To investigate whether there is a difference in citation rate between open access and subscription access articles in the field of radiology.European Radiology. Pearson χ2, Fisher’s exact, and Mann-Whitney U tests were used to assess for any differences between open access and subscription access articles. Linear regression analysis was performed to determine the association between open access publishing and citation rate, adjusted for continent of origin, subspeciality, study findings in article title, number of authors, number of references, length of the article, and number of days the article has been online. In a secondary analysis, we determined the association between open access and number of downloads and shares.This study included consecutive original articles published online in p = 0.024 and p = 0.001), while articles with corresponding authors from Asia were significantly less frequently published open access (p < 0.001). In adjusted linear regression analysis, open access articles were significantly more frequently cited , downloaded , and shared  than subscription access articles .A total of 500 original studies, of which 86 (17.2%) were open access and 414 (82.8%) were subscription access articles, were included. Articles from Europe or North America were significantly more frequently published open access (Open access publishing is independently associated with an increased citation, download, and share rate in the field of radiology.A minority of articles are currently published open access in European Radiology.• European and North American authors tend to publish more open access articles than Asian authors.• Open access publishing seems to offer an independent advantage in terms of citation, download, and share rate.•  A citation is the acknowledgment that a scientific article has been referenced by another article . The numEthics committee approval was not applicable for this literature study.European Radiology between April 23, 2015, and July 6, 2017. Review articles , editorials, letters to the editor, and case reports were excluded. The following data were extracted for each included article: whether or not the article was published open access, continent of origin of the corresponding author, subspeciality , mentioning of study findings in the article title, number of authors, number of references, length of the article in pages, number of days the article has been online , and number of citations, number of downloads, and number of shares  on the date the article was analyzed for this study).A research fellow (R.H.M.A.) included all consecutive original articles published online in χ2 test. However, when the number of articles was ≤ five in one cell, Fisher’s exact test was used instead of the Pearson χ2 test. Differences in continuous variables were assessed using the Mann-Whitney U test. Adjustment for multiple testing was done using false positive rate control [f2 of 0.03) with a statistical power of 80%  [P values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant.Statistical analyses were performed by using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows . Differences in dichotomous variables between open access and subscription access articles were assessed using the Pearson  control . Multiva = 0.05) . We alsop = 0.024; and 20.9% vs. 8.6%, p = 0.001, respectively). Articles with corresponding authors from Asia were significantly less frequently published open access than subscription access . Open access articles were significantly more frequently cited than subscription access articles . Other metrics  were not significantly different between open access and subscription access articles. Results of multivariable linear regression analyses are displayed in Table p = 0.016). These results remained significant when we limited our analysis to articles from North American and Europe only . Open access articles were also significantly more frequently downloaded  and shared  than subscription access articles.A total of 500 original studies, of which 86 17.2%) were open access and 414 were subscription access articles (82.8%), were included. Main characteristics of these studies are displayed in Table 7.2% wereEuropean Radiology are significantly and independently more frequently cited than subscription access articles. This can be explained by the facts that open access by definition does not require a journal subscription or payment of a fee to read the article, open access offers potentially faster and easier article access even to subscribers because there is no need to login, and open access articles are also published in PubMed Central, which improves article visibility. Altogether, this may increase the number of article reads and subsequent citations. Interestingly, articles from Europe and North America were significantly more frequently published open access. The opposite was true for articles with corresponding authors from Asia. It can be speculated that there are more European and North American institutions who have an agreement with the publisher to cover open access charges or there may be more study funders from Europe and North America who require open access publishing. Indeed, Springer, the publisher of European Radiology, has open access agreements with many institutions from Europe but none from Asia (https://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/springer-open-choice/springer-compact).The results of our study show that open access articles in European Radiology are significantly and independently more frequently downloaded and shared than subscription access articles. A previous study also confirmed that open access articles are among the most downloaded articles [The author’s h-index and journal’s impact factor (which are based on citation rates) are still the most popular measures of research influence , 12 and articles . Interesarticles .European Radiology. Other renowned general radiology journals, such as Radiology and American Journal of Roentgenology, offer a combined type of open access, i.e., immediate open access for selected articles and delayed open access for all articles after 1 year. This would impede an unconfounded analysis with a follow-up of more than year after article publication. A follow-up time ≤ 1 year may be insufficiently long for published articles to cumulate citations. European Radiology only has one open access option at present, i.e., immediate open access for selected articles. This allowed us to perform a fair comparison with a mean follow-up of 1326 days for open access articles and 1340 days for subscription access articles. Third, our results only apply to original articles. We chose not to include review articles , because these are more often highly cited and may be more often published open access. Moreover, original articles are the core of scientific research and the primary focus of most journals.Our study has some potential limitations. First, our study was a retrospective, nonrandomized observational study. Hypothetically, authors may have self-selected only those articles of higher than average quality for open access publication. However, a previous study found evidence that the citation advantage of open access articles was not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make open access . FurtherIn conclusion, open access publishing is independently associated with an increased citation, download, and share rate in the field of radiology.


The quality and integrity of the scientific literature have recently become the subject of heated debate. Due to an apparent increase in cases of scientific fraud and irreproducible research, some have claimed science to be in a state of crisis. A key concern in this debate has been the extent to which science is capable of self-regulation. Among various mechanisms, the peer review system in particular is considered an essential gatekeeper of both quality and sometimes even integrity in science.However, the allocation of responsibility for integrity to the peer review system is fairly recent and remains controversial. In addition, peer review currently comes in a wide variety of forms, developed in the expectation they can address specific problems and concerns in science publishing. At present, there is a clear need for a systematic analysis of peer review forms and the concerns underpinning them, especially considering a wave of experimentation fuelled by internet technologies and their promise to improve research integrity and reporting.We describe the emergence of current peer review forms by reviewing the scientific literature on peer review and by adding recent developments based on information from editors and publishers. We analyse the rationale for developing new review forms and discuss how they have been implemented in the current system. Finally, we give a systematisation of the range of discussed peer review forms. We pay detailed attention to the emergence of the expectation that peer review can maintain ‘the integrity of science’s published record’, demonstrating that this leads to tensions in the academic debate about the responsibilities and abilities of the peer review system. Recently, there has been heated debate on the quality, credibility and integrity of scientific literature. Due to a perceived increase in scientific fraud and irreproducible research, some claim the publication system, or even science in general, to be in crisis , 25. ThiA key issue in the debate on scientific integrity has been the extent to which processes of institutional self-regulation are able to track and prevent misconduct e.g. , 108). I. I108]).The system of peer reviewing research papers in particular has long been central to these notions of self-regulation . HoweverNevertheless, most scholars seem to agree that peer review serves as a filter in distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ science , 110. DeEver since being established, journal peer review has developed in a quite disorderly fashion so that currently it comes in many shapes and sizes , 110. FoThis article has three objectives. First, we describe the diversity of current peer review practices and innovations in the section ‘We will demonstrate that these new expectations are not always entirely compatible with one another and hence lead to tensions in the current academic debate about what peer review can and should do. Underlying this debate, we note a growing expectation that the scientific literature will serve as a database of established knowledge, rather than as a collection of research reports, pointing to more fundamental disagreement about the nature of scientific knowledge. At least some of the expectations of peer review are not just about the practicalities of ‘how to make it work better’; many also expect the process to address the functions of the publication system and even what it means to publish an account of a research project.Many accounts of the peer review process’ origins locate its beginnings in the seventeenth century, coinciding with Henry van Oldenburg’s establishment of an academic journal , 66, 90.The practice of assessing or commenting on manuscripts prior to publication primarily arose in learned societies in the early and mid-nineteenth century . In theiBritish Medical Journal (BMJ) was one of the independent journals to pioneer the novel practice of using external reviewers to assess submitted manuscripts. Since 1893, its editor-in-chief, Ernest Hart, called upon the specialised knowledge of a reviewer, whom he labelled as ‘an expert having knowledge and being a recognised authority in the matter’. Although Hart acknowledged the fact that such a system was labour intensive, requiring ‘heavy daily correspondence and constant vigilance to guard against personal eccentricity or prejudice’, he believed that his system of selecting outside reviewers was ‘the only system that seems adequate to the real needs of professional readers’  this would enable a fully automated publishing process – including the decision to publish.’  critical for ensuring the integrity and utility of the scholarly record’ [Research Square actually reports detecting integrity issues much more frequently than would be expected considering current estimates on the extent of misconduct in science [Notably, one of the commercial services providing independent review,  record’ . It awar science .PubPeer [peer, so that the term now refers not only to a small cluster of editor-selected experts, but to anyone who feels capable of understanding and evaluating a given piece of research. This emergence of an ‘extended peer community’ gives rise to novel challenges concerning the role of expertise in peer review, as well as to questions regarding who has the right and competence to judge the quality, soundness and relevance of scientific research [In addition to the systems providing pre-publication review, other independent platforms have emerged, such as PubPeer , in whicresearch . In addiBMJ journals in 2010 [Another way of reducing the burden on peer review lies in the concept of ‘cascading peer review’. This model, which was first consistently used at the beginning of the twenty-first century, became common practice in the  in 2010  and is n in 2010 . The sys in 2010  and ratiBoth of these peer review models, cascading review and review by third parties, are designed to assure that one single manuscript does not have to go through multiple rounds of peer review. Sharing review reports, either from a commercial party or from a rejecting journal, with a potentially interested journal, decreases the number of reviewers assessing a single manuscript , 110. ThEuropean Molecular Biology Organization) and the elife journal, have attempted to improve editorial decision making by introducing interactive stages in the review process, during which reviewers and editors can share or discuss their reports and opinions on a manuscript before communicating a final decision to the author [elife journal pioneered this new model, referring to movements concerning transparency and accountability in peer review as rationale [Finally, the advent of digital technologies has paved the way for new levels of openness in the review process. Some journals, most notably journals at EMBO . This electronic journal, does not ‘publish’ or archive its own articles, but merely adds a signature to articles on arXiv, after having reviewed them [Secondly, academic publishing provides a hierarchy of published results. Peer review is particularly instrumental in sustaining this hierarchy, by establishing a continuum ranging from top-tier journals to outlets of lower status. An interesting example, in which this expectation of peer review becomes particularly visible, is the mathematics ‘wed them . As suchwed them ). TherefPLoS format), or whether they also account for relevance, perceived impact or usefulness to future research. As a result, tensions have arisen regarding the expectations of what peer review can establish.Given this hierarchical allocation of recognition, the content of review criteria has become increasingly contentious. Questions arise regarding whether journals merely judge adequacy, consistency and methodological accuracy  the selection conditions, including the timing of the review and its selectiveness; (ii) the identity of and interaction between the actors involved; (iii) the levels of specialisation within the review process; and (iv) the extent to which technological assistance has been implemented in the review system. These four dimensions cover an array of peer review processes than can map both the historic and current forms of peer review, and suggest some axes of possible future development. In addition, this classification can serve as the basis for future empirical research assessing the quality, effectiveness or feasibility of the diverse peer review forms.Many of the recent innovations have come about as a response to shifting expectations of what peer review can or should achieve. Whereas the post-war dissemination of the system was presented as a form of quality-guarantee, it later responded to concerns regarding inequality in science, the efficiency of the publication system and a perceived increase in scientific misconduct. Currently, four major expectations of the peer review system can be distinguished: (i) assuring quality and accuracy of research, (ii) establishing a hierarchy of published work, (iii) providing fair and equal opportunities to all actors and (iv) assuring a fraud-free research record. Different peer review formats will be preferred, depending on which of these expectations take precedence, as not all of these expectations can be easily combined. For example, a hierarchy of published work through a review process that favours highly relevant, high-impact research can jeopardise equal opportunity, and potentially even accuracy or integrity, as authors go to extreme lengths competing for attention at the top.To date, very little systematic research has investigated whether peer review can live up to these differing expectations. There is limited evidence on peer review’s capacity to guarantee accurate and high-quality research. Additionally, the potential of peer review to distinguish between possibly relevant and seemingly irrelevant research, or between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research, has not been adequately studied. This leaves a clear knowledge gap to be addressed in future empirical research. Our classification of review forms can constitute a useful tool to set up such comparisons between review practices.The existing discrepancy between what some expect of the system and what others believe it is capable of has led to several current tensions. Most notably, the expectation that the peer review system should be used in gatekeeping to prevent erroneous or fraudulent research is problematic. Many have blamed peer review for not properly detecting erroneous research; however, simultaneously, others claim it was never designed to do so. Recent new developments and tools in peer review suggest that it is increasingly possible to detect and filter erroneous or fraudulent research in the peer review process. However, more research is needed to investigate the extent to which these innovations can live up to the expectations.Meanwhile, some of the fraud detection innovations in peer review seem to shift the modalities of knowledge validation. Whereas peer review used to rely on the inter-subjectivity of colleagues to check the objectivity of research, currently, statistics scanners or image-checkers permit more automated judgement in peer review, which aims to reduce human judgement. From inter-subjective checking, the focus is shifting towards more mechanical forms of objectivity, with automated discovery as an uncomfortable asymptote .These tensions about peer review’s expectations and abilities point to more fundamental shifts in ambitions for the scientific publication system. At first, the scientific literature was primarily perceived as a large (public) library containing reports on scientific research, review papers, discussion papers and the like. While this view still prevails, we would argue that an additional frame has appeared, which presents the scientific literature as a database of accurate knowledge or ‘facts’. This new frame, which seems specifically attractive to those holding realist and positivist views of knowledge, is witnessed, for example, in the belief that ‘inaccurate knowledge’ should be retracted from the literature. In the library frame, questioned research was addressed through further publications, referencing and commenting on earlier publications, without removing them. Propositions and knowledge claims, as well as their denials, co-existed in an inter-textual universe of scientific knowledge claims—some more, some less veracious. The publication system as a database insists on removing erroneous records and replacing them with newer, corrected versions through innovative technologies such as corrections, retractions, statistics-checks, or post-publication reviews, facilitated by the digital revolution in publishing. The publication system as database creates new expectations about a body of reliable knowledge, including the possibility of meta-studies or systematic reviews, which are in turn used as arguments to shift further towards a database model. Seemingly technical innovations in the peer review system could therefore be signs of far more fundamental shifts in notions of objectivity or the status of the knowledge contained in ‘the scientific literature’.


Most research manuscripts are not accepted for publication on first submission. A major part of the resubmission process is reformatting to another journal’s specific requirements, a process separate from revising the scientific content. There has been little research to understand the magnitude of the burden imposed by the current resubmission process.We analyzed original research article submission requirements from twelve randomly selected journals in each of eight scientific and clinical focus areas from the InCites Journal Citation Reports database. From the 96 journals selected, we randomly identified three recently published manuscripts and sent surveys to those first and/or corresponding authors  to solicit information on time spent reformatting resubmissions and opinions on the process.There was significant variation in manuscript submission requirements for journals within the same scientific focus and only 4% of journals offered a fully format-free initial submission. Of 203 authors responding (71.5% response rate), only 11.8% expressed satisfaction with the resubmission process and 91% desired reforming the current system. Time spent on reformatting delays most publications by at least two weeks and by over three months in about 20% of manuscripts. The effort to comply with submission requirements has significant global economic burden, estimated at over $1.1 billion dollars annually when accounting for a research team’s time.We demonstrate that there is significant resource utilization associated with resubmitting manuscripts, heretofore not properly quantified. The vast majority of authors are not satisfied with the current process. Addressing these issues by reconciling reformatting requirements among journals or adopting a universal format-free initial submission policy would help resolve a major subject for the scientific research community and provide more efficient dissemination of findings. The process of publishing peer-reviewed research can be slow and onerous –2. It isNature, for example, has decreased nearly 30% in the last 20 years [One obstacle for authors is the need to reformat a rejected manuscript when submitting to a new journal –17. Valu20 years . These d20 years , 22. Jou20 years .Despite this, there has been little research to understand the magnitude and reasons for resubmission delays. In this study, we investigate how much formatting variation exists amongst a diverse set of scientific journals. We then conduct a survey of recently published researchers to determine how much time is spent reformatting manuscripts before journal acceptance and the largest contributors to publication delay. Lastly, we evaluated the authors’ satisfaction with the current process and their recommendations for change.https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/B5HJQX.Our research study was approved by the Stanford University institutional review board (#43750). The data sets that support the findings of this study are publically available at the Harvard Dataverse: We randomly selected twelve journals from the InCites Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database in each of eight broad scientific  and clinical fields . The OpenEpi random number generator was used to select each numerically assigned journal from the InCites JCR website . The basFrom each of the 96 journals selected, we randomly selected three recently published manuscripts. We again used a random number generator to pick each article, which was pre-designated a number. We picked articles starting from the most recent issue at that time of review (September—October 2017). The following inclusion criteria were used: 1) considered an original research article as defined by the journal, 2) publicly available contact information displayed for the first and/or corresponding authors and 3) the first author/corresponding author must be affiliated with a US-based institution. The latter criterion was required for communication purposes as regular mail was used to obtain a portion of surveys as described below.All 288 first authors from the 96 journals randomly selected were sent an email with a link to complete an eight-question survey on reformatting for journal resubmissions . A request for suggested reviewers was made in 6/12 journals, 2/12 journals had specific table/figure limitations, and 4/12 had restrictions on the number of citations accepted. Additionally, while all of the gastroenterology journals required an abstract, the word limits for the abstract varied from 150 to 300 words.For microbiology journals, the heterogeneity was even greater. For example, an author contribution section was required in only 4/12 journals. Suggested reviewers were mentioned in 8/12 publications. Standard paper body structure was either not required or not mentioned in 2/12. Though a structured abstract was commonplace in gastroenterology journals, this was not the case for microbiology, as 7/12 journals did not require standard abstracts. At the time of our review, only 4/96 (4%) of journals offered fully format-free initial submission.We received a total of 206/288 responses (71.5%) to our survey of United States based biomedical researchers . Mail-inOf note, we received eighteen email bounce backs from the initial email survey request. For six authors, we were able to publicly search for a replacement email address that was up to date. For the other twelve, which we were not able to find an updated email address, we re-selected twelve new articles in the same respective journals and resent the survey request email to the twelve new first authors with no further bounce backs.The distribution of time spent reformatting by survey responder and by the entire research team is shown in Only 11.8% of 203 authors expressed satisfaction with the current resubmission process, with 59.3% reporting dissatisfaction . 91.1% oDissatisfaction varied by the number of submissions prior to acceptance . CompareBased on our data of 57.3% of articles needing resubmission, the time spent on reformatting , and priWe demonstrate that authors bear a substantial burden when revising manuscripts for journal resubmission. Among the time-consuming processes involved are adjusting manuscript structure , changing figure formats, and complying with word counts that vary significantly depending on the journal. Beyond revising the manuscript itself, authors often have to adjust to specific journal and publisher online requirements . Most authors reported spending “a great deal” of time on this reformatting task. Reformatting for these types of requirements reportedly caused three month or more delay in the publication of nearly one fifth of articles and one to three month delays for over a third of articles.The cumulative time burden to researchers is greater than previously hypothesized. Previous estimates on time spent (e.g. at least one hour per each rejected article) on reformatting were based on editorial and opinion pieces rather than actual representative data ,22. Our The research community has expressed frustration about the amount of time often highly trained scientists are devoting to reformatting instead of to discovery , 22. AccFor authors, such delays can increase training times, delay career advancement, and decrease chances of securing time-sensitive grants , 14. TheEfforts to reduce these times expended in manuscript submission include increasing use of preprint servers such as bioRxiv and format-free initial submissions , 23, 31.Our study does have some important additional limitations. Inherent to a survey based study, there is risk for recall bias. By choosing the most recent publications, we hoped to limit this issue as much as possible. There is also possibility of voluntary response bias, particularly for those who have strong opinions on this matter (perhaps those whose papers required multiple re-submissions). A very robust response rate, however, and study data showing a high rate of authors (43%) having their manuscript accepted into their initial journal choice reduce the risk of this bias.The majority of manuscripts are resubmitted, yet researcher’s efforts and opinions about reformatting requirements have not been adequately explored. We have found that researchers with recently published manuscripts are dissatisfied with the current resubmission process and expend substantial time on reformatting instead of on productive scientific activities. This is a potentially unnecessary burden with substantial collective scientific and financial impact. Our data supports reconciling reformatting requirements among journals and adopting a universal format-free initial submission policy.S1 Text(PDF)Click here for additional data file.


Since the beginning of this century, widespread use of the internet and some weaknesses of the existing system have changed the scientific publishing model . This neThis system provides rapid and open access to scientific information and data. However, some publishers do not hesitate to use this new model for unethical purposes and have begun to accept and publish scientific articles without a genuine peer-review process. Jeffrey Beall and his blog (Scholarly Open Access) played a key role in unveiling these unethical publishers and journals. He became interested in this topic when he received a spam e-mail in 2009. In 2010, he coined the term “predatory open access publishing” and has developed a blacklist of “predatory” journals . According to the view published in Nature, Beall described these predatory publishers as follows: they publish counterfeit journals to exploit the open access model, in which the author pays . Two strA study by Xia et al.  examinedDemir  carried Akça and Akbulut  examinedThe above two studies stated that the new incentive allowance system effective since 2016, known as the ex-post funding system, could be one of the factors that led Turkish researchers to publish in predatory journals. Therefore, it was worth investigating whether the initiation of the academic incentive allowance system has an impact on this. Demir's  work parThe study sought to answer two questions: 1. What were the downsides of the ex-post funding system to academic publishing among Turkish researchers? and 2. What were the contributions of the ex-post funding system to academic publishing? . He scanAs shown in the data given above ,8,9, wheSince 2016, under the new incentive allowance system implemented in Turkey, researchers are paid an incentive for articles published in any journal and for papers presented at any international conference. A new arrangement by the Turkish Council of Higher Education in 2018 aimed to remove publications in predatory journals from the incentive allowance system. For this purpose, additional criteria have been introduced for international recognition of the journal. One of them is a minimum publication history of 5 years. However, these measures are not sufficient, and publications in these predatory journals and conferences should be removed completely from the scope of the incentive allowance system. To accomplish this will require diligent work because there are many low quality, non-predatory journals that are not included in major indices .Universities in countries like Turkey must develop strategies to mitigate predatory publishing. One strategy adopted by several universities is that publications in those journals do not count toward academic evaluation or promotion. With this aim, in March 2019, the Turkish Council of Higher Education decided that scientific papers published in predatory journals would not be taken into account in academic promotion and assignment. Thus, Turkey has taken the step of becoming one of the first countries to implement this in the world. Since there is no agreed list of predatory journals and dubious conferences around the world, this process must be carefully implemented. Perhaps it is healthier to point out the good  instead of the bad (blacklist).Since the problem is international and complex, we need to know that it is not an easy solution. But a few months ago, there was a promising news from America. A publishing company was ordered by a federal court to pay $50.1 million to the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive and predatory publishing activities . This US


A major challenge medical librarians face is connecting their patrons to full-text journal articles. Tools like link-resolvers and full-text databases can provide access to thousands of journals, but for these tools to work, patrons must begin their searches via their libraries’ websites. If library patrons search the open web and find a journal article on a publisher website, they do not have clear path to full-text access. Kopernio is a browser plugin aimed at solving this problem. This review describes what Kopernio is and how to set it up and explores some of its advantages and disadvantages. A brief discussion of similar products is also included.Kopernio is a browser extension that simplifies finding full-text portable document format (PDF) copies of journal articles. The main interface is an icon overlaid on pages containing journal article information. If the web page a patron is using contains a journal article digital object identifier (DOI), Kopernio will attempt to locate a link to a PDF copy of that article. It does this by querying a list of known sources for articles, including publisher websites, open access repositories, and Google Scholar. If it can access a copy of the PDF, it will notify the user by changing the icon in the lower left corner of the screen. For some databases, including PubMed, Kopernio also integrates download icons into results lists, giving a quick and clear indicator which articles in a particular set can be easily accessed.All users are also given a “locker,” 1,000 megabyte (MB) of online storage space associated with an account that users can create. Any articles retrieved via Kopernio are automatically stored in this locker for future reference. Articles stored in the locker can also be tagged and cited using a built-in citation tool. Users can also select a preferred search tool to integrate with the Kopernio toolbar button. Google, Web of Science, and PubMed can all be searched directly from the Kopernio button on the browser toolbar. Other available settings include preferred citation manager and citation styles.One important feature of Kopernio is that users are always presented with the most authoritative version available of an article. Official publisher PDFs are given precedence over repository copies, and all PDFs are sourced from legitimate sources.Kopernio requires minimal configuration. Once users have down loaded the extension in their browsers of choice, they will be asked to provide an email address and choose their home institutions. If their institutions have registered proxy information with Kopernio, user requests will be routed through that proxy. Users can log in to their institutional proxy once, and Kopernio will encrypt and store credentials in the browser, which speeds up the article retrieval process. Users can also select a preferred search tool to integrate with the Kopernio toolbar button.There are several other tools that serve a similar purpose as Kopernio:Nomad is a browser extension built by Third Iron, the makers of Browzine. Nomad functions similarly to Kopernio, adding icons to pages that contain journal article information indicating whether or not access is available. One clear advantage that Nomad has over Kopernio is that it is aware of the user’s affiliation and has access to library holdings data; however, Nomad is not free. Libraries must purchase a yearly license to offer the tool to their users.Journal of the Medical Library AssociationApril 2019 issue of the .Unpaywall is a tool developed by Impactstory that focuses on finding open access journal articles. Similar to Kopernio, Unpaywall overlays an icon on the user’s screen that indicates when a free, open access copy of an article is available. Unpaywall was reviewed in the Google Scholar Button and the OA Button insert a button onto the user’s toolbar. When the user finds a web page containing a journal article DOI, they can click the toolbar button to locate a copy. Both tools search a number of sources for free and open access copies of journals articles.Kopernio is an extremely useful tool for users who search for journal article PDFs. The most appealing functions are the clear visual indicators for downloads and the ability to proxy links for users even if they do not find journals via the library website. The locker, citation management, and tagging features are a nice bonus but will probably only be of interest to power users.Kopernio for libraries.Librarians will want to be sure they provide information about their institutions’ proxies to Kopernio, so that their users can benefit from this tool. Additional information about Kopernio and instructions for librarians to provide their proxy information can be found at Matthew B. Hoy, AHIPhoy.matt@mayo.edu, Associate Director, Mayo Clinic Libraries, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN,


African Journal of Laboratory Medicine’s (AJLM) eighth volume contains almost 30 articles, our largest issue yet. A few areas of laboratory medicine are not represented, but the impressively expansive scope of the volume extends from bacteriology (including mycobacteriology), clinical chemistry, clinical pharmacology, haematology, histopathology and virology to informatics, laboratory development and quality management. While appreciating that growth has come with good subject area representation, we have to be just as intentionally concerned with the diversity of matters other than content.The 1 and other forms of imbalance may be even more entrenched. AJLM is therefore not alone in its current introspection and quest for diversity. In a bid to accelerate the quality improvements that will come with inclusiveness, a number of editors, journals and independent researchers have published their recent observations and reflections on the gender and geographic balance of editors, reviewers and authors.4 Almost universally, they find that representation in scientific journals is slanted towards the male northern bias that permeates most of science, even if the tilt angles differ.If nothing is done, some estimates suggest that it will be over 200 years before gender parity is reached throughout society5 and globally women play a prominent role in healthcare delivery but are much less visible in its leadership.6 Both of these deficits could well influence representation in a laboratory medicine journal with a lens on Africa, the continent that is home to the fewest scientists per capita. Secondly, as a regional journal with global reach, we receive and publish a large number of scientific articles from African authors. We simultaneously provide an owned perspective and a global view of African science, a dual role that is rare in scientific publishing.7 This vantage-point notwithstanding, AJLM also represents a powerful mouthpiece for speaking to African scientists and therefore we cannot take for granted that our editorial processes and authorship will reflect our readership.As a journal owned by an African scientific society, with both editorial and publishing offices based on the continent, AJLM has an uncommon position in this discourse. Firstly, women are severely underrepresented in African science8 Composite Editorial Board Diversity Score. But, given our focus on Africa, we have a greater proportion of Africa-based editors than any of the 27 global health journals that were assessed in that study. We lag most noticeably in geographic diversity. Scientists from all over the world work with laboratory medicine experts on our continent to better health, and findings from studies in or on Africa will inform the practice of laboratory medicine anywhere. So, our editorial board is deliberately global even though we do seek editors who are familiar with science in Africa. We, therefore, would benefit from representation from Australasia, Latin America and the Caribbean, which is currently absent from our editorial board.The vision and content of a journal is shaped by its editors. As of October 2019, AJLM’s editorial team comprised a female editor-in-chief, five section editors  and a 22-person editorial board that included only three women. This team had affiliations on four continents with a third of us working in Africa. With three of our six editors being women , we merit only 60% by Bhaumik and Jagnoor’s5 the vast majority of our articles are wholly or predominantly authored by Africans. In spite of the well-documented male skew in African science,5 AJLM Vol. 7(1) 2018 comprised articles with nine female and five male first authors (with one indeterminate). First authors on articles in Vol. 8 include 11 men and nine women (4 indeterminate based on first name and online searches). Therefore, AJLM is an important venue for publishing female-led work, particularly from Africa. We are also pleased to find that AJLM continues to feature articles from a range of African countries and from beyond them and that it addresses health issues of different populations, including ethnic minorities or those living in rural or remote areas.Even though this is not the case with respect to African biomedical research overall,Unfortunately, while we have good representation from Africa, we find that there is less diversity in the geographic origin of AJLM articles within the continent. Five 2018 corresponding authors listed South African addresses and one each from Rwanda, Ethiopia, the Netherlands, Kenya, Cameroon, Barbados, Haiti, Namibia, Nigeria and Canada. In 2019, we published six articles with corresponding authors from South Africa, four each from Nigeria and the United States (US), one with a double Nigeria-US affiliation, two from Kenya and Saudi Arabia and one each from Belgium, Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana and Zimbabwe. While preponderance of Anglophone corresponding authors is expected for an English-language journal, the underrepresentation of submissions from Western, Central, North and East Africa in our recent volumes is obvious and concerning. If AJLM has uncommon success in publishing high-quality African research, it should do so for those parts of the continent least represented in science.What could AJLM do to enhance diverse representation in our journal going forward? Firstly, we need to maintain the diversity that we do have and to ensure that with the growth in our size and reputation, minority contributors do not become overshadowed or, worse, replaced. AJLM will continue to encourage female scientists to submit to, review for and edit for the journal as well as to support those that work with us. We will also continue to offer a mentored review process and copy-editing support for accepted articles, which allows us to feature work by new authors and non-Anglophone scientists. However, we will have to do much more to bring in manuscripts from across the continent and explicitly wish to call for papers from countries not featured in our last two volumes.From time to time, AJLM offers heavily subscribed manuscript writing training workshops and in future, we will prioritise early-career participants from African countries who are underrepresented in the journal or who are female. We will also endeavour to invite more female scientists to review for the journal and take places on our editorial board. Finally, with this editorial, AJLM is in the process of keeping track of the demographics of our authors, reviewers and board because, unless we do, we will have no idea how far we are from our goal of being the primary outlet for truly balanced scientific work in laboratory medicine across the continent.


BioMed Research International has retracted the article titled “Correlation between Serum Levels of High Mobility Group Box-1 Protein and Pancreatitis: A Meta-Analysis” [nalysis” . The artWe also found that the authors note there is publication bias, but they do not account for this in their analysis or discussion. The skew in Figure 6 is quite marked, meaning that negative results were likely not published. This may mean that the association of HMGB1 with pancreatitis is a false positive.In addition, we checked the original files submitted by the authors and found that the files were edited by MedChina, a company previously alleged to be involved in the sale of articles .The authors did not respond to our queries and we have informed the authors' institutions of our concerns.


Behavioral Ecology, BE), we assigned gender to every authorship of every paper published for 2010–2018 in that journal compared to four other journals with single-blind reviews but similar subject matter and impact factors. While female authorships comprised only 35% of the total in all journals, the double-blind journal (BE) did not have more female authorships than its single-blind counterparts. Interestingly, the incidence of female authorship is higher at behavioral ecology journals  than in the ornithology journals  for papers on all topics as well as those on birds. These analyses suggest that double-blind review does not currently increase the incidence of female authorship in the journals studied here. We conclude, at least for these journals, that double-blind review no longer benefits female authors and we discuss the pros and cons of the double-blind reviewing process based on our findings.To date, the majority of authors on scientific publications have been men. While much of this gender bias can be explained by historic sexism and discrimination, there is concern that women may still be disadvantaged by the peer review process if reviewers’ biases lead them to reject publications with female authors more often. One potential solution to this perceived gender bias in the reviewing process is for journals to adopt double-blind reviews whereby neither the authors nor the reviewers are aware of each other’s identity and gender. To test the efficacy of double-blind reviews in one behavioral ecology journal ( For the past 25 years, there has been welcome interest in the role and relative success of women in the process of scientific publication . The maiBehavioral Ecology (BE) after that journal switched from single-blind to double-blind reviews, while five comparable ecology journals that retained single-blind reviews showed no increase in the incidence of female authorship. However, others have suggested that different statistical analyses would have been more appropriate and with those new analyses showed that the incidence of female authorship has steadily increased across all journals, regardless of peer review style , The Auk (AUK), The Condor (CONDOR), and The Ibis (IBIS)) that published papers on similar topics during the same period, and had comparable recent impact factors . Comparing the bird papers in BE to those in both BES and the bird journals allowed us to control for taxonomic biases in the reviewing process. We included both AUK and CONDOR in this analysis because both are published in North America, publish papers only about birds, and attract papers mostly from North American authors. Because BE and BES had substantially more international authors than AUK and CONDOR, we added IBIS to our analysis to see if author nationality might be important. Thus, while we analyzed data from only a small number of journals, and from only one double-blind journal, the journals were chosen carefully to minimize the effects of confounding variables, and the sample sizes of papers analyzed in each journal was large enough to make some meaningful comparisons.We began this study to assess the recent effects (2010–2018) of double-blind review on gender bias in papers published in BE, which has used double-blind reviews since 2001. To do that, we compared the gender of authors in BE to those in four journals with single-blind reviews  only first initials were listed, (ii) the order of given and surnames was unclear to us , or (iii) names were not consistently gendered . In all, 580 papers with at least one authorship of ambiguous gender were excluded from all analyses, resulting in 4,865 papers for the analyses presented here. Each paper was also scored as being about either birds or other topics.For the 5,445 papers published between 2010 and 2018 in those five journals, we assigned a gender to each authorship , noting also the first and last authorships of each paper. We defined "authorship" as each author on each paper; many authors publish multiple papers per year and thus account for multiple authorships. We assigned gender based solely on the perceived genders of first names rather than searching the internet for more information on specific authors. Thus, we assumed that a reviewer would determine gender based on first names. For names that were unfamiliar to us, we used We tested for gender biases in published papers, comparing journals and testing whether patterns changed over the 9 years in our sample. Using all 4,865 papers in our sample, we assessed the odds of having any female authorships in a paper and the proportion of authorships that were female. For single-author papers, we assessed the odds that the authorship was female. For multi-author papers, we assessed the odds of having a female authorship in the first or last position.To examine general trends since 2010, we analyzed the percentage of female authorships in each issue of each journal. We chose to analyze the period from 2010 to 2018 to provide a current estimate of gender biases and recent trends, specifically to update the information in For each response variable, we performed a binomial logistic regression testing for associations between female authorships and journal, year, and their interaction. When testing whether there were any female authorships on papers, we included the total number of authorships to account for the increase in female authorships as total authorships increases.To test whether research collaborations led by women had higher proportions of women involved as coauthors than collaborations led by men, we looked for associations between the proportion of female-authorships before the last authorship  and the assumed gender of the last authorship, controlling for the journal, year, and their interaction.DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/RYZ62).We conducted all analyses using data from papers on all topics, as well as focusing only on papers about birds .All analyses were conducted in R version 3.5.2 . R scripAs expected, the odds of a paper having at least one female authorship increased with the total number of authors on the paper . The oddn = 4,865) and years (n = 9), there were fewer female (mean 35%) than male (mean 65%) authorships . Although the percentage of female authorships increased overall from 2010 to 2018, that rate differed significantly among journals  but not in BE (–0.5% [–4.6–3.8]), the only double-blind journal in our study . These dFrom 2010 to 2018, the percentage of female last-authorships was generally stable or increased slightly  than the overall percentage of female authorship (35%) in these journals . The perThe percentage of single-authored papers that had female authorship changed across years in all journals, but the rate of change varied significantly  was female rather than male, the proportion of other female authorships on that paper increased significantly  by 44% [Our analyses show that, from 2010 to 2018, the journal BE, that mandated double-blind peer reviews, did not have higher rates of female authorship than the subject-comparable BES, with single-blind review. Instead, we found a general increase in the frequency of female authorship across all journals, except on single-author papers where the frequency of female authorship actually decreased in the double-blind journal while increasing in the single-blind journals. While there were fewer female (mean 35%) than male (mean 65%) authorships, the proportions of female first authorships (mean 40%) and last authorships (mean 25%) parallel the proportion of female graduate students (∼55%) and professors (∼30%) in biology , suggestThe three ornithology journals that we sampled had lower rates of female authorship than the more taxon-general behavioral ecology journals (BE and BES). This discrepancy may not be due to a stronger reviewer bias amongst ornithologists as the pattern holds in the double-blind BE when considering only bird papers. Moreover, the lower rates of female authorship in the bird journals are not likely to be due to differences in the nationalities of authorship, as IBIS, BE, and BES all publish many papers by authors outside North America. Instead, we suggest that lower rates of female authorship in these three ornithology journals may be a result of women being less likely to submit to these taxon-specific journals, for some as yet unknown reason. Alternatively, the shortage of female authors in the ornithology journals may be a legacy effect. BE and BES were both founded relatively recently  with both men and women on the editorial boards and have always aimed for gender parity. In sharp contrast, the ornithology journals were all founded by small groups of men in the mid-to-late 1800s, and have not had female editors-in-chief . This awareness of potential bias may well have benefited the gender ratios of authors in BE and BES. For example, conference organizers achieve gender parity when they explicitly consider gender when inviting speakers, while those who do not do this tend to under-invite women relative to the proportion of female society members .In our dataset, 11% of papers had at least one authorship whose gender we could not be certain of from their first name alone. Manuscript reviewers, however, often have prior knowledge of an author’s gender, particularly amongst those with established careers and particularly in small fields such as ornithology. Reviewers may also look up unfamiliar authors to get a sense of who they are reviewing. We did not categorize the genders of ambiguous authors by using other criteria but as they represent only 11% of our sample of papers, they are unlikely to have influenced our findings.Because we analyzed data from only one double-blind journal (BE), our conclusions are by necessity limited. BE is may not be representative of all double-blind journals so our conclusions may apply only to the five journals in our analysis. Our aim in this study was to provide information on the effects of double-blind reviewing on gender bias in a comparable subset of journals, controlling for subject matter and impact factor. Unfortunately, there are very few journals that meet these criteria and those that employ double-blind reviews have implemented the policy too recently to provide useful comparable data. Currently, biology journals appear to be trending towards adopting double-blind review policies, so a further broader scale analysis may become possible. Nonetheless, our analyses of the recent data from these five journals have suggested to us the following potential costs and benefits of double-blind reviews that we hope will help inform editorial decisions.Although we find no evidence that a double-blind reviewing process has increased female authorship in BE compared to the four single-blind journals that we surveyed, that does not mean that double-blind reviewing is not worthwhile. Rather, double-blind reviewing may reduce the incidence of nepotism and both institutional and geographic biases. If these factors are thought to influence the acceptance of manuscripts in the journals that we studied, they should be studied in those journals specifically, in a recent sample of journal volumes.There is evidence, for example, that authors familiar to reviewers, either through a personal connection or the author’s prominence in the field, are more likely to have their papers or grants accepted than unfamiliar authors . In SwedThere is also evidence from other general surveys that there may be strong geographic biases with authors from the USA, Canada, and the UK being substantially more likely to have their work accepted for publication than authors from other countries . For exaOne common criticism of double-blind review, particularly in small fields of study, is that reviewers can identify authors from the study system or location. However, although reviewers, particularly experts in a field, attempt to guess the authors of manuscripts, they are wrong 65–90% of the time  in psychFor the five journals we surveyed, double-blind reviewing does not appear to have increased the publication rate of women scientists since 2010 –3. Our aSeveral previous studies have outlined three obvious arguments against double-blind reviews. First, the process of preparing a manuscript for double-blind review is time-consuming if done well. Time spent removing authors’ names, and any telling details of study location, study species, references, acknowledgments, and funding, might be more profitably be spent checking statistical details, improving graph quality, or preparing data and statistical code for an online repository, all of which might be more beneficial to the scientific community than double-blind reviews. Second, the double-blind reviewing process requires some additional editorial time if done well, checking submitted manuscripts thoroughly and corresponding with authors who have not met the journal’s requirements. This is an additional burden that might discourage authors or increase the costs of journal editing.Third, double-blind reviewing deprives potential reviewers of useful information when deciding whether to accept a request to review. Scientists might, for example, be reluctant to provide additional reviews to papers that they have rejected with prejudice from a different journal or by authors whose work they would not review based on past experiences. In particular, reviewers who share a conflict of interest with authors must decline to review, something that is impossible to determine without knowledge of the authors’ identities. Analogous to one of the core principles of Bayesian statistics, informative prior knowledge might well benefit the reviewing process.Since reviewers seem to be able to guess the authorships of a proportion of manuscripts , there iWe also wonder whether authors might derive some intangible and long-term benefits when reviewers know who they are. As scientists become more experienced and prominent in their field, they are likely to do more reviews, and those reviews often constitute an increasing proportion of the papers that experienced scientists read thoroughly. For many reviewers, knowledge about the quality, creativity, and relevance of research (and the researchers) is acquired in large measure from the reviewing process. Double-blind reviewing thus deprives authors of that potentially important source of information. We have not seen this issue mentioned in previous studies of gender bias and double-blind reviewing, and suggest it might be worth further investigation, as difficult as it might be to quantify.In our experience, journal editorial boards have strong opinions about the value of double-blind reviewing, often citing the importance of eradicating gender biases. While gender biases and inequalities within academia are of great concern, we hope that our analyses might help to clarify the role of gender bias in the peer review process and help inform editorial boards’ opinions on double-blind review. Because we are behavioral ecologists, we would advocate a cost-benefit approach to decision making. If the goal is simply to maximize what we have characterized as the benefits to double-blind review, then, of course, double-blind is likely to be the best course of action, unless it actually discourages author submissions. But if the goal is to maximize the net benefits, then the decision is not so clear, and some thoughtful analysis of the costs might prove informative.10.7717/peerj.6702/supp-1Supplemental Information 1Code and output of all statistical analyses in the article.Click here for additional data file.


BioMed Research International would like to express concern with the article titled “miR-195-5p Suppresses the Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma by Targeting TRIM14” published in October 2017 [We asked the authors to explain this and provide the underlying images and raw data for all the figures. They said that they introduced this error when they used PowerPoint to put one image of the Cal27 (Scramble + pc DNA3) group into the Cal27 (miR-195-5p + TRIM14) group by mistake, though they could not provide the correct images as their laptop was damaged in 2017 and they lost the data and images for this experiment. A member of the editorial board recommended that the authors repeat the experiment to correct the panel for Figure 4(f). BioMed Research International will reach a final decision regarding the article once the authors have had an opportunity to replicate these results.


David Ferrier is a Reader at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Scottish Oceans Institute, where his lab studies how the diversity of form in the animal kingdom evolved, with an emphasis on using comparative genomics. In this interview, David shares his thoughts on how to escape the ‘straitjacket’ of traditional model systems, transparency in peer review, and the past and future of genome sequencing. I take a comparative genomics approach to study animal evolutionary developmental biology, which could be summarized as evolutionary developmental genomics. I tend to focus on the homeobox-containing genes since there are so many intriguing instances of links between their organization in animal genomes and their functions (most famously in the case of the Hox gene cluster). They tend to provide a good indication of changes that happen at major transitions in the animal kingdom, such as whole genome duplications or major rearrangements and departures from the deeply conserved synteny (gene neighborhoods) that have been one of the most startling findings in this era of whole genome sequencing –7.The technical developments in DNA sequencing are progressing at a staggering rate, and costs are tumbling. This is a very exciting time to be working in fields associated with genomics. I think some of the key areas of progress that are happening (but that we need more of) are things like improved taxon sampling, to provide denser coverage of clades as well as wider coverage of the animal kingdom (speaking as a zoologist!); improvements to assembly pipelines, which are also being aided by things like long-molecule sequencing technologies; and developments in annotation tools and pipelines, as plenty of manual annotation is still required for those of us interested in the precise details of gene family evolution and organization.Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, or one of the few vertebrates that are usually worked on for functional genetics. The research funding bodies have a major role to play in this new era of using a diversity of species in biology involving functional genetics, and it is to be hoped that they do respond by broadening their horizons.CRISPR and RNAi techniques have also been truly revolutionary, and this now opens up biology to make use of broader taxon sampling so that we can start to move away from the straitjacket of a small handful of model organisms. Instead we can find the organism that has the interesting biology and do the experiments in that species, rather than having to adapt our research so that we have to do experiments in one of the big traditional systems like It is an essential element of science, and so a duty of all scientists to contribute. There are also more selfish sides to agreeing to review manuscripts, such as seeing interesting work before the community at large as well as helping to shape this work, hopefully for the benefit of the field.There are interesting developments in more open peer review, exploring different forms of this (e.g. review reports published either with or without the reviewers’ names). There are pros and cons  and haviI am wary about making this second point, because as an English speaker I am very lucky that the international language of science is English. And I recognize that things are much harder for those who have English as a second language. So this comment is certainly not meant as a criticism of those who might struggle to write well in English and I certainly do not want to give the impression that I am criticizing the writing of non-English speakers. Nothing could be further from the truth. My point though is that there is often a scope for manuscripts to be improved for written English before going out to academic editors and referees.The aim must be to enable academic editors and reviewers to focus solely on the science, making the process more efficient. Time is precious, and it can be frustrating within the peer review process when one feels the need to provide lots of comments on sentence construction and appropriate vocabulary. Also, part of the problem is that the professional editing services that authors have to pay large sums of money for are of highly variable quality. Whether the burden for this extra language editing should be picked up more by the journals is a moot point, but there is certainly scope for more to be done by the universities and research institutions around the world, to develop further their in-house editing services.BMC Biology because a molecular phylogeny in our paper did not have enough taxa to resolve the position of the species we were working on with any real confidence. But in fact that paper was nothing to do with the phylogenetic position, and instead was merely illustrating branch lengths as a minor component of the main story. Conversely, I did once have the dream situation of receiving referees’ comments that required no revisions at all! So it is all a ‘mixed bag’ really, but when there are problems, appeals processes and talking to editors can help, although this can seem daunting and editors handle this in very different ways in terms of their willingness to engage with such communications.I think we all have occasional bad experiences, which usually center on feelings of injustice involving editors or reviewers not seeming to read the manuscript carefully enough. Although a counter-argument would be to improve the clarity of writing! I once had a manuscript turned away from On the reviewing side, I once had the bizarre experience of dealing with a manuscript that turned out to be from some creationists. In my report I focused on the shockingly poor writing and incoherent organization of the rambling manuscript, with no clear message and extensive inappropriate plagiarism. Not once did I comment on the evolutionary angle, because so much else was wrong with the manuscript, but after the authors received the comments they ranted about narrow-minded, establishment scientists and completely missed the point of my comments. It was at this point that I looked into the backgrounds of the authors more carefully and discovered that they gave their affiliation as a creationist/intelligent design institute . Following the authors’ ranting response the journal editor then stepped in and terminated the whole process and rejected the manuscript, I’m relieved to say.Website:https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/david-ellard-keithferrier(9d113045-bca1-49ef-8315-05b2d8425d14).html and https://synergy.st-andrews.ac.uk/edge/.


You are putting the final touches on your latest article and it is time to consider a venue for publication. It is also time to ask yourself some questions. What is the urgency of publication? Am I going to use this article for educational purposes? Do I have a need to post the article in a public forum?Medical Physics. Even so, traditional publishers are adjusting their publishing models to keep abreast with the changing landscape of publishing trends. These include the following:Many traditional publications have begun to offer an open access option. By paying an additional fee, any article may be offered to the public without cost.https://arxiv.org/Articles may be offered in public archives prior to being submitted to traditional journals and peer review. An example of this is the arXiv repository: Some traditional journals are maintaining a subscription model and a paywall but abandoning print as a mode of delivery. This is because print is too costly to maintain unless there is robust print advertising to cover the cost.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5385169/New-York-Times-stop-printing-10-years-says-CEO.htmlPrint journalism is expected to expire in about 10 years. Could academic journals be close behind? The AAPM's approach to academic dissemination is to provide complementary publishing options, based on the article's content and the preference of the authors. The open access model of the JACMP is not in conflict with those of traditional publications, such as our companion publication, Medical Physics, the copyright is transferred to the AAPM and the society becomes the owner of your article. Distribution of your article is subject to the restrictions enumerated in the publication agreement between the AAPM and Wiley. The copyright transfer agreement is appended for your interest . However, the same article concluded that publishing an article in an open access journal does not necessarily influence the number of citations, not at least in the first 9–12 months.What factors are important to consider when you are deciding whether to publish open access? Some that come to mind include the cost and speed to publication as well as the visibility of your article and the benefit that you retain the copyright. For the JACMP, the article publication charge of $500 is among the lowest in the industry. The time from receipt at Wiley to Early View publication is typically between 30 and 40 days. Also, if you select an open access journal for your article, more people are likely to access and read it. One study showed that full‐text downloads were almost twice as high for open access journals as opposed to journals with a paywall  license. Wiley publishes the following notice within its instructions to authors of JACMP articles:Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics agree to the following terms:Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non‐exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work , with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.https://authorservices.wiley.com/open-science/open-access/for-authors/faqs.htmlAuthors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online  prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. (See the Effect of Open Access). Authors who publish with Maintain the right to disseminate your workMaintain the right to use your work for educational purposes including your classesMaintain the right to post your work on any website you choose, including your own websiteMaintain the right to post and archive your work in your employer's Institutional RepositoryReserve the right to post the pre‐refereed or even post‐refereed version of your paperAllow for the largest possible audienceThe impact of this license is that you retain copyright and reuse rights of your work. Your work can be shared, copied and redistributed in any medium or format under the condition that you as the author are given appropriate credit. A link to the license must be provided, and changes made have to be indicated. No one may use it commercially or alter it without your permission. Finally, publishing under this license means that you comply with open access mandates as may be required by a granting agency respecting your article. By retaining your rights, you will be permitted to:The bottom line is that by owning your article and retaining legal title to the ideas and data contained therein, you control how it is used. For clinical physicists who want to disseminate their work as widely and rapidly as possible to benefit our community and our patients, the JACMP is a good place to publish.


Communications Biology. Our aim is simple: to provide a place for all biologists, regardless of research topic, to publish high-quality work that advances their field of research.We are pleased to introduce  Communications Biology. We are thrilled to publish the first of what will be many articles reporting exciting advances across the diverse spectrum of disciplines within the life sciences.Today marks the official launch of Communications Biology fills a specific need within the Nature Research portfolio for a high-quality, broad-scope biology journal publishing work of importance to fellow researchers without the need for articles to be of broad, general interest outside a specialist community—a theme that extends to our sister journals, Communications Chemistry and Communications Physics. It also fills a more general need as one of still only a small number of life sciences journals providing a broad platform for specialist advances.Why are we launching this journal, at this time? Biologists already have a dizzying number of journals to select from when choosing where to submit their latest research. At the same time, the number of research articles published each year continues to grow and staying abreast of the literature has become a daunting, if not impossible, task for any researcher. We believe that journals have an important role to play in filtering the research to provide at least a rough guide to scientists for where they can find the latest research of most importance to their work. Communications Biology, says a lot about what we hope to achieve. Our editors select research for peer review on the basis of whether it advances an area of inquiry within the biological sciences. However, the journal communicates that research not only to other specialists, but to all biologists. Through the publication of Reviews and Comments, we provide a place for biologists to communicate new ideas or announce new developments of importance to the community. Communications Biology also describes our publishing model. We are a fully open access, online only journal, allowing us to make our authors’ work immediately available so it can be communicated rapidly to all who wish to read it. And, finally, our editorial model is also set up to foster communication between our in-house editors and editorial board members, the latter of whom are active researchers in the community we aim to serve.Our title, Our in-house editors and academic editorial board members all share the same passion for service to the community through editorial excellence.Communications Biology will be honest, transparent, and constructive, regardless of the final outcome. We sincerely hope that if we ever fall short of our goals, you—our readers, authors, and reviewers—will remind us of our mission. Communication cannot be a one-way street.As part of our goal to help biologists communicate their research, we strive to provide the highest possible level of editorial service, just as scientists have come to expect from the Nature Research journals. Our in-house editors and academic editorial board members all share the same passion for service to the community through editorial excellence. The editorial and review process with Our editorial focus is on helping biologists communicate their work to the world, whether it is translational research with obvious potential for impacting human health, or basic research that provides the raw material for future technological and medical breakthroughs. We believe this is especially important now, in these tumultuous times when the value of scientific inquiry to humanity is being questioned more than ever. We will not reject a paper for lack of applied utility as long as the research provides new biological insight. At the same time, we will consider innovative and useful tools and methods that will further advance biological or medical research in the future, without the need to demonstrate a new biological discovery.Seymour et al.), to a molecular mechanism of chromatin remodeler regulation  and an ultra-high-throughput method for antibody selection . The Review by Ryszard Maleszka invites us to consider the complexity of developmental and epigenetic programs in the determination of honeybee castes. And we will be publishing across a wider range of subject areas as we grow. Our editors are committed to serving the needs of each unique community of biologists—ecologists, evolutionary biologists, molecular biologists, geneticists, neuroscientists, plant scientists, microbiologists, biophysicists, biochemists, computational biologists—and those biologists who defy labels.Our first few papers offer a glimpse of the diversity of biology that we will publish, from a study of environmental DNA degradation in river systems (Communications Biology.Today is only the beginning of a long journey. We hope you will join us on this journey and help contribute to the future success of


Journal of Experimental Botany (JXB) every month, and this year we have put together a virtual issue of the journal both to celebrate our approach and increase awareness of how the content is developing.SEB Annual Meetings cover a diverse range of plant, animal and cell biology, and that diversity extends within each section – as scientists we are all specialists, but we all deeply value the wider connections between disciplines that are a vital part of the organization. That range and ethos is echoed in the plant science published in Vicia faba), which produces a move from selfing to outcrossing in this significant crop . These findings are important in understanding fundamental mechanisms and moreover are directly relevant for breeders, and in both cases their wider importance is highlighted and further explored in the accompanying Insight articles by other research scientists. Insights in the eXtra Botany section, a part of our journal since 2016 , provide readers with accessible information beyond their specialism and highlight links between disciplines – as with the diverse sessions at the SEB meetings.The articles selected follow the plant sessions at the SEB meeting and also include those from the preceding satellite meeting, ‘Advances in Plant Reproduction – from Gametes to Seeds’. A number of papers in the issue cover fascinating aspects of pollination and reproductive investment, including the effects of temperature on pollination in faba bean  used a new approach with computed tomography-based tools to examine reproductive investment in orchids. The high-resolution 3D imaging of flowers with almost no specimen destruction was used to count the pollen grains and ovules at two different scales in ‘deceptive’ and ‘rewarding’ species. This is interesting not just in the specific situation, understanding the balance between species types and their effects on pollinators, but also in the much wider value of the methodology in counting high-contrast objects within tissues, an aspect covered further by Legland et al. (2017). Related reviews in the issue cover the complex biomechanics of seed germination , lettuce and canola. As noted by the authors, cyclotides hold great potential, both as key active molecules themselves and, through their exceptional stability, as facilitators.The link with societal issues has always been important in JXB often makes this connection directly, including in the editorials by Interweaving with regular issues of the journal, our special issues provide a focus on topical areas, and these are led by authoritative Special Issue Editorials, often written by guest editors who have also been involved in organizing the scientific programmes for related conferences. These provide essential context about the overall area of research and act as a useful point of reference for each collection. But increasingly we have encouraged writers to go further than this, taking a view on the state of the field, wider implications and new directions, much as one would take away from participation in the sessions at meetings. In this issue, again linking with major sessions at the SEB meeting, such editorials cover seed development, maturation and germination , the plaJXB have provided readers with in-depth accounts of diverse subjects for many years, and those selected for this issue provide coverage ranging from the origins of multicellularity , and the cross-disciplinary approach to science exemplified by the SEB Annual Meeting and the journal is clear from the themes and articles explored here. The journal is also pleased to be able to provide direct sponsorship for the satellite meeting ‘Advances in Plant Reproduction – from Gametes to Seeds’ and the session covering morphogenesis in non-flowering plants.We are proud of the link between the SEB and JXB. But as a community-led journal other aspects including free open access publication for corresponding authors of subscribing institutions, any reasonable format for initial submission, free data archiving with Dryad Digital Repository (up to 20 GB) and full integration with the BioRxiv preprint server are also given a very high priority. This year publication on acceptance has been a popular new addition ensuring that papers are available at the earliest possible opportunity. We also undertake the highest standards of quality assessment, with friendly and supportive staff making the publication process as efficient as possible.High-impact science and excellent quality metrics, underpinned by an outstanding editorial board, will always be critical for As always, comments are very welcome – just email the editorial office at j.exp.bot@lancaster.ac.uk with any feedback and/or questions.


High quality and timely assessment of manuscripts are the cornerstones of peer review, which plays a central role in validating research results and advancing scientific discovery. However, the evolution of the publishing and research landscape is bringing challenges to the peer review process: reviewers struggle with the burden of growing numbers of papers to assess, finding peer reviewers for manuscripts is overall becoming harder , and autBMC Biology has for many years supported portable peer review practices [BMC Biology  with any journal of the authors’ choice, including those outside of BMC and Springer Nature.ractices . As partBMC Biology has also considered papers reviewed at other journals on the basis of the existing referee reports, with the support of our Editorial Board. In this way, we have been able to publish many impactful and robust studies while reducing time to publication and the effort of reviewers. We see that these practices benefitted authors, reviewers and ultimately research, and to further encourage portable peer review at BMC Biology, we are now formalizing them into a policy. We want to let potential authors know that they are welcome to come to us with their reviews, and we’ll chart together the path forward for the papers. Authors wishing to take up this route can simply email us to enquire about the suitability of a manuscript, with information about previous journal’s identity and all reviews. We then typically ask the previous journal to share with us the reviews and reviewers’ identities, and—subject to agreement from all parties—original reviewers may be consulted if deemed appropriate.For the past 5 years, With these changes we want to support a pragmatic and streamlined peer review process that will allow robust science to thrive, while minimizing the challenges ailing the current process.


It is Monday morning, the end of your tedious department faculty meeting. As if the meeting has not been dreadful enough, your colleague starts to brag about how smooth their recently accepted submission has been and how it was solicited by several journals at the same time. You pat their back and wonder if you should ask them what they think that the journal editor had meant by ‘not broad enough interest’ in the last reject-without-review decision letter you received. The colleague had been put on tenure track at the same time as you, but everything seems curiously effortless for them, while you struggle to keep up. You are confident your work is no less significant than the accepted work that they are bragging about, and you can’t help but ask yourself whether you have missed something important.Your mentors seem to talk to journal editors on a regular basis, and sometimes they even complain about too much correspondence. According to the rule of ‘six degrees of separation’, you are sure that you could get in touch with and eventually interest one of the editors with the details of your recently rejected work. You start planning which colleague you should reach out to first: your postdoc mentor, your PhD mentor or the ‘lucky’ colleague who you are sure will take the next open tenure position in your department.You probably do not know it, but you have probably missed three to five editors at each of the conferences you attended last year, a total of at least ten conferences involving numerous cross-continental sleep-depriving flights. The journal editors sit in front of you while you give the talk and they stare at your poster while you explain the technical details of the experiments. They are observers that tend to be as silent as possible, but they aim to learn as much as they can. Their role as your career partner is written between the lines of an editor’s job description, yet getting to know or talk to a journal editor could seem daunting at first. Here are some tips for those seeking to meet a ‘silent partner’ at a conference.Some conferences have ‘meet the editor’ panels, with the participants listed in the meeting program. You can go to the program website to check for these panels or lists. Some conferences are co-organized by journal editors, in which case their names will be listed on the front page of the website.If you are having trouble finding this information on the conference website, once you are registered to a conference, you will be able to access the list of attendees, which might be on the printed version of a conference book or on a mobile application. The domain names of the attendees’ email addresses will be one of the most straightforward ways to identify professional in-house editors. On the other hand, it might take more effort to identify academic editors; you might need to cross-reference journal websites with the conference attendee list to find the editor whose journal interests you.Schedule a 30-min meeting with the editor by email if you are not sure that you will be able to recognize them when you bump into them. Editors are generally very happy to meet with you and to answer any questions that you might have about a future or past submission. Another option would be to talk informally during a coffee break, but you should expect that you might only get a 5-min slot to do so. Although it may be very challenging to interest an editor in such a short time frame, you may still be able to hear comments from a completely new perspective.People might argue that meeting in person is outdated; emails, phone calls or social media are efficient enough. This is a valid argument, but you might be the kind of person that finds a smile or some other form of body language helpful when interpreting the feedback regarding the ‘interest level’ of your work. The best editor might even give some brainstorming ideas, which could sound outrageous but which might help you to think outside of the box. In most cases, the editors will let you know how robust the findings need to be or how broadly applicable the work has to be for the journal to send it for review.A good ‘elevator talk’ is a small talk that captures the audience’s attention within a few sentences. Aside from elevators, beware of editors when you grab your food, they will probably be waiting in the same line as you to grab a coffee or a sandwich lunch. Abstract thoughts are built, logged and archived by keywords and phrases; therefore, precise keywords are helpful to have on hand in order to capture the attention you need. A few good key thoughts will encourage an editor to come up with questions; these questions are indications of what’s going on in their minds and are those that are often asked in review reports circulating in this journal.It’s always a good habit to prepare an ‘elevator talk’, which should evolve with the work in progress. When preparing your talk, try to contain one keyword that highlights the gap in the field that is filled by your work, one keyword to show the advances achieved by the work (which could be a new technique or a significant insight), and finally, one keyword to show which doors this work has opened for fellow scientists.When you meet with an editor at the conference, if you don’t have time to set up a full meeting, you could mention that you have a talk or a poster scheduled at the conference. Invite the editor to your poster; they won’t miss the chance to hear an interesting story.You are center stage when you are chosen to give a 5–20 min talk. Remember that you are a storyteller, not a young PI who needs funding, good postdocs and published, well-cited articles. Don’t worry about the clicking sound of people taking pictures of you and your slides. Don’t worry about the questions that are going to bury you 5 min later. Tell a complete story first.A complete story should describe the incentive behind your work, which shouldn’t be the fact that you happened to inherit some rare lab material or that your funding agency is favoring this topic lately. Go back to the keyword describing the gap knowledge that needed to be filled; this is the ‘once upon a time’ that you are looking for in a conference talk. The story should also contain a sound logic flow. You may be worried about sharing unpublished results as part of your talk, but leaving these results out of your slides can compromise your logic flow. In addition, editors are often most interested in your unpublished results and like to hear about where you think the project is heading.Demonstrating a good understanding of the field and maintaining a sound logic flow throughout your talk is important in attracting your ‘silent partners’ because these are essential to making your project stand out among other scientific communications. It might not be immediately obvious, but peer review and eventually published articles are forms of scientific communications, and only good ones inspire followers. Mention the subject areas that you are interested in at the end of the talk; an editor may take the hint and come to catch up with you.It might seem that posters have less impact than a talk at the moment of presentation, but posters are gold mines for editors because they often contain preliminary work with good potential, whereas many talks reference already published projects. As posters don’t have the luxury of verbal context or the length of a full manuscript, you should make sure that your poster effectively communicates your main results. The only visible text on posters might be the title and a few words on the figures, so make good use of them and make sure that they explain your work clearly.Again, keywords come in handy when developing your title and making an impression. More time should be spent on the figures selected for the poster. They don’t have to be the same as those in the manuscript that you are writing, and they could be replotted to make a better illustration that is more suitable for a poster. In some cases, including all of the figures from your results might not be a good idea for a poster. How you plot the figures will be critical in helping the audience to understand what has been done and how significant your findings are. The figures should be self-explanatory without detailed legends.Scientific communication takes many forms, but conferences are places where direct communication with editors can happen in a quick and straightforward manner. Aside from promoting your work to the editors, don’t shy away from volunteering yourself as a reviewer, have your electronic resume prepared and offer to send it to the editor if they show interest. Your publication list can help the editor to see what your areas of expertise are. Prepare for different personal encounters, and you are sure to meet your next career partner very soon.