Dear Colleagues:Surgery Open Science. This open-access journal is published as a sister journal to Surgery, one of the leading subscription journals in the field of surgery. The primary goal of Surgery Open Science is to deliver the highest quality open access surgical basic and clinical science content, with leading edge dynamic, transparent, and interactive access to process and data.We live in an exciting, dynamic time for science, medicine, and publication. Rapid technological and clinical advances are being disseminated more rapidly than ever before imagined. In this milieu, Elsevier is very pleased to bring you a new surgical journal—The open access movement has roots beginning in the 1960s; however, it really began to gain traction in early 21st century as internet availability spread widely. In brief, gold open access makes all of a journal's content available to anyone at any time. The journal's ability to curate their data is covered financially by article processing charges to funding agencies, institutions, or authors. The advantages of open access are numerous, and include immediate and universal access to content, exposure to a very broad audience, and publication on an electronic platform with unlimited space requirements.The open access movement has been embraced particularly in the life science community which has used this platform in creative ways such as ongoing data accumulation, providing an open forum for dynamic discussion of research findings, and completely transparent access to the peer review process.Over the past decade, open-access publication has grown rapidly. For example, in 2016, it is estimated that 15% of all medical scientific articles were published in open-access journals Surgery Open Science is extremely well-positioned, with full backing of the Elsevier publishing infrastructure and support of the existing Elsevier surgery journal family. Elsevier is supporting a Surgery Open Science Managing Editor to ensure that all manuscripts meet outlined technical specifications, monitor the reviewing process, and ensure each author receives an outstanding publication experience with their submission. Surgery Open Science uses the same production team as the prestigious Elsevier print surgical journals, including the latest high-tech proofing tools. The Surgery Open Science editorial team has recruited an experienced and enthusiastic editorial board to provide oversight to a competitive review process; all manuscripts undergo the same rigorous peer review process expected at subscription journals such as Surgery.A significant challenge for the open access movement is quality control. Academic medical professionals are solicited seemingly daily by so-called “predatory” open access publications—disreputable journals focused primarily on financial gain. Development of high-quality open access platforms in the surgical space therefore represents a critical need. In this milieu, Surgery Open Science is to provide the highest quality science in the open access space. Our first issue underscores this commitment to quality. The top-quality articles in the first issue including review of circulating tumor cells by world class Johns Hopkins University scientists highlight the quality expected by the Editorial Board and supported completely by Elsevier.A fundamental goal of Surgery Open Science grows.We look forward to the journal's evolution, engaging with our readership as


Since the onset of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic in late 2019, the scientific literature on the SARS-COV-2 virus and the disease COVID-19 has a growth rate that resembles the growth in confirmed COVID-19 cases that continue to make media headlines all across the globe. Biomedical coronavirus research started slowly but increased to hundreds of articles per week—not unlike the spread of the virus itself. At the time of writing in mid-2020, around 2500 publications per week appear in PubMed on COVID-19 or SARS-COV-2. This new biomedical literature has emerged at an unprecedented but will the scientific community be able to end the suffering caused by the pandemic? Can we trust the insights from the rapidly emerging scientific literature on the coronavirus to implement wide-ranging social, economic, and health policies and vaccination programs? To answer these questions, I here relate the rapid science on the coronavirus pandemic to regular biomedical science and the meta-scientific insights on it. I focus my attention on peer reviews, open access, retractions, open data, and registration of studies. Since the onset of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic in late 2019, the scientific literature on the SARS-COV-2 virus and the disease COVID-19 has a growth rate that resembles the growth in confirmed COVID-19 cases that continue to make media headlines all across the globe. Figure Will the scientific community be able to end the suffering caused by the pandemic? Can we trust the insights from the rapidly emerging scientific literature on the coronavirus to implement wide-ranging social, economic, and health policies and vaccination programs? To answer these questions, I here relate the rapid science on the coronavirus pandemic to regular biomedical science and the meta-scientific insights on it. I focus my attention on peer reviews, open access, retractions, open data, and registration of studies. I end with an optimistic conclusion.The vast pace in publishing in the literature on the coronavirus reflects the speed of setting up studies, conducting the research, analyzing outcomes, writing up results, and the peer review process that seeks to independently check the quality of the work. With respect to the latter, we know that the typical review process at biomedical journals takes 3–4 months. For the early articles reporting coronavirus research, the median publication lag was 11 days Kun . This beOne way to deal with limitations of the closed system of pre-publication peer review is to increase the number of critical readers by publishing work without any restrictions under open access. In the first half of 2020, the coronavirus literature included 27,373 publications in PubMed. In the same period, the literatures on cancer and cardiovascular diseases—the leading causes of death in the Western world—included 95,527 and 30,728 publications, respectively. Two-thirds of the coronavirus publications  are publicly available under open access. These percentages are markedly lower in cancer research  and cardiovascular research . Open access improves the dissemination of results and increases the number of potential post-publication reviewers by the thousands. In this sense, the biomedical literature on the coronavirus is more open than ever.A main corrective mechanism of science is to avoid the publication of sloppy research through peer review. But if sloppy research gets published after having passed peer review anyway, we can only hope that attentive readers scrutinize the publication and correct the record by publishing critiques or by corresponding to the editor that something in the original publication does not smell right. In that case, the editor might choose to retract the publication altogether. In that respect, retractions might reflect the self-corrective mechanism of a field. Interestingly, the retraction rate of coronavirus publications is markedly higher than that in the wider literature  and counters many other biases in the analysis and reporting of research results is the registration of studies prior to data collection. Most randomized clinical trials are nowadays registered via platforms such as Almost everyone in the world has been affected by social distancing policies due to the coronavirus pandemic, and a lot of people have suffered or passed away due to COVID-19. Many more will unfortunately perish because of it. But the graphs in Figs. As long as scientists work transparently, sharing their work, data, and research plans online, and as long as scientists are overwhelmingly interested in the truth, science will go ahead and progress will be made. There is no way of telling when to expect the needed breakthroughs. Science is certainly not functioning optimally and could surely become more efficient. But science anno 2020 is bigger, faster, and more transparent than it ever was. The rapid science of COVID-19 and SARS-COV-2 is not perfect, but it offers hope and ultimately a solution to the coronavirus crisis. We might even expect the movement towards more rapid, open, self-corrective, and meticulous research to persist after the crisis to create a science that is more resistant to false claims and better equipped to promote global health and well-being.


Consumer reports of “Keto Flu” associated with the Ketogenic Diet  or not is a different matter.We contend that the scientific and consumer narratives are not mutually exclusive, and that both are subject to potential bias and may contain fraudulent or spurious material. Accordingly, we would rather see the study of consumer narratives incorporated as a standard component of the scientific agenda, the utility of this approach being determined on its merits. This would include the proviso that ethical considerations are met. This direction would complement moves to make scientific narratives available to consumers, for example through open access publishing, by rendering consumer narratives accessible to scientists.Sharing, contesting, and informing the ideas in both the scientific and consumer narratives is the desired outcome.ad-hoc to a semi-structured interview question on a given side effect. It will be interesting to see how this field evolves.With respect to specific issues raised in the commentary. The media report widely and with varying degrees of accuracy on many published journal articles and this possibility cannot govern the publication of results. There is a vast amount of consumer comment available through the internet and it would be impractical for interested parties to keep up with the full content. We believe that methods are required which accurately summarize this material with respect to the particular topic of enquiry. In our paper the topic was side effects of ketogenic diets (KD) and the focus within this category was in what is popularly termed “keto flu,” as discussed in online forums on this subject. Whether the aggregate of consumer comments in online forums is less reliable than conventional questionnaire-based methods is an empirical question. We have an open mind as to whether joining an online conversation, contemplating one's own experience and formulating this in writing in a form of public space is more or less reliable than scoring a questionnaire item or responding The commentators have noted that ancillary information such as level of education and type of KD would assist in interpreting the results. We agree but have noted that for ethical reasons we did not analyse or report on personal information but rather confined our attention to the principal aim of discerning the pattern of side effects.The analysis of gray literature is a growing area of research and the results of further studies will inform discussion of the merit and limitations of this approach. Between January and September 2020 twelve publications listed on PubMed reported analyses of online forum/ discussion board content. These covered a variety of topics, including irritable bowel syndrome , and infEB, KK, BT, and JH contributed equally to the response to the commentary. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.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.


Almost 2 years ago, on February 28, 2019, the first set of articles appeared in the new peer-reviewed open access online-only scientific Journal “Neurological Research and Practice” (NRP). The journal is published jointly by Biomed Central  and the German Neurological Society . NRP is the official journal of the German Neurological Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Neurologie (DGN)), one of the largest national neurological societies worldwide with more than 10,000 members. NRP was created by the leadership of the DGN as an international English language publication with a broad thematic scope reflecting all clinical, translational, and basic research aspects of neurology and neuroscience [In the first year, we published 41 articles. We were pleased by the quality of the reviews 12) and research articles (16), the innovation of the clinical trial protocols, and the reliability of Guidelines and Standard operating procedures [ and reseIn total, more than 120 citations have been counted by now. Table Access rates also show how much interest some of our articles have received. A review on the “resumption of oral anticoagulation after intracerebral hemorrhage” has already received almost 10,000 accesses . Other hIn December 2020, NRP was included into Pubmed in a record-breaking time of less than 2 years after the publication of the first articles.This is a great breakthrough and the first milestone on our way to a widely accepted international scientific journal. We believe that this listing will lead to an increasing number of article submissions. We hope that our publications will be cited even more frequently, which will lead eventually to our first impact factor in a short time.Our publication pipeline continues to grow, and the number of international submissions is increasing. So far, we have received 55 submissions from authors outside of Germany. We will continue to invite reviews on new developments and perspectives, and we welcome the submission of research articles. Several clinical trial protocols are in preparation, and we have lists of upcoming standard operating procedures and guidelines to be published within the next 12 months.The Editorial Board has been a great source of support for establishing NRP, and we will have the first rotation of our Editorial Board in 2021. We will announce Section Editors for key areas in neurology such as neuroimmunology and neurooncology, neurodegeneration and movement disorders, stroke, interventional neurology and critical care, pediatric neurology, cognitive neurology, and functional imaging, and neuromuscular disorders.As the founding editor of NRP I am grateful for the ever increasing support by the leadership of the German Neurological Society represented by our current President Professor Christine Klein, Past President Professor Gereon Fink, Incoming President Christian Gerloff, the Secretary Professor Peter Berlit, and the Chief Administrative Officer Dr. Thomas Thiekötter. I express my gratitude to our partners at the publisher’s office, namely Emily Jones and Cecille Calusa for their continuous support, to all members of the Editorial Board, to the authors for submitting their articles, and to the reviewers for their most important contributions. They all make the first years of NRP so successful.Please continue to support us to make NRP a well-received and influential voice of German neurology publishing content with international relevance.


Peer review is often criticized for being flawed, subjective and biased, but research into peer review has been hindered by a lack of access to peer review reports. Here we report the results of a study in which text-analysis software was used to determine the linguistic characteristics of 472,449 peer review reports. A range of characteristics  were studied as a function of reviewer recommendation, area of research, type of peer review and reviewer gender. We found that reviewer recommendation had the biggest impact on the linguistic characteristics of reports, and that area of research, type of peer review and reviewer gender had little or no impact. The lack of influence of research area, type of review or reviewer gender on the linguistic characteristics is a sign of the robustness of peer review. Most journals rely on peer review to ensure that the papers they publish are of a certain quality, but there are concerns that peer review suffers from a number of shortcomings . These iAnalysing the linguistic characteristics of written texts, speeches, and audio-visual materials is well established in the humanities and psychology . A recenTo date most research on the linguistic characteristics of peer review has focused on comparisons between different types of peer review, and it has been shown that open peer review (in which peer review reports and/or the names of reviewers are made public) leads to longer reports and a more positive emotional tone compared to confidential peer review . SimilarHere we report the results of a linguistic analysis of 472,449 peer review reports from the PEERE database . The repWe used various linguistic tools to examine the peer review reports in our sample (see Methods for more details). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text-analysis software was used to perform word counts and to return scores of between 0% and 100% for ‘analytical tone’, ‘clout’ and ‘authenticity’ . Three dFor all combinations of area of research, type of peer review and reviewer gender, reports recommending accept were shortest, followed by reports recommending minor revisions, reject, and major revisions . ReportsLIWC returned high scores  for analytical tone, and low scores  for authenticity, for the peer review reports in our sample . High auWhen reviewers recommended major revisions, the text of the report was more analytical. The analytical tone was higher when reviewers were women and for single-blind peer review, but we did not find any effect of the area of research  of peer review reports, which is consistent with previous, case-based research . It is pThe results of our study should be considered in the light of certain limitations. Most of the journals were in the health and medical sciences and the physical sciences, and most used single-blind peer review. However, the size, depth and uniqueness of our dataset helped us provide a more comprehensive analysis of peer review reports than previous studies, which were often limited to small samples and incomplete data . Future PEERE is a collaboration between publishers and researchers , and thehttps://gender-api.com/), and used the returned gender whenever we found a minimum of 62 samples with, at least, 57% accuracy, which follows the optimal values found in benchmark 2 of the previous research  to analyze the peer review reports in our sample. LIWC measures the percentage of words related to three psychological features (so scores range from 0 to 100): ‘analytical tone’; ‘clout’; and "authenticity. A high score for analytical tone indicates a report with a logical and hierarchical style of writing. Clout reveals personal sensitivity towards social status, confidence or leadership: a low score for clout is associated with insecurities and a less confident and more tentative tone (We used a version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text-analysis software with standardized scores  LIWC measures ‘emotional tone’, which indicates writing dominated by either positive or negative emotions by counting number of words from a pre-specified dictionary. (ii) The SentimentR package  classifihttps://moralfoundations.org/other-materials/) to analyse the reports in our sample according to five moral foundations: care/harm ; fairness/cheating (or fairness-virtue/fairness-vice); loyalty/betrayal ; authority/subversion (authority virtue/authority-vice); and sanctity/degradation (or sanctity-virtue/sanctity-vice).We used LIWC and Moral Foundations Theory  of peer review reports. To our knowledge, this is the first paper addressing such a large data set on peer review and the potential biases often experienced by scholars of all fields. This is highly valuable to academic research as a whole. However, we do not believe the evidence warrants the authors' conclusion that peer review lacks moral bias (see below), and we suggest that the authors revise their paper to focus exclusively on the LIWC indicators . There are also a number of other issues that need to be addressed in a revised manuscript.Essential revisions:1. Reducing the emphasis on moral bias in the present manuscript will involve deleting the last 10 rows of table 1 , and making changes to the text. The title also needs to be changed, but Figure 1 does not need to be changed.2. The authors should analyze the data they have for word length, analytical thinking, clout, authenticity, emotional tone and morality in general in greater detail through regression analyses and/or multilevel models.Here is what referee #1 said on this topic: I am concerned that the explorative approach misses a lot of underlying information. By comparing means of groups, the in-group variance is overlooked. Some of the observed effects might be large enough to hold some sort of universal "truth", but for other cases, substantial effects might still exist within groups. My suggestion would be to rethink the design into one that allows for multidimensionality. One approach could be regression analysis, which would require a more strict type of test-design though. Another approach could be to build reviewer-profiles based on their characteristics. E.g. reviews with a high degree of clout and negative emotion, and low analytical thinking could be one type. Where is this type found? What characterizes it? Additionally, this would allow the authors to include information about the reviewer, e.g. are they always negative? This might also solve the baseline problem, as this would be a classification issue rather than a measurement issue.Here is what referee #3 said on this topic: All the analyses are descriptive ANOVAs and the like (bivariate). Given the supposed quality of the data, I'd recommend they explore multilevel models. Then they can fix out differences by fields, journals, etc so we get a more clear sense of what's going on.3. Please include a fuller description of your dataset and describe how representative/biased the sampling is by field and type of journal.4. Please provide more information on what the LIWC measures and how it is calculated? It would be especially helpful if you showed several LIWC scores together with sample texts (preferably from your own database) to illustrate how well it analyses text. This can be shown in an appendix. If you can't show text from your own database due to privacy concerns, feel free to show passages from this report. 5. What are baseline effects? What kind of changes should we expect? E.g. when arguing that the language is cold and analytical, what is this comparable to? I would expect most scientific writing to be mostly in this category, and it should not be a surprise - I hope. It would be very useful for the reader to have some type of comparison.6. Does the analysis allow for the fact that different subject areas will have different LIWC scores? The largest sample of reports comes from the physical sciences, which use single-blind review the most. Reports from this field are also shorter, slightly more analytic and display less Clout and Authenticity. I think your results are picking up this selection bias instead of representing actual differences between the two review processes.Please discuss.7. Please add a section on the limitations of your study. For example, there is no discussion of sample bias and representation really.Also, LIWC is full of issues and problems (NLP has come a ways since LIWC arrived on the scene): do you use the standardized version of LIWC constructs with high cronbach alphas, or the raw versions with poor cronbach alphas?Does the analysis distinguish between original research content and other forms of content ? Essential revisions:1. Reducing the emphasis on moral bias in the present manuscript will involve deleting the last 10 rows of table 1 , and making changes to the text. The title also needs to be changed, but Figure 1 does not need to be changed.Thank you for your comment. We revised the tables according to the reviewers’ recommendations and created new tables where we present multilevel description of the review reports based on the interaction effects of the reviewer recommendation, journal discipline, journal peer review type and reviewer gender. We created the tables for the five LIWC variables , and two new additional measures . All multilevel relations are now presented in new figures, which are the results of the mixed methods linear regression where we controlled the random effect of the journal, word count (except for LIWC word count) and article type. In light of the new results, and coherently with referee recommendations, we introduced a change in the title and replaced the Figure 1. We now have seven new graphs describing linguistic characteristics of the reviews between groups in the main text and eleven graphs presenting the moral variables in the Supplementary file.2. The authors should analyze the data they have for word length, analytical thinking, clout, authenticity, emotional tone and morality in general in greater detail through regression analyses and/or multilevel models.Thank you for your comment. As mentioned above, we performed a new analysis, where we used the mixed methods approach with reviewer recommendation, journal discipline, journal peer review type and reviewer gender as predictors (fixed factors) and different journals, word count and article type as the random factor, which would enable us to control the variations between journals . We found significant interaction of the reviewer recommendation, journal’s field of research, the type of peer review and reviewer’s gender in each variable assessment, but we understand that this significance could be due to the large sample size. So, we presented figures with the within-group relations on standardized scales where we presented the differences between groups.Here is what referee #1 said on this topic: I am concerned that the explorative approach misses a lot of underlying information. By comparing means of groups, the in-group variance is overlooked. Some of the observed effects might be large enough to hold some sort of universal "truth", but for other cases, substantial effects might still exist within groups. My suggestion would be to rethink the design into one that allows for multidimensionality. One approach could be regression analysis, which would require a stricter type of test-design though. Another approach could be to build reviewer-profiles based on their characteristics. E.g. reviews with a high degree of clout and negative emotion, and low analytical thinking could be one type. Where is this type found? What characterizes it? Additionally, this would allow the authors to include information about the reviewer, e.g. are they always negative? This might also solve the baseline problem, as this would be a classification issue rather than a measurement issue.Thank you for the comment. Excellent point. We re-performed the analysis accordingly. The mixed methods approach revealed that the majority of effects of the differences in the writing style of the reviews can be attributed to reviewer recommendations, much less to the journal’s field of research, the type of peer review type and reviewer’s gender. We tried to provide an overview of the general writing style in peer reviews by presenting relevant variables in the same graphs so that a reader can have an overview about what peer review characteristics predict different language styles.Here is what referee #3 said on this topic: All the analyses are descriptive ANOVAs and the like (bivariate). Given the supposed quality of the data, I'd recommend they explore multilevel models. Then they can fix out differences by fields, journals, etc so we get a clearer sense of what's going on.As explained above, we performed mixed methods approach where these effects were analysed jointly. The current analysis provides an overview of the interaction effects in peer review characteristics and sizes of the differences between them.3. Please include a fuller description of your dataset and describe how representative/biased the sampling is by field and type of journal.Thank you, we added this both to the methods and the limitations in the Discussion section.4. Please provide more information on what the LIWC measures and how it is calculated? It would be especially helpful if you showed several LIWC scores together with sample texts (preferably from your own database) to illustrate how well it analyses text. This can be shown in an appendix. If you can't show text from your own database due to privacy concerns, feel free to show passages from this report. LIWC has a dictionary with words associated with different tone, and it counts number of words for each tone type in a certain text. The LIWC output is the percentage of words from a tone category in the text. We now provided the calculation of the different tone variables in the Supplementary file, both for high and low levels of tone. The examples are anonymized.5. What are baseline effects? What kind of changes should we expect? E.g. when arguing that the language is cold and analytical, what is this comparable to? I would expect most scientific writing to be mostly in this category, and it should not be a surprise - I hope. It would be very useful for the reader to have some type of comparison.https://peerreviewcongress.org/prc17-0234). However, with the new methodological approach we looked at the relationship of the linguistic characteristics and different aspects of peer review process and found important differences. The analytical tone was indeed predominant in all types of peer review reports, but we found differences in other linguistic characteristics. The new results are presented in the revised manuscript.Another good point. The results in our study were similar to an unpublished study that focused on the analysis of the peer review linguistic characteristics, but on a much smaller sample and in only in a single journal : do you use the standardized version of LIWC constructs with high cronbach alphas, or the raw versions with poor cronbach alphas?The LIWC version we used is the standardized version with high Cronbach alphas. This has now been clarified in the Methods section of the revised manuscript. We also analysed the data using Stanford CoreNLP deep learning tool in order to increase internal validity of our approach.Does the analysis distinguish between original research content and other forms of content ?There were no book reviews in the dataset. However, we did make the distinction between the original articles and other formats , which is now described in the Methods. We used this as the random factor in the mixed model linear regression.


There has been much discussion in the scientific literature on a crisis of reproducibility in science , 2. It hReproducibility in computational biology research is certainly a problem, yet perhaps a challenge that our field can uniquely tackle. A lack of reproducibility in computational biology research can be attributed to many factors, but incomplete or erroneous descriptions of the simulations , incomplete documentation on how to run simulations, or simply failing to post the relevant computer code needed to run a given simulation are common issues that occur.http://co.mbine.org/ and https://normsys.h-its.org/) and there exist articles that propose best practices, such as Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research [Ten Simple Rules for Writing and Sharing Computational Analyses in Jupyter Notebooks [Many tools have emerged that we can leverage to make computational biology research more reproducible  to launch a pilot peer review workflow to assess reproducibility . After authors opt-in to participation in the pilot, a peer reviewer will be solicited  to specifically evaluate the reproducibility of the computational modeling aspects described in the submission. All the peer reviewers can receive credit for the reviews through our partnership with ORCID (https://blogs.plos.org/plos/2019/06/youve-completed-your-review-now-get-credit-with-orcid/) and authors can elect to have the peer reviews published alongside the final publication of the work . We aim to have the review process completed in the usual time frame with a hope that the additional review will help editors and authors assess and improve the reproducibility of the work. There are a few questions we intend to investigate with this pilot, including questions the pilot can answer directly:How popular is the desire to publish reproducible models?What is the minimum information required to reproduce published model results?What are the common reasons computational studies are not reproducible?and questions that the pilot will help us start to explore and point us in the right direction:What are the benefits of producing reproducible models?What incentives would attract authors to make the studies available in a reproducible manner?What tools and technologies can be created to facilitate reproducibility?What training is required to improve community awareness of tools and practices which lead to FAIR  computational studies?We feel the answers to these questions can help inform the community how best to encourage a change in culture toward a more FAIR  computatThere are already some general principles we’ve learned about good practices for reproducible biomedical modeling . These iWe are certain to learn more as this pilot progresses. We will need to tackle challenges like developing and supporting repositories for the models, scaling up the “reproducibility validation” peer review effort, and creating tools to help make these assessments. As a community, we need to learn how to properly recognize the tremendous effort of reviewers involved in this work, perhaps with increased support of ORCID or Publons as tools to help peer reviewers receive credit for their work in the assessment and publication process. We need to work out how papers that have been so vetted are appropriately identified, perhaps with the use of badges that provide a “stamp of approval” for papers and associated codes that have been assessed and passed defined criteria to provide public recognition.We think that journals and scientific publications have a critical part to play in making scientific work more reproducible. As a journal for the computational biology research community, PLOS Computational Biology is working to address this significant need within the community. As our work is more rigorously evaluated for reproducibility, we can build on each other’s contributions to advance science.


In this presentation, the managing editors of GSA’s peer-reviewed journals will discuss how the editorial offices operate and their roles in the publishing process. The topics will include how to navigate the ScholarOne submission system, why it is important to read the Instructions to Authors, and how authors can work with the editorial offices to increase the visibility and impact of their published articles.


This article presents a vision for a scholarly communication research infrastructure for social sciences and humanities (SSH). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pressing need to access research outputs without the traditional economic and temporal barriers. This article explores the current scholarly communication landscape, assessing the reasons for the slower uptake of open access in SSH research. The authors discuss such frontiers as commercial interests, sources of academic prestige and discipline-specific genres. This article defines and discusses the key areas in which a research infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: (1) providing a federated and easy access to scattered SSH outputs; (2) supporting publication and dissemination of discipline-specific genres ; (3) providing help with evaluation and quality assurance practices in SSH; (4) enabling  scholarly work in national languages, which is significant for local communities; (5) being governed by researchers and for researchers as a crucial factor for productive, useful and accessible services; (6) lastly, considering the needs of other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication, such as publishers, libraries, media, non-profit organisations, and companies. They conclude that a scholarly-driven, inclusive, dedicated infrastructure for the European Research Area is needed in order to advance open science in SSH and to address the issues tackled by SSH researchers at a structural and systemic level. AlthougElsevier orEBSCO, opened some of their resources to address the issue of students and scholars being stranded at home without library access, as well as to “accelerate the fight against coronavirus,” which proves, indirectly, that paywalls and closed access actually slow down research. This sudden eruption of open access to scientific content proved how indispensable it is for international and interdisciplinary collaboration in addressing the great challenges of humankind. On the other hand, this situation gave additional visibility to open access publishers and repositories, which didn’t have to make their resources public for a limited timeframe as they had already been freely available; and so they concentrated on creating dedicated collections1 and guidelines2 about the open content. The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced our thinking about scholarly communication and the future of open access. It will take time to realise how deep this change is, but one thing is certain: this emergency has forced academics to look differently at the practices they had believed to be indispensable, both in the connections within the scholarly community, and between scholars and the public. The sudden rise in remote meetings and conferences is the best example here. However, this change also affects access to scientific outputs. Big commercial content providers likeFuture of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication, which proposes to define scholarly communication broadly as “any form of exchange used by scholars and researchers to participate in the elaboration of knowledge through critical discussions and conversations with fellow humans. This encompasses all the procedures, from the purely informal conversation to the highly formalised stage of ‘publishing’” , or an analysis of a source (in the humanities)” ” , 65. EacResearchers assume different roles at different steps of this process. They are not only authors, but also information-seekers, annotators, bibliographers, editors, reviewers, etc. These roles are very important for research but do not carry the same level of prestige in academia as the role of author. This has a negative impact on introducing and sustaining changes in scholarly communication , 13. HowCommunication and the community. Communication is thus not only an important factor, but the actual enabler of scholarship. The development of the postal network during the sixteenth century allowed for unprecedented knowledge exchange between scholars within (and often beyond) Europe, forging the idealistic notion of the republic of letters: a common, intellectual space . This could lead to the creation of disciplinary siloes, “knowledge clubs” that operate on the basis of the “joint production and consumption of scholarly output by the scholarly community,” whereas “knowledge is most intensively produced at group-boundaries, in interaction with other, competing groups” , signed in February 2002, and hinting at the recreation of theold tradition of the republic of letters in the digital environment. Now, almost two decades later, the situation has somewhat improved, but the appetite of open access proponents has also increased, crystallizing in a movement for open science.“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good;” thus begins thePlan S, proposed by a coalition of funders, explicitly states that starting from 2021 all outputs of grants provided them must be available in open access without embargo. On a global scale, UNESCO has launchedThe Global Consultation on Open Science, to ensure “a better distribution and production of science in the world”. These actions are aimed at stimulating the communities in its transition to open access.Recent initiatives by various institutions reflect the urge to speed-up this transition. The European Commission’s working document that lays the foundations for the next framework programme, Horizon Europe, has identified “rather limited progress at the EU level in the transition towards open science, including on open access to research output” , 104. ThBOAI had famously advocated “open-access to peer-reviewed journal literature,” either through self-archiving or “a new generation of open-access journals,” which are now commonly known as green, gold, and diamond open access (BOAI). Open science, with regard to scholarly communication, currently has a much wider scope as it applies to all stages of the research process, “from designing the question and methods, to collecting and analysing data, through to the communication and dissemination of findings” . So, in 3.There are many arguments in support of open science, whichIn Poland, the 2018 report on the implementation of OA policies reveals that the fragmentation of open science efforts—such as the rise of many small repositories that are not linked to each other , 11—callIn the same way, there is still not enough awareness of the benefits associated with the transition to open access in Greece, and the engagement of key stakeholders has been relatively low , which perhaps stems from its centralised tradition, with the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as the focal point for scholarly activities. OpenEdition is its signature national infrastructure for SSH see:. In 2019Croatian Scientific Bibliography (CROSBI), andHRČAK, a common platform for OA journals. Over half of the Croatian OA journals are from SSH disciplines, mostly following the Diamond OA route without article processing charges, grounding their business models on government subsidies. Research and higher education institutions can establish their own institutional and disciplinary, or thematic repositories free of charge via the national infrastructure for digital repositories,DABAR.In Croatia, the Ministry of Science and Education is currently adopting the open science agenda and although there are other strategic documents addressing OA, funders and policy-makers still haven’t developed key top-down policies. Numerous OA and OS initiatives have emerged in Croatia and have sought to alleviate this lack of national policies, and to provide the infrastructure necessary to support openness, such as the4. In this landscape the social sciences in Switzerland have been supported by theSwiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS) infrastructure, whereas humanities are under the lead of theData Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH); both institutions are supervised by theSwiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).In recent years open science has been strongly supported in Switzerland. Since October 2017, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has required researchers to include a data management plan (DMP) in their funding application to most of the funding schemes. As of 2020, all results have to be made available in open access. In April 2020, the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) agreed with various stakeholders to introduce a national strategy for open research data in 2021Scientific Monographs programme for printing books (RESCOM) covers the OA-related costs.Although the whole open access landscape has not yet been thoroughly researched and analysed in Luxembourg, it is worth mentioning some significant top-down initiatives, such as the Policy on Open Access adapted by FNR , as well as its Open Access Fund programme (focused on promoting OA in projects receiving FNR funding). Moreover, theThese examples suggest that, despite the long history of the movement, the uptake of open science is still in need of a major boost. Moreover, progress in various European countries is uneven, which calls for more coordination at the EU level. However, there is a key obstacle impeding this transformation, which Martin Paul Eve calls “digital economics,” i.e., “the economics of scholarly publishing in the two interlinked senses of an ‘economy’ of academic prestige and of finance”  without Untangling Academic Publishing . Similar conclusions could be drawn from the analysis, byIt should be noted that economic observations and trajectories stem from the analyses of the ‘global West’. A slightly different case could be made for national communities where the scholarly communication is conducted in local languages and with a strong tradition of state-funded publishing, such as Poland and other countries of the former Eastern bloc. Apart from the issues discussed earlier, like high subscription rates, we also observe a diminishing position of the local journals. For instance, the Polish evaluation system for journals is based on the Scopus database which has an uneven, to say the least, representation of scholarship in local languages and discipline-specific outputs, including monographs. If local journals and monographs are not indexed, the impact of a publication could be measured solely on the basis of the international reception, what gives a false impression of a lower impact especially in the case of humanities (e.g. Polish studies). Thus, the prestige of a publication became closely linked with a business product with opaque inclusion policies beyond the control of the scholarly community. This is a dangerous situation as it creates a clear conflict of interests for a company which both publishes journals and ranks their impact. Hence, the pressure for internationalisation, aptly described bySo, although there seems to be a consensus that OA is generally good for research, the broader adoption of open practices will not happen without a substantial transformation of the practices of prestige allocation in academia. Eve describes the systemic aspects of this mechanism: since the venue’s prestige is used as a proxy measure for quality, it encourages publication in acclaimed outlets and has a cooling effect on innovation, while conservative evaluation mechanisms petrify this system , 50. And5, sketches out a vision of a pan-European meta-infrastructure “federating existing resources across national data centres, European e-infrastructures and research infrastructures”  Report on research infrastructures in digital humanities insist that “an RI cannot be defined in an abstract, absolute and immutable way; rather, it is a term that is adapted for and by different disciplines”  disciplines , 24.SubYou’re just writing about books, or movies, or art, after all!), readers often are not inclined to wrestle with the difficulties that our work presents” . The ongoing project on interdisciplinary practices in Europe (SHAPE-ID) tries to answer the question of why SSH is poorly integrated in inter- and transdisciplinary (ID/TD) endeavours. Early results have identified the root of this problem “in a lack of understanding by researchers, policy makers and funders, about what the  are and what these disciplines can contribute to solving societal problems” . They pointed out the uniqueness and individuality of scholarly apparatuses 7 and the methods ontology proposed by theNetwork for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH)8. These remediated operations include the capturing of sources (discovery), creation , data enrichment by annotating or editing, storage (archiving), and various forms of dissemination, that is, from collaboration, to commenting (reviewing), crowdsourcing, publishing, and sharing.This transformation is particularly visible in the development of digital humanities (DH), i.e., an approach being taken up across all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, which incorporates digital tools in research workflowsdigital turn stimulated the rapid changes in these areas across all disciplines in a twofold manner: as cutting-edge digital-humanities work, pushing the boundaries of the state-of-the-art; and digitally-enabled research, characterised by the selective use of particular tools by a largely non-digital community to answer a specific, disciplinary research problem9. For instance, the massive use of electronic communication and social media by research communities facilitated collaborative annotation, writing, and the evaluation of scientific argumentation by a community that connects authors, readers, and reviewers, thus creating a productive environment for the emergent publishing initiatives , which does not focus solely on the advanced proponents of digital methods, but also analyses digital needs and competences of the SSH community, allowing for the transfer of skills and knowledge between researchers , 9.Survey and Analysis of Basic Social Science and Humanities Research at the Science Academies and Related Research Organisations of Europe (SASSH) showed the reality of multilingualism across European researchers, thus proving the need for infrastructure that accommodates different languages  conducted another survey on sources discovery as well as series of interviews with researchers and other stakeholders. They aimed to capture current scholarly discovery practices, and the users’ needs that would be incorporated into building a new platform for finding, accessing, using, and re-using research materials. Indeed, users will continue to be involved and consulted at all phases of the project.In the field of scholarly communication, two current projects that are affiliated with OPERAS are conducting user-research. The Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities – Preparation (OPERAS-P), an EU-funded project, has launched a survey on SSH scholarly communication and the challenges of openness, together with focus studies aimed at gaining a more in-depth understanding of communication practices. WP 3,byproducts andbeta-results of the research process. This, in turn, results in a wide range of objects that could be communicated, like texts, data, methods, and software  are used frequently by 10–15% respondents and regularly by 35–45% . Online The main obstacle to this productive proliferation of new communication practices lies in the fact that these informal communication channels remain invisible to the research assessment system and, consequently, to academic prestige . For insShortly before his untimely death, Jon Tennant, a vocal proponent of open science, sketched out its future priorities and challenges (2020), which now constitutes his legacy. What is interesting about his relatively short proposal, published as a blog post, is its scale. Tennant looked not only at the immediate, direct measures for achieving progress, but rather at a complex reconfiguration of scholarly communication institutions that should take place if progress is to be achieved. These priorities entail research evaluation reform, rethinking the role of scholarly publishers, increasing global participation, community building, and creating alternatives to the commercial platforms . This laA recent report by the EC Expert Group, dealing with the future of publishing, puts researchers “at the heart of the scholarly communication of the future,” advocating inclusivity in terms of participants, purposes, and methodologies , 25. TheThe discussion will be based on the core values of scholarly communication as defined in the Vienna Principles, which were prepared by Open Access Network Austria (OANA). We have taken a similar approach, not treating openness as a goal in itself but rather as a means to achieve broader principles, which are implicitly present in the discussions on open science  research data; CLARIN, working with linguistic resources; CESSDA and ESS with social science data; and E-RIHS,ctions” , 745, whThe discussions presented in the sections above have led us to define the following key areas in which an infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: open access to outputs, discipline-specific genres, evaluation and quality assurance, impact on local societies through multilingualism, scholarly guidance, and the inclusion of various stakeholders. The remainder of this paper addresses the role a research infrastructure could play in these areas in order to assist a systemic change in SSH scholarly communication.The first issue is access. Although its crucial component is mere accessibility, i.e., the free, unrestricted, and sustainable dissemination of knowledge within a community; access should be understood more broadly as allowing for the discoverability and reusability of resources  and repository content , they provide different search options, rarely allow for full-text search, and do not cover the open content scattered throughout smaller, national or regional infrastructures. In consequence, a comprehensive literature review covering open access papers would have to be conducted through dozens of smaller outlets. As Mounier observes, “[g]iven the multiplicity of dissemination platforms that currently exist, researchers have to browse through too many websites if they want to cover all publications in their field or, alternatively, use Google” , 304.Moreover, large commercial databases tend to underrepresent SSH outputs , 73. So,This process should run in both directions and also enable researchers to “publish intermediate and relevant products of the research process, i.e. raw data, secondary data, and publications, in a way that they are discoverable, meaningfully interlinked, and re-usable by others” , six additional ones will be used: Croatian, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese. Importantly, the initiative is well aligned with the broader EU strategy and will be integrated into EOSC, thus serving as the gateway for SSH open-science outputs in this pan-European endeavour.There is a clear “need for a single discovery platform dedicated to SSH, indexing all types of content  in different languages and across different countries” , 304. OnA scholarly communication research infrastructure should not restrict, but rather enable, the successful transfer of knowledge in all genres and formats used in a given discipline. This resonates with the European Commission’s ‘holistic approach’ to EOSC, as described earlier, whereby no discipline must be left behind. Hence, we shall embrace disciplinary specificities to successfully attune infrastructures to the actual needs. The results of SSH work are still often mainly published using traditional channels such as monographs and articles . There aA good example of the role that infrastructures can play in such endeavours is OpenEdition, which works with a freemium model and allows open access to the full texts of books and articles while delivering premium services, such as other file formats, to libraries, thus providing revenue for smaller publishers who want to disseminate their content through digital means. Another example is Language Science Press, which is supported by a network of cooperating institutions, and provides a platform and technical support for a community of linguist authors, engaging volunteer researchers in the process .However, an equally important task for research infrastructures is to support scholars in embracing the innovative potential of new technologies. “These potentials include real-time exchange and dissemination, ubiquitous and simultaneous availability of resources, zero marginal cost for dissemination, new workflows, improved reusability of data and results, the ability to process huge volumes of data and new forms of presenting” , an open access publication that is “open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing, and comment by readers.”A good example of an innovative genre can be drawn from Open Notebook Science (ONS), which entails providing up-to-date information on research progress by putting the lab notebook online. The audience has access to the raw descriptions of methods, results and research data, and code, which makes the entire research process transparent.Research infrastructures for SSH should support quality assurance and evaluation through transparent peer review practices of the scholarly outputs and metrics used for assessing their impact  are published in other languages , 2. AcadJussieu Call for Open Science and Bibliodiversity, an initiative of scientific publishing stakeholders, views this concept as challenging the power relations in scientific communication by “putting an end to the dominance of a small number among us imposing their terms to scientific communities.” In a follow-up call for action, Sheareret al. enumerated the barriers to bibliodiversity, such as the already discussed dominance of English, the concentration of infrastructures and services, the limited funding models, and the narrow focus on journal-based policy measures .Signatories to the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication addressed this problem by preparing a set of recommendations for policy-makers, institutions, funders, libraries, and researchers that aimed to “support dissemination of research results for the full benefit of the society,” and “promote language diversity in research assessment, evaluation, and funding systems” , 1.JussSciELO, an electronic library of Brazilian research articles created in response to the underrepresentation of content in Portuguese and Spanish in international databases, and thus in global knowledge exchange. After two decades of operation, it “provides visibility to the journals it hosts in international indexes such as Scopus, WoS, Latindex, and others, resulting in more than 1.5 million COUNTER-certified daily downloads from all over the world in 2017 for the whole platform” . The logic of commercial revenue is often at odds with scientific needs, especially in terms of open access publishing . AlthougHIRMEOS project is an example of an action that could be adopted by a scholarly research infrastructure in the interests of researchers and for the benefit of “small-scale independent partners with limited resources,” allowing them “to cooperate and gain economies of scale by sharing the costs and resource for technical development in order to implement services that are normally accessible only to larger companies who have much greater financial resources and expertise to draw on” . It is also linked with the principle of collaboration, which “leads to a better understanding of research among stakeholders, and stakeholders can point out research questions that are important to them" . It is even more crucial in the case of SSH, where knowledge legitimation “demands not only scientific peers but also society” , established in 2015 in order to foster the contribution of open science to achieve developmental goals. The first goal is to build a common language, i.e., enabling a reflective process “around shared principles and goals, to ensure that everyone is striving towards a common objective” (TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a project that brings together different stakeholders in the United States  to create a sustainable open monograph ecosystem and open SSH scholarship to a wider readership. TOME recognises the deficiencies in the funding model for monographs and aims to subsidise these outputs through institutionally funded faculty book subsidies. The cooperation, under an ongoing five-year pilot project, is based on the universities providing baseline grants for publications and the publishers committing to producing open-access editions of TOME books. The programme also encourages innovative book formats, enabling the incorporation of multimedia, annotation, and commenting tools.EKT ePublishing, a project developed by the National Documentation Centre in Greece, provides a useful example of how multiple stakeholders can be accommodated by a research infrastructure. The project provided an infrastructure for scholarly eJournals, eBooks, and eProceedings that could be used by non-profit institutional publishers to disseminate their publications .In a recent blog post that addressed open-access policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, Samuel Moore expressed some scepticism as to whether the impact of the current situation will last, as “paywalls have been lifted temporarily, unilaterally and unsystematically, purely in response to a global pandemic crisis. Once this crisis has passed, or at least when publishers deem it to have passed, there is no suggestion that anything other than business as usual will return” . This prThis is a wider problem, too. Mariana Mazzucato has recently called for a rethink of public-private partnerships in the wake of the upcoming economic crisis, as “[t]oo often, these arrangements are less symbiotic than [they are] parasitic” . She expBut there is a way out. Moore posits that we should be emancipated “from the idea that knowledge and education can only ever be understood as a commodity and disseminated in a market;” instead, he suggests we need to recognise that “there should be no financial qualification to either accessing or producing such knowledge, and that both could be supported through non-market and economically just means” (2020). And this is precisely where he sees the role of infrastructural projects: to create “commons-based alternatives that point to a better future,” by reinstalling the academic oversight over the scholarly communication (ibid.). As Aspesi and Brand put it, “[t]he time for the academic community to act in coordination is now” .However, the economy is only one of the complex factors in the scholarly-communication system we have tried to disentangle in this paper. A successful change to, and implementation of, open-science principles in SSH will require a fundamental reconfiguration of the entire landscape that addresses all stakeholders. Kathleen Fitzpatrick provides a tentative list of practices that will have to change: business models; editorial practices; text structures; copyright ownership; archival and preservation practices; relationships between university libraries, presses, technology centers, and academic units; funding models; and the relationship between academia and the surrounding culture , 13. AndAs we have argued in this paper, only a scholarly-driven, inclusive research infrastructure for scholarly communication could be up to the task of addressing these aspects, as this comprehensively addresses both structural and systemic frontiers. The numerous papers, projects, and initiatives discussed here prove that scholars have many ideas about how to improve scholarly communication, along with the specific needs that have to be addressed. A dedicated research infrastructure may eventually make this vision a reality.No data are associated with this article. I applaud Maryl, Błaszczyńska, Szulińska, and Rams for their extremely thorough literature review on scholarly communication infrastructure across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. I learned a tremendous amount from reading the article and approve it for indexing in F1000Research. That said, I believe the article could be made more concise and more forceful than it is currently. As it stands, the article is a description of what’s broken and a statement of need for change, stopping short of providing actionable proposals or a theory of how transformation will proceed.  To the extent that this article does sketch a vision of the target state of scholarly communications infrastructure, that vision is one based mostly on coordinated planning and centralized management of some sort, even while scholar-led. I remain skeptical about the likelihood of success of monolithic solutions, given what we know about the important role that entrepreneurship plays in innovation, and about how universities and other parts of the research ecosystem function.   Most of this long, ambitious, and at times meandering article is spent reviewing the current state of scholarly communications infrastructure on an international scale, and making the case for an alternative model, one that supports the values of diversity, inclusivity, and multilingualism, and is researcher governed as opposed to market driven. All to the good thus far. However, the reader is then left wanting suggestions for actionable next steps. What form will real progress take, and where will needed innovations come from? Do the values underpinning open knowledge and tools necessarily run counter to competition-based innovation and distributed models of change? If the F1000’s editors and article authors are inclined to go further, I propose that the authors summarize the literature review here more concisely, and devote more space to spelling out how to make progress, however gradual, towards a researcher-driven, inclusive infrastructure for open science in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). From the authors’ perspectives, this may be another article entirely — and that’s fine —  but I’ll lay out my own thoughts and questions here in order to help guide potential revisions or future work. First, I take issue with the implicit premise here that, because the natural sciences have advanced further and faster than SSH fields towards open access and enriched knowledge infrastructures, models in the sciences are the right ones to follow for SSH. If models of effective scholarly communication in SSH are inherently more diverse and inclusive, as the authors substantiate in their review, then it may be that SSH communities can lead the “harder” sciences in defining at least some new models and infrastructures. For example, why would gold open access be an aspiration for SSH when we’ve seen the problems it has perpetuated in the sciences? And perhaps the more qualitative ways in which we evaluate excellence and prestige in SSH knowledge production have advantages over quantitative citation-based methods that natural science communities can learn from. Next, the paper could benefit from a clear definition of scholarly communications infrastructure early on. The authors devote lots of space in this paper to defining scholarly communications within the context of formal and informal communication systems broadly defined, but wait until section 1.3 (page 8) to supply the European Commission’s definition of research infrastructures. So too, that definition stops short of a full depiction of well established scholarly communications infrastructures. In addition to physical and computational edifices and publishing platforms writ large, these include persistent identifier systems such as Crossref and ORCID, metadata frameworks and other technical standards to enable interoperability among systems, content sharing norms such as Creative Commons licenses, and even business models themselves. When you embrace a broader definition of knowledge infrastructures, it expands your levers of change. If you describe the challenge in an entirely top-down way — that, for example, in order to effect desired transformation in scholarly communication you must convince the powers that be to tear down old, expensive edifices and cooperate in designing and funding the construction of new, expensive edifices — you may be setting yourself up for many years of frustration.http://credit.niso.org/) for representing contributor roles in multi-authored works enable scholars to describe their contributions to scholarship in enriched ways. If we empower scholars with new impact narratives, aren’t we enabling change in academic evaluation that wouldn’t be possible otherwise? I think we are, and believe that seemingly small advances like growing the use of alternative metrics, expanding which scholarly outputs are assigned DOIs, what contributions and works are tracked by ORCID, etc. amount to a powerful enabler of desired change. It’s all infrastructure. Similarly, creating publisher-independent signals of quality and rigor, as proposed in our Peer Review Transparency workhttps://www.prtstandards.org/report, helps lay the foundation for academic evaluation processes that are less dependent on publisher brands and traditional publication genres to signal contribution and prestige. Yes, fixing scholarly communications is a large and complex challenge, with multiple stakeholders, and change will take time. But I would urge the authors to investigate the question of to what extent we can let’s accelerate the process by directly giving researchers, societies and mission driven publishers tools to help drive it from the ground up, as it were. What do I mean by that? Standards like the NISO CRediT taxonomy . Another grassroots way to increase the variety of “signals” that inform our assessment of scholarly contribution and excellence is via launching new open access publications. There are several examples of SSH outputs and genres in the article. But I am thinking here of new publications like1).  Another very promising “bottom up” approach to change is through the systems that universities use to track and report on faculty activities. Expanding the catalog of works in such systems to include pre-prints, non-traditional publication outputs and genres, or informal communications such as blogs is an indirect but powerful way of deconstructing the institutional norms that hold back change in scholarly communications. Such faculty activity reporting systems can also be directly integrated with institutional repositories , this paper advocates in a convincing way for the development of an integrated research infrastructure dedicated to the SSH. Such a platform would facilitate the discovery and the reuse of scientific publications and data, would contribute to preserving linguistic, methodological and epistemic diversity, especially in the humanities, and would stimulate the creation and/ or the expansion of interdisciplinary communities. The needs of SSH scholars with regards to scholarly communication are attentively scrutinized and well understood, both through personal engagement of the authors in user-research within the OPERAS project, and thanks to the perusal of an extensive bibliography. However, the paper seems to me, for the moment, insufficiently focused. The first part (p. 3 to 11) appears to propose a rather theoretical discussion about the gaps impeding a streamlined, multi-lingual, multi-purposed scholarly communication, but the second part (p. 12 and subsequent), abandons the “looking at the future” perspective and sounds much more as a kind of monitoring report on the advances towards an integrated platform for scholarly communication. This second part is, indeed, much more focussed on existing projects, products or initiatives , the larger part of them being under development within OPERAS realm. This oscillation between “should” and “has been done” is somewhat confusing for the reader, and could be avoided through putting forward the second focus from the very beginning, as an opinion paper allows to do. I also recommend to shorten the background part of the paper, that can be deemed in places as breaking open doors , to the detriment of elaborating more on the solutions provided by OPERAS and some other providers. As an example, the difference between the TRIPLE project and the OAPEN Library should be explored in more depth, so as to avoid giving the impression of competing products that tackle the same issue, or to justify the need for such a competition. Also, when the authors discuss the post-publication peer-review and the commentary layers appended on already published content (p. 13-14), it is unclear what the contribution of the proposed platform would be. Solutions seem to be already in place, where is the problem and what’s the innovative idea we are talking about here? More generally, the discussion about the challenges related to the streamlining of fragmented initiatives for new forms of scholarly communication could be more developed.1 It may also be useful to revise the discussion about the proposed platform contribution to research evaluation. Too many perspectives and ideas are conflated here, as shown by the following sentence that artificially separates evaluation (probably reduced to “reading of metrics”) and quality: “apart from evaluation and impact measures, RI can also support the assessment of scholarly quality”. The proposed (or existing but incomplete) platform is presented as answering a need , but also as a lobbying tool that may ultimately result in imposing unwanted obligations to the scholarly community . In advocating for taking into account all the forms of scholarly communication in career evaluation, the paper underestimates the difficulty for the scholarly communities to think about acceptable standards and rewards for such activities if they are not to become just a form of “posh” or “negatively oriented modern research”. Finally, some compelling affirmations are embraced without further discussion. Undoubtedly, the idea of a publication as a “dynamic document evolving in time” is stimulating. Still, it may be worthwhile to look at what happened in the field of scholarly editing, where the digital format and the TEI freed the scholars 30 years ago from the “frozen document” paradigm. As Elena Pierazzo puts it, this led to the creation of a culture of “perpetual prototype(s)”. Nowadays, platforms and consortia struggle with a form of publishing procrastination, with many resources existing in a digital format, but unavailable for the large public, because deemed insufficiently “scholarly” for publication. Alternatively, the “fluid” model may stimulate “premature” publications, whose improvement is promised but never realised for lack of time or other (good) reasons. Therefore, “formal” publication model still has some clear advantages, and I invite the authors of the paper to reflect more on the place it may take in their comprehensive communication eco-system, and on the links, the complementary or the tensions it may have with the other forms of communication.Is the topic of the opinion article discussed accurately in the context of the current literature?YesAre arguments sufficiently supported by evidence from the published literature?YesAre all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations?YesAre the conclusions drawn balanced and justified on the basis of the presented arguments?YesReviewer Expertise:Digital text analysis, French Literature, Research Evaluation in the SSHI confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.


The latest threat of COVID19 pandemic has jolted the whole world and affected every segment of the society, forced people to change their working style which is not so easy for everyone. Medical Editors were no exception and COVID19 pandemic has affected their working as well. While the leading biomedical journals of the world with huge staff and adequate resources were quick to shift to work from home, it was not possible or easy for many journals in the developing, countries. Firstly they did not have the resources to begin with, secondly the lockdowns were announced so suddenly and thirdly most of the staff were not trained to work from home. The result was that manuscript already submitted, could not be processed further in time and got delayed. The peer review process also got disrupted and the normal flow of working could not materialize.The authors are most often most impatient and wish to get their manuscripts published as soon as possible that is why the authors are considered the most dangerous pressure groups which the editors have to face.Since lockdowns provided ample time for the researchers and authors, they used this opportunity to complete their research projects, pending write-ups and accelerated their submissions. The result was an overwhelming increase in the new submissions with most of the peer reviewed biomedical journals. There were some positive developments as well linked to this COVID19 pandemic. There was sudden surge in research activities, numerous studies were planned, executed on COVID19 pandemic, many new drug trials are under way starting from finding a possible vaccine to testing efficacy of already available anti-viral preparations besides finding new effective cost effective drugs for its treatment. Numerous medical journals all over the world have published special supplements on COVID19 pandemic as hundreds of papers are getting published daily related to this virus. Easy availability of so much literature on this virus also encouraged the healthcare professionals to plan systemic reviews, meta-analysis and reviews. Some researchers have even started critically looking at the information available on COVID19 on YouTube, analyzing it for their quality and usefulness. Categorization of the submissions on COVID19 has also been a dilemma for the editors as in many cases, the authors did not like to accept the editor’s decisions. It also had something to do with the regulatory bodies of various countries which give different weightage to different categories of manuscripts. In fact almost everyone who has interest in medical writing is now interested to write a review or short communication on COVID19 and medical journals are getting innumerable requests to process them which of course is not possible.When we decided to publish a special supplement devoted to COVID19, we selected a team of thirteen peer reviewers who were requested to review the manuscripts received within a week’s time at the most. The authors were also asked to respond to the reviewers comments immediately, sending the revised manuscripts immediately so as to accelerate the whole publication process. All those submissions before being sent for external review had their initial screening, got through the editor’s triage, similarity check using iThenticate as well as internal review to make the job of the reviewers easy. Hence, we were able to select and publish thirty three manuscripts in different categories from authors from Pakistan and overseas. The supplement was published in a record time of just seven weeks without compromising on quality and peer review.2Since in this era of COVID19 pandemic, most of the teaching institutions, medical colleges and medical universities being no exception have also opted for online education, it has opened yet another area for research. Hence, editors are now getting many manuscripts related to online education as well. Though every institution is trying to opt for it but, the faculty is not trained to use the new technology to facilitate online education and it will take some time when the faculty and students will start enjoying these online education activities.medRxiv. It is sponsored by Yale University Open Data Access.4On the other hand, problems faced by the medical editor have multiplied as they are now receiving more and more manuscripts just related to different aspects of COVID19 with the result that manuscripts on other disorders, subjects do not get the same attention. The processing of routine submissions get delayed much to the agony of the authors who are keen to share their information with other colleagues soon. However, Peer Review process is time consuming and there is no quick fix solution. This has encouraged some authors to post their manuscripts on sites like


Nature Communications, we commit to disregard from our editorial evaluation any competing works that are published while a submission to our journal is under review or under revision by the authors.The robustness of science is best revealed when independent investigations of the same problem arrive at similar conclusions. At  Being the first to publish a research result in a peer reviewed journal is prized in the current evaluation system for researchers. The increasingly popular practice of preprint posting shifts the attention to when a result is first made public, thus time-stamping the achievements of a research group independently of what others publish in the meantime. However, because preprints are not yet peer reviewed, this does not fully address the issues with the evaluation system.overestimate the long-term penalties of being second to the finish line).Therefore, having your work ‘scooped’—that is, having a competing work published while yours is anywhere between a final draft and close to being accepted by a journal—can be disheartening and perceived to hinder proper credit attribution. In highly-competitive or fast-moving fields, priority of discovery is often seen as paramount (though it is worth mentioning that people can Nature Communications, we want to help on both fronts, by implementing the below changes with immediate effect.We believe that journal policies can go a long way in mitigating the consequences of, as well as redefining the negative connotations associated with, being scooped. At Nature Communications, we want to help on both fronts, by implementing the below changes with immediate effect.We believe that journal policies can go a long way in mitigating the consequences of, as well as redefining the negative connotations associated with, being scooped. At In the first instance, we can help ensure that your results still get the recognition they deserve when a competing study is published while your manuscript is under revision. When we invite a revision of a manuscript following peer review, we commit to keep evaluating the work at subsequent review rounds on its own merits: in other words, although similar papers published by different groups in the meantime must be acknowledged and cited where appropriate, such publications will not constitute a reason to reject the revised manuscript.Nature Communications if results similar to yours have just been reported elsewhere. Instead, we encourage you to discuss the related work in your cover letter.In addition to our policy during review and revision, we will also adopt a more open stance when assessing new submissions whose results overlap considerably with a recently published paper. While each manuscript will still be judged on its own merits on a case-by-case basis, we will not consider the presence of a recent publication reporting similar results as a sole reason for declining publication of the work being evaluated, when it is clear that the two studies were carried out independently. The final decision on what constitutes a reasonable time-frame between publication of competing work and submission of a new study will be ultimately made by the editorial team. So, you should not be discouraged in submitting to reproducibilityproblem. Similar results corroborated by different groups, through different analysis and experiments, increase confidence in the scientific endeavour and thereby enhance reproducibility efforts in the community. Furthermore, it is rare that two studies overlap entirely, so any new work will almost certainly report new information as well as supporting existing knowledge.After all, when two research groups carry out independent work leading to similar conclusions, they are in effect validating each other’s findings. The value of corroborating studies cannot be emphasised enough at a time when there is a widespread belief that science has a Nature Communications still aims to publish manuscripts that will be of high interest and have a significant impact in their respective fields, and our editorial standards are not changing. At the same time, we want to stimulate a move away from an excessive focus on novelty and the pressure to be ‘first’ in research, as this is not always indicative of the true value of the work. We hope that this change will be welcomed by our authors.