The authors of those papers are from a large number of chemical and biomedical disciplines including toxicology, pharmacology, molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, pathophysiology and pathobiochemistry from molecules to integrated function of organisms. Progress in understanding the properties and effects of toxins critically depends on the mutual interaction of scientists from these different disciplines. Toxins aims to foster the crosstalk between scientists of different methodological and theoretical backgrounds, addressing the various aspects of toxin chemistry and toxin action. The scope of this journal is probably best reflected by the research interests of the members in the editorial board. However, the journal will publish any manuscript of high scientific quality which pertains to toxin chemistry and toxin effect irrespective of the questions asked, the methods applied or the material analyzed. By competent, rapid and fair reviewing the journal attempts to attract authors and by publishing excellent papers to attract readers.The journal The open access of the journal will provide maximal dissemination of the published research reaching an almost unlimited readership. In this way, the large and heterogeneous scientific community interested in toxins will be reached without any restrictions. Accordingly, the access will allow the journal to optimally serve its function, i.e., the promotion of research by distributing pertinent experimental knowledge and scientific ideas.


While open access (OA) is becoming a reality, open evaluation (OE), the other side of the coin, has received less attention. Evaluation steers the attention of the scientific community and thus the very course of science. It also influences the use of scientific findings in public policy. The current system of scientific publishing provides only journal prestige as an indication of the quality of new papers and relies on a non-transparent and noisy pre-publication peer-review process, which delays publication by many months on average. Here I propose an OE system, in which papers are evaluated post-publication in an ongoing fashion by means of open peer review and rating. Through signed ratings and reviews, scientists steer the attention of their field and build their reputation. Reviewers are motivated to be objective, because low-quality or self-serving signed evaluations will negatively impact their reputation. A core feature of this proposal is a division of powers between the accumulation of evaluative evidence and the analysis of this evidence by paper evaluation functions (PEFs). PEFs can be freely defined by individuals or groups  and provide a plurality of perspectives on the scientific literature. Simple PEFs will use averages of ratings, weighting reviewers , and rating scales  in different ways. Complex PEFs will use advanced statistical techniques to infer the quality of a paper. Papers with initially promising ratings will be more deeply evaluated. The continual refinement of PEFs in response to attempts by individuals to influence evaluations in their own favor will make the system ungameable. OA and OE together have the power to revolutionize scientific publishing and usher in a new culture of transparency, constructive criticism, and collaboration.The two major functions of a scientific publishing system are to provide  A scientific publication system needs to provide two basic functions: access and evaluation. Access means we can read anything, evaluation means we do not have to read everything. The traditional publication system restricts the access to papers by requiring payment, and it restricts the evaluation of papers by relying on just 2–4 pre-publication peer reviews and by keeping the reviews secret. As a result, the current system suffers from a lack of quality and transparency of the peer-review evaluation process, and the only immediately available indication of a new paper’s quality is the prestige of the journal it appeared in.Open access (OA) is now widely accepted as desirable and is in the process of becoming a reality Harnad, . HoweverThe evaluation system steers the attention of the scientific community and, thus, the very course of science. For better or worse, the most visible papers determine the direction of each field and guide funding and public policy decisions. Evaluation, therefore, is at the heart of the entire endeavor of science. As the number of scientific publications explodes, evaluation and selection will only gain importance. A grand challenge of our time, therefore, is to design the future system, by which we evaluate papers and decide which ones deserve broad attention. OE, an ongoing post-publication process of transparent peer evaluation (including written reviews and ratings of papers), promises to address the problems of the current system.Here I outline a vision for an open publication and evaluation system with the following key features: Papers are evaluated in an ongoing fashion after publication by means of reviews and ratings. Reviews are mini-publications and can be signed or anonymous. Signed reviews and signed ratings both contribute to a scientist’s visibility. More important papers are more deeply evaluated as they will receive more evaluations. Scientists are more motivated to perform reviews, because it helps build their reputation. Multiple paper evaluation functions (PEFs), freely defined by individuals or groups  provide a plurality of perspectives on the scientific literature. The transition toward a future system of instant publication can be achieved by providing an OE system that will initially serve to more deeply evaluate important papers published under the current system of pre-publication peer review. When the OE system has proven its superiority to the current system of peer review, it will replace the current system.First, I briefly describe key features of the current system of scientific publishing and where it falls short. Second, I briefly describe some positive current developments that represent steps in the right direction, but do not go far enough. Third, I present a general vision for scientific publishing, based on OA and OE, using entirely transparent post-publication reviews and ratings and freely definable PEFs. Fourth, I describe a specific plan for a minimalist OE system that is simple and yet could go a long way toward providing the key functionality for accumulating the evaluative evidence. Fifth, I describe a specific plan for a PEF, so as to illustrate more concretely how the accumulated evidence can be combined to prioritize the literature. Sixth, I outline the ultimate goal, free instant scientific publishing with OA and OE. Finally, in the discussion, I address a number of concerns and counterarguments that have frequently come up in informal discussions. These concerns include a lack of evaluations and the question of how we might smoothly transition toward the envisioned system.The current system of scientific publishing provides access and evaluation in a limited fashion. While access often requires payment, papers are made available in an appealing professional layout that makes them easier to read. This function is desirable, but not critical to scientific progress. The current system also provides evaluation: It administers peer review and provides an evaluative signal that helps readers choose papers, namely journal prestige. This function is critical to scientific progress. However, journal prestige is a crude measure that is not specific to particular papers. The overall process of the current system is summarized in Figure Scientific papers benefit society only to the extent that they are accessible. If the public pays for scientific research it should demand that the results be openly accessible. If private publishers offer valuable services at reasonable prices that contribute to the dissemination of scientific papers, such as appealing layout, then research institutes may want to purchase them. However, access to results of publicly funded research should never come at a cost to an individual. Since OA is already widely seen as desirable among scientists and the general public, this paper focuses on OE: how to open up the other major function of a publication system, namely the evaluation of scientific papers.Nature than to a similar paper published in a specialized journal. While journal prestige is somewhat correlated with the quality of scientific papers, it is not a reliable indicator of the quality of a particular paper. Moreover, journal prestige as an evaluative signal is compromised by causal circularity: Prestige – once acquired – creates its own reality.The main evaluative signal provided to readers for prioritizing their reading of scientific papers is journal prestige. We are more likely to attend to a paper published in The self-fulfilling prophecy of journal prestige has two component cycles of causality, a virtuous one and a vicious one Figure . In the In addition to being an unreliable indicator of a scientific paper’s quality, journal prestige provides only a greatly impoverished, evaluative signal. The detailed reviews and multi-dimensional ratings provided to the journal by the reviewers are kept secret. The reviewers are established experts, largely funded by the public, who work hard to evaluate scientific papers. And yet the detailed evaluations are kept secret and contribute to the reception of a paper only after being reduced to a categorical quality stamp: the journal label. This constitutes a loss to the scientific community and to the general public of valuable judgments that are already being performed and paid for.The current system of publishing is based on a non-transparent evaluation process that includes secret reviews visible only to editors and authors. For high-impact publications, the editorial decision process preceding full review often also includes informal comments solicited by the editors from other scientists. Such informal additional sources of evaluation may often improve the quality of the decisions made – this is why they are used. Nevertheless, this practice compromises the transparency and objectivity of the system.The selection of a paper for publication is typically based on 2–4 peer reviews. The quality of an original and challenging scientific paper cannot reliably be assessed by such a small number of reviewers – even if the reviewers are experts and have no conflict of interest . In reality, the reviewers who are experts in the particular topic of a paper often have some personal stake in the paper’s publication. They may be invested in the theory supported or in another theory. More generally, they may have competitive feelings that compromise their objectivity.precise quality assessments if they are to realize their claim of selecting only the very best papers.For high-impact publications, this political dynamic is exacerbated because the stakes are higher and more scientists are competing for a smaller stage. To make matters worse, high-impact publications require their reviewers to judge the significance of the paper. Judging a paper’s significance requires a necessarily somewhat subjective projection as to where the field will move and how it will be affected by the paper under review. Despite these additional sources of noise in the value signal provided by the reviews, high-impact journals – more than specialized journals – need Even if the majority of scientists are principally motivated by a desire to find the truth and maintain a high level of personal ethics, the incentives built into the system influence the level of objectivity achieved in the writing of papers and in the evaluation process. The current system provides several unhealthy incentives:It rewards authors for making claims that are stronger than can be justified .It rewards authors for suggesting reviewers known to be friendly or supportive of the claims and for selectively citing other scientists likely to support publication (as these are more likely to be selected as reviewers).It rewards reviewers for spending little time reviewing (as this is time available for their own science and reviewing is not rewarded or even recorded). This encourages reviewers to decline many reviews and to avoid in-depth evaluation of the ones they accept.It rewards reviewers for obstructing or delaying the publications by competitors and for expediting publications by allies.Most scientists may resist these rewards. However, an ideal system would not provide such unhealthy incentives. To obstruct or expedite publication, a reviewer need not make any false statements, but merely to gage the review’s level of enthusiasm and focus on strengths or weaknesses as needed. Since the reviews and the reviewer’s identity are kept secret, there is no public scrutiny of either the arguments in a review or possible conflicts of interest of the reviewer. A rogue reviewer can therefore act with impunity and distort decisions indefinitely. The antidote to corruption is transparency – this is a central motivation for the present proposal.The current system of journal-controlled pre-publication review delays publication of papers by months in the best case. When authors target prestigious journals, multiple rejections and rounds of review and revision, often delay publication by more than a year from the date of initial submission. Scientific papers are the major mode of formal scientific communication. Delays of many months in this crucial communication line slowdown the progress of science.In the current system, the key function of evaluating and selecting papers is controlled by private publishing companies. Although papers are reviewed by scientists, the selection of reviewers and the decisions about publication are largely in the hands of private publishers. The publishers are professional at what they do, draw from a large amount of experience, and have a reputation to defend. However, profit maximization can be in conflict with what is best for science. The current system is immensely profitable to the publishers, so they are not natural leaders of a transition to a better system. More generally, the arguments in favor of direct public funding of not-for-profit research institutes (as opposed to buying studies from private research institutes) also apply to scientific publishing. To the extent that the free market can provide cost-efficient solutions, there is a place for the private sector. However, we need to assess whether the benefit to science of the services provided justifies the cost of the current system.ResearchBlogging.orgMany positive developments in scientific publishing include the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and other open-access journals, the Frontiers journals, Faculty of 1000, and The PLoS journalsAlthough the post-publication commentary and rating functionalities represent an attempt at integrating OE, these features are not widely used and thus do not yet provide a major evaluative signal at the moment. This highlights the challenge to motivate scientists to contribute to post-publication evaluation. The PLoS family of journals relies on the traditional process of secret pre-publication peer review as the core of its evaluation process. In a fully transparent post-publication system as proposed here, the editor-solicited initial reviews and ratings would be public, so every paper would have multiple reviews and ratings from this process. For specialized papers, such as those published in PLoS ONE, it is not realistic to expect many additional reviews to accumulate. Moreover, commenting on PLoS papers requires login (increasing the effort required), but comments and ratings are not part of the core evaluation mechanism (which remains secret pre-publication peer review). A scientist who might want to share an opinion has minimal motivation to use the commenting system because there is little indication that such a contribution will matter as the paper already has its mark of approval from pre-publication peer review. A signed critical comment, in particular, would mean taking a social risk without promising much positive impact. As we will see below, the change of culture required to make a transparent evaluation system work requires that the post-publication evaluations really matter as more than an add-on and that signed reviews count as mini-publications that are citable and help build the reviewer’s reputation.The Frontiers journalsImportantly, papers are first published in the specialized journals. Based on the additional evaluative information accumulated in the reception of the papers by the community, a subset of projects is selected for wider publication in a higher-tier journal. This has several advantages over conventional approaches: Selection for greater visibility is based on more evidence than available to traditional high-impact publications . The higher-tier thus responds more slowly and ideally more wisely: avoiding to draw attention to findings that do not pass the test of confrontation with a larger group of peer scientists than can be asked to initially review a paper. Like PLoS, Frontiers offers web functionality for reviewing and rating, but these OE features do not yet form the core of the evaluation process.The Frontiers system is visionary and represents a substantial step in the right direction. As for the PLoS journals, however, quality control for the lowest tier still relies on pre-publication review, tolerating the evaluation inaccuracies and delays and failing to provide detailed evaluative information, such as public reviews.Faculty of 1000ResearchBlogging.org collects blog-based responses to peer-reviewed papers. This is a big advance as it allows anyone to participate and provide evaluative information, which can be accessed through the ResearchBlogging.org website. The use of blogs is helpful in that it makes this system open. However, it also means that reviews are not permanently citable as blogs can be taken down. Moreover, as of yet the blog responses lack numerical ratings that could be automatically analyzed for paper evaluations. Blog responses are also not digitally signed for author identification, and the responses are not visible when viewing the target paper itself.The problems of the current system can all be addressed by open post-publication peer review. The basic process of this model is summarized in Figure Any scientist can instantly publish a peer review on any published paper. The scientist will submit the review to a public repository . For example, a controversial paper appearing in Like the current system of pre-publication evaluation, the new system relies on peer reviews and ratings. For all of its faults, peer review is the best mechanism available for evaluation of scientific papers. Note however, that public post-publication reviews differ in two crucial respects:(1)They do not decide about publication – as the papers reviewed are already published.(2)They are public communications to the community at large, not secret communications to editors and authors.This makes the peer review more similar to getting up to comment on a talk presented at a conference. Because the reviews are transparent and do not decide about publication, they are less affected by politics. Because they are communications to the community, their power depends on how compelling their arguments are to the community. This is in contrast to secret peer review, where uncompelling arguments can prevent publication because editors largely rely on reviewers’ judgments and reviewers are not acting publicly before the eyes of the community.The term “evaluation” refers to both reviews and ratings. Like peer reviews, peer ratings are used by many journals in the current system. However, the valuable multi-dimensional quantitative information they provide remain secret. The OE system will enable explicit ratings on multiple scales that reflect both the confidence that the claims are veridical and the importance of the paper. Scales will include “justification of claims,” “novelty of claims,” and “significance of claims.” The system will also include a simple syntax for freely introducing new scales within any evaluation. All this requires is to give the new scale a name that clearly denotes its meaning and to provide a rating.The necessary selection of papers for reading can be based on the reviews and their associated numerical judgments. Any group or individual can define a PEF based on content and quality criteria. A PEF could for example, rely only on signed ratings from post-PhD scientists, and weight different rating scales in a particular way. A PEF could also employ social-network information, e.g., to downweight ratings from reviewers that are associated with the authors. Social networks could also contribute evaluative information on papers to PEFs, including usage and sharing statistics as well as ratings Lee,  will be Web-portals  public, so that their work in reviewing the paper can be of benefit to the readers of the paper and to the community at large.The quality of the evaluative signals will be improved by post-publication review for a number of reasons:(1)Since reviews are open letters to the community, their power is dependent on how compelling they are to the community. (2)The system will include signed evaluations, so the reviewer’s reputation is on the line: he or she will want to look objective and reasonable. (3)Important papers will accumulate more evaluations (both reviews and ratings) over time as the review phase is open ended, thus providing an increasingly reliable evaluative signal.Ratings, like reviews, can be signed and will enable us to help steer the attention of our field without investing the time required for a full review. Early signed ratings that turn out to be solid can contribute to a scientist’s reputation just as reviews can. As researchers read and discuss the literature in journal clubs around the world as needed for their own research, the expert judgments are already being performed behind closed doors. The OE system will provide a mechanism for feedback of this valuable information into the public domain. With PEFs in place to summarize the evaluations, journal prestige will eventually not be needed anymore as an evaluative signal.Open evaluation means that the scientific community organizes the evaluation of papers independently, thus taking control of this critical function, which is currently administered by publishers. Evaluation is the key function that currently keeps science dependent on for-profit publishers. Achieving OE, therefore, will also help accelerate the ongoing shift toward general OA. Conversely, OA is a requirement for true OE, as only openly accessible papers can be evaluated by the entire community. OA and OE are the two complementary pieces of the ongoing paradigm shift in scientific publishing.A core feature of this proposal is a clear division of powers between the OE system, which accumulates reviews and ratings and links them to the papers they refer to, and the PEFs, which combine the evaluative evidence so as to prioritize the literature from particular perspectives. This division of powers requires that the evidence accumulated by the OE system is publicly available, so that independent groups and individuals can analyze it and provide PEFs. This division of powers ensures transparency and enables unrelated groups and individuals to freely contribute to the evaluative evidence and to its combination for prioritizing papers. For example, if a group of scientists started doing mutual favors by positively evaluating each other’s papers, an independent group could build a PEF that uses only signed evaluations and downweights evaluations from individuals within cliques of positive mutual evaluation. Conversely, when a web-portal claims to combine the evaluative evidence by a given PEF to compute its paper ranking, anyone can re-implement that algorithm, run it on the public evaluative evidence, and check the ranking for correctness. This fosters a culture in which we keep each other honest, and in which public interest and self-interest are aligned. When the process is entirely transparent and competing PEFs evolve in response to any attempts to game the system, an individual’s best bet is to act according to the criteria of objectivity he or she believes will eventually prevail.What are the minimal requirements for a web-based OE system for accumulating evaluations? We would like the system to enable rapid ratings, signed or unsigned, and also multi-dimensional ratings and in-depth reviews. A key consideration is the time it takes for users to provide ratings as this will determine the efficiency of the system and, thus, the volume of evaluative evidence accumulated. I will now describe a prototype that meets minimum requirements and is designed to “seduce” the user to provide more detailed information.The quickest rating is clicking a “like” button. While this has proven useful for prioritizing items in non-scientific web systems, it is not ideal for evaluating scientific papers. The key argument against one-click ratings is that they provide continuous valuations only in aggregate. Counting the number of likes confounds the amount of exposure a given item  has received (how many people considered clicking “like”) with the value attributed to it. Adding a “dislike” button enables us to consider the balance of likes and dislikes. However, a continuous valuation requires a sizeable number of contributions, and error bars on the valuation require even more contributions. “Like” and “dislike” buttons, therefore, are ideal for sampling casual judgments of large numbers of people, but less suited for our present purpose, i.e., sampling careful judgments of small numbers of people.I therefore suggest using an overall rating scale as the first evaluative piece of information. The fastest way to collect a continuous judgment might be a click on a continuous scale on the screen. However, we are interested in careful deliberate evaluations. We therefore prefer the user to decide on a numerical rating. A numerical rating is also better suited for being explicitly remembered and communicated. Entering one number takes only a little longer than a click.The next question is how the single scale should be defined. Rating scales for movies and other cultural items sometimes use a five-star system. However, a five-level scale appears too coarse to reflect individual scientists’ quality judgments on papers and also does not provide a sufficiently fine-grained signal for prioritization entire literatures. A higher resolution appears desirable, e.g., a number between 0 and 100. Bounding the ratings between a lowest and highest value provides an intuitive definition of its units, e.g., from worst to best imaginable. Ideally, however, the units of the scale should be defined more precisely than by a mere specification of bounds. In that case bounding the scale is not necessary.A rating could be conceptualized as a “weight,” which the rater thinks should be given to the paper in combining the evidence on a scientific question . This would suggest that 0 should be the lowest possible rating. A rating of 0 would communicate the judgment that the paper’s contents are best ignored in order to arrive at the truth. Note, however, that limiting the scale to positive values entails that the average across multiple noisy ratings will be positively biased . To address this shortcoming, ratings could comprise negative as well as positive numbers. This possibility is illustrated in Figure Beyond the resolution and range of the scale, we need to decide the content: What evaluation criteria should be captured by the first scale (for which we expect to accumulate the greatest number of ratings)? The scale’s definition must be highly general as any specific choice we make is going to be problematic. Say we defined the scale as measuring the “justification of the claims” of the paper. A user might find a technical paper that is highly justified in its claims less significant than a bold paper that presents a groundbreaking theory and still makes a reasonable case for its claims. Other users will have different priorities. While the proposed system ultimately addresses this issue by enabling multi-dimensional ratings , it still faces a decision for the first scale.We must not put the user in a double bind, where the scale is defined by one criterion, but he or she would prefer to judge by another, in awareness of the real-world consequences of the judgment on the visibility and thus ultimately on the impact of the paper. I therefore propose that the single overall scale should be the “desired impact” for the paper. This describes the actual effect the scale is meant to control and thus avoids the double bind. A user who feels that justification of claims should be the most important criterion will judge desired impact by this criterion. A different user might give more weight to the originality of the ideas put forward. Defining the scale as “desired impact” acknowledges the inherent subjectivity of judging the significance of scientific papers.desired, not predicted impact. One might predict great impact for a paper one considers incorrect. But most of us would not desire high impact for such a paper. The desired-impact rating enables scientists to judge by their own criteria (including veracity and importance) what impact a paper deserves.Note that the proposed overall scale of “desired impact” is not the only scale that should be used. Other scales will focus explicitly on the justification of the claims of a paper and on other specific evaluative dimensions. Note also that “desired-impact” ratings express The next question is how desired impact should be expressed numerically. I propose the use of a unit that scientists already understand: the IF. IFs are used in the current system of scientific publishing for evaluating journals. Journal IFs are problematic, especially when they are misinterpreted as measures of the quality of the papers published in a given journal. However, they are widely understood and grounded in the citation success of papers. The IF of a journal is the average number of citations in the present year received by papers published by the journal in the previous 2 years. We can loosely interpret the IF as the average citation success of a paper in the 2 years following the year of its publication.We define the first scale as “desired impact” in IF units. The IF unit is redefined to apply to a particular paper as measuring the number of citations the paper should receive in the 2 years following the year of its publication, so as to be considered by the user as having received an appropriate amount of attention. Alternatively, we can think of the desired-impact rating as the IF of the hypothetical journal that the paper is deemed appropriate for.Figure Signing can utilize existing web identification and authentication technology. It could be automatized using active logins in scientific or non-scientific social networks. For example, Google Gmail, facebook, and Apple iTunes all use such technology. But even if the scientist just signed by name in a text field, the system could work, because all evaluations are public, and identity theft in OE could be righted retrospectively.The motivation to sign would come from the greater weight certain PEFs will assign to signed evaluations. In some of these PEFs this weight will also depend on an evaluation of the signing scientist. In addition, signing evaluations contributes to the reputation and visibility of the scientist.After signing, the user has the option to disclose information about social links to the authors and about any personal stake in the results of paper. Within another 30 s, the user can disclose how many of the authors he (1) has co-published with in the past, (2) is friends with, and (3) is acquainted with, and (4) whether the findings reflect positively upon his or her own work. These ratings are made in an honor system. However, since they are public information that can be verified, there is a strong disincentive to misrepresent potential conflicts of interest. As for signing, the positive motivation for disclosing comes from the greater weight some PEFs will assign to ratings, for which this information is available.Finally, the user is given the option to attach a review. The review can be attached in a suitable format for being read by people and analyzed by PEFs. The existing formats txt, doc, or pdf could initially serve this purpose, although more structured and flexible formats might come to be preferred. A review can contain ratings on multiple scales , along with text and figures. Such a review is an instant citable, mini-publication, providing added motivation for contributing to the process.The web-based OE system we described above can accumulate the evaluative evidence. However, the evidence still needs to be combined for prioritizing the literature. We have stressed the need for a division of powers between these two components of the evaluation process, and for a plurality of perspectives on the literature in the form of multiple competing PEFs. To make the concept of a PEF more concrete, I propose a blueprint for a general-purpose PEF called “sciture” Figure .Sciture stands for “scientific citation future.” This particular PEF uses only the desired-impact scale, enabling it to draw from a larger number of ratings than PEFs that combine multiple rating scales (for which we expect to accumulate fewer scientists’ ratings). A paper’s sciture is the impact projected for the paper by the scientists that rated the paper. The sciture is the desired impact in impact-factor units averaged across the scientists who signed their ratings.H and weights each rating by the rater’s H-index  uses an unweighted average of all signed ratings, so as to give raters equal influence. The second is called sciture Hirsch, , thus giOnce OE provides the critical evaluation function, papers themselves will no longer strictly need journals in order to become part of the scientific literature. They can be published like the reviews: as digitally signed documents that are instantly publicly available. OE will provide evaluative information for any sufficiently important publication. With OE in place, there is no strong argument for pre-publication review. The binary decision for or against publication will be replaced by graded evaluative evidence, that is summarized by PEFs. Publication on the internet can, thus, be instant and reviews will follow as part of the integrated post-publication process of reception and evaluation.editor for the paper. If the senior scientist accepts, an acknowledgment of his or her role as editor will be added to the paper. The editor’s job is to select two to four reviewers and to email them (via an automatic system that uses standard invite texts) with the request to publicly review the paper. If they decline, the editor is to find replacements. However, anyone else is allowed to review the paper as well. In particular, the author may also inform other scientists of the publication and ask them to review the paper. Author- and editor-requested reviews will be marked as such. Reviewers could be asked to state whether or not the review has been requested by an editor or suggested (explicitly or implicitly) by the authors. Requested as well as unrequested reviews can be signed or unsigned. Editors must not have been at the same institution or on any paper with the authors. Reciprocal or within-clique editing is monitored and discouraged. Since the editors are named, PEFs can detect within-clique editing and reviewing and downweight within-clique reviews and within-clique-editor-requested reviews.Peer-to-peer editing can help to get the evaluation process started and to ensure that the initial two to four reviewers are somewhat balanced in terms of biases and expertise. Balance is particularly important in the initial phase, because a small number of negatively biased initial reviews can nip a paper’s OE process in the bud. After publication, the author asks a senior scientist in his or her field to serve as If the weight of the criticism in the accumulated reviews and the importance of the paper justify it, the authors have the option to revise their paper. The revision will then be the first thing the reader sees when accessing the paper and the authors’ response to the reviews may render the criticism obsolete. However, the history of revisions of the paper, starting from the original publication will remain accessible in perpetuity.Reviews will no longer be secret communications deciding about publication. They will be open letters to the community with numerical quality ratings that will influence a paper’s visibility on web-portals. The quality and quantity of signed reviews written by a given scientist will be one of the determinants of his or her status. This will greatly enhance the motivation to participate in the evaluation process. With a general OE system in place, reviewing activity can be analyzed with the same methods used to analyze other publication activity. Figure Open evaluation goes hand in hand with a new culture of science. This culture will be more open, transparent, and community controlled than the current one. We will define ourselves as scientists not only by our primary research papers, but also by our signed reviews, and by the prior work we value through our public signed ratings. The current clear distinction between the two senses of “review”  will blur. Reviews will be the meta-publications that evaluate and integrate the literature and enable us as a community to form coherent views and overviews of exploding and increasingly specialized literatures. Evaluation of scientific work and distillation of the key insights are at the heart of the entire endeavor of science. The scientific community will therefore take on the challenge of designing and continually improving the evaluation system. This includes design of the human-computer interfaces, design of the web-mediated interactions between humans, and design of artificial-intelligence components that will help evaluate and integrate our insights. Designing the OE system will lead us to the ultimate challenge: to design the collective cognitive process by which science, globally connected through the web, constructs our view of the world, and ourselves.The discussion is structured by critical questions that I have encountered when discussing this proposal.Yes, but that’s not a problem. Peer review currently serves as a barrier to entry into the literature, serving to maintain a certain quality standard. Removing this barrier might seem dangerous in that it might open the gates to a flood of low-quality papers. In other notable proposals of public peer review, pre-publication review therefore still plays a role . This would help prevent computer-generated content from being submitted. Beyond these formal restrictions, authors will be aware that low-quality publications will damage their reputations. Scientific papers require minimal storage  and their number is small per capita of the population and year. Although the total storage required will be substantial, our technology can handle it.Peer evaluation cannot be truly open  unless the paper is publicly available . A public peer review, thus, is post-publication by definition. A pre-publication stage would be merely a matter of labeling published papers as either “under review” or “reviewed” . However, OE is to be ongoing and incremental, and the evaluative signal continuous and multidimensional. Labeling already published papers as “reviewed” or “properly published” at some stage merely amounts to imposing an arbitrary threshold on some PEF. There is no clear motivation, thus, for dividing OE into two stages.Some published papers will never get a single review or rating; this is not a problem. There will be a new twilight zone of published, citable, but unevaluated papers. As readers, we do not mind this, because twilight papers will not come to our attention unless we explicitly search for them. As authors whose work remains in the twilight, we will learn that we need to connect better with peers through conferences, conversations, and high-quality work, to earn enough respect to find an initial audience, and a peer-to-peer editor. In case we are too far ahead of our peers to be understood, our twilight publications might be discovered later on. The future system will thus provide a mechanism for publication of science that defies the dominant scientific paradigm, is unpopular for other reasons, or simply difficult to understand. However, there is no instant mechanism for distinguishing the bad from the brilliant, but misunderstood. It is therefore necessary to provide permanent access to both, and unavoidable that a proportion of the literature will receive little attention and no proper evaluation.Many papers will receive some evaluations, but not enough for reliable averages. These papers are under evaluated as are all papers in the current system. In the proposed system, however, the lack of reliable evaluation will be reflected in the absence (or large range) of the error bars on the overall score from a given PEF.Important work will eventually be read, rated, and reviewed. Because a scientist’s time is a limited resource, broad and deep evaluation can only be achieved for a subset of papers. Broad evaluation means that many scientists from different fields participate in the evaluation. Deep evaluation means that experts in the field provide in-depth evaluations and commentary on the details. To the extent that an initial set of reviews brings more attention to a paper, it will tend to be more broadly and deeply evaluated. This selective and recurrent allocation of the field’s attention is a key feature of the proposed system. Selective recurrent rating and reviewing ensures that we have a reliable evaluation before raising a paper to global visibility within science and before bringing it to the attention of the general public.In the current system, scientists are approached by editors and asked to review new papers. They regularly comply. In the new system, they will be approached similarly often through peer-to-peer editing with the same request – only the reviews will be public. There is some evidence that potential reviewers are more likely to decline to review when they are told that their name will be revealed to the authors Reviewers are motivated to minimize bias when they sign their reviews: their reputation is on the line: The perception of a specific bias attributable to the reviewer’s academic or social connections or to a self-serving preference for certain theories would seriously threaten the reviewer’s reputation. To a lesser extent, a reviewer who signs will also be motivated to minimize general positive bias, which might result from the desire to appear to be a nice person. A general “niceness bias” would suggest that the reviewer is undiscerning and thus fails to contribute critical judgment.(2)A general positive bias will not compromise the assessment of the relative merit of different papers: Even if each reviewer were affected by niceness bias to some degree, the relative merit of different papers could still be judged. The extreme scenario would be an endorsement culture, where only positive reviews are ever signed. This is comparable to reference letters, which are meant to help evaluate people’s abilities. Reference letters are affected by massive positive biases, but still serve their purpose. Even if all signed evaluations were positive endorsements, the number of endorsements, the numerical ratings, and the level of enthusiasm of the positive reviews would still offer valuable measures of the community’s appreciation of a paper.(3)Biases of signing reviewers can be measured and corrected for by PEFs: For a given reviewer, the set of signed reviews written and the distribution of signed numerical ratings given are public information. PEFs could therefore estimate and remove biases. For example, each reviewer’s ratings could be converted to percentiles, reflecting the relative rating in comparison to the other studies reviewed by the same person. In addition, a reviewer’s general bias could be assessed by comparing each of his or her ratings to the mean of the other reviewer ratings across all papers reviewed. As for specific biases reflecting academic or social connections or preferences for particular theories, these too could be automatically assessed. The suggested minimalist OE system already includes optional disclosure of information that might suggest biases . When the reviewer does not volunteer such information, his or her ratings could be downweighted preemptively. Moreover, analyses of social and academic networks and of published papers could be used to estimate the probability of a conflict of interest. Again, PEFs could use such estimates to adjust the weight assigned to a reviewer’s ratings.(4)Signing reviews is optional: If a reviewer feels timid about signing a critical argument, he or she can contribute the argument without signing the review. Unsigned reviews and ratings might be given less weight in some PEFs. However, other reviewers who invest enough time in the paper to read the previous reviews may pick up the argument if it is compelling in their own signed reviews. Note that there is no need for an ethical requirement that a single scientist either sign or not sign all reviews. Instead signed and unsigned reviews serve complementary positive roles and the choice between them motivates a richer and freer exchange of arguments.H index suggested above, each rating is weighted by the reviewer’s H-index. Alternative indices of the reviewer’s general scientific performance could equally be used  and total time spent reviewing could also be used to limit a single person’s influence.A reviewer who signs a review or rating links a little piece of his or her reputation to a paper. This is a gamble. Say the review was positive. If the paper stands the test of time, then the reviewer’s reputation rises a little. If the paper becomes discredited, the reviewer’s reputation falls. Since every scientist rates many papers, a single erroneous judgment will not have a large effect. A reviewer’s performance on a given evaluation can be estimated as a function of the existing evaluations at the time of submission of the evaluation and the evaluations accumulated up to the present moment: Performance could be judged as high if the reviewer’s judgment stands the test of time, and especially high if this evaluation was made early and/or diverged from existing evaluations when it was entered. This criterion can be formalized in an information-theoretic framework.The OE system will enable scientists to make visible contributions by evaluating others’ work. As a result, reviewing will be a competitive, public activity, that strongly impacts one’s reputation as a scientist. Some scientists will contribute to the evaluation more than others. In fact, the system would enable some scientists to specialize in this particular form of meta-science. The system will fundamentally change the way science progresses: scientists will want to attach their reputations to the developments they truly believe in. Looking wisely ahead with deep intuition will be rewarded over following shallow trends.A revision will take precedence over the original version of the paper in that it will be the version most visibly presented to readers. However, the entire history of the paper, including the original version, all revisions, and all evaluative meta-information will remain openly accessible and separately citable in perpetuity. The authors have no right or ability to remove this record.If the authors decide to submit a revision of their paper, the revision will require re-review (as is the case in the current system for major revisions). The ratings and reviews of the original paper will not automatically transfer to the revision. If the revision is important to the field, it will be re-evaluated by enough scientists . If the revision is less important, it will not be as broadly and deeply evaluated as the original version, but can still serve to provide the most up-to-date version of the paper and address the reviews of the original.The authors are free to refuse to revise their paper if other projects are of greater importance to them. When the authors disagree with reviews, they can publish responses to the reviews (as meta-reviews), which may contain further experimental results, along with ratings of the reviews. PEFs may utilize higher-order reviews in weighting the ratings of the first-order reviews. Responses to reviews are simply reviews referring to other reviews, thus utilizing the same infrastructure as reviews of papers and meta-reviews contributed by other scientists. Author responses to reviews and will provide an important function complementary to that of a revision.A paper, once published, can never be erased from the crystallized record of scientific history. Moreover, the attention the community grants to a new paper upon publication so as to evaluate it may not be reduplicated for a revision. This creates a strong motivation for scientists to publish only work they can stand by in the long run. Scientists will therefore seek informal constructive criticism before initial publication to a greater degree than currently. For example, in addition to presenting the project at a conference they may post the paper on a blog or share it with selected researchers by email a few weeks before publication. This informal round of review and revision will reduce the noise in the crystallized record.Yes, alternative metrics derived from usage statistics, from links, and from the social web will play an increasing role in steering the attention of both the general public and the scientific community  can provide overall importance indices, and can be modified to rely more heavily on some links  than others. In usage and link-based importance indices, however, positive and negative attention adds to the visibility of the content. Explicit judgments, such as the “desired-impact” rating suggested above, provide a complementary signal that will be important in science. In contrast perhaps to other domains like art and entertainment, science will always rely on explicit peer judgment.Research blogging fills an important gap: between informal discussions and formal publications Harnad, . Unlike Blogs are science’s short-term memory Figure . They enThe web’s equivalent of a citation is a link. Links are versatile and fast, but there is no mechanism to ensure that they will continue to work in perpetuity. In fact, such a mechanism would rob the web of a key feature: plasticity. While the web world of blogs is fast and flexible, it is also fleeting and this is a good thing. As a complement to the web, however, we need a crystallized scientific record. Links here are citations of papers identified by digital object identifiers, which are guaranteed to be maintained in perpetuity. Links crossing the boundary between these two worlds are desirable. Scientific posts  will use web-links to other non-crystallized resources and in addition they will cite the crystallized record. Conversely, scientific papers  will rely on citations to ground themselves in the crystallized scientific record and can additionally utilize web-links, with the understanding that these may become defunct.This proposal affirms the importance of the scientific paper and the process of peer review as essential elements of scientific publishing. The current function of the journal in administrating peer review, selecting content, and providing access to related papers in context will be more fluidly served by web-portals that present a portion of the literature, prioritized by PEFs. The future system will be designed by scientists, independent of publishing companies. This reflects the fact that the key functions of access and evaluation can be served at a higher level of quality and at lower costs than in the current system.Nature and Science.However, for-profit scientific publishers will have new opportunities to offer services that will legitimately contribute to science and society. The publication and review of specialized scientific papers might no longer depend on for-profit publishers, but their services can contribute to communicating the most important scientific findings beyond the confines of a highly specialized scientific audience. As an example of this challenge, let’s consider the role currently played by the high-prestige publications Nature and Science strive to reach a broad scientific audience with groundbreaking new science. They succeed in publishing many important papers. However, they use classical peer review, so their evaluation mechanism suffers from non-transparency (secret review) and from a lack of evaluative evidence (2–5 reviews). As a result, Science and Nature, despite having the highest standard in the industry, do not quite live up to their promise of publishing only groundbreaking work. Conversely, they miss out on groundbreaking work published elsewhere (because it was either not submitted to them or rejected by them). In addition, primary research papers in Nature and Science do not typically succeed at communicating their results to a broad audience.Frontiers). Since the scientific validity and significance has already been established, the publisher’s role would be to ensure readability and didactic quality of text and visuals. Copy editing and professional artwork and layout, as provided by publishing companies, are non-essential for primary research reports, but valuable for the broader communication of groundbreaking findings.In the future, a for-profit publisher could utilize the OE system, develop its own PEF for selecting content, and produce a high-prestige publication that fully succeeds (1) at presenting only groundbreaking science and (2) at communicating it to a broader audience. The content of such a general science magazine would not be primary reports of new scientific findings. Rather the publisher would select independently published studies that have turned out to be groundbreaking, relying on the broader, deeper, and more reliable evidence from OE. The original authors would then be invited to write a piece communicating the science more broadly  the individual scientist’s motivation, cognition, and interaction with web-based human-computer interfaces, (2) the consequences of enabling different forms of individual influence on the system, (3) the dynamics of the entire system as a social network, (4) mechanisms for combining evaluations from many individual scientists so as to prioritize the literature, (5) the network of papers (nodes) and citations (links) and potential automatic inference methods  that can be applied to this network to assess the validity of the claims in the context of their interrelationships.Yes, we should. Web collaboration is bound to revolutionize the way science is done Nielsen, , 2011. SThe author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.


By means of 10 simple lessons the problems and pitfalls of getting a manuscript published are considered. Working through each lesson in turn will provide the reader with a step-by-step guide to effective publishing in the biomedical arena. The process of scientific research is only useful if novel and robust results can be communicated to others such that the stock of human knowledge increases. Consequently publication must be seen as a central part, if not the central part, of the research process. Of course there are many benefits to authors contingent on publication, ranging from kudos to enhanced employment prospects and even tenure, but it is the communication of novel information that is paramount. Many find the process relatively easy while others struggle. Some authors are well coached by their mentors. Others have not benefited from such development, and in particular for junior researchers the key steps of grant writing and paper writing can be daunting and full of frustration. In this short review I will provide a personal perspective on the issue of writing scientific papers in the biomedical arena, based on my experiences as an author, a reviewer and an editor. I shall approach this task with a series of Ten Lessons, each of which builds into a short course that will successfully develop your writing skillsAs with all skills the ability to write well can be learned. Some find it easy, others hard, but without doubt all can improve and develop their skills. As with all educational experiences there is a relationship between effort expended and rewards. A key ‘educational device’ in the school of scientific writing is reading! Read much and widely! Read scientific papers in front rank journals and examine closely the style and approach of authors who have succeeded. Look at the structure and clarity of language. Observe the simple structure of sentences and paragraphs. See how the well-crafted paper is concise and to the point. Notice how good authors use simple language without verbosity and flowery, overly inflated statements. There is much to be gained from time spent reading!There are thousands of journals and perhaps hundreds of thousands of paper published every year. It is a sad fact that the majority of papers are not cited and it is likely that many are not read by more than a handful of people. This then begs the question as to when is something worth publishing? The key point here is ‘have something to say’! Only when you have a clear message should you begin to think about the publication process. Your message should be clear and it should be a significant addition to the literature. Consequently you need to have a good grasp of the relevant literature relating to your message, and also the techniques and methods you have used, their advantages and disadvantages, value and limitations, and the general background of the area.The core structure of a research article  is well established. Despite being criticized by some authorities,“Why did you start, what did you do, what answer did you get and what does it mean anyway?”This of course relates to the general paradigm of Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion (sometimes referred to as IMRAD). The Introduction should set the scene and in a concise manner define the general background to the subject of investigation. It should not be overly long and should be in proportion to the rest of the manuscript. A useful strategy is to end this section with the question (or hypothesis) that is being posed.The Materials and Methods of any research paper should contain enough information for the reader to understand exactly what was done. This is crucial. It may be that to save space extraneous detail might be placed in supplementary information that is only published online. This is now increasingly common but there still needs to be enough information in the paper to explain core methodologies, including patient groups. The practice of placing all Materials and Methods in supplementary material online is, in my view, unfortunate and indeed reprehensible.The Results section should contain clear statements of all the core data and observations in a logical order. It should not contain interpretation nor materials and methods! Display items and tables should not replicate information provided in text. As with the Materials and Methods it is now common for additional data and results to be placed online and this is entirely appropriate. However, as with the Materials and Methods there should be full disclosure of the key results in the main body of the paper, again sufficient to allow the reader to understand the key data.In the Discussion, the data should be placed in a broad context and appropriately discussed. It is common for authors to extend discussions into all sorts of tangential areas and to speculate wildly. In my view it is important to stay focused on the point of the paper. However, it should be said that it is good practice to mention and discuss potential problems and caveats of the studies reported and to consider (or at least mention) opposing or alternate views and hypotheses. A balanced paper will consider the field in the round.A number of other elements are important in papers today. A conflict of interest (COI) statement is important. Conflicts of interest in themselves are not a bar to publication: not knowing about COI is however regrettable. A recent Commentary on this subject has been published.In Lesson 1 we considered the value of reading widely. There are general rules of writing and George Orwell outlined these.Never use a long word where a short one will doIf it is possible to cut a word out, then cut it outKeep sentence constructions simpleAvoid one-sentence paragraphsUse simple punctuationOver and above these rules I would recommend two ‘tests’ that assist in writing. First, the ‘tell it to a friend’ test. Can you explain the points you are wishing to make in your paper in simple terms to a colleague or even to a relative who is not an expert? If you are able to do this your understanding of what you wish to convey is excellent. If you cannot then are you sure you have a full grasp of the field? Second, the ‘read it out loud’ test. Having written your paper, and once you are very happy with it, take it to a quiet place. Perhaps in an empty room or an empty field. There slowly read it out loud to yourself! You will be amazed how something you have written and looks fine on paper, sounds awful when you read it out loud. The grammatical errors and poorly contrasted sentences will jump out as you speak them!Finally it is important to get others to read you draft manuscripts. Do not rush to send manuscripts to journals. A few days extra with input and advice from others, from mentors and colleagues can be invaluable. If nothing else they may spot typographical errors and other small points that an author can become blind to after spending days or weeks crafting their magnum opus.New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Cell, Nature and Science that command huge respect and in whose pages are often (but not invariably) carried research reports, reviews and other articles of major importance. Publishing in such high impact journals is the pinnacle of careers and inevitably few authors achieve this. There lie just below these a wide array of journals whose impact is only slightly less and also carry major impact articles. Then within any given specialty there are specialist journals and here to there is a range of ‘quality’ and impact. For example, in Pathology there are currently 71 journals listed by ISI ranging from the research journal with the highest impact: Journal of Pathology (Impact Factor 6.446) to the Korean Journal of Pathology (Impact Factor 0.064) with the mean Impact Factor of this grouping being 2.25. While Impact Factor is a widely criticized parameterIt is a simple fact that there exists a clear hierarchy of journals: there are those very high profile journals such as the Journal of Pathology currently has a mean time to first decision of 13 days. The mean time to final decision is 22 days. From acceptance to publication online of an edited but not typeset version is just a few days. Other journals are much slower. Authors would like their work disseminated as quickly as possible and so these issues will influence the decision-making process.So then how does an author (and his colleagues) decide on where to send a manuscript? From Lesson 5 you will now have an understanding of the ‘league tables’ of journals and as a simple rule one should aim as high as possible. High impact journals will inevitably have more exposure and weight than low impact journals. But the Impact Factor is not the only variable to consider. Authors need to ask questions about the appropriateness (or fit) of their work with the journal. They need to read the aims and scope of the journal: does the proposed manuscript ‘fit’ in the journal‘s area of coverage? Authors should look at copies of the journals that they are considering and see if they publish the kinds of work that the authors are going to report. Authors need to consider some other important issues such as the time a journal takes to undertake the review process. This can be gleaned from examining published papers and examining the dates of submission and acceptance. Some journals are quick: others notoriously slow. Even when a manuscript has been accepted there is an interval between acceptance and publication: what is this for the journals you are considering? Again there is great variation. The The final group of issues relevant to decisions regarding publication relate to costs and the nature of access. Authors should consider the quality of printing and the quality of the journal website and its online versions. Authors should consider the costs involved: are their submission charges? Are there page charges? What is the cost of color figures? Does the journal charge for supplementary material online? Over and above this authors should consider the pros and cons of open access journals, that is journals where the author pays a significant fee  to have the paper free to all via the Internet. All of these factors will influence the final choice of destination for your manuscript.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/%28ISSN%291096-9896/homepage/ForAuthors.html). Here we set the instructions out in a ‘checklist’ based manner with a range of headings that follow the normal structure of a paper. Each heading is hyperlinked to further text with explanatory detail. That detail is important and manuscripts that are submitted without attention to the various points outlined are usually returned to the authors without review. This wastes everyone‘s time! Moreover it sends a signal to the editor that the authors do not worry about detail. If they do not worry about detail in the submission process can the editor be sure they worry about detail in the research? It sends a very worrying signal!Each journal will publish in hard copy and/or via its website a clear set of instructions of how a manuscript should be produced and prepared for submission to that journal. While it is the case that there are differences in detail between all journals, in reality the basic principles are the same. However it is crucial that any author reads and carefully considers all of the issues in these instructions and attends to the issues with a focus on detail. Take for example the Instructions to Authors for the Journal of Pathology (see Where do authors make the biggest mistakes? Without question the biggest errors come from (1) manuscripts, figures and tables in the wrong file format (if it says a Word file do not send a PDF), (2) incorrect font and text formats , (3) incorrect format of references in the text or in the bibliography, and (4) incorrect resolution for figures and other display items. With regard to the latter sadly it is the case that many authors do not realize that what looks excellent on a computer screen (resolution 72 dpi) is wholly inadequate for publication purposes, where 300 dpi are often needed. Furthermore the dimensions of an image are important. Regularly one sees figures being submitted which are 300 dpi and seemingly fine, but they are perhaps only 10 by 5 mm: when expanded to fit a full column (86mm wide) or full page (176 mm wide) the resolution falls to unacceptable levels. It seems odd that authors invest considerable time in generating data but fall at the final hurdle when preparing their figures. Again attention to detail and the meticulous following of instructions to authors is crucial to success in publication.Your manuscript has been written and after careful proofreading and worrying about all the issue in the instructions to authors, you and your co-authors are happy. Today nearly all submissions are via some online manuscript handling system. Before you begin this process make sure you have an electronic folder with all the correct files present, in the correct file format and with sensible (preferably unique) file names. Calling you main manuscript file ‘manuscript.doc’ is not smart since it is not unique. Use something in naming file that is unlikely to be confused, perhaps including the first author name, a key word, and maybe the date. Perhaps Bloggs_VEGF_hepatoma_October_2010.doc, for example. Make sure you have the final version available of each relevant file, not draft versions. Make sure track changes and comments are turned off. As with Lesson 6, worry about the detail! Most journals will want the email and relevant other contact details of all authors, so have these to hand. Again such information will be found in the instructions to authors of any reputable journal. Some journals may ask for suggestions of reviewers. If so ensure you have some sensible suggestions to make and you can sometimes suggest reviewers that you do not want to be involved: I would suggest you indicate why you have non-preferred reviewers. When suggesting reviewers avoid colleagues in your own institution or those who have obvious conflict of interest.Journal of Pathology this is about 30% of manuscripts). This is usually because the manuscript is felt by the editors to be not in the scope of the journal or to in some way not be likely to have a good chance of succeeding in the review process. Hopefully this will be done in a few days and saves everyone time. Do not be dejected, but recognize the editor has probably done you a service, hastening your submission to a more appropriate journal.After successful submission all you can do is wait. The editorial team will review the manuscript and it is increasingly common for a proportion of manuscripts to be returned to authors un-reviewed  a final version. At this point a PDF proof will be sent to the corresponding author: it is essential that they respond to the questions posed by the typesetter  as soon as possible. This is the last opportunity for any minor changes to be made! At some time after that the manuscript will be published online and in a print version.Editors are simple people! They like authors to follow the instructions to authors and this is a huge step in winning over an editor. Many would be astonished by how common it is for authors to completely fail to comply with key issues in the instructions to authors (see Lesson 7). Over and above this editors like manuscripts that have a good ‘fit’ with the journal’s aims and scope and address a clear research question. A message or story that is important is desirable if not essential, and concise clear writing is important. The title should be short, informative and to the point and the abstract should be clear and comprehensive but without unnecessary material. The display items and tables should be clear and of good quality and the legends appropriate.The corollary of Lesson 8 is that there is a range of things that editors really do not like! Papers that do not fit with the journal, that are unoriginal, that are overly long or in any other way do not comply with the instructions to authors are the bane of the editor’s life. It may seem overly picky to some, but it is crucial to comply with formatting instructions to be found in the instructions to authors, whether they be in relation to font size, spacing, page numbers, line numbering, abbreviations, reference format and style. In addition, editors do not like manuscripts that contain poor science. For example, studies based on flawed or incorrect assumptions or that use inappropriate methodologies are problematic. In addition, poor experimental controls will compromise a potentially important study as will poor images and data presentation. Careful scrutiny of these issues by colleagues and co-authors is better than having a manuscript returned without review! Attention to detail can avoid these pitfalls (see Lesson 7).Journal of Pathology revealed that most did get published eventually, and almost invariably in a lower impact factor journal [9]. That is to say manuscripts tend to settle at a level in relation to their perceived quality (of course authors tend to perceive their work as being world class and one has to become objective of ones efforts).Authors need to understand that most journals only accept a fraction of the submitted material. However if one is persistent and recognizes that there is a hierarchy of journals one can get your work published. A recent study of papers rejected from the A crucial element of the publication process is the comments of reviewers and editors. The entire peer review process is intended to improve manuscripts and the quality of the scientific record. Certainly reviewers are fallible and as human beings can be influenced by external factors. However, on receipt of reviewers comments examine them with care. Even if you profoundly disagree with one or more comments, look carefully at your manuscript. Is there a possibility that the reviewer has important observations relevant to your work? Even if your paper is rejected from that particular journal you should examine your manuscript in the light of the comments. It may lead you to undertake more experiments (or make more observations). In addition at the very least it may lead you to redraft your manuscript. Use the reviewers’ comments! They are intended to help.The 10 lessons in this short course will, I hope, guide authors  through some of the key steps in scientific writing. But some further words might be useful. It is crucial that you read, and know, the literature that relates to your area. What you try and publish should be influenced by what others have published: be guided by that. As indicated by Lesson 1 it is important to read and read: by reading you will see good practice and hopefully develop your skills: and as with any skill practice leads to improvement, even if perfection is rarely achieved!This review is based largely on lectures given by the author at the Workshop on Scientific Writing and the Publication Process, 23 February 2010, King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.The author is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Pathology.