Perspectives on Medical Education (PME) to provide insights into the journal’s inner workings and to “take stock” of where PME is today, where it has been, and where it might go.To conduct a bibliometric case study of the journal Data, including bibliographic metadata, reviewer and author details, and downloads, were collected for manuscripts submitted to and published in PME from the journal’s Editorial Manager and Web of Science. Gender of authors and reviewers was predicted using Genderize.io. To visualize and analyze collaboration patterns, citation relationships and term co-occurrence social network analyses (SNA) were conducted. VOSviewer was used to visualize the social network maps.n = 57) acting as single authors.Between 2012–2019 PME received, on average, 260 manuscripts annually (range = 73–402). Submissions were received from authors in 81 countries with the majority in the United States (US), United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. PME published 518 manuscripts with authors based in 31 countries, the majority being in the Netherlands, US, and Canada. PME articles were downloaded 717,613 times (mean per document: 1388). In total 1201 (55% women) unique peer reviewers were invited and 649 (57% women) completed reviews; 1227 (49% women) unique authors published in PME. SNA revealed that PME authors were quite collaborative, with most authoring articles with others and only a minority (This case study provides a glimpse into PME and offers evidence for PME’s next steps. In the future, PME is committed to growing the journal thoughtfully; diversifying and educating editorial teams, authors, and reviewers, and liberating and sharing journal data. In 2005, Ioannidis described the scientific community’s increasing concern that most research findings are false due to poor research practices . This arBritish Medical Journal (BMJ) conducts meta-research across its suite of journals and offers a doctoral program on the responsible conduct of research. PLOS, which strives to empower researchers to accelerate scientific progress by leading a transformation in science communication, takes a similar approach [Perspectives on Medical Education (PME) also strives to take meta-research seriously and apply findings from its articles to improve journal processes and content.Many organizations, including academic institutions, journals, and publishers, have taken the findings of meta-research seriously and have tried to improve their processes and incentives. For example, the approach . Moreoveapproach . SimilarOne approach to meta-research is bibliometrics, which is the use of statistical methods to analyze publications. The field of bibliometrics is well-established, dating back to 1934  and popuTo open the special issue on meta-research in medical education, this article uses bibliometrics to undertake a case study of PME itself. In it, we hope to provide readers, authors, reviewers, and editors with transparency about the journal’s inner workings and offer insights into the context of the scholarly conversation taking place in PME. Our aim is to make this analysis useful to different stakeholders with, for example, their interpretation of scholarly discussions or editorial decisions. Additionally, we wrote this article as a way of “taking stock” of where we are today, where we have been in the past, and where we might go over the next decade, with the hopes of using an evidence-based approach to guide the journal’s future. Lastly, as we present our results and interpretations in this paper, we pose a series of questions and invite the health professions education (HPE) community to begin a dialogue on these important meta-research issues, and we encourage members of the HPE community to think about how the journal and the field could move forward.We conducted a bibliometric case study of PME using bibliographic metadata, citations, downloads, and statistics about the submission and review process. As journals are complex entities that generate a wealth of data, for feasibility we choose to focus on several key aspects that we feel are relevant for PME’s readers, authors, reviewers, and editors. In particular, we provide an overview of the manuscripts submitted to and published in the journal, including descriptions of publication types, author characteristics, related author keywords, and overall acceptance rates. We also examine peer-review practices, such as publication timelines and reviewer characteristics and, for published articles, we describe article usage and citation data. Finally, using social network analysis, we explore the relationships between authors, institutions, and topics.PME is the official journal of the Netherlands Association of Medical Education (NVMO). The journal’s mission is to support and enrich collaborative scholarship between education researchers and clinical educators, and to advance new knowledge regarding clinical education practices by publishing a variety of publication types including original research. The NVMO’s sponsorship enables PME to be a diamond Open Access journal, which levies no author charges and makes all articles freely available immediately under a Creative Commons attribution license. This is the least restrictive Creative Commons license enabling reuse while still providing credit to the authors. PME is published by Bohn Stafleu van Loghum, part of Springer Nature, and indexed in over 20 databases, including MEDLINE, Web of Science (WoS), and Embase. In 2020, PME was recognized with the Directory of Open Access Journals Seal of Approval for Open Access Journals and was also awarded a journal impact factor by WoS. PME is a single-blind, peer-reviewed journal. Manuscripts are handled by an associate editor and reviewed by at least two reviewers. The editor-in-chief renders all final decisions.Data for this case study were collected for manuscripts submitted and published between 2012–2019. We focused on this time period because after 2012 PME transitioned from a Dutch to an English language journal and established an international editorial board. We primarily extracted data from PME’s version of Editorial Manager with the exception of usage data, which were provided by Springer, and basic citation data, which were obtained via WoS.Author names, institutions, and countries were cleaned to combine various spellings and variants of the same entity into one . This was done using the VOSviewer thesaurus function. For author names we changed 58 spellings of author names for 53 authors to merge them with alternative spelling variants. The majority of changes affected first name initials only . Author name disambiguation reduced the total number of distinct authors from 1285 to 1227. We also cleaned institution names, reducing the total number of institutions from 423 to 333. We found 955 keywords and, for ease of analysis, selected only those that appeared at least three times in our dataset, which reduced the keywords most frequently found to 101.n = 62), we searched the individuals’ online presence. We recognize that gender is a complex social construct that is best described by an individual and that the binary nature of these results is not ideal. However, because the field of bibliometrics currently lacks better alternatives, we decided to use this approach, which has been employed to predict gender in several recent studies with similar aims [To predict the gender of authors and peer reviewers, we used the tool Genderize.io , which clar aims –19.Descriptive statistics were calculated using GoogleSheets and Excel , 21. To Our author team includes researchers with expertise in HPE and information science. Three of the authors have official connections to PME. ED is the Editor-in-Chief, LM is the Deputy Editor-in-Chief, and AA is an Associate Editor of PME. SH is a guest editor for PME’s special issue on meta-research. We recognize that our relationship with the journal gives us information access that is traditionally not publicly available (e.g. usage data); this is a strength of this case study. However, we also realize that this could be construed as a conflict of interest. Therefore, for transparency, we deposited the study data obtained from Editorial Manager in an open-access database to allow for independent review and replication of our findings . MoreoveAlthough we were fortunate to have access to a great deal of data, we are mindful that journal pages are a precious and finite resource. Therefore, we provide here only a summary of our findings and have deposited supplementary tables and figures as freely accessible resources on Zenodo , and refPME received an average of 260 manuscripts per year . From 2012–2019 there was a 451% increase in submissions , United Kingdom (UK) , and the Netherlands . Manuscripts submitted by authors based in the Netherlands had the highest acceptance rate (25.5%) followed by authors in the US (22.6%) and Canada (22.3%). See the dataset on Zenodo for counts of manuscripts accepted and submitted across all countries [PME received manuscripts from authors based in 81 countries. Corresponding authors for submitted manuscripts were primarily based in the United States (US) . Each issue contained, on average, 11 articles  with six issues published annually during most years. A seventh supplementary special issue published in 2018 focused on researchers’ surprises and failures [The majority of publications were research articles (62.9%), followed by editorial material (24.5%), reviews (5.8%), and letters (5.8%). Two book reviews and two corrections were also published. While review articles became more frequent in 2017, fewer letters were published in 2016 and beyond.PME articles were downloaded 717,613 times . Despite being recently published in 2019, an article by Neubauer et al.  that proThe most frequently cited PME articles in terms of absolute number of citations were Artino , Lefroy n = 369). On average, reviewers reviewed 2.78 manuscripts over the study period (range 1–35).Between 2012–2019, 1201 unique peer scholars were invited to review manuscripts. Of those, 649 (54.0%) completed reviews, with the slight majority reviewing only a single manuscript  followed by the Netherlands  and Canada . Women were invited to review more often than men  and completed more reviews .Reviewers were based in 49 countries with those in the United States (US) invited most frequently . Women took on average 16.7 days to submit a review  and men 15.4 days . Values of 0 indicate that the reviewers returned their reviews on the same day that they received their assignments.A total of 1227 unique authors published in PME between 2012–2019. Overall, 49% of authors were predicted to be women and 46% men. We were unable to determine the gender of 5% of names. Men and women were similarly productive  and collaborative , which aligns with related findings suggesting relative gender parity in HPE publications in recent years , 27. Then = 572; 24.7%), followed by the UK  and the Netherlands . Notably, in 2019, the journal received its first submissions from authors based in Cuba, Cyprus, Lebanon, Oman, and Zimbabwe. PME articles listed affiliations in 35 countries with the largest number of authors based in the Netherlands , US  and Canada .PME received manuscripts from authors in 81 countries. US-based authors submitted the most , followed by Western University (n = 34) and University of Toronto (n = 32) (see Tab. n = 25), Radboud University Nijmegen (n = 19) and Vrije University (n = 19)—being the most prolific. The second largest cluster  includes 30 institutions, the most prolific of which are in the US, including University of Michigan (n = 9), Harvard University (n = 8), and Cleveland Clinic (n = 7). The third largest cluster contained 28 institutions, led by University of Aberdeen (n = 9), University of Liverpool (n = 6), and New York University (n = 5).Authors were affiliated with 333 different institutions, 233 of which were connected in the largest component of the institutional collaboration network. Authors affiliated with Maastricht University published the most articles , reflecting the former national focus of the journal. The US (138), Canada (131), and UK (76) are the second, third and fourth most represented countries, respectively. In terms of collaboration patterns, these countries showed the strongest ties with each other. The largest number of co-publications occurred between the Netherlands and the US (24), the US and Canada (16), and Canada and the UK (10). We identified that authors from nine countries represented only collaborated with authors from their own country. See Zenodo file for the top 10 institutions by number of articles published .The presence of these predominantly Western institutional and geographical affiliations aligns with patterns observed in HPE more broadly –28, althWhat other factors could account for the institutional and international collaboration depicted in Fig. Author keywords were available for 401 of the 518 articles. After cleaning terms (see Methods), 955 unique terms were used to describe these documents. The most frequent terms were medical education (assigned to 73 documents), medical students (26), assessments (24), feedback (21), undergraduate medical education (19) and curriculum (15). As one might expect, the distribution of documents per author keyword was very skewed, and the majority of terms  were assigned to one document only.medical education, is at the center of the network as the largest node. It is part of the second largest cluster 2 (green) together with 21 other author keywords, including undergraduate medical education (19 documents), curriculum (15), qualitative research (13) and clinical reasoning (10). Overall, the network contained 7 clusters. The largest cluster 1 (red) contains 31 different keywords with assessments (24), feedback (21), faculty development (13) and professionalism (12) being the most frequent. The third cluster (blue) contained 14 keywords, including medical students (26), simulation (9), competency-based medical education (6) and learning (6).Fig. medical education. The dominance of this keyword possibly indicates that PME is more focused on manuscripts addressing topics specific to training of doctors and less so on the broader field of HPE. However, in our experience, the term medical education is often used interchangeably with the more inclusive term, HPE, and so this finding should be interpreted with caution. Next, it is noticeable that the largest cluster (red) contains keywords that one could group as associated with assessment , suggesting that PME has made assessment a key focus. While these keyword clusters can be interesting, these data speak to the lack of consistency in author keyword selection, which makes this type of network map less useful. This lack of consistency reflects similar findings in a case study of the multiple terms HPE researchers use for the term faculty [In considering these clusters, it is easy to be distracted by the central key word  faculty .In what ways, if any, do you find these clusters surprising?Are there any topics that you think are missing?Upon reflection of our findings from this case study, below we address four key takeaways for PME: growing thoughtfully, diversifying, educating, and liberating and sharing journal data.While the number of manuscripts that PME published has remained constant, there has been a significant increase in the number of submissions, which have continued to climb during and beyond the study period. In 2021, for example, PME received over 900 submissions, which may be an artifact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But in 2022 PME submissions are on pace to exceed this number. As noted, journal pages are precious, and each article exacts a cost that demands both monetary resources  and humMedical Education [While PME received and published manuscripts from around the world, the majority of those manuscripts, as well as the majority of the researchers who peer reviewed those manuscripts, were affiliated with Western countries. While this finding aligns with the broader literature , 28 and ducation ), we feeducation . To thisEducating the medical education community of scholars has always been one of PME’s most cherished goals, and based on several of the highly cited, education-focused articles listed in Tab. In this study, we were fortunate to have access to the Editorial Manager’s internal report system; we also had permission from Springer to use those data. Notwithstanding this access and permission, we currently do not have standing, guaranteed, real-time access to our own data—data that are generated by our readers and editors. This lack of access is a policy hurdle, not a technical hurdle. For example, the Open Journal System, which is operated by the Public Knowledge Project, is the world’s largest open access publishing platform. It makes readily available—in real time—data on article and abstract views, editorial and review activity, and user counts by submission. And these data are readily available to its editors without the need for a special request . We contIn this case study, we aimed to provide a glimpse into the inner workings of PME for a variety of stakeholders and to generate evidence to guide PME’s next steps. As a way of “taking stock” of where we are and where we have been, we hope this analysis can help guide PME’s future. In considering this future, it seems that some of the following topics may be worthy of broader consideration by the HPE community: growing PME thoughtfully; diversifying and educating editorial teams, authors, and reviewers; and liberating and sharing journal data. We are optimistic that this case study will kick start the conversation on these topics for PME and other journals in the field.


Sci Rep. (2021) 11:3118. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-82795-z), and PLOS One  16:e0245553. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245553).Following publication, concerns were raised about similarities between the article cited above in Frontiers in Veterinary Science and Scientific Reports (Alves JC, Santos A, Jorge P, Lavrador C, Carreira LM. Intraarticular triamcinolone hexacetonide, stanozolol, Hylan G-F 20 and platelet concentrate in a naturally occurring canine osteoarthritis model. The three studies share data, results and conclusions to an extent that is inconsistent with Frontiers requirements for the publication of original research.Following the assessment and agreement of the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Veterinary Science, the Specialty Chief Editor of Veterinary Regenerative Medicine and the Specialty Chief Editor of Comparative and Clinical Medicine, and in accordance with Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines, this article is retracted.The authors do not consent to this retraction.


Radiation and Environmental Biophysics, unconditionally support the condemnation and echo the statement of Frank Vrancken Peeters, the Chief Executive Officer of Springer Nature: “Our thoughts are with all those affected by the unfolding situation across the region. We join the call for a ceasefire and the return to peace. Peace is one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and a prerequisite for human progress. As an academic and education publisher dedicated to building bridges of understanding, we are shocked and saddened by an act which is designed to drive people apart” (https://www.springernature.com/de/advancing-discovery/springboard/blog/blogposts-open-research/springer-nature-condemns-russian-invasion/20191448).Springer Nature, similarly as other publishing houses, condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We, the Editors of the journal of A question discussed by journal editors since the invasion is whether manuscripts submitted by scientists affiliated to institutions in the Russian Federation should be considered for publication. For example, Olesia Vashchuk, the head of Ukraine’s Young Scientists Council at the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science, wrote in March 2022: “Russian scientists have no moral right to retransmit any messages to the world scientific community” . It appears to us that the COPE statement does not directly apply to the idea of boycotting submissions from scientists affiliated to Russian institutes, because such a boycott would not be directed against individuals but against state organisations. Specifically, it would imply rejecting submissions from people working for these organisations, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion. Also, such a boycott would not be prompted by any direct governmental influence on the journal editors. Rather, it would be motivated by the policy of the Russian government towards the international community.We consulted Springer Nature and received the information that the Publisher rejects the idea of boycotting submissions from the Russian Federation and that this policy is based on the advice of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) that reads as follows: “Editorial decisions should not be affected by the origins of the manuscript, including the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of the authors. Decisions to edit and publish should not be determined by the policies of governments or other agencies outside of the journal itself, except where a decision might place the journal in violation of applicable law” (Radiation and Environmental Biophysics will continue to handle submissions of scientific papers from the Russian Federation in the spirit of freedom of science. However, this should not be interpreted in any way as support of the war against Ukraine driven by the government of the Russian Federation.The above considerations demonstrate the complexity of the situation. Which policy will do most good and least harm? We do not know. In any case, in accordance with the policy of the Publisher, we as the Editors of the journal of


Bioinformatics Advances, an interdisciplinary journal on bioinformatics and computational biology.  The journal represents a joint endeavor of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and Oxford University Press (OUP).Welcome to Why, with the many publication outlets available for computational biology research do we believe that there is a place for another journal on computational biology? Actually, there are quite a few reasons.Bioinformatics is a still-growing field. The field has established its relevance in research in the life sciences in the past couple of decades. However, due to its interdisciplinary character, many of its contributions are spread over a wide variety of topical journals. This journal aims at strengthening the awareness of the central role bioinformatics plays in the life sciences within the scientific community. It does so by illuminating the field in its entirety and by providing a balance between methodical contributions and data analyses providing novel biological insights. The journal aims at providing a venue for many high-quality contributions to our field that, so far, are at the risk of disappearing in the vast landscape of topical journals.Bioinformatics Advances aims at placing early spotlights on these emerging areas as the field develops.Bioinformatics is not only growing but evolving, with new promising concepts and approaches continually appearing on the horizon, often based on new experimental technologies but sometimes also representing new paradigms in data analysis, modeling and simulation. We feel that there is much room to develop our interdisciplinary field as a community, as we strive for fairer representation of contributions from the diverse corners of our scientific community. Therefore, this journal will expend special efforts on accounting for the diversity of our contributing scientists, be it with respect to scientific background, gender, seniority, ethnicity or geographical region. In order to make the scientific contributions widely available, this journal will be fully open access and online only.Bioinformatics being an official journal of ISCB today and for much of the lifetime of the society, the proceedings of ISCB’s flagship conference, the Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) being published within Bioinformatics and OUP regularly sponsoring ISMB. Therefore, it is natural that OUP and the ISCB run this journal together.The journal’s goals spelled out above mirror the goals of the ISCB. In 2021, the ISCB enters its 25th year furthering the scientific field and the community that is its base. Over that time, the ISCB has had a strong working relationship with the publisher OUP. Examples include Aside from original research contributions, the journal will offer formats that reflect the development of the field and its community, special collections and sections on important scientific meetings, reviews and opinion pieces as well as personal profiles of and perspectives by special contributors to our field.Bioinformatics published by OUP. This entails the following aspects:The journal will maintain close connections to the journal Bioinformatics Advances will include and expand those of Bioinformatics. With respect to scope, Bioinformatics Advances will reach beyond method-centered articles and include application-centered articles (Discovery Notes) and contributions to emerging areas as well as reviews, opinion and perspective articles. Furthermore, Bioinformatics Advances will include special feature articles that reflect the life of the scientific community, in general, and of the ISCB, in particular, such as personality features on recipients of prestigious awards in the field and, information on funding and policy and ethics and more.Both the scope and the article types of Bioinformatics but could not be accepted by that journal will be eligible for direct transfer to Bioinformatics Advances. Both journals will have compatible submission guidelines to enable simple and speedy transfer without the need for reformatting.Certain contributions that have been submitted to Bioinformatics will reduce the burden on reviewers of papers. In a similar vein, Bioinformatics Advances will also consider papers that have been reviewed previously for other journals. If the other journal will confirm the veracity of the reviews, our editors will take them into account in their decision-making.Transferring manuscripts with reviews from We work with a two-tier editorial team. The team consists of a set of Associate Editors and of an Editorial Board. Our small team of Associate Editors will grow as the number of submissions increases. From the beginning, we place priority on the scientific excellence, editorial expertise and potential of our Associate Editors. At the same time, we look for broad topical coverage and for high diversity among the editorial team. The Editorial Board consists of established scientists who will help furthering the direction of the journal, reviewing specific papers and working out issues that arise.We cordially welcome our inaugural editorial team that is listed below and thank all of them for their commitment to bringing this new journal to fruition.We are happy and honored to welcome a stellar group of inaugural Associate Editors:Bissan Al-Lazikani, Institute of Cancer Research, London, UKBissan Al-Lazikani's research focuses on developing and applying multidisciplinary computational techniques for drug discovery and clinical application. She is also Head of Data Science at the ICR, where she leads the Knowledge Hub Big Data Team for intelligent application of computers in adaptive, individualized therapy.Ivet Bahar, University Pittsburgh School of Medicine, USAIvet Bahar is a Distinguished Professor and John K. Vries Chair, Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Her research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of Biomolecular system interactions and their binding, catalytic and allosteric signaling effects. A major research goal of her lab is to investigate the dynamics of molecular systems in the cellular environment cellular using fundamental principles of physical sciences and engineering.Sofia Forslund, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, GermanySofia Kirke Forslund is a computational biologist and a junior group leader at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint venture between the Berlin Max Delbrück Center (MDC) and the Charité University Hospital. Her research group focuses on host–microbiome factors in cardiovascular diseases, working toward the goal of data-driven models for how human host and microbiome develop together under different conditions toward either health or disease.Marieke Kuijjer, Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway, University Oslo, NorwayMarieke Kuijjer is a Group Leader at the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway (NCMM), University of Oslo, Norway; adjunct Assistant Professor at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), the Netherlands. Her research focuses on developing computational frameworks that place genomic data into the context of gene regulatory networks and on exploring how these networks influence cancer and complex disease.Nicola Mulder, University of Cape Town, South AfricaNicola (Nicky) Mulder is a Professor and the Head of Division, Computational Biology, Department of Integrative Biomedical Sciences; Member of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM), Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town. She also serves as the Principal investigator of H3ABioNet, a Pan African bioinformatics network for H3Africa. Her main research interests lie in the areas of genomics and its application to human diseases of relevance to Africa.Aïda Ouangraoua, Université de Sherbrooke, CanadaAïda Ouangraoua is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Université de Sherbrooke where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Computational and Biological Complexity. She leads the Computational Biology (CoBIUS) Team at the Computer Science Department of Université de Sherbrooke. Her research focuses on developing algorithms and comparative genomics methods to study the evolution of genome structures, gene splicing structures and RNA structures.Alexandros Stamatakis, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, GermanyAlexandros Stamatakis is the head of the Computational Molecular Evolution (CME) research group at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and is the Chair in High Performance Computing in the Life Sciences (Department of Informatics) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). His research interests are in algorithms, parallel computing, parallel architectures, computational phylogenetics and evolutionary bioinformatics.Zhang Zhang, National Genomics Data Center, Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and China National Center for Bioinformation, Beijing, ChinaZhang Zhang is a Distinguished Professor and Associate Director of National Genomics Data Center (NGDC), Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and China National Center for Bioinformation (CNCB). His research focuses on big data integration and curation, computational health genomics and computational molecular evolution.Bioinformatics Advances.It is our goal to make the journal as attractive to authors and readers as possible. We hope that you will join us on this new adventure through reviewing for and publication in


We were inspired to write this editorial by our experiences of editing/reviewing for several journals and an article was written by Wiley's Regional Manager of Peer Review imploring editors to “Do to Others as You Would Have Them Do to You” in order to foster academic kindness Willis, . ClearlyPeer review is a central (and arguably the most important) aspect of the scientific publishing process . Consider writing “I'd be grateful if the authors could provide precise details about how they randomised  in their study, I'd suggest looking at the following guidance for further information.”Don't make general sweeping statements, such as “mixed methods research is simply a way of dressing up a substandard study as something interesting, I do not have time for it”.Do outline the strengths of the manuscript, even if you think it is inherently flawed and should not be published. “I congratulate the authors on the effort that they have put into this manuscript. Unfortunately, I think there are some important methodological issues that will need to be addressed, for example…”.Do comment if poor grammar detracts from clarity. But, don't focus too much on individual typos or make insensitive comments about authors not being native English speakers. For example, it might be appropriate to write “I note that you are inconsistent in your use of past and present tenses, as you are reporting the results of a study that has been completed you should use the past tense for example we randomised…, participants were assessed by a researcher blind to…”One bugbear of ours is self‐citation in peer review. Don't use the process as an opportunity to put pressure on the authors to cite your (or your mates') work in the manuscript. Interestingly, Thombs et al.  reportedFinally, before submitting read the review back and imagine how you would feel if you received the review you have just written.We hope we have encouraged some reflection of the need for sensitive peer review. Having thought about this issue ourselves these are some of our do's and don'ts:We should be mindful and respectful that authors have spent a good deal of time and effort thinking about, preparing and submitting their paper. The least we can do as editors and peer reviewers are to acknowledge this regardless of whether the paper is accepted or rejected. It is our academic and professional duty to support authors – many of whom are submitting their first paper – who will invariably be grateful, learn from and improve their writing and publishing.https://publons.com/about/home/) to track their peer reviews and encourage colleagues in academic leadership roles to recognise peer review and a performance metric. Reviewers are vital to the publishing enterprise and they serve an important role for the journal, the profession and the individual. But, as with all roles, there is always room for improvement.It is also worth acknowledging that peer reviewers undertake the task on top of often heavy workloads and with no remuneration. They may do it for a variety of reasons, including gaining peer recognition, keeping abreast of developments in their field, bolstering their CVs and maybe even aiding career progression. We encourage authors to make use of Publons  and have approved the final version.All authors have contributed equally, meet at least one of the ICMJE criteria for authorship (Ethical approval is not for required this editorial.


At the end of this Editorial, we ask you to take a few minutes to respond to our short anonymous online query. If you have no time to read this Editorial about the possible collapse of the peer review system, please just respond to the survey. But we—the editors in chief and managing editor of the International Journal of Public Health (IJPH) and the Public Health Reviews (PHR)—hope you dedicate the time to read this Editorial about the peer review crisis in public health sciences.In a 2019 workshop of the Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH+)—the owner of the IJPH and PHR—all participants agreed that our journals should continue with thorough pre-publication peer review, including revisions, point-by-point responses and final decisions made by science editors, to strengthen the quality of publications. But soon after, the explosion in COVID-19 research caused an unprecedented increase in submissions and thus demand for peer review in health science journals . During The growth in publications has brought the peer review system to the edge, as the commitment of scientists did not keep pace with the increase in manuscripts. In Elsevier’s health and medical journals the increase in peer review invitation acceptances from 2019 to 2020 (February to May periods) was about 50% lower than the increase in submissions . The recThe consequences of this crisis are equally bad for our authors and editors. First, the endless search for reviewers has slowed down the publishing process substantially. Second, editors have to resort to the release of automatic “mass-invitations” to 20+ potential reviewers at a time and to remind those repeatedly, thus, flooding the stressed community with even more invitation emails. Third, automated search strategies require artificial big-data search engines. As those are of limited intelligence yet, a rather high rate of 25%—probably the tip of an iceberg—of active decliners tell us “this is not my field.” Fourth, we are forced to discuss whether and under what conditions final decisions should be based on the feedbacks of only one review. And last but not least, the workload for our handling editors has also increased substantially, which in turn triggers their resistance to handle manuscripts.The simple truth is: if we collectively “do not have time” to review manuscripts, there will be no peer review anymore. Thus, key questions emerge. Does public health science serve authorities and the public sufficiently if research is published without formal pre-publication peer review? Is post-publication peer review also appropriate to promote good public health sciences? Will publishing on pre-print servers become the new standard given the abundance of innovation in this field . In the Given the ubiquity and magnitude of the problem, we call for concerted strategies also of publishers to resolve it together with journal editors as they cannot do it alone. The literature discusses various incentives for reviewers, among them discounts on publishers’ products, certificates, recognizing the best reviewers, increasing diversity in the peer-review process and financial incentives –8. The dFrom a quantitative perspective, the solution looks rather straightforward in our typically multi-authored science: if researchers agree to review as many papers per year as they write as first or last author, the crisis would resolve. Indeed, the trends in scientific publishing where the number of publications doubles every 10 years whilst the number of scientists increases by only 21%  call forOur two journals have adopted a feature to remove at least barriers of the peer review mode (blinded or open) on reviewers’ willingness to review: while we run peer reviews double blind to minimize biases, we leave it up to the reviewers to decide after peer review if they would like to publish their name, the review report or both with the published article. We are aware that reviews of rejected articles are not recognized this way and therefore, encourage reviewers to register their reviews on reviewer recognition platforms. We invite excellent reviewers who provided relevant information beyond the content of an article to comment in an Editorial. We publish reviewer acknowledgments. And on request we issue reviewer certificates. We offer an online course to train junior researchers in editorial tasks and peer reviewing. However, this is not enough.As a non-profit society journal, we wonder whether our research community is more open to review for society journals as compared to the many for-profit journals owned by publishers and their shareholders. Or does it matter who the publisher—rather than the owner—of the journal is? Alternatively, is the Impact Factor of a journal or its open access status relevant for scientists’ decision to review or decline? IJPH has a Q1 Impact Factor of 5.1 and PHR’s Q1 CiteScore of 9.6 is promising for its first Impact Factor to be obtained next year. Both journals publish gold open access. Do scientists consider whether journals promote early career researchers and researchers from low and middle- income countries like we do with our Young Researcher Editorial Series (YRE) in IJPH and the Globequity APC waiver program?In an attempt to better understand the requirements of reviewers of PHR and IJPH we reach out to you. We would greatly appreciate your answers to a few questions that will guide our decisions to foster your willingness to review for IJPH and PHR.https://ssphplus.ch/en/ssph-journals/survey-peer-review/ to our query.Please kindly follow this link Do you have time to counter the peer review crisis? We very much hope!


The Transplantation Society and Wolters Kluwer, the publisher of Transplantation (TPA), established Transplantation Direct (TXD) as an online open access journal with specific goals and a continuous publishing mode, commencing publication in February 2015.4 Articles may be submitted directly to TXD or may be transferred after initial submission to TPA. The editors of TPA have the option to offer authors transfer of their articles to TXD if it is assessed to be of high quality, meeting specific aims and quality thresholds of TXD while not being deemed of sufficient priority for publication in TPA. Authors may respond that they “Agree to Transfer” or “Decline Transfer.” We conducted an analysis of 5 y of this practice and are thus able to provide insight into the outcome of such journal pairing by examining the destination of articles, which are offered the opportunity to flow from a traditional journal to an online open access paired journal.Open access publishing provides a model in which authors pay the costs of publication. In the “traditional” approach, in contrast, costs are mostly covered by the reader.TPA after peer-review and offered transfer to TXD between 2015 and the end of 2019 were included in this bibliometric analysis. Data were derived from the submission system operated by the editorial offices of TPA and TXD and included the date of final decision, title and authors of the article, editorial article status if authors were offered transfer, and whether the transfer was received by TXD. All articles not published in TXD were sought on PubMed and Google Scholar by 2 independent reviewers (T.B. and S.B.) using key words from the title and first author names. Destination journals were categorized as either full open access or traditional, using the Directory of Open Access Journals,5 and the 5-y impact factor (IF), calculated from the years 2015 to 2019, was derived from the Journal Citation Reports provided by the Web of Science Clarivate Analytics Index System.6 The study was registered at the University Medical Center Groningen Research Register (no. 202100708). Data were accessed as an editorial system quality assurance study approved by the Executive Editorial Committee of Transplantation. All data retrieved remain confidential, no journal authorships are disclosed beyond the 2 independent reviewers, and all identifying data have been eliminated after articles were accepted for publication.All articles rejected by TPA received 8365 article submissions between 2015 and 2019, of which 1969 (23.5%) were published, 1170 (14.0%) were rejected after editorial “desk” review, and 5226 (62.5%) were rejected after full peer review , author declined to revise (n = 9), submission was removed by the author (n = 37), submission was removed by the editor (n = 3), submission was removed from the system because of prolonged inactivity (n = 52), and a small number was still being revised at the time of the analysis (n = 6). Thus, a total of 1043 articles offered transfer were not published in TXD. These articles were subjected to a systematic literature search. It appeared that 871 (83.5%) of these articles were published elsewhere, of which 666 (76.5%) articles were published in traditional journals and 205 (23.5%) in open access journals  d, P < 0.001). The number of transfer offers and subsequent transfers published in TXD did not change over the years, with 250 to 290 articles offered a transfer each year, of which 22% to 28% were actually transferred and published.This analysis demonstrates the choices made by authors as they seek to publish their article, as well as the tradeoffs of cost and time to publication that they experience as their articles flow to publication in both traditional and open access journals. About three quarters of authors whose articles were eventually published after declining transfer did so in conventional journals, and only a quarter published in an open access journal indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals. Of critical relevance, this approach resulted in a substantially longer time to publication . The considerations that contributed to authors’ decisions are unknown. Publication in a paired open access journal through transfer is faster, more reliable and a more sustainable way to use peer-review, especially as it has become increasingly difficult to find suitable and willing expert peer reviewers. However, author publication costs are higher, and most open access journals have a lower IF. Although some universities and research institutions have established arrangements to meet article processing charges and publications costs, others, especially in emerging economies, do not, creating accessibility issues for these researchers.Transplantation’s editors and authors, which may not necessarily be applicable to other journals; we did not examine all articles rejected by TPA but focused on those that were offered transfer to TXD; TXD started in 2015 at the start of the analysis period and thus did not have an IF to help guide authors, although the use of the alternative system for which TXD has a reported and rising CiteScore (3.7)7 may assist.This analysis has a number of limitations: we analyzed the publishing behavior of Pairing traditional journals with open access sibling journals offers a reliable and time efficient opportunity for authors to publish their research while maintaining validation of the high standard and quality peer review of the traditional journal. This analysis provides an insight into editor and author decision making cascading between journals, especially with sibling journals offering a transfer option for articles of particular interest. Authors appear to opt for the highest IF journal that will accept their paper, and many opted for traditional journals perhaps to reduce publication costs. The downside of these decisions was the delay of publication by about 6 mo with many articles still being published with open access charges.Transplantation and Transplantation Direct for assistance.We would like to thank the editorial office of


What is the concordance among sample size, primary end points, results for primary end points, and interpretations described in preprints of clinical studies posted on medRxiv that are subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals ?In this cross-sectional study of 547 clinical studies that were initially posted to medRxiv and later published in peer-reviewed journals, 86.4% of preprint-journal article pairs were concordant in terms of sample size, 97.6% in terms of primary end points, 81.1% in terms of results of primary end points, and 96.2% in terms of study interpretations.This study suggests that most clinical studies posted as preprints on medRxiv and subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals had concordant study characteristics, results, and final interpretations. Preprints have been widely adopted to enhance the timely dissemination of research across many scientific fields. Concerns remain that early, public access to preliminary medical research has the potential to propagate misleading or faulty research that has been conducted or interpreted in error.To evaluate the concordance among study characteristics, results, and interpretations described in preprints of clinical studies posted to medRxiv that are subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals .This cross-sectional study assessed all preprints describing clinical studies that were initially posted to medRxiv in September 2020 and subsequently published in a peer-reviewed journal as of September 15, 2022.For preprint-journal article pairs describing clinical trials, observational studies, and meta-analyses that measured health-related outcomes, the sample size, primary end points, corresponding results, and overarching conclusions were abstracted and compared. Sample size and results from primary end points were considered concordant if they had exact numerical equivalence.Among 1399 preprints first posted on medRxiv in September 2020, a total of 1077 (77.0%) had been published as of September 15, 2022, a median of 6 months  after preprint posting. Of the 547 preprint-journal article pairs describing clinical trials, observational studies, or meta-analyses, 293 (53.6%) were related to COVID-19. Of the 535 pairs reporting sample sizes in both sources, 462 (86.4%) were concordant; 43 (58.9%) of the 73 pairs with discordant sample sizes had larger samples in the journal publication. There were 534 pairs (97.6%) with concordant and 13 pairs (2.4%) with discordant primary end points. Of the 535 pairs with numerical results for the primary end points, 434 (81.1%) had concordant primary end point results; 66 of the 101 discordant pairs (65.3%) had effect estimates that were in the same direction and were statistically consistent. Overall, 526 pairs (96.2%) had concordant study interpretations, including 82 of the 101 pairs (81.2%) with discordant primary end point results.Most clinical studies posted as preprints on medRxiv and subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals had concordant study characteristics, results, and final interpretations. With more than three-fourths of preprints published in journals within 24 months, these results may suggest that many preprints report findings that are consistent with the final peer-reviewed publications. This cross-sectional study of preprints compares the agreement in characteristics, results, and conclusions of clinical studies posted as preprints to medRxiv and subsequently published in any peer-reviewed journal. To further inform discourse about the use of preprints in clinical and health science research, we conducted a cross-sectional evaluation examining the agreement between clinical studies posted as preprints to medRxiv in September 2020 and subsequently published in any peer-reviewed journal, including sample size, primary end points, results of primary end points, and overall interpretations.Although not all preprints will be published in peer-reviewed journals, among those that are , it is possible to examine the extent to which the studies’ design, results, and conclusions are changed as of publication. Although previous evaluations have provided some reassurance of the consistency between preprints and subsequent publications, these efforts have often focused on specific fields and journal types. For instance, evidence suggests that COVID-19–related preprint-journal article pairs are largely similar in terms of their abstracts, figures, and interpretations.STROBE) reporting guideline.We did not involve members of the public or patients when we designed our study, interpreted the results, or wrote the manuscript. However, we asked members of the public to read our manuscript after submission to ensure it was understandable. The study did not require institutional review board approval because it was based on publicly available information, in accordance with 45 CFR §46. Informed consent was not needed because no patient data were used. This cross-sectional study adheres to the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology  to locate all manuscripts posted to medRxiv in September 2020  manually reviewed each preprint and characterized the study design of each into 1 of the following categories: clinical trials, observational studies, meta-analyses with or without systematic reviews, modeling studies, or other , we first used the medRxiv API, which matches preprints to journal articles based on title and author(s)  reviewed the preprint-journal article pairs and collected the following information: abstract-reported sample size, primary end point(s), results for each primary end point, and overall interpretations or conclusions. For preprints or journal articles with unclear information at the abstract level, we reviewed the full text. For clinical trials and observational studies, sample size was defined as the number of the individuals in the cohort or database used for the primary analysis. For meta-analyses, sample size was defined as the number of discrete studies included in the primary analysis. For each preprint-journal article pair, we identified the measurement scale  and ascertainment time for the primary end points. For clinical trials or prospective observational studies, ascertainment times were defined as the follow-up times for the cohorts of interest. For all other observational study designs and meta-analyses, ascertainment times were defined as the cutoff dates for data collection or database searches. Last, we recorded the Altmetric score for each preprint and journal article.10 we assessed the concordance between the preprint-journal article pairs in terms of sample size, primary end point(s), results of each primary end point, and interpretation. For sample size, the preprint-journal article pairs were classified as concordant if they had numerical equivalence; if a pair was discordant, we conducted further investigation to characterize the type of discordance . For any results of primary end points classified as discordant, we reviewed the Methods and Results sections of the preprint-journal article pairs to assess the type and potential reasons for the observed discordance (eAppendix in For primary end point(s), preprint-journal article pairs were classified as concordant if all primary end points identified in the preprint were identified as primary end points in the publication, and no additional primary end points were specified in the publication. For each preprint-journal article pair, results of primary end points were classified as concordant if all effect estimates and/or CIs or 2 test and the Fisher exact test were used to compare concordance rates across COVID-19 relation and journal impact factor. A 2-sided P < .05 was considered to be statistically significant. Analyses were conducted using JMP Pro software, version 15.0.0 (SAS Institute Inc), and figures were generated using Python software, version 3.7 .12We conducted descriptive analyses to quantify the preprint characteristics and concordance rates between preprint-journal article pairs. Analyses of concordance rates were repeated across study designs , journal impact factor (≥10 vs <10), topic (COVID-19–related vs non–COVID-19–related manuscripts), and use of the original posted preprint for the concordance assessment between preprint-journal article pairs with multiple versions. We also abstracted median (IQR) time to publication (in months) from the original post. The χWe identified 1853 preprints posted on medRxiv in September 2020, of which 1399 (75.5%) were new manuscripts rather than updated versions of previously posted preprints . Of the Of the 1399 preprints, 1077 (77.0%) had been subsequently published in a peer-reviewed journal as of September 15, 2022 , includiThe overall median time from first preprint posting to journal publication was 6.0 months , which was consistent across study designs .A total of 547 preprint-journal article pairs that measured health-related outcomes were included in our concordance analyses  . The mosOf the 535 pairs (97.8%) reporting sample sizes in both sources, 462 (86.4%) were concordant ; sample Of the 535 pairs with numerical results for the primary end points, 434 (81.1%) were concordant with respect to numerical effect estimates, direction of effect, and statistical significance. Of the 101 pairs with discordant results, 66 (65.3%) had effect estimates that were in same direction and were statistically consistent, 5 (5.0%) had results in which the direction of the effect estimates or statistical significance were discordant, and 17 (16.8%) had results in which the number of outcomes or number of reported outcomes were discordant.Of the 101 of 535 pairs (18.9%) with discordant results for the primary end points, the most common observed reason for discordance was discordant sample size (46 [45.5%]) . A totalOf the 547 pairs with available study interpretations, 526 (96.2%) had concordant study interpretations, including 82 of 101 pairs (81.2%) with discordant primary end point results . Of the P = .002) and for primary end point results  (P ≥ .99) and interpretations  were not significantly different between journals with high impact factors and those with low impact factors.Among pairs with articles published in journals with high impact factors (≥10), the concordance rates were lower than for pairs with articles published in journals with low impact factors for sample size  . The conThe concordance rates were not significantly different between the 293 pairs reporting results from COVID-19–related studies and the 254 pairs reporting results from non–COVID-19–related studies  had preprints with multiple versions. Overall, the concordance rates were relatively consistent when using the original posted preprint instead of the most recent preprint  , in which 68% of results of primary end points and 98% of interpretations were concordant. The current study extends this previous work by examining pairs in all journals, predominantly those with an impact factor less than 10. Our study also mirrors a previous evaluation of preprints posted to bioRxiv and medRxiv, which found that most abstracts did not change significantly after publication.9 Similar to our evaluation, these studies also suggest that preprint-journal article pairs with numerical or statistical changes often have consistent conclusions.10 High levels of concordance have also been observed across other fields, including preprints posted on arXiv and bioRxiv, which are preprint servers for the life and physical sciences, respectively.13We found that 81.1% of preprint-journal article pairs were concordant in terms of numerical results of primary end points and that 96.2% were concordant in their interpretations. These findings are in general agreement with a previous study14 examining different versions of preprints and journal articles reporting on COVID-19 interventions, approximately one-third of the pairs with changes in study results had changes in sample size. Although this finding is smaller than our finding, it may not be surprising, given that the previous study examined changes across any of the results, not just the primary end points. Although we found only a few studies with discordant results owing to different primary outcomes or primary outcome components, evidence suggests that outcome switching may be more prevalent among COVID-19–related preprint-journal article pairs.14 With only 21 pairs with discordant interpretations in our sample, we are unable to draw strong inferences as to why interpretations of preprints change after publication as journal articles. Previous work suggests that preprints within the medical sciences undergo more extensive reframing15; however, further research on the potential reasons that preprints change on publication will be necessary.Among preprint-journal article pairs with discordant results, we found that most were owing to minor numerical changes or adjustments, likely resulting from updates that increased the study sample size, which did not change the overall interpretations. According to a previous study17 Among our sample of preprints posted 24 months ago (September 2020), less than one-fourth were not published. Although this finding may suggest that there is a sizable fraction of research articles that would not have been publicly available without the opportunity to post as a preprint, the quality and utility of these studies were not assessed. Among preprints that were subsequently published, differences between the published article and the preprint were minor and often owing to changes in sample size, which could be requested by reviewers or editors during peer review. Another study noted that for COVID-19–related clinical trials initially posted as preprints, publication in a peer-reviewed journal did not significantly improve reporting transparency or quality.18 Together, these studies may suggest that editors and peer reviewers primarily act as gatekeepers, preventing certain studies from being published and identifying those that merit publication; given the consistency between preprints and publications, perhaps those that merit publication are of higher quality and do not require major changes. However, given that we do not know the final fate of those preprints that have not yet been published, including whether they were ever submitted for publication and/or were rejected after peer review, future evaluations are needed to elucidate the exact role of peer review in preprint evaluation.In the health sciences, the benefits of preprints—namely, rapid dissemination and increased transparency—are typically weighed against concerns that preprint findings are preliminary and subject to change after peer review and editorial oversight.14 Second, our study was limited to preprints posted in September 2020 and published within 24 months, and additional preprints may eventually be published in subsequent years. However, studies suggest that many manuscripts are published within 7 months of initial submission.21 Third, given that we captured only preprints that were initially posted to medRxiv in September 2020, it is possible that the types of preprints that are posted may change over time, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic wanes. However, approximately half our sample was of non–COVID-19–related preprints, and we were able to capture a cross-section of preprints posted at a time when the influx of preprints related to COVID-19 leveled off. Fourth, we relied on subjective text review to assess reasons for discordance because not all manuscripts divulge reasons for changes between preprints and published versions of the manuscript. Although automated or algorithmic approaches may be more objective, they would capture only numerical or word changes and not the meanings or interpretations of manuscripts.This study has several limitations. First, we were able to evaluate only preprints that were published in a peer-reviewed journal. Therefore, we are unable to draw conclusions about preprints that do not make it through the peer review process, whether it be because they were never submitted or were rejected. Future studies could survey authors of preprints without corresponding publications to learn more about the fate of preprints and the role of peer review.In this cross-sectional study of clinical studies posted as preprints on medRxiv in September 2020 and subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals, most had concordant study characteristics, results, and final interpretations. For preprint-journal article pairs with discordant results, most changes were minor numerical changes, often owing to sample size differences. More than three-fourths of the preprints were published in journals within 24 months, and the results of this study may suggest that most of these preprints report findings that are consistent with the final journal publication.


FEBS Open Bio Editorial Board in March 2022. Currently, he is Professor of Bioinformatics at Oslo University Hospital and the University of Oslo in Norway. He received a PhD in computational solid‐state physics from the University of East Anglia, in 1991, and served as a Lecturer at the Dept of Physics in the University of Texas before working as a Research Fellow at the McDermott Centre for Human Growth and Development, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre at Dallas (UTSW). He went on to become Assistant Professor at the Depts of Biochemistry & Internal Medicine, UTSW before co‐founding BioAutomation Inc. where he developed DNA & RNA synthesis technology and was involved in the Human Genome Project. Simon is a CAS scholar and has also been a Professor of Bioinformatics at the Chinese Agricultural University in Beijing. Here, he tells us about his multi‐disciplinary career transitions, including experience working on three continents, and reflects on implementing open science and fair data.Simon Rayner joined the  FEBS Open Bio Editorial Board in March 2022. Currently, he is Professor of Bioinformatics at Oslo University Hospital and the University of Oslo in Norway. Here, he tells us about his multi‐disciplinary career transitions, including experience working on three continents, and reflects on implementing open science and fair data.Simon Rayner joined the  What I was interested in as a physicist was how systems respond to external influence. What I like about microRNAs (miRNAs) is that they're very imprecise in the way they regulate their targets, since they only partially bind to their target, meaning it's very hard to predict how or what a miRNA will regulate. So that means it puts a lot of noise into the system and I'm interested in how system noise is necessary for providing system stability.I originally got involved because I was working on infectious disease and I was not only looking at how a particular strain of a virus was more virulent but also how evolution was effectively allowing the virus to probe and find niches where it could be more effective.I think the biggest one was I'd been a PhD student for 3 months and my advisor announced that he was moving to the United States. It was actually an interesting experience but then I had to strip the lab down into boxes, ship it to the United States, reassemble everything, and we had to do the translation from 240 volts to 110 volts. I had to go and rewire all the equipment and then set it all up again. So it took 18 months to actually get to the point where I could take measurements to start doing my PhD. While that was a challenge, it was also a really good experience, i.e., actually shifting a lab to a new country and then trying to set up. And I had a very good advisor who was a good mentor, so I think it was a good tradeoff.I think this comes back to not really having a clear career plan. So I've actually been back and forth three times between industry and academia. Because I was really trying to find something that interested me and it was only when I discovered infectious diseases that I realised this was what I really wanted to work on. I originally worked just doing software development in industry, and then I got offered a lecturer position at the university, and so I went back. Then I ended up getting involved in the Human Genome Project where I developed technology that we used to form a company, and so I went back to industry. Once the company was stable I fancied doing something else, so that's why I ended up in China, to just try something different. That was where I discovered infectious diseases. And then when I ended up leaving China, I used industry as a stepping stone again, until I got this current position as well [Professor of Bioinformatics at Oslo University Hospital and the University of Oslo in Norway].That was actually because my sister was doing a PhD in molecular biology and I started reading about what she was doing to try and understand it. Then I became interested in that and I ended up moving into that field. Then a position came up working on the Human Genome Project, and it was originally developing robotics so that's how I ended up switching over. I enjoyed doing it, and then I ended up switching to bioinformatics.I think it's changed a lot over the years, and now there's less difference between industry and academia. Nowadays, it seems there's pressure to produce both in industry and academia, in one, there's this pressure to publish, and in the other there's this pressure to develop the product. Whereas I think maybe when I was a student, it was more relaxed and you could actually do research and test the hypothesis. If you didn't publish something for a year or two, then as long as you were showing that you were working your way forward in your research then that was okay. But I think now the metric is how much have you published, where have you published, how much spending have you got. So now, I think this distinction is less clear.I worked both in Beijing and Wuhan and there was such a big difference in the culture. So even within China, moving from the north to the south was a big change. But certainly within China there's much more of a hierarchical structure, so much so that even I couldn't go and talk to the boss. Instead, I would have to talk to the next person up, then they will talk to next person, and they will talk to the person higher up. So you have to respect hierarchy, whereas in Norway, it is very different. I used to work in Norway and Denmark, both of which are very different in culture as well, and the situation there is also very different. It's a much flatter environment.When I was there, there were very few PhD programmes for foreigners, but people could come across for 3 months or so. I was the only foreigner in my institute and there were no foreigners around the city, or at least there were very few. So I never had any firsthand experience of what the PhD programmes were like when I lived there. But I think they now have good PhD programmes, there are very good labs and they have these joint programmes between American universities and Chinese institutes. So I think it's definitely something I would encourage people to consider, not just from the point of view of having the opportunity to work in good research labs, but just also the experience of being in a completely different culture; it's just a great experience.In Norway, it's always outdoor stuff since there are nice hills. People go skiing and cycling in the summer, so it's just a very good environment for being outdoors.Virologica Sinica, which was a Chinese language‐only journal, and we translated it to an English language journal. We actually also got an SCI entry as well, and it has an impact factor of 6.947 now. It was an interesting experience trying to make that transition and we realised that there were a lot of good manuscripts that would be rejected from journals, either based on language issues or because the editors decided they weren't interesting. For example, manuscripts talking about an infectious disease outbreak in a very local region in southeast Asia. At the time, we were doing some good research and we were aiming for publication. So we ended up publishing some very nice research and I got the sense that there was the same flexibility in FEBS Open Bio, the same way that we wanted to encourage research at Virologica Sinica. For FEBS Open Bio, the question when considering submissions is: “Is the research good?” So I just got that sense that, yes, it's probably worth trying to contribute to this journal. So that was my motivation.Somebody contacted me and asked me if I was willing to do it. When I was in China, we'd taken this journal, Obviously, I think open access is a great thing. I think that what tends to be overlooked is not the idea of open data but actually making the data available. It's not just about being “here's an Excel spreadsheet”. In an article we just published, we were trying to come up with a solution that is of help in actually sharing data in a fair‐like way . The Norwegian Research Council, for example, and ERC state that people must indicate how they will implement fair data in their grant. However, the guidelines themselves are not always very clear. There's no clear way about how to show that your data are fair.Even if you've published your article open access, making your data open as well is a big challenge. In addition, making your software available is equally challenging as well. That's one of the things that we're trying to work on as well, i.e. trying to provide software solutions to make data fair‐like for publication, but also for sharing amongst collaborators. This will help to get away from this idea of using Excel spreadsheets, and instead having a software platform where you can specify a set of standards that you can use for sharing your data amongst collaborators. In that way people could upload their data as part of the publication and then say these are the standards that we used in the data we are sharing.fairsharing.org has 1600 different standards, but actually it is not always straightforward or clear how you actually use those standards in your everyday work, and I think that's what's missing. I don't really think it's the responsibility of the journals to do that, because you'd then end up with different journals having different sets of standards or different platforms to implement those standards. What would be better is if there could be software that different journals could use open source, that would allow an author to provide the data, the standards and the platform they used.For example, I think


Apoptosis and autophagy are intrinsic processes essentially required for cellular homeostasis  and reviews published in the present Research Topic elucidate/discuss new findings on apoptosis, autophagy, and mitophagy dysfunction in AD and shed light on their emerging clinical significance and therapeutic importance.Subui et al. investigated mitochondrial transport and distribution in tauopathy neurons  is a well-ordered and orchestrated program that involves both genomic and proteomic components to regulate normal development and tissue homeostasis. Aberrant activation of RCD results in cell death by multiple mechanisms, including apoptosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, and autophagy-dependent cell death. In a review report, isorders . As the Xue et al., in a review report, further evaluated research progress on pyroptosis in AD (In this line, is in AD . AssessiIn summary, the present Research Topic gathers original research and comprehensive reviews highlighting the role of apoptosis, autophagy, and mitophagy dysfunctions in AD pathogenesis. It further comprises new knowledge on these processes's functional and pathophysiological emergence and their underlying mechanisms that could advance AD diagnosis and therapeutics in clinics.All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


Evidence exists that women and people from low‐ and middle‐income countries are under‐represented on the editorial boards of medical journals. This may adversely influence the journal output. We conducted a pooled, cross‐sectional evaluation of the editorial board membership of anaesthesia journals. We collected data on members of editorial boards from the founding year and at 5‐yearly intervals until 2020. For each editor, we recorded gender, country of affiliation, World Bank income classification (1990 onwards) and editorial role (2020 only). The composite editorial board diversity score was calculated for each editorial board. We obtained complete data for the composition of editorial boards from all 30 journals for 2020, but for only 171 out of 304 editorial boards (56%) over the time period examined. In 2020, 409 out of 1973 (21%) were women  and 139 out of 1982 (7%) were from low‐, low‐middle‐ and upper‐middle‐income countries . In 2020, of editorial board positions with known seniority status, 109 out of 259 (42%) of women and 306 out of 960 (32%) of men were in senior roles. In the same year, 397 out of 1115 (36%) of people from high‐income countries were in senior roles, compared with 19 out of 93 (20%) of people from upper‐middle‐income countries and 0 out of 14 (0%) people from lower‐middle‐income countries. The median composite editorial board diversity score was 4 (range 2–6) in 2020 – 5 or less suggests poor diversity, while 8 or more suggests good diversity. Women and people from low‐ and middle‐income countries are under‐represented on anaesthesia journal editorial boards. The editorial boards do not reflect the anaesthesia workforce and may act as a barrier to the publication of research produced by these groups. Urgent action is required to improve diversity. Journal editors are described as a “r field” , and ther field” . Publicar field” . A lack r field” . Evidencr field” , 6, 7. Tr field” , 9, 10 ar field” . This lathe practice of conducting primary research within a host country and subsequently publishing findings with inadequate recognition of local researchers, staff and/or supporting infrastructure” [In a recent consensus statement about measures to promote equitable authorship in the publication of research from international partnerships, Morton et al. highlight the problem of ‘parachute’ research, which is “ructure” . The autructure” , a lowerructure” , 13.We aimed to explore the diversity of the editorial boards of major anaesthesia journals. We considered the gender balance and geographical distribution of institutional affiliation of editorial board members as well as the representation in senior positions. We also calculated a composite editorial board diversity score  for eachWe used pooled cross‐sectional analysis to evaluate the editorial board membership of journals in the field of anaesthesia. The study received an exemption from ethical review. A reflexivity statement on equitable research partnerships as outlined by Morton et al.  is availWe evaluated editorial board members based on gender, country of affiliation and seniority. Additionally, where data were available, we calculated the composite editorial board diversity score, based on previously described metrics . We inclFor current (2020) editorial boards, we used the journal website. For other years, we obtained the data using the following steps: a review of editorial board as published in the journal, either online or print issues (accessed via the University of Oxford) or if the editorial board was not listed online or available in print, we contacted the journal editorial office. If no reply, a minimum of two further attempts were made to contact the journal before deeming those data ‘unavailable’.The country of affiliation of the editorial board member's institution was categorised according to World Bank geographical regions and World Bank Income classification group in the year of publication to determine whether it is a high‐income country (HIC), upper‐middle‐income country (UMIC), lower‐middle‐income country (LMIC), or low‐income country (LIC) . This cl“Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy. Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.”[We attempted to categorise gender in a simplified binary approach, which is an approximation given the constraints of the available information.  organs.”. Gender  organs.”): assessWe acknowledge that this approach makes flawed assumptions based on typical gender associations of names or appearances. It also assumes a binary gender rather than accommodating the true range of possibilities.We collected data on the roles assigned to each member of the editorial board. Due to the wide variety of roles listed , we contFollowing data collection for editorial boards and their members, we calculated the composite editorial board diversity score. This was first proposed by Bhaumik and Jagnoor  for use International collaboration on data collection was enabled with Google Drive . Data handling was performed using Microsoft Excel . All analyses were purely descriptive and no statistical hypotheses formulated or tested.A total of 30 journals in anaesthesia were included Fig. . Out of Across the data, a total of 131 different editorial roles were listed, with ‘editorial board’ (n = 1578), ‘editor’ (n = 960), ‘associate editor’ (n = 947), ‘editorial advisory board’ (n = 569) and ‘section editor’ (n = 388) the most common. Out of the 131 roles, 101 were used less than 10 times. We contacted all the journals for clarification of which roles used in 2020 were senior, not senior or not formally part of the editorial board. Out of the 21 who replied, 19 clarified all roles and two clarified some roles.Based on available data, the proportion of women across all anaesthesia journal editorial boards has gradually increased over the years to 21% in 2020 Fig. . In 2020Over 60% of editorial board members were affiliated with institutions from the USA or the UK , a total of 5101 out of 5323 (95.8%) editors were affiliated with HIC institutions, while 174 (3.2%), 43 (0.8%) and 1 (<0.1%) were affiliated with UMIC, LMIC and LIC institutions, respectively. There was a slight decrease in the proportion of editors affiliated with HIC institutions over the years from 242 out of 246 (98.4%) in 1990 to 1843 out of 1984 (92.9%) in 2020  women and 306 out of 960 men (32%) were senior editors. When considering geographical region, 287 out of 684 (42%) of editors from North America were senior, compared with 5 out of 16 (31%) from the Middle East and North Africa, 26 out of 87 (30%) from East Asia and Pacific, 86 out of 363 (24%) from Europe and Central Asia, 12 out of 63 (19%) from Latin America and the Caribbean and 0 out of 7 (0%) and 2 (<0.1%%) from South Asia and sub‐Saharan Africa, respectively. Considering the World Bank income classification, 397 out of 1115 (36%) editors affiliated with HIC institutions were senior, while 19 out of 93 (20%) editors affiliated with UMIC institutions were senior. Out of the 14 editors affiliated with LMIC institutions, none were senior.The composite editorial board diversity scores for 2020 are shown in Fig. Canadian Journal of Anesthesia [To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive study looking at gender and diversity in the editorial boards of multiple journals in anaesthesia and the first to use the composite editorial board diversity score in this specialty. We found that women held a minority of editorial board positions in 2020, although there appears to have been an increase over time. Geographical representation outside HICs remains especially poor, with apparently much less progress than for gender representation. There is no apparent progress in the inclusion of editorial board members from LMIC since 1990, and there was not one single editorial board member identified from a LIC from 1990 to 2000. Our findings confirm previous similar studies assessing editorship in journals, which found similar under‐representation of women and people from low‐ and middle‐income countries in global health journals, psychiatry journals and the esthesia , 6, 17.This study shows country income diversity on editorial boards is poor, with more than 90% of editors affiliated with HIC. If the target readership is physician anaesthetists, then evidence shows that, worldwide, 47.8% of physician anaesthetists are based in HIC, 40.2% in UMIC, 11.7% in LMIC and 0.002% in LIC . The uneWe note that many journals included in this study are associated with national anaesthesia associations or societies. These require significant resources from their associated society to be successful and this may be a contributing factor to the dominance of editors from these high income countries. Some included journals may consider themselves to be primarily national, rather than international, journals. It could be argued that those associated with national associations may be expected to have editorial boards comprising editors who are mostly from that country. However, we argue that most journals included in this study now have a clearly defined international scope, with both international readership and authorship. More diverse editorial boards may contribute to journals being able to support and strengthen research capacity in low‐ and middle‐income countries.Our findings show women are under‐represented on anaesthesia editorial boards. Available data from HICs show up to 47% of the anaesthesia workforce are women , 26, 27 The composite editorial board diversity score shows at best moderate scores for the journals we assessed, and values were lowest for national income diversity. This score was initially developed to assess journals in global health  and as sOur study has several limitations. First, we were not able to obtain all historical editorial boards for analysis and use of 5‐yearly intervals may have inadequately represented their membership. Second, the gender determination of editorial board members was based on techniques used previously in similar studies but is at risk of bias: based on name rather than self‐assignment by the editors themselves and only in a binary format. We acknowledge that considering gender as binary is itself problematic, which was a methodological compromise to allow discussion of an under‐represented group (women). We cannot make any comment about representation of people who identify outside a gender binary. Third, some editors may be affiliated with an institution in a country different from that with which they would personally identify. This may have led to an underestimation of representation by geography and country income diversity. Finally, while not a limitation, we would like to acknowledge our study group composition, which is made up of six men and four women. Six authors are affiliated with HIC institutions, one with an UMIC institution and three with LMIC institutions, spread across five geographical regions. We have sought to bring the diversity of our experiences to this study.Further research in this area should explore the representation of other components of diversity that may result in discrimination. Of note, ethnicity and its representation is a complex issue beyond the scope of our study. Further qualitative study could explore the impact of ethnicity, membership of other minority groups and living in a different country to that of birth, on representation and research priorities in academic anaesthesia.We focused only on Science Citation Index Expanded‐listed journals; further research may seek to explore the diversity of anaesthesia journals listed elsewhere, including those listed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index and the Global Index Medicus. In order to enable equitable representation of women on editorial boards when compared with the anaesthesia workforce, additional research is needed to fully describe the current composition globally . FurtherIn conclusion, our findings show that the composition of editorial boards from Science Citation Index Expanded‐listed anaesthesia journals fails to represent the diversity of their readership and the populations they serve, with an over‐representation of male editors from HIC. A lack of diversity in editorial boards perpetuates barriers to publication, access to editorial advice and the development of academia in LMIC. It is also likely to contribute to the under‐prioritisation of knowledge from marginalised groups . ConversThis is a call to action. There are already some publishers committing to improving inclusion and diversity, promoting actions such as mentorship and inclusive shortlisting of applicants , 31. TheBox 1Anaesthesia is proceeding with this option.*Appendix S1. Reflexivity statement.Click here for additional data file.Table S1. The number of editors of each gender on each editorial board in 2020, arranged according to the proportion of representation of women (from lowest to highest).Table S2. Country affiliation of anaesthesia journal editors across all available data and in 2020, ranked according to the number of journal editors in 2020 (highest to lowest).Table S3. The breakdown of composite editorial board diversity scores based on available data for the years 1990–2015 for different anaesthesia journals.Click here for additional data file.