The emergence of the Internet has transformed all areas of society. This includes the universe of scientific publications, with several publishers now exclusively focusing on the electronic format and open access model while expanding to a megajournal scope. In this context, the pandemic of predatory open access journals (POAJs) and meetings are of grave concern to the academic and research community. This new shift within academia produces a variety of new victims; namely, the authors themselves. In turn, scientific knowledge is often discredited, with the public placing less trust in science. Now more than ever, performing research with integrity and selecting a journal in which to publish requires close attention and expertise. The “predatory movement” has developed increasingly sophisticated techniques for misleading people into believing what seem to be credible professional layouts and legitimate invitations. Initiatives such as the Jeffrey Beall’s list, the Cabell’s Scholarly Analytics and Think.Check.Submit offer some guidance to uncover the “parasitic” intervention of predatory journals and meetings, but specific education in this field is sorely needed. This work aims to review the main characteristics of predatory journals and meetings and to analyze this topic in the context of forensic and legal medicine research. As in oThe current emphasis seems to be shifting too far in the direction of speed science rather than careful, robust research. This needs to be balanced, particularly since scientific results often drive regulatory agencies’ decisions. In the race to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, for example, it has become even more essential for society to be able to trust science as well as the drug companies seeking regulatory approval. Prestigious medical journals are also victims of misconduct during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly due to ultrarapid scientific data publication in some cases . MoreoveOszust means “fraud” in Polish) submitted a fake application for an editor position to 360 journals, a mix of legitimate titles and suspected POAJs. Forty predatory journals accepted her name as editor (i.e. “Dr. Fraud”), some within only a few hours of being contacted [Journal of Forensic Science and Research , given the fact that I am accustomed to paying attention to correspondence from contacts of the original and legitimate journal, Forensic Sciences Research (fsr@ssfjd.cn).In the context of scientific publishing, predatory open access journals (POAJs) are emerging as a critical topic of discussion. Numerous publications address problems associated with POAJs, proposing potential solutions and educational campaigns that could reduce the flow of manuscripts to such journals . In factontacted . In anotontacted . Sadly, ontacted  with theontacted . Despiteontacted , 11, 17.ontacted . ParticuIt is important for us to exercise caution as we seek to avoid confusing POAJ with genuine open access journals. Although POAJs advertise peer review, this scrutiny is typically absent, as can easily be detected by looking at the date of submission, peer review, and receipt of the acceptance letter. Since results and conclusions may be produced in such journals without the benefit of critique by actual experts, inaccurate data may drive court decisions on the part of those not familiar with such publications, leading to harmful repercussions for patients and society, as well as for political and economic realms.This paper seeks to complement and update my initial reflection on research integrity  by revievia Google to identify grey literature . Approximately 95 documents were consulted, with 54 citations, which are listed in the References section of this review. A date limit was not applied, but most publications retrieved were released after 2012 when the term “predatory journal” entered the mainstream literature [An exhaustive search was conducted in a range of databases to achieve cross-disciplinary coverage, including PubMed , Web of Science, Embase and Scopus and Google Scholar, and terature . MultiplScholarly Open Access aiming to summarize potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publishers using his own predefined criteria. The website was shut down in January 2017, reportedly in response to threats, lawsuits and pressure from his employer, the University of Colorado Denver, and out of fear for his job [https://beallslist.net/, which provides an updated version of Beall’s list [http://www2.cabells.com/ [https://thinkchecksubmit.org/) [No standard accepted definition of predatory publishing currently exists . Moreove his job , 28. Forl’s list , the Cablls.com/ , and theit.org/) .In a recent study of the topic, although the US was the most common of the reported publishers’ country, when addresses were checked using Google Maps and Google Street View, in almost 50% of cases, the locations were considered “unreliable” . The comSupplementing this list, Iowa State University attempted to classify predatory journals, proposing four different categories: phisher, imposter or hijacker, trojan horse, and unicorn. Definitions are provided in Experimental & Clinical Cardiology, after being sold by the Pulsus Publishing Group in 2013 to the offshore owners of Cardiology Academic Press, started to publish scientific “junk for hire”, still capitalizing on the journal’s original good name [Transformation of legitimate journals into predatory journals is also an important issue. Maintenance is relevant, because despite considerable efforts, sometimes even good journals cannot withstand the competition. For example, the esteemed Canadian medical journal, ood name .Although not as pervasive as POAJs, the literature in this area also reveals the harmful impacts of predatory conferences , 37. JefReported organizers of predatory meetings include the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET) and the OMICS Publishing Group, but there are many other organizations offering the same deceptive kinds of meetings. On 25 August 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against the OMICS Publishing Group, iMedPub, ConferenceSeries, and Srinubabu Gedela (an Indian CEO of the companies) regarding its predatory journals and conferences . In 2013curriculum vitae for proposed integration in forensic academy and research institutions. I immediately scrutinize the source of the author’s publications, since I feel that if they are produced in predatory journals, something is wrong as far as the researcher’s integrity, credibility and scientific values [The 21st century marks a turning point in evidence-based forensic sciences with the advent of several new techniques and research, in part due to the interest of researchers in this area, and possibly also triggered by the success of TV series such as “CSI”. Forensic experts tend to follow the published literature to handle our complex forensic diagnoses and cases. Nevertheless, accepting fake evidence could lead to erroneous judicial decisions, with detrimental effects on the focus on the person who is a victim of violence, which is, in broad sense, the major “object” of the forensic routine. Sometimes we must also discount and demystify aberrant theories that flourish in predatory forensic literature that has not been fully scrutinized. Such consequences can last for decades and have long-term global repercussions. These consequences can be even more harmful if the article was published in legitimate journals and then proved to be misconduct, as occurred with measles vaccination , 47, 48.In Portugal, we have a proverb that can be roughly translated as follows: “tell me what you got and where you got it and I will tell you how much it is worth”. In other words, without proper assessment of academic and research outputs of researchers, the truth of professional advancement may be distorted. One study demonstrated that the majority of faculty researchers had published in POAJs, and there was a positive correlation between predatory publications and receipt of internal research awards . This paAlthough typically POAJs become repositories for low quality scientific articles, it is possible that some legitimate articles occur within POAJs, since at the time of submission, the well-intentioned authors believed that they were dealing with a reputable journal. Forensic experts with a scientific background in bibliometrics are certainly more capable of producing higher quality forensic reports by selecting and interpreting published scientific results and avoiding counterfeit science.The open access model is a noble one. Still, it has rapidly paved the way for opportunistic predatory publishers who threaten the credibility of science, as claimed in a joint statement from three prominent medical writing societies . This moPublishing in and sitting on an editorial board of POAJs can damage a researcher’s reputation as well as that of their affiliated institution. As they embark on their careers, I always inform my students and junior faculty that after their first appearance in a scientific congress with an abstract or as an author of an article, they will be inundated with invitations to submit their work for publication in any number of “new” open access online journals. I encourage them to ignore devious invitations and implore them not to fall into the trap of this dark side of science , 52. BesHijacked journals also represent a formidable threat to research integrity, abusing as POAJs, of the open access publishing model. The term “hijacked journals” is used to describe fake websites that mimic authentic and reputable journals and their websites, abusing both established names and identities such as the ISSN with the sole purpose of financial exploitation , 54. TheEstablishing a consensus definition of POAJs and predatory conferences could be a starting point for implementing policies and educational initiatives to reduce such submissions, particularly because of the vulnerability of young, inexperienced researchers who are eager to publish and suffering from anxiety to increase the number of publications in a short time, especially those coming from developing countries . Junior


Computer science offers a large set of tools for prototyping, writing, running, testing, validating, sharing and reproducing results; however, computational science lags behind. In the best case, authors may provide their source code as a compressed archive and they may feel confident their research is reproducible. But this is not exactly true. James Buckheit and David Donoho proposed more than two decades ago that an article about computational results is advertising, not scholarship. The actual scholarship is the full software environment, code, and data that produced the result. This implies new workflows, in particular in peer-reviews. Existing journals have been slow to adapt: source codes are rarely requested and are hardly ever actually executed to check that they produce the results advertised in the article. ReScience is a peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research can be replicated from its description. To achieve this goal, the whole publishing chain is radically different from other traditional scientific journals. ReScience resides on GitHub where each new implementation of a computational study is made available together with comments, explanations, and software tests. These low numbers only reflect the authors’ success at running the code. They did not check for correctness of the code , nor the reproducibility of the results (does each run lead to the same results as in the paper). One example of this problem can be found in When Colberg and colleagues  decided Materials and Software Sharing and on Data Availability, and in the recent announcement by eLife on forking (creating a linked copy of) software used in eLife papers to GitHub. Such policies help to ensure access to code and data in a well-defined format  by Konrad Hinsen and Nicolas P. Rougier in September 2015.Performing a replication is a daunting task that is traditionally not well rewarded. Nevertheless, some people are willing to replicate computational research. The motivations for doing so are very diverse see . StudentBOX 1Authors having published in Rescience explain their motivation. I was motivated to replicate the results of the original paper because I feel that working through code supplements to blog posts has really helped me learn the process of scientific analysis. I could have published my replication as a blog post but I wanted the exposure and permanency that goes along with journal articles. This was my first experience with formal replication. I think the review was useful because it forced me to consider how the replication would be used by people other than myself. I have not yet experienced any new interactions following publication. However, I did notify the author of the original implementation about the replication’s publication. I think this may lead to future correspondence. The original author suggested that he would consider submitting his own replications to ReScience in the future. Our initial motivation and the main reason for replicating the model is that we needed it in order to collaborate with our neurobiologist colleagues. When we arrived in our new lab, the model had just been published (2013) but the original author had left the lab a few months before our arrival. There was no public repository nor version control, and the paper describing the model was incomplete and partly inaccurate. We managed to get our hands on the original sources  only to realize we could not compile them. It took us three months to replicate it using 250 lines of Python. But at this time, there was no place to publish this kind of replication to share the new code with colleagues. Since then, we have refined the model and made new predictions that have been confirmed. Our initial replication effort really gave the model a second life. Replicating previous work is a relatively routine task every time we want to build a new model: either because we want to build on this previous work, or because we want to compare our new model to it. We also give replication tasks to M.Sc. students every year, as projects. In all these cases, we are confronted with incomplete or inaccurate model descriptions, as well as with the impossibility to obtain the original results. Contacting the original authors sometimes solves the problem, but not so often (because of the dog ate my hard drive syndrome). We thus accumulate knowledge, internal to the lab, about which model works and which doesn’t, and how a given model has to be parameterized to really work. Without any place to publish it, this knowledge is wasted. Publishing it in ReScience, opening the discussion publicly, will be a progress for all of us.#20, #39, #41, #43). The editorial board covers a wide range of computational sciences (see http://rescience.github.io/board/) and more than 70 volunteers have registered to be reviewers. The scientific domains of published work are computational neuroscience, neuroimaging, computational ecology and computer graphics, with a majority in computational neuroscience. The most popular programming languages are Python and R. The review process takes about 100 days on average and involves about 50 comments. There is a strong bias towards successful replication (100%); experience has taught us that researchers are reluctant to publish failed replications, even when they can prove that the original work is wrong. For young researchers, there is a social/professional risk in publishing articles that show results from a senior researcher to be wrong. Until we implement a certified anonymized submission process, this strong bias will most likely remain.ReScience is an openly-peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research. In order to provide the largest possible benefit to the scientific community, replications are required to be reproducible and open-source. In two years of existence, 17 articles have been published and 4 are currently under review  or why they have failed, •a description of any difficulties encountered during the replication, •open-source code that produces the replication results, •an explanation of this code for human readers.A complete submission therefore consists of both computer code and an accompanying article, which are sent to ReScience in the form of a pull request (the process used on GitHub to submit a proposed modification to a software project). Partial replications that cover only some of the results in the original work are acceptable, but must be justified.If the submission respects these criteria, the editor assigns it to two reviewers for further evaluation and tests. The reviewers evaluate the code and the accompanying material in continuous interaction with the authors through the discussion section until both reviewers consider the work acceptable for publication. The goal of the review is thus to help the authors meet the ReScience quality standards through discussion. Since ReScience targets replication of already published work, the criteria of importance or novelty applied by most traditional journals are irrelevant.For a successful submission  to be accepted, both reviewers must consider it reproducible and a valid replication of the original work. As we explained earlier, this means that the reviewers •are able to run the proposed implementation on their computers, •obtain the same results as indicated in the accompanying paper, •consider these results sufficiently close to the ones reported in the original paper being replicated.For a failure to replicate submission to be accepted, we require extra steps to be taken. In addition to scrutiny of the submission by reviewers and editors, we will try to contact the authors of the original research, and issue a challenge to the community to spot and report errors in the new implementation. If no errors are found, the submission will be accepted and the original research will be declared non-replicable.Since independent implementation is a major feature of replication work, ReScience does not allow authors to submit replications of their own research, nor the research of close collaborators. Moreover, replication work should be based exclusively on the originally published paper, although exceptions are admitted if properly documented in the replication article. Mistakes in the implementation of computational models and methods are often due to biases that authors invariably have, consciously or not. Such biases will inevitably carry over to a replication. Perhaps even more importantly, cross-fertilization is generally useful in research, and trying to replicate the work of one’s peers might pave the way for a future collaboration, or may give rise to new ideas as a result of the replication effort.Although ReScience is still a young project, the submissions handled so far already provide valuable experience concerning the reproducibility and replicability of computational work in scientific research.de-facto reproducibility (“works on my machine”) by reviewers is useful as well, because it tests the robustness of the code under small variations in the computational environments that are inevitable in real life. Our goal is to develop a set of recommendations for authors that represent a workable compromise between reproducibility, robustness, and implementation effort. These recommendations will evolve over time, and we hope that with improving technology we will ultimately reach full reproducibility over a few decades.While some of the reasons for non-reproducibility are specific to each scientific domain, our experience has shown that there are also some common issues that can be identified. Missing code and/or data, undocumented dependencies, and inaccurate or imprecise description appear to be characteristic of much non-reproducible work. Moreover, these problems are not always easy to detect even for attentive reviewers, as we discovered when some articles published in ReScience turned out to be difficult to reproduce for someone else for exactly the reasons listed above. ReScience reviewers are scientists working in the same domain as the submitting authors, because familiarity with the field is a condition for judging if a replication is successful. But this also means that our reviewers share a significant common background with the authors, and that background often includes the software packages and programming languages adopted by their community. In particular, if both authors and reviewers have essential libraries of their community installed on their computers, they may not notice that these libraries are actually dependencies of the submitted code. While solutions to this problem evidently exist , they represent an additional effort to authors and therefore discourage them from submitting replication work to ReScience. Moreover, the evaluation of Another issue with reproducibility is that with today’s computing technology, long-term reproducibility can only be achieved by imposing drastic constraints on languages and libraries that are not compatible with the requirements of research computing. This problem is nicely illustrated by The well-known weaknesses of the traditional anonymous peer-reviewing system used by most scientific journals have motivated many experiments with alternative reviewing processes. The variant adopted by ReScience is similar to the ones used by F1000Research or PeerJ, but is even more radically open: anyone can look at ReScience submissions and at the complete reviewing process, starting from the assignment of an editor and the invitation of reviewers. Moreover, anyone with a GitHub account can intervene by commenting. Such interventions could even be anonymous because a GitHub account is not required to advertise a real name or any other identifying element. ReScience does currently require all authors, editors, and reviewers to provide real names (which however are not verified in any way), but there are valid reasons to allow anonymity for authors and reviewers, in particular to allow junior scientists to criticize the work of senior colleagues without fear of retribution, and we envisage exploring such options in the future.Our experience with this open reviewing system is very positive so far. The exchanges between reviewers and authors are constructive and courteous, without exception. They are more similar in style to a coffee-table discussion than to the judgement/defence style that dominates traditional anonymous reviewing. Once reviewers have been invited and have accepted the task, the editors’ main role is to ensure that the review moves forward, by gently reminding everyone to reply within reasonable delays. In addition, the editors occasionally answer questions by authors and reviewers about the ReScience publishing process.#28), a reviewer suggested asking the author of the original work for permission to re-use an image. The author intervened in the review and granted permission.The possibility to involve participants beyond the traditional group of authors, editors, and reviewers is particularly interesting in the case of ReScience, because it can be helpful to solicit input from the authors of the original study that is being replicated. For example, in one recent case  providing a permanent reference. The A minor inconvenience of the GitHub platform is its implementation of code reviews. It is designed for reviewing contributions to a collaborative project. The contributor submits new code and modifications to existing code in the form of a “pull request”, which other project members can then comment on. In the course of the exchanges, the contributor can update the code and request further comments. Once everybody is satisfied, the contribution is “merged” into the main project. In the case of ReScience, the collaborative project is the whole journal, and each article submission is a contribution proposed as a pull request. This is, however, not a very intuitive representation of how a journal works. It would be more natural to have a separate repository for each article, an arrangement that would also facilitate the final publishing steps. However, GitHub does not allow code review on a new repository, only on contributions to an already existing one.Relying on a free-use offer on a commercial platform poses some additional problems for scientific publishing. GitHub can change its conditions at any time, and could in principle delete or modify ReScience contents at any time without prior notice. Moreover, in the case of technical problems rendering ReScience contents temporarily or permanently inaccessible, the ReScience community has no legal claims for compensation because there is no contract that would imply any obligations for GitHub. It would clearly be imprudent to count on GitHub for long-term preservation of ReScience content, which is why we deposit accepted articles on Zenodo, a platform designed for archiving scientific information and funded by research organizations as an element of public research infrastructure.The use of free services provided by GitHub and Zenodo was clearly important to get ReScience started. The incentives for the publication of replication work being low, and its importance being recognized only slowly in the scientific community, funding ReScience through either author page charges or grants would have created further obstacles to its success. A less obvious advantage of not having to organize funding is that ReScience can exist without being backed by any legal entity that would manage its budget. This makes it possible to maintain a community spirit focused on shared scientific objectives, with nobody in a position to influence ReScience by explicit or implicit threats of reducing future funding.Based on our experience with the ReScience initiative, we can engage in informed speculation about possible future evolutions in scientific publishing, in particular concerning replication work. We will not discuss minor technical advances such as a better toolchain for producing PDF articles, but concentrate on long-term improvements in the technology of electronic publishing and, most of all, in the attitude of the scientific community towards the publication, preservation, and verification of computer-aided research.A fundamental technical issue is the difficulty of archiving or accurately describing the software environments in which computational scientists perform their work. A publication should be accompanied by both a human-readable description of this environment and an executable binary form. The human-readable description allows an inspection of the versions of all software packages that were used, for example to check for the impact of bugs that become known only after a study was published. The executable version enables other scientists to re-run the analyses and inspect intermediate results. Ideally, the human-readable description would permit rebuilding the executable version, in the same way that software source code permits rebuilding executable binaries. This approach is pursued for example by the package manager Guix . A more Containerization, as implemented e.g., by Docker  is curreSciUnit or OSB-model-validation). An integration of such frameworks, which would greatly enhance the verification and validation process, seems feasible for the existing software development platforms.Today’s electronic publishing platforms for scientific research still show their origins in paper-based publishing. Except for the replacement of printed paper by a printable PDF file, not much has changed. Although it is increasingly realized that software and data should be integral parts of most scientific publications today, they are at best relegated to the status of “supplementary material”, and systematically excluded from the peer review process. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, ReScience is the only scientific journal that aims to verify the correctness of scientific software. As our experience has shown, it is far easier to graft publication onto a software development platform than to integrate software reviewing into a publishing platform. Furthermore, tools that will allow for the automated validation of computational models and the automated verification of correctness are being actively developed in the community (see, for example, Software Heritage project, whose aim is to create a permanent public archive of all publicly available software source code, adopts exactly this point of view for the preservation of software. As our experience with ReScience has shown, integrating the narrative of a scientific article into a framework designed for software development is not difficult at all. Publishing and archiving scientific research in Software Heritage would offer several advantages. The intrinsic identifiers that provide access to the contents of the archive permit unambiguous and permanent references to ongoing projects as well as to snapshots at a specific time, and to whole projects as well as to the individual files that are part of them. Such references hold the promise for better reuse of scientific information, for better reproducibility of computations, and for fairer attribution of credit to scientists who contribute to research infrastructure.A logical next step is to fully embrace the technology designed for software development, which far better takes into account the specificity of electronic information processing than today’s scientific publishing systems. In addition to the proper handling of code, such an approach offers further advantages. Perhaps the most important one is a shift of focus from the paper as a mostly isolated and finished piece of work to scientific progress as a collection of incremental and highly interdependent steps. The One immediate and legitimate question is to wonder to what extent a replication could be performed rior to the publication of the original article. This would strongly reinforce a claim because a successful and independent replication would be available right from the start. As illustrated in


EJPH, improving accessibility to the journal, as well as abandoning the hard print copies of the EJPH. With this issue, we implement the new format of the The change to full Open Access was decided by the European Public Health Association in November 2020. With our switch to full Open Access, not only our members but also all public health professionals have access to the publications of high-quality scientific research. On top of that, we also fully comply with the European Union’s demand for Open Access for all research.EJPH, we say goodbye to the hard copy of the journal. And this issue is the first that will not be distributed by regular mail to our subscribers and to libraries in Europe and in the world. While some of us like paper journals, to carry with us for reading on buses and trains, etc., this is not the way scientific articles are read today. The latest report from the publisher shows that readers access papers in the journals for more than 50% through Google or Google Scholar, around 25% access articles directly on the web, and only few through other channels. In the interest of the environment and bookshelf space in our offices (now to a large extent at home), we do not think one should be sad.With the new online-only version of the While our change in format is an adaptation to how scientific papers are read and shared, we have been very keen on not changing the content and structure of our journal. Many open access journals are not really journals, but catalogues of papers, sometimes sorted in some way, often not. We believe that a journal’s ‘soul’ is reflected not only by its scientific content but also by its additional material, such as editorials, viewpoints and our ‘European public health news’. While not clearly visible in statistics, many browse journals’ tables of content for assessing where to publish articles or finding linked articles in thematic issues.We welcome readers and authors to our new format of the journal, more adapted to current ways of accessing articles, and in line with the general move to open access to scientific information. You will not get the journal in your postbox, but the content and structure of the journal will remain unchanged.Conflicts of interest: None declared.


The Year 2020 has proved to be a great success for Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences as we achieved yet another landmark of crossing the Impact Factor of one as per the Journal Citation Report released by Clarivate Analytics for the Year 2020. Our current Impact Factor is 1.088.A critical analysis of the year under review shows that the number of new submissions from Pakistan as well as overseas has also significantly increased. The total submissions in 2020 was 1781. While the number of submission are increasing but our acceptance rate has remained almost static about 20%. The number of manuscripts received from Pakistan during 2020 were 854. Majority of them being from Karachi 261, Lahore 226, Islamabad 101, Peshawar 62 and Rawalpindi 43. The number of submissions and publications from Turkey was increasing during the Years 2013-2018 but decreased in 2019 but has again increased in 2020. However, the number of papers accepted for publication after peer review has not increased much due to strict peer review Researchers are under great pressure to publish their research work as soon as possible to meet deadlines for the completion of their research projects or to defend their PhD thesis but editors of biomedical journals in Pakistan are also faced with a dilemma due to human resource and financial constraints. Publications overseas in Impact Fact journals which the regulatory bodies in Pakistan as well as overseas demand is very expensive which many researchers cannot afford while the number of Impact Factor medical journals published from Pakistan so far remains just three. A few more journals have applied but it may still take some time and the authors who are always impatient will continue to suffer. The situation can be eased if the regulatory bodies in Pakistan like Higher Education Commission can accept Only Online Journals which will reduce the cost of production to a great extent and also enable the editors to accommodate more papers as there will be no page constraints. It will also reduce the publication charges for the authors which is expected to increase further in view of the devaluation of the Pakistani currency. 3However, going for only Online Journals does involve some challenges as well in view of the increasing number of predatory journals. Hence, to check this menace, the authorities can give this permission of Only Online Journals to those publications which have earned Impact Factor, or indexed in Medline, and are covered by important databases like PubMed Central and Scopus. The regulatory bodies should also facilitate the journals to get IF and indexation in international databases. (PAME) on its behalf has taken an initiative in collaboration with University of Health Sciences (UHS) Lahore to start Certificate Course in Medical Editing (CME) to build professional capacity of the editors . This has helped many editors whose journals have now been recognized by the Higher Education Commission as per the latest revised list released last month.5While we would like to thank our valued members of the Editorial Board and Reviewers who have played a vital role in the enhancement of our Impact Factor and improving the quality of manuscripts accepted for publication, we are mindful of our weaknesses as well. We need to increase our presence on Social Media which at present is not satisfactory. Accelerating the peer review system shortening the time from submission to acceptance and publication is also being looked into. We also need understanding by the authors whose papers are not accepted for various reasons and hope situation will improve in the days to come. Repeated lockdowns due to Covid19 Pandemic has also adversely affected our working. However, we were lucky to publish a special issue on Medical Imaging in collaboration with Wuhan Institute of Technology during September 2021 thereby further improving the academic collaboration and cooperation between the healthcare professionals and medical institutions of Peoples Republic of China and Pakistan.Yet another important step that Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences has taken during the Year 2021 is collaborating with PharmEvo Pharmaceuticals to establish PharmEvo Research Forum with the main objective of promoting research culture and the art of medical writing and scientific publishing.We have also offered Internship facility to one Fellow who is getting training for the last few months. We offer special prize, scholarships in the name of our founder Chief Editor late Dr. Maqbool H. Jafary to junior editors every years and some of the brilliant candidates in the CME Course by UHS are also picked up for this award. At the certificate distribution ceremony of CME Batch-2 held at UHS Lahore on June 23, 2021, four junior editors were presented this prestigious prize/award. This is our humble effort to promote the cause of medical journalism in Pakistan.


FUNCTION, published in partnership with Oxford University Press, is now operational and ready to receive submissions. FUNCTION will provide a multidisciplinary home for cutting-edge research describing major advances in basic and translational science that significantly broaden the understanding of biological function.It is a great pleasure to announce that the American Physiological Society’s new peer-reviewed open access journal FUNCTION aims high and we have therefore assembled an extraordinary team of eminent executive editors, consulting editors, and editorial board members. A substantial number (19) are Fellows/Members of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and/or Academia Europaea and includes three Nobel Laureates. However, we also have many younger rapidly rising stars. At the beginning of its life, the editorial team is clearly FUNCTION’s greatest asset. Through the editorial team’s leadership, FUNCTION will accelerate discovery and move the field of physiology forward in the years to come.Nature’s “top 10” in 2018, who had just received the Academy’s Gold Medal. During his exceptional tenure as the EU Commission’s powerful Director-General for Research and Innovation, Robert-Jan Smits was responsible for the creation of the European Research Council (ERC), Horizon 2020, and later the Commission’s Scientific Advice Mechanism. However, at the time of this dinner, he was the Commission’s Special Envoy for Plan S, demanding that the results of research funded by public grants must be published in open access journals. We talked extensively that night about the future of scientific journals. I was impressed by Robert-Jan Smits’s enthusiasm and his clear vision of a world in which all real knowledge would be readily and freely accessible to everyone. I also understood that the world of science publishing is undergoing a transformation and the time for launching a high-profile open access journal in the field of physiology is now.Why do we need this new journal? One important reason is the movement toward open access and, more recently, the demand from many leading funding organizations worldwide for grantees only to publish in full and immediate open access journals. I must confess that it was only in September 2018 that I was fully converted to this cause. At a dinner in London, following the celebration at the Royal Society of the 30th anniversary of the Academia Europaea, I was seated next to Robert-Jan Smits, one of FUNCTION to be the home for the best of physiology and pathophysiology or, in other words, function and malfunction. As the inaugural Chair of the ERC’s starting grant panel for physiology, pathophysiology, and endocrinology (2009–2011), I saw that the vast majority of grant proposals were in the area of pathophysiology. This was not for tactical reasons, because the ERC assesses proposals exclusively on the basis of their intrinsic quality and without any regard for potential utility. The reason is that there are massive opportunities in this area, as physiologists have developed a sophisticated knowledge of the basic functions of the body and a fantastic technical armory, that now allow us to effectively explore the pathophysiology of many important diseases. I, therefore, expect that a substantial fraction of the publications in FUNCTION will deal with pathophysiology. FUNCTION will not be a clinical journal; yet will welcome clinical and translational perspectives on important new pathophysiological findings.Our vision is for Editing a scientific journal is a mixture of science and art. A good editor cannot simply act as a post-box distributing articles to specialist reviewers and then follow the advice of a majority. The advice of specialist reviewers is essential, but their arguments have to be interpreted and weighed by the editor. It is always easy to find reasons for not publishing a paper, but perhaps it is more important to recognize a real breakthrough in an imperfect article. In my experience, it is essential to remember that the most critical referee is not necessarily right.Nature’s biological sciences editor, and later started Current Biology, invited me to write a review article on calcium-activated potassium channels and secretion. I wrote the paper in the summer of 1983 and it became not only a review, but also incorporated a new model for control of fluid secretion. After peer review and correction of proofs, I expected rapid publication, but I received instead a telephone call from Nature’s formidable and rather intimidating Editor-in-Chief, John Maddox. He told me that he had just read my article and although he found the paper interesting, he was now going to rewrite it. Knowing that John Maddox was a physicist, this sounded frightening to me, but there was of course nothing I could do about it. Shortly thereafter, I received the heavily edited version of my article, which now contained numerous and rather serious errors. However, the language was much more vivid and there was a much-improved narrative flow, so the article had become much more readable for a nonspecialist audience. I corrected all the errors and the article, which eventually became a Science Citation Classic, was duly published in Nature in February 1984. Many years later, in 2000, both John Maddox (now Sir John) and I were elected Fellows of the Royal Society and I was seated next to John Maddox at the celebratory dinner. I recollected my experience from 1983/1984 and John Maddox revealed that he had the habit of reading and correcting the whole front part of the journal prior to publication. He wanted to ensure optimal clarity and a logical flow as well as removal of all specialist jargon. From this, and later work as a member of the editorial board of Current Biology (2002–2017), I learned a lot about writing and editing.Articles that are scientifically important and sound deserve to be presented in such a way that they become accessible to a broad audience. This was brought home to me long ago by a personal experience. In 1983, Peter Newmark, who was at that time FUNCTION has several of these. A good scientific journal should be much more than a database of new findings. In the biomedical sciences, we need context and perspective and FUNCTION will endeavor to provide this in relation to every single original paper we publish. We will commission a perspective article from a leading expert as soon as an original research paper has been accepted. I also believe that we have a duty, to those who entrust their best scientific papers to us, to ensure that their new findings get maximal exposure by providing platforms, such as FUNCTION symposia and American Physiological Society meetings, for presentations by authors of papers published in FUNCTION. We plan to invite FUNCTION authors to share their discoveries at meetings and we plan to solicit speakers to contribute to FUNCTION.A new journal should have innovative features and FUNCTION going to deal with this problem? First of all, we will aim to be totally clear and transparent when we come to a decision at the end of the first review round. If the “story” is interesting and convincing, we shall not demand further experiments. If the “story” is interesting, but there is a clear need for a few further experiments, we shall require these to be carried out. However, we think that if a team has entrusted their work to us we have an obligation to be fair to them and in such a case it will therefore be made clear that the paper will be accepted irrespective of the outcome of the additional experiments. Clearly, in some cases, this may necessitate changes in the discussion and the conclusions. If large numbers of experiments are required in order to make a paper convincing, it will be rejected, but if there is an interesting core, resubmission of an entirely new and more complete paper will be encouraged.During my many years in science, I have noted that there has been an increasing tendency for top journals to demand more and more data. Often long lists of required additional experiments are produced by reviewers—the so-called “reviewer experiments”—and it is implicit in the demand for revision that if these experiments do not work out as predicted, the paper will be rejected. Given that a paper in a top journal can be career changing, the temptation to exclude data that do not “fit” can be enormous, not to speak of even worse actions. Many consider that this issue has contributed to the problem of irreproducible data. How is As it increasingly takes longer and longer to produce a high-quality paper, because of the demand for completeness, there is a danger that important new results take too long to reach the scientific community, delaying real progress in the particular field. We are therefore introducing a category of focus paper—known as the Function Focus—that reports a very significant and fully documented single finding, but does not require exploration of all the ramifications that typically are expected for full papers.Physiological Reviews (2003–2011) and, more recently, senior reviews editor for The Journal of Physiology (2016–2019), I fully appreciate the immense value and influence review articles can have, but I am also conscious of significant failings that have evolved over time. Review articles have increasing numbers of references, sometimes massive numbers, and critical statements of supposed facts are often summarized in sentences that end with a long string of references. These are frequently a mixture of other review articles and an assortment of original articles that may or may not include the reference to the original discovery. Sometimes, the only references are to other review articles and when these are consulted it may be seen that they, again, do not refer to original articles, but to other review articles. In too many cases, it turns out to be impossible to find the actual evidence for a particular claim, which may not even exist. This has distorted the literature and this issue is confounded by an increasing tendency also for authors of original papers to quote review articles rather than the articles providing the actual evidence. At a translational medicine meeting in Budapest last year, at which many leading editors spoke, there was concern about this problem, which has generally been “swept under the carpet.”Having served as European executive editor of FUNCTION will therefore introduce a new type of Evidence Review, in which there will be no references to other review articles but only to the original literature. Furthermore, precise referencing—making explicit which original article contains which specific piece of information—will be encouraged, so that the ambiguity in many current review articles with regard to “who did what and when” will be avoided. This same principle of precise referencing can, and will, also be applied to the introduction and discussion sections of original papers to be published in FUNCTION.In my current work for the EU Commission’s Scientific Advice Mechanism, I have overseen the generation of several expert evidence review reports by Science Advice for Policy by European Academies. The evidence review reports summarize the published evidence in a particular area of concern and assess the relative reliability of the key findings, but do not express opinions. These reports are then used as the basis for a report called “scientific opinion,” which is produced by a separate group of chief scientific advisors to the EU Commission. It occurred to me that such a clear separation of fact and opinion could also be helpful in scientific publications. FUNCTION is now reaching out to the physiological and pathophysiological communities and asks you to join us in what we think will be a very exciting venture. FUNCTION looks forward to working with you to publish your best work in the most attractive way possible and give it the context and prominence it deserves. We are waiting for your submissions of original papers as well as Focus articles and will be happy to consider proposals for evidence reviews.


Write and Publish a Scientific Paper .The column in this issue is supplied by Barbara Gastel, MD, MPH, who is professor of veterinary integrative biosciences and of humanities in medicine at Texas A&M University, where she coordinates the graduate program in communicating science. Dr. Gastel obtained her medical and public health degrees from Johns Hopkins University. She is first author of the current edition of How to  If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.New England Journal, JAMA, or Annals? Or perhaps a more realistic target, such as a subspecialty journal?The situation is all too common. An early-career physician or scientist wishes to publish some recently completed research. But where to publish it? Someplace like the As the prospective author ponders, an email message serendipitously arrives. It compliments the recipient on being an eminent researcher and invites them to submit an article for publication. According to the message, this journal publishes papers in many fields of science, medicine, and even humanities. It says submissions are published in less than a week. Its editorial board lists many prominent researchers—including some the prospective author thought had long ago retired. And the publication fee is less than $100, unlike the hundreds or thousands of dollars charged by many open access journals.The author submits the paper to the journal, along with the fee. But the paper is just posted without peer review. Or maybe it never appears at all. What had seemed to be a journal turned out to be a fraud.predatory journals—have arisen. These “journals” take authors’ money without providing the services of a valid journal, such as peer review and editing. They arose simultaneously with legitimate open-access journals, which, rather than charging for subscriptions, defray publication costs by charging authors fees. Some say so-called predatory journals are not truly predatory, as they capitalize on a market for those wanting to list publications among their credentials.1 But papers submitted to fraudulent entities are unlikely to reach their intended readers. They add no luster to a curriculum vitae and indeed may tarnish it.In recent years, a multitude of fraudulent journals—commonly called How can one avoid falling prey to the lure of fraudulent journals? Some suggestions:PubMed? Not all good journals meet such criteria, but if the answer to such questions is “no,” one should investigate further.Seek evidence that the journal is solid: Have you read papers from it? Do libraries carry it? Is it listed in Consult those with expertise in such matters: Ask a mentor, or check with a medical librarian; the library community has taken a lead in identifying fraudulent journals.Look for clues that the journal may be less than a quality endeavor: Such clues can include grammatical errors in the invitation letter and on the journal website, lack of contact information on the website, and lack of papers posted.2 a webpage from The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute,3 and the website “Think.Check.Submit.,” which has a checklist for assessing whether a journal seems valid.4 This site also contains guidance on determining whether a book publisher is legitimate.Sources of further advice include a recent journal article presenting tips and resources for avoiding predatory journals,Indeed, those enticing emails can arrive not just from fraudulent journals but also from analogous shams regarding books and conferences. So, investigate critically. Don’t let “seems too good to be true” become “seems too bad to imagine.”


I thank all the associate editors for their time and expertise they invest in making our journal publish most rigorous scientific research. I also take this opportunity to thank all the reviewers for the quality of their reviewing, a selfless activity which can be time-consuming but which is essential for maintaining the theoretical and methodological standards of a scientific journal.During my second term as Editor-in-Chief of our journal Psychologica Belgica, I have the pleasure to highlight a number of major events for our journal. First, we have increased the editorial board to 17 associate editors  and the current 5-year impact factor is 2.38 (Clarivate®). It is also important to stress that manuscript rejection rates exceed 50%. As already noted, the number of papers published is increasing, with 22 papers published in 2019, 24 in 2020 and already 20 for the first half of 2021.Third, our journal has been able to reach these numbers despite, or perhaps because, of the Covid-19 pandemic situation. In 2020, we launched a special issue on the psychological factors associated with the Covid-19 situation. This special issue has attracted a particularly large number of submissions, six of which have already been published. The call is now closed and the continuous publication scheme of our journal allows us to publish articles immediately after the completion of the peer review process, thus authors do no need to wait until the entire special issue is compiled before seeing their work getting disseminated. This editorial policy is particularly important for the publication of research characterized by time-sensitive issues such as the new psychological challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.Fourth, our journal will soon be able to benefit from a new and optimized manuscript handling platform, to the great benefit of our authors, editors and reviewers for the submission, reviewing and editing of the different types of articles we accept. Psychologica Belgica, a flagship publication of the Belgian Association of Psychological Sciences (BAPS), publishes standard research reports, but also theoretical reviews and statistical notes. I also remind here that Psychologica Belgica is a full open access journal with minimal publication fees (and of which regular BAPS members are exempted). Truly open access does not only concern a scientific paper but also the data from which it is derived. Therefore, Psychologica Belgica encourages that all anonymized data are fully and freely accessible, an encouragement that will be transformed into a requirement during my second and last term as Editor-in-Chief see also .In closing, I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Laurence Claes, whose term as an associate editor came to an end. She has been a long-standing member of our editorial board and spent countless hours in editing manuscripts, chasing reviewers and writing decision letters. We thank you for your professionalism and devotion to Psychologica Belgica. I also reiterate all my thanks to the associate editors who remain on board and to those who have newly joined our team.


The authors regret that Fig. 3 was truncated in the original publication. Here we provide the complete original figure as submitted to the journal during peer-review of the manuscript.The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.


My journey in medical education is a global one. I relocated as a doctor, teacher and researcher from the Global South (India) to the Global North (the Netherlands). As I reminisce about my ambitious, motivated self in India with competence in research, but low confidence in scientific writing and publishing, I realize that I simply did not have the training and resources to complete the trajectory from conducting innovative research to crafting a publication-worthy academic paper. By hindsight, my research was publication-worthy, my writing was not. Moving to the Netherlands gave my career a new boost. I was granted access to resources at a premier Dutch institute, University Medical Center Utrecht, and could benefit from the guidance of world-renowned expert Professor Olle ten Cate. By virtue of my new location and my new mentor, I became part of a network where the dominant knowledge conversations in the field were happening. I became privy to those conversations and viewpoints. I was able to identify gaps in the literature relatively easily through reading and talking to people about research and was successful in setting up my own research program with innovative research themes.After my PhD, as I gathered experience as a reviewer, I came across interesting manuscripts in medical education written by authors from the Global South that were rejected for reasons such as: ‘the gap in the literature is not clear’, ‘poor quality of scientific writing’, ‘poor English language skills’, ‘this has already been done in the Western context’, ‘this topic is not important enough in the current conversations in the field’, and so on. It broke my heart to see high-quality original work rejected for these reasons, knowing it had been conducted under serious resource constraints by researchers who were not familiar with the publication culture in the Global North. I identified with each of those authors, who I could imagine had overcome major hurdles in order to put pen to paper and muster enough confidence to submit their work. When I was appointed as an associate editor on multiple medical education journals, I made a pact with myself that I would drive the cause to help authors from the Global South publish in the major journals. I would do this by mentoring some authors on a one-on-one basis, while simultaneously starting conversations about this topic with editors. This commentary on the leaky pipeline in publications in medical education is an attempt to drive this conversation.The leaky pipeline metaphor has been used to illustrate the lack of representation of women in academia  and in tBuffone et al. conducted an investigation into publications in seven major medical education journals over a 10-year period and reported that publications with lead authors from the Global South  were less than 21%, even though these continents represent around 85% of the world population . Maggio In their recent investigation of the editorial boards of ten well-established medical education journals, Yip and Rashid brought to light a well-known picture that was never before supported by hard data . On a scThus, it begins with the Global South being excluded from conversations in the medical education field. An article published by Lancet Global Health on how the Global South is not part of the storytelling in the medical field is evidence of this phenomenon . Global Lack of resources or access to literature and training in Western scientific writing, which is the dominant accepted practice, can seriously hamper the confidence and perceived competence of Global South authors. Much of the work is not even submitted for publication in major journals. If some authors do gather the guts to submit their work, which seems to be happening in the last few years, there is still only a miniscule chance that this work will be accepted for publication .If we put the lack in diversity of authors successful in publishing in major health professions education journals together with the lack of diversity of editorial boards, it is reasonable to conclude that the extremely skewed knowledge syntheses is informally and implicitly dominated by a handful of powerful Global North (associate) editors. They set standards for quality which is not open for the majority to debate . Our leaAddressing this problem needs a combination of several strategies such as:Related to publications practices—Naidu recommends a three-pronged strategy to address the issue of publication bias and calls it ‘decolonial praxis’: a) Changing the actors—By providing marginalized authors the opportunities to publish in major journals, b) Shifting the power in research—By funding context-relevant unconventional research, which is not embedded in Western frameworks, and c) Dismantling the predominant writing structures and fixed notions of the quality of science/research [research . I, for Related to journal editorial boards—Journal Editors must take up diversity targets as some of their key performance indicators. This includes geographic as well as income-level related diversity not only among the authors whose work they publish but also in their Editorial Boards. Every journal should publish a report on diversity in their publications annually, in the interest of transparency in publication practices.Related to specific initiatives for enhance research and publication from the Global South—International initiatives such as the International Network for Advancing Science and Policy (INASP) can be considered as best practices to learn from [arn from . INASP sarn from . We needThis is a call to join forces to fix our leaks!


Background: The internet has changed the way we access and publish Orthopaedic literature. Traditional subscription journals have been challenged by the open access method of publication which permits the author to make their article available to all readers for free, often at a cost to the author. This has also been adopted in part by traditional subscription journals forming hybrid journals. One of the criticisms of open access publications is that it provides the author with a “pay to publish” opportunity. We aimed to determine if access to the journals impacts their influence. Methods: We selected the top 40 Trauma and Orthopaedic Journals as ranked by the SCImago Rank. Each journal was reviewed and assessed for the journal quality, defined by reviewing the journal impact factor and SCImago rank; influence, defined by reviewing the top 10 articles provided by the journal for the number of citations; and cost of open access publication. Results: Of the top 40 journals, 10 were subscription, 10 were open access, and 20 were hybrid journals. Subscription journals had the highest mean impact factor, and SCImago rank with a significant difference in the impact factor (p = 0.001) and SCImago rank (p = 0.021) observed between subscription and open access journals. No significant difference was seen between citation numbers of articles published in subscription and open access journals (p = 0.168). There was a positive correlation between the cost of publishing in an open access journal and the impact factor (r = 0.404) but a negative correlation between cost and the number of citations (r = 0.319). Conclusion: Open access journals have significantly lower quality measures in comparison to subscription journals. Despite this, we found no difference between the number of citations, suggestive of there being no difference in the influence of these journals in spite of the observed difference in quality. Orthopaedics is an ever-evolving specialism with practice regularly being improved due to developing evidence and research. Research is the cornerstone of this evolution, as the premise is to find a solution to a problem or identify a new idea that can further improve current practice.There is an ongoing drive for doctors to undertake research in current practice, and there are many reasons why this is the case. Such reasons include aiming to improve patient outcomes with better equipment, techniques, or standards of care. Research can often progress the understanding of pathology and theories behind improved practices. For the individual, publishing research can improve their reputation and stand within their field of interest . ResearcDue to the various reasons for undertaking research, there may emerge a conflict between the individual’s requirement to publish research and the standard of research . TherefoMany well-established journals have a strong reputation for publishing only high-quality research . This isTraditionally readers would be required to subscribe to a journal to read the published research. Alternatively, the reader would be able to access a copy of the journal from their institution’s library . SubscriWith the development of the Internet, the medium in which journal articles are published and distributed has changed drastically. This has provided the reader with an easier search for their desired topic and gain immediate access to published articles. The Internet has also enabled the reader to access a broader number of articles published across the world.In turn, this change to greater availability of articles online has created “open access” journals. Open access journals provide free download articles to any reader which the journal has published. Instead of the reader paying to read the article, the author of the publication may have paid the journal a fee to publish the article so that it is available to all. Subsequently, open access journals could be criticised for providing a “pay to publish” culture, which provides the author the benefits of publishing at a cost. This method could be criticised for publishing lower quality research in comparison to subscription journals due to higher acceptance rates , 7, 8.Some subscription journals now allow the author to publish via either open access or subscription methods. This has created three different types of journals based on their publishing methods. Subscription journals are those which once published the articles are only available to those readers who have subscribed to the journal via individual or institutional access. Open access journals are those in which the reader and journal have made their article available to all readers free of charge. Hybrid journals adopt both methods of publication and provide the author of the article with the option to publish in either format.This study aimed to determine if open access journals are now as influential as subscription-based journals.We selected the top 40 Trauma and Orthopaedic Journals as ranked by the SCImago Journal and Country Rank as of January 2020. We excluded the journals which were based on sports medicine and basic science.The SCImago Journal and Country Rank is an online portal that is publicly available to enable analysis and comparison between journals based on journal metrics .For each journal, we collected data from reviewing freely available online material. Firstly, we reviewed the publication method of the journal from its “Author’s Instructions”. If it was identified as being a journal that provided open access publishing, then its cost was recorded. The Impact Factor, SCImago Rank, and H-index were recorded for each journal online. Each of the top 40 journals websites were reviewed for a list of their “Top 10” most popular, downloaded, or viewed articles. Each of these articles was reviewed for the article publication method and the number of citations recorded on Google Scholar. The number of downloads, views, or captures was also recorded from the article publication page on the journal’s website.The data collected was then analysed and sub-categorised to identify if any statistical differences could be seen. Firstly, the journals were categories into their publication method of subscription, open access, or hybrid. These categories were then compared for journal quality, journal influence, and publication cost. We defined journal quality as the higher the Impact Factor, SCImago Rank, and H-index, the higher the quality of a journal. Journal influence is the number of citations a published article receives. The publication cost is the amount the author would have to pay in order for their article to be published.Of the top 40 journals, 10 were subscription, 10 open access, and 20 hybrid journals. These are listed in The Subscription journals had the highest mean impact factor, SCImago rank, and H index. Open access journals had the lowest in all three of these categories .p = 0.01 and p = 0.021 respectively). No other statistical differences were seen between the journal types.T-Tests were performed between the different journal types for impact factor and SCImago rank to assess any statistical difference. A significant difference between the impact factor and SCImago rank was seen between subscription and open access journals , SCImago Rank (r = 0.316), and H index (r = 0.534). Each of these demonstrates a strong positive correlation.Publishing within an open access journal requires a mean cost of publication of £1007 with a range of £0–£1790. Hybrid journals had a higher mean cost for open access publication at £2300 (range £1922–£2646). Spearman rank correlations between the cost of open access publishing and the journal quality measures were observed for Impact Factor (r = −0.319).There was a negative correlation between the cost of open access publication and the mean number of citations for the journal  were all significantly greater for the purely subscription journals than the purely open access journals. Additionally, there was a significantly greater impact factor observed for hybrid journals than purely open access journals. This suggests that journals publishing articles with some element of subscription (subscription only or hybrid) have an average higher quality of articles than those exclusively open access.We determined journal quality on the impact factor, SCImago journal rank, and However, the hybrid journals had no statistical difference in quality measures to the subscription journals. Therefore, we can surmise that publishing open access articles alongside subscription articles in hybrid journals do not have a detrimental effect on these quality measures compared to subscription-only journals. Therefore, the mode of publication does not have an impact on the scoring of these quality measures.The lower quality measures for the open access journals alongside a cost to the author are supportive of the theory of paying for publication. This theory has been surmised as the articles published in open access journals have lower average journal metrics, so therefore presumed to be of lower quality. Open access journals rely on publishing papers in order to make a financial profit. It could be hypothesised, therefore, that in order to increase their profit, they may have a higher acceptance rate of papers for publication, as the number of people who read the article does not impact the journal’s profit.Open access is a newer form of publication method in comparison to the traditional subscription method. This, therefore, may provide the traditional subscription journals with greater perceived importance within the orthopaedic community. This could lead to readers citing these articles more frequently in their own work as they feel that these papers are of greater quality. Are the traditional journals article’s promoted better, so readers are more likely to see them than articles in lesser well-known journals.An author’s desire to publish can be multifactorial. These include the fact that publications are currently one of the criteria required by Orthopaedic Specialist Trainees in the United Kingdom to enable them to receive their Certificate of Completion of Training (CCT) . FurtherJournal influence was defined as the number of citations achieved for the top 10 articles published by the journal. When we reviewed the number of citations for open access and subscription journals, we found no significant difference between the two types of journals. The hybrid journals had the lowest mean number of citations of all three journal types. However, when the hybrid journal articles were separated into those which were published by subscription and open access and added to the respective groups, there remained no significant statistical difference between the publication methods.Open access articles are more readily available to the reader as they are free to access. This greater ease in availability may mean they have as good a chance of impacting practice as articles in higher-ranked subscription journals. Our results show no statistical difference between the citations achieved for the top 10 articles of open access and subscription journals. Therefore, publishing via open access which is statistically lower-ranked journals, can provide as much influence as publishing in higher impact subscription journals . HoweverThe ability of readers to search for articles easily by keywords on databases such as PubMed and Google Scholar has promoted open access articles as the reader can immediately access these articles. In comparison to subscription publications which can be found as easily but may not be instantly accessible.Our sample size from each journal to assess the influence of the journal is relatively small, but we feel it is reflective of the journal articles available. It would be interesting to see if this trend was matched in other specialities other than orthopaedics. Also, we should comment that a completely fair comparison between the number of downloads, views, and captures could not be performed as the metrics each journal provided were different.The cost of publishing for each open access journal was ascertained from reviewing the online author’s instructions to identify the fee. In most cases, there is a significant amount of money required, at the author’s expense, to publish an article as open access. We identified that there is a positive correlation between the impact factor and the price of publishing for open access articles. This highlights that in order to have work published in a higher-ranked journal, this comes at a greater financial cost to the author. This again may suggest that paying for open access may provide a pay to publish facility, as to have an article in higher-ranked journal is at greater cost to the author.There is no data available within the public domain regarding acceptance rates for each journal, so it is therefore unclear if it is easier to be accepted for publication in open access in comparison to subscription journals in orthopaedics. This information would potentially be very valuable to the reader and the author. It would demonstrate the standard of acceptance threshold for each journal as well as provide the author with an understanding of their chances of successful submission. Such information could then be compared to the type of Journal, Subscription or Open Access, and compared to any publication fee to either support or reject the theory that it is easier to publish work in open access as is thought to potentially be the case , 7.Our data identified that publishing by open access in a more expensive journal may provide your publication in a higher impact journal, but this does not necessarily provide more citations.An author publishing their work in an open access journal may be able to achieve as great an impact in the orthopaedic community as if they published in a higher-ranked subscription journal. The articles published in subscription and hybrid journals have a greater average number of citations and higher quality measures. However, the potential influence of the article is not dependent upon the type of journal it is published within.Published acceptance rates of publications submitted to journals potentially could provide the reader with a greater understanding of the acceptance threshold for individual journals.The high costs for the author associated with open access journals may be a barrier to their ability to publish significant findings, and with the importance attached to clinicians’ involvement in research, this could result in individual financial concerns.In an era of evidence-based medicine driving improvements in clinical practice and patient outcomes, it may be argued that all publications should be available to readers so they can make the most informed decisions for their practice. The importance of a reader’s ability to critically analyse an article remains the most important factor in determining their own opinion in use within their practice.The authors declare that they have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to report.No funding support was obtained to assist with this manuscript.No ethical approval was sought for this paper as there was no patient involvement, and all data were obtained from freely available information on the internet.Not applicable as no patients involved in the paper.Robert Cooke was involved in conceptualisation, methodology, data collection, writing, reviewing and editing. Neil Jain was involved in supervision, conceptualisation, methodology, writing, reviewing, and editing.


JSR’s forthcoming transition to open access.Discussing  Journal of Synchrotron Radiation (JSR) editorial team would like to take this opportunity to inform all our readers, authors and supporters about the coming transition to open access. All papers submitted to JSR after 1 October 2021 will be for open-access publication. By taking this step, JSR is supporting a journey towards open science in general.The entire JSR was founded in 1994  Journals Editor-in-Chief and the IUCr Editorial Office, supported by the IUCr Executive Committee, believe that switching to open access will benefit research in this area by disseminating it more easily and rapidly to the global synchrotron and free-electron laser science communities. The clear goal of this initiative is to induce the smoothest and most research-oriented transformation possible of JSR from a behind-paywall subscription-based publishing model to an open-access-based publishing model. All of us increasingly work under conditions in which open access supports researchers in every aspect of their workflow. New detailed instructions on general policies for submission, possible open-access discounts, and other guidelines and templates are discussed at https://journals.iucr.org/s/services/openaccess.html. However, we wish to emphasize that all open-access articles will undergo initial editor assessment and the same rigorous peer review process as at present. The management of the peer review process will continue to focus on the high standards and rapid publication expected for IUCr journals.Now, the JSR’s supporting (facility) institutions. We also hope that more supporting institutions will join with JSR as we move forward from here. JSR supporting institutions are entitled to a certain number of open-access article processing charge (APC) vouchers per year for papers reporting work carried out at their facilities. Alternatively, if the contact author’s home institution is included in a transformative or read-and-publish arrangement with the IUCr’s publication partner, Wiley, those authors will be able to publish open-access research or review articles in JSR with no direct (APC) charge. Currently, such arrangements exist in Austria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Contact authors with connections to IUCr  will receive modest APC discounts. Meanwhile, discounts (50%) for authors from lower middle income countries and waivers (100%) from low income countries will be issued. However, please note that a major difference from present arrangements is that all submitting authors will need to apply for such discounts and waivers at the time of submission and payments will be handled via Wiley authors services .At this time, we wish to express our enormous appreciation of JSR Editorial Board welcomes feedback from the JSR research community, especially from authors, on the new open-access procedures, and is keen to know what is working well and what needs some adjustment.As the transition to open access proceeds, the JSR since 2018 is shown graphically in the figureThe change to open access is made with every faith in the future. The Editors fully believe that the publishing of scientific research with global open access providing worldwide visibility without barriers demonstrably leads to more downloads, citations and more impact for authors. The increased citation of open-access articles published in JSR Editors embrace both the idea and concept of making research freely available to all researchers, and are committed to coordinate and establish best principles to facilitate a smooth transition from subscription to open access. The Editors wish all the best to all JSR authors for the future and look forward to seeing your forthcoming high-quality open-access research submissions to JSR.The


Plant Physiology, mark a period of transitions, successes, and the occasional disappointment, but most of all of a sense of satisfaction, both personal and professional. The American Society of Plant Biologists for their part must agree, as they saw fit to reappoint me to the post twice. Their trust in me has been deeply gratifying. Yet, while I see that there is still much to do going forward, I also recognize that it is time for new blood at the helm. So, my ambivalence.Sitting down to write this editorial, I recognize my ambivalence. These past 9 years, during which I have served as Editor-in-Chief of Plant Physiology has grown; in the dedicated, face-to-face meetings of the editorial board that I introduced in 2014 and how we have come together as a working community; in the knowledge that my support has helped to guide the board through a number of challenges, not least in developing policies that have extended journal coverage, doubled its annual citation count—for 2021 expected to exceed 100,000 citations—and helped raise its impact factor from 6.55 to 8.34. Indeed, Plant Physiology remains by far the single, most highly cited international journal in the plant sciences.The question most often asked of me is whether the role of Editor-in-Chief has not been a huge task. Of course, it has; but it comes with equal rewards. I take immense pride in the way that Plant Physiology would not have been possible without this community: the editors who rightly can take ownership of the journal and its achievements, and the staff, past and present, who have fostered a supportive familial atmosphere within the Society. My deepest thanks to you, not only for your unstinting efforts, but also for your friendship. Working with the journal these past 9 years, I have come to know many with whom I might not have crossed paths otherwise, and this has been the greatest pleasure for me.Make no mistake, the success of There is much I might relate from my experiences and no single theme that can encapsulate them all. So I highlight here a few points only. Foremost on my mind are the changes to scientific publishing. These have been breathtaking, in many ways benefitting authors and readers, and occasionally disturbing in their implications. While I recognized from the start that scientific publishing was moving toward online staging as the primary means of dissemination, I could not have envisaged its pace, nor the influence it has had in expanding author-pay and open-access platforms, the explosion of online (and sometimes predatory) journal titles, and the evolving “S plan” for public access to scientific output.Even as they continue to develop, these changes are completely transforming the landscape of academic publishing, not to mention the research that it showcases, and they present special challenges for the survival of society journals. There is a cliché about unintended consequences ; I often wonder whether the advocates of the S plan, themselves, were caught unawares by its consequences for scientists, their access to publication as authors, not just as readers and, looking forward, its potential for further polarizing research globally.The digital transformation has generated other challenges that will continue to demand attention. Among these, not least are the growth of social media and so-called post-publication peer review (PPPR). Forgive me if I risk a few generalizations . A great strength of social media is the way it has encouraged public access to science as well as accelerating its dissemination within the research community. It is a worry, however, that social media endorses, if unwittingly, a deep-seated impatience that does not always sit well with considered scientific thought. I noted previously that “publication is only the beginning of scientific debate” ; informeWhich brings me to the anonymous airings of PPPR. Here I see great danger. Early on, I shared my views in a series of editorials calling out the public forum of PubPeer that purports to host PPPR . The firFor me, it remains a deep concern that open debate is not lost, both for science today and for the future. Bear in mind that the process of scientific critique differs from that of policing. Websites such as PubPeer fail to make this distinction; they make the case for anonymity in scientific discourse by conflating the objectives of debate with those of research integrity. For sure, there is a legitimate place for anonymity in protecting the whistleblower, but not in scientific debate.Setting aside policing, anonymity in PPPR creates an atmosphere that undermines informed discussion and, more broadly, the public perception of science. I noted that anonymity is intimidating and confrontational by its very nature, it entrenches inequality in every exchange, and the price often enough is an absence of worthwhile discussion. As one commenter in the ensuing PubPeer threadsAs scientists, we are trained to question ideas and the evidence that supports them, to debate and assess alternative interpretations, and to test predictions that arise from these deliberations. Progress in science is a massively cooperative undertaking and its foundations are built on communication. Thus, “it is a warped worldview, indeed, in which scientists are so fearful of engaging that they never challenge others’ research and ideas openly, whether online or in publication” , 2016.As for scientific integrity, there can be no doubt that digital platforms have expanded an awareness of data mishandling, misinformation, and occasionally fraud within the scientific publications. This is not to say that we are seeing an explosion of fraudulent research. Over 30 years of analysis by the Rockefeller University Press and by the NIH has shown that the rate of deliberately fraudulent papers remains virtually unchanged, present in a fraction of a percent only of research publications . NonethePlant Physiology, beginning in January 2018. These checks have supported the findings of the Rockefeller University Press and the NIH, and they have unquestionably improved the quality of research that the journal publishes. If I have a disappointment here, it lies in the difficulty to convince, beyond this Society, in favor of a coordinated, plant science-wide approach to scientific fraud. Nonetheless, I am pleased that the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) now recognizes the benefits of sharing relevant information between journals.We introduced routine checks of data presented in all manuscripts accepted by Plant Physiology introduced the program in 2018 alongside the Plant Cell to bring promising early-career scientists onto the editorial board and engage their expertise in assessing and writing about research published in the journal. It has been a pleasure to watch these scientists bring their passion for science to the journal and to see their News and Views articles on some of the most exciting advances we publish. Their contributions continue to expand the journal content and, equally, they gain professionally in experience and exposure. I have shared the task of handling and editing the Associate Features Editor submissions with staff members Mary Williams and Ash Wolf, and we take great pride in their progress. Indeed, the majority of the early-career scientists we worked with in the first 2 years of the program have since secured permanent academic and research posts. I like to think that, in our small way, we have helped to support their successes.One unalloyed success, also facilitated by the digital platform of the Society, is the Associate Features Editor program. Plant Physiology has expanded over the past decade without losing its core themes, including those of biochemistry, molecular biology, and hormonal physiology. The generic approach to both remit and formats that I brought to the journal has helped to blur research boundaries, support and encourage submissions that integrate methods and straddle disciplines; it has facilitated rapid and focused publication, for example, with the formats of RESEARCH REPORTs and LETTERs that attract much reduced and no author charges, respectively; and it has granted the journal a flexibility that opens the doors to new developments. Among the latter, both ecophysiology and synthetic biology are growing concerns that have found a home with the journal over the past decade and will no doubt grow further over the next.I am equally proud of the manner in which the scope of Plant Physiology have built an environment that serves the plant sciences with a publication of the highest standards while nurturing and supporting authors, both those who aspire to publish with the journal and those who do. It has been a great pleasure for me to contribute in this construct. Looking forward now, the immediate tasks ahead will be in establishing with the new partner of the Society, Oxford University Press, a seamless operation that fosters and enhances the standards of Plant Physiology while ensuring this legacy of support for the research community and for authors. These are tasks that I am certain the incoming Editor-in-Chief Yunde Zhao is ready to take on, and I wish him the very best of success as the journal enters its second century.Most of all, I take pride in the way that the Society and


The first edition of Anais Brasileiros de Dermatologia (ABD) was published in 1925. Uninterruptedly, it has maintained its trajectory of scientific dissemination.Always aiming to increase the quality of the journal, we sought innovation that stimulates our main vocation. Thus, the Tropical/Infectoparasitary Dermatology section was created. The other, more established areas of dermatology also deserved attention. Following the global trend, the sections “Research Letters” and “Case Letters” were created. Some sections were removed.Seeking international recognition of ABD, the current editors and the Board of the Brazilian Society of Dermatology (SBD), during Dr. José Antônio Sanches’ administration (2017/2018), decided that the journal would be edited by an international company. After careful assessment, Elsevier was chosen. With this partnership, we gained access to Ahead of Print and Science Direct. This meant the immediate publication of articles, soon after being approved by the editors.A year ago, ABD reached the same level of visibility as the main international dermatological journals.These changes allowed the increase in IF and in the journal's visibility. Currently, the number of international articles submitted to ABD is greater than that of national articles.However, to attract national and international research articles, further advancements are needed. Research related to doctoral theses, cutting-edge research, and other relevant investigations do not reach ABD. Rather, they are submitted to journals with higher scores. We were Qualis B3 and now we are Qualis B2.For ABD to grow and reach new accomplishments, the participation of the national dermatological community is paramount. We are over 10,000 dermatologists and we deserve respect in the international dermatological community.It is important to emphasize that everything that was accomplished during this period was only possible with the participation of many collaborators and the support of the executive boards.We thank the members of the SBD Deliberative Council who, in 2015, entrusted us with the direction of the ABD for the 2016-2020 period.Since the beginning of our activities in 2016, we have had the unconditional support of all SBD departments. On behalf of Presidents José Sanches and Sérgio Palma, we would like to thank all colleagues on these boards.In this task, the collaboration of countless reviewers of articles already published or awaiting publication was essential. It is impossible to name all of them. They have been and will be fundamental pieces for the credibility of ABD.We would like to thank our operational base: Priscila Rudge, Vanessa Zampier, Nazareno Souza, Bruno Souza, Laryssa Novato. We also would like to thank all employees at SBD headquarters.None declared.Sinésio Talhari: Elaboration and writing of the manuscript; critical review of the manuscript.Bernardo Gontijo: Elaboration and writing of the manuscript; critical review of the manuscript.Everton Carlos Siviero do Vale: Elaboration and writing of the manuscript; critical review of the manuscript.Silvio Alencar Marques: Elaboration and writing of the manuscript; critical review of the manuscript.None declared.


Open Biology is 10 years old and we have much to celebrate. Open Biology launched as the Royal Society's first fully online, open access journal dedicated to cell and molecular biology. The underlying principle of Open Biology is to enable discoveries to be quickly and easily disseminated through the community, and in this vein in the first 10 years of the journal we have introduced format-free submission, mandated open peer review where the reviews and author responses are published with the paper, and established our enthusiastic Preprint Team under the guidance of Prof. Michael Ginger. Credit for most of this success is due to the guiding hand of David Glover, our founding editor, and the team at Royal Society Publishing. Open Biology as a highly visible place to publish original research. Our most cited article on PINK1 phosphorylation of Parkin from Miratul Muqit in 2012 has been cited 679 times, and the journal Impact Factor is now 6.41 . Open Biology has also built a reputation for authoritative reviews. Of particular note are our commemorative articles on Antony van Leeuwenhoek and on Centrosome Biology, and our special feature on Protein Fatty Acylation. Our next special feature will be on ‘Advances in Quantitative Bioimaging' and will be edited by Ricardo Henriques, Aubrey Weigel, Christoph Leterrier and Ilaria Testa. I for one am greatly looking forward to catching up with this exciting and rapidly moving area of science.Our first decade established Opening Up section to research papers as a place to speculate and set out your ideas in broader context, and we are delighted to see that other journals are following our lead. Our Open Questions articles focus on important unanswered questions or identify neglected but important areas of study, and we have just introduced a Short Communication article format to provide a format to draw attention to new and challenging ideas. We will soon introduce tools for readers to comment upon articles on-line, and we are planning a series of moderated on-line discussions to debate major topics and issues in contemporary research. I encourage you to let us know of any subjects that you would like to see critically examined and debated.We intend to build upon our success to continue our quest to make publishing your research less frustrating and more constructive, but we also aim to bring back the excitement of the free exchange of ideas. To this end, we introduced our Open Biology begins its second decade, as befits a journal guided by active scientists, we are well on the way to making it the natural home for exciting, innovative science, for challenging ideas, and for robust but informed debate.Thus, as


Researchers in cognitive development and developmental science more broadly are encouraged to bring our science into the “messiness of the real world”  and across informal and formal educational settings . Several of the articles in this collection point to how opportunities to reflect on informal experiences can reveal learning, and that chances to tell stories and recount experiences can be important in the process of bridging across learning experiences. Indeed, a critical factor in successful learning and transfer is whether the knowledge that is gained in one setting can be represented or re-represented so that it can be accessed in another context over time (e.g., Bransford and Schwartz, TP wrote an initial draft of the editorial which was then edited by all authors. The topic was initiated by TP. TP invited JB and CH to join as co-editors. All authors contributed equally to the proposal of the Research Topic, managed submissions in consultation with each other, and contributed equally to the writing of this editorial.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.