Advances in Respiratory Medicine (ARM) is the journal of the Polish Respiratory Society. As with the Society itself, it grew out of phthisiatry. The first issue of the journal was published in 1909 under the Polish title Gruźlica (Tuberculosis). Interestingly, the Society itself was founded much later, in 1934, as Polskie Towarzystwo Badań Naukowych nad Gruźlicą (the Polish Society for Scientific Research on Tuberculosis). Therefore, tuberculosis is at the root of contemporary pulmonology, and probably not only in Poland. Why? At that time, tuberculosis was one of the most important diseases. In 1909, tuberculosis was still the leading cause of death in the US (it was replaced shortly thereafter by heart disease). (1) In Poland, tuberculosis was the most important cause of death for much longer, until the 1950s, which was partly a result of the enormous destruction and poverty caused by World War II. (2) The name of the journal and the society therefore corresponded to the main medical problem of the time. Over time, both the journal and the Society were renamed, gradually losing their nomenclature to tuberculosis. In 1976, the journal changed its name to Pneumonologia Polska (Polish Pneumonology), but a similar movement on the side of the Society took place much later, because it was not until 2006 that the Society lost tuberculosis in its name, changing its name to Polskie Towarzystwo Chorób Płuc—PTChP (the Polish Respiratory Society—PRS).For many years, the journal published articles in Polish, written by Polish authors for Polish phthisiatrists, and then pulmonologists. In addition, the journal published a mixed set of articles to combine two functions: a research journal  and an educational journal (mainly review articles and case reports). About 15 years ago, the journal began to change. The changes resulted from several factors. The first was the organizational change of the Society itself. Not only has the name changed, but the entire structure of the organization has changed. At the same time, Poland was changing rapidly. Gradually, new requirements regarding the quality of scientific achievements emerged, which forced the necessity to start changes to the journals. Additionally, the expectations of the Society’s members changed. Those of us who worked in scientific institutions expected, above all, articles of high scientific quality, with an obvious necessity to publish in English. This, however, did not satisfy the majority of the Society’s members, working only as medical practitioners, who, in turn, expected further articles in Polish, preferably of a purely educational nature. As a consequence, 10 years ago, PTChP (PRS) began the process to publish two different journals, the previous one, which changed their name to the English-language one—Advances in Respiratory Medicine, and a new educational journal with the old name Pneumonologia Polska. For the last 8 years, one publisher and one editorial team have served the two journals above. ARM has undergone a number of changes in the last few years, as a result of which, all articles are published only in English and online; the vast majority of articles come from abroad; and the journal is indexed in scientific databases .The latest changes in the journal began last year with the decision of the previous ARM editorial board to focus their efforts only on the educational journal—Pneumonologia Polska. The PTChP (PRS) board appointed a new editorial board of the journal, and the function of the Editor-in-Chief was taken over by the undersigned. The new editorial team started to work on 1 October 2021. What problems did we encounter? First of all, the journal, despite 15 years of attempts, was not able to enter the list of journals with an Impact Factor. Secondly—for Polish authors, the journal has ceased to be attractive as a result of science reforms in Poland in recent years, which resulted in an almost complete lack of original articles from Poland. Thirdly, a very large number of articles from abroad was sent to the ARM, but their quality was low. Fourth, there was a growing problem with the reviewers, as foreign authors mostly refused to review, so this obligation fell on the vast majority of Polish pulmonologists. Fifthly, the time from submitting the article to its publication was becoming longer and longer, which was partly a result of the problem with the reviewers. These are just a few of the many problems we found. We started a series of activities, the most important of which was the search for a new publisher who would help us achieve the most important goal, namely a quick increase in the scientific quality of the published articles, so that it would become realistic to obtain an Impact Factor for the journal. After many months of negotiations, PTChP (PRS) signed a contract for the publishing of ARM by MDPI—an international publishing company, a leader in publishing open access scientific articles. As of 1 July 2022, ARM is issued by MDPI.Our goal for the next 5 years is to quickly improve the scientific quality of the published articles so that it becomes realistic to achieve an Impact Factor at the end of this period. To make it possible, we will look for the best possible authors writing the best scientific papers. Thanks to the cooperation with MDPI, many of our problems are already improving. Let me give two examples: better access to a larger group of foreign reviewers and significantly shortening the time from submitting an article to ARM to its final approval. We plan to look for new ARM editors from among active authors and reviewers. I firmly believe that a new and brilliant period in the history of the journal has begun.


Most of the literature on conflict of interest (COI) has not focused on the role of academic editors and their possible COIs, although academic editors often hold senior faculty positions at universities, which might be considered a COI if this influences towards a more favourable processing to articles submitted by institutional colleagues. The current study aims to assess whether academic editor affiliation, a potential COI, can influence academic institution ranking as top contributor in the biomedical field.We conducted a cross-sectional analysis extracting publicly available data from the 2019 Clarivate InCites Journal Citation Reports for journals in the “Medicine, General & Internal” category and from each journal website. We constructed the following study outcomes: i) being a top 5 academic contributor for the peer-review journal of interest (yes/no), ii) being a top 10 academic contributor for the peer-review journal of interest (yes/no), and iii) ranking position as top 50 academic contributor for the peer-review journal of interest. Mixed-effect linear and logistic regression models were employed, as appropriate.We included 114 journals in our analysis, 49% were open-access only. Sharing same affiliation of any of the editorial board members was associated with a 6.7 and 5.6 greater likelihood of being top 5 and top 10 contributors, respectively (95%CI 5.07-8.73 and 4.34-7.22). Similarly, sharing same affiliation was associated with being 12.1 places higher as top contributor (95%CI 10.35-13.81). When considering the editor in chief affiliation solely, association was even stronger.We found that academic editors sharing the same institutional affiliation with authors was strongly associated with the likelihood of that institution of being a top contributor. Shared institutional affiliations between editors and authors should be clearly stated as part of an open and transparent peer-review process.• Editors sharing same affiliation with authors was strongly associated with the likelihood for the institution the editor was affiliated with of being top contributor for academic medical journals.• Shared institutional affiliations between editors and authors should be clearly stated as part of an open and transparent peer-review process.


In this paper, we analyze the role of science and technology studies(STS) journal editors in organizing and maintaining the peer revieweconomy. We specifically conceptualize peer review as a gift economyrunning on perpetually renewed experiences of mutual indebtednessamong members of an intellectual community. While the peer reviewsystem is conventionally presented as self-regulating, we drawattention to its vulnerabilities and to the essential curatingfunction of editors. Aside from inherent complexities, there arevarious shifts in the broader political–economic and sociotechnicalorganization of scholarly publishing that have recently made it moredifficult for editors to organize robust cycles of gift exchange. Thisincludes the increasing importance of journal metrics and associatedchanges in authorship practices; the growth and differentiation of theSTS journal landscape; and changes in publishing funding models andthe structure of the publishing market through which interactionsamong authors, editors, and reviewers are reconfigured. To maintain afunctioning peer review economy in the face of numerous pressures,editors must balance contradictory imperatives: the need to triageintellectual production and rely on established cycles of giftexchange for efficiency, and the need to expand cycles of giftexchange to ensure the sustainability and diversity of the peer revieweconomy. Journal peer review is a mechanism for constituting and legitimating thepublishability of scholarly manuscripts. It is also increasingly framed as aproblem of supply and demand of review labor in an academic environment thatincentivizes authorship over other kinds of scholarly work, especiallyactivities that are not made visible through any formal accounting . The anaAttending to the complexities of editorial work in the organization of peerreview is particularly topical because the broader conditions under whichpeer review is conducted are in transition. A pertinent long-term trend is,first, the growing importance of metrics like the journal impact factor(JIF) and associated authorship practices aimed at maximizing publicationoutput in high-impact journals . CitatioThe empirical basis of our analysis is a set of 76 semi-structured interviewswith informants from the STS publishing world, speaking from different actorpositions: as authors, reviewers, editors in various functions, andpublishers. Informants are associated with a range of STS journals,including general and specialist outlets. The scope of the material allowsus to compare editorial strategies in dealing with pressures on the peerreview system, thereby providing input for ongoing discussions about thetimeliness and problems of editorship in STS journal publishing.Peer review has most commonly been studied in terms of its effectiveness inevaluating or falsifying scientific claims. Such literature is oftenproduced by scientific practitioners with a personal interest in addressingshortcomings of peer review; for example, failure to detect misconduct orbias .Rather Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from1865 onward. And Despite these efforts, the political–economic organization of peer reviewremains understudied, both in regard to the labor it draws on and in termsof how scholarly publishing as a business mediates its epistemic workings. Afew noteworthy exceptions deserve mention. The classic study by In this paper, we build on this literature by focusing on the work done byeditors in organizing and curating the peer review economy. Peer review is aquintessential form of “invisible labor” that is often presupposed, butwhose actual organization is not usually analyzed. A common notion amongacademics is that peer review is the collective responsibility of members ofan intellectual community, fueled by the exchange of favors amongindividuals who rely on each other’s unpaid work to pursue shared goals. Inshort, an economy based on gift exchange as theorized in the influentialwriting of The idea that scientific work is based on gift-giving has a tradition in thesociology of science . BuildinIn our view, it is questionable whether the circulation of publications atlarge could ever be usefully understood as a gift economy, given that theconvertibility of publications into reputation, employment, and fundingopportunities connects publishing rather closely to a logic of accumulation. We arguEver since the widespread adoption of journal peer review in the mid 20thcentury, it has been a common expectation among members of intellectualcommunities that previously published authors repay their debt for the labora journal has invested in their manuscripts by acting as reviewers forothers . As clasA crucial implicit assumption in popular accounts of the review gift economy isthat it is based on a stable community, meaning, first, that the populationof researchers submitting manuscripts to a journal neatly coincides with itsreadership and, second, that individual researchers constantly cycle throughthe different roles—author, reviewer, and sometimes editorial team member.These two preconditions ensure that obligations are experienced fromdifferent perspectives and thus are more likely to be upheld .theproduct of this curatorial work rather than its stablesubstrate.In our analysis, we draw on these insights as starting points for analyzingpeer review as a gift economy. Feelings of mutual obligation clearly are keyconstituent elements of a field, perhaps equally important as sharedconceptual frameworks and research methods. Yet, if taken too literally, thenotion of peer review as a gift economy tends to simplify this economy tothe point where it appears as a self-regulating system that is fueled byshared norms and inherent dynamics of reciprocity. Both functionalists likeHagstrom and certain techno-utopian accounts of scholarly publishing cf. have a tCharacteristically, from the perspective of authors, many functions fulfilledby editors are ill-understood and even interpreted as arbitrary. And whileinevitably involving subjective judgment, editorial work becomesanalytically more tangible if we acknowledge that all the crucialintellectual decisions it entails have a political–economic dimension aswell.The editorial process starts with the initial screening of manuscripts.Screening serves to assess whether a manuscript is sufficiently developedand an epistemic fit for the outlook of a journal. Simultaneously, it iscrucial to keep in check the sheer number of manuscripts the journal has toactively handle at any given time. This part of editorial work remainsinvisible to authors unless they receive a desk-rejection.As a next step in the process, editorial work entails selecting and invitingsuitable researchers to review a manuscript. It is in fact common forauthors to complain about being mismatched with reviewers ; for exaFinally, editors must report review outcomes to authors and decide whetherfurther investment of journal resources is warranted. This entails a processof commensurating review reports ;that isThe job profile of editors is thus more complex than implied by functionalistand popular views of the academic journal publishing system cf. . It requThe peer review gift economy is in fact embedded in various other economies,for which it helps provide the material infrastructure. First, the economyaround scholarly reputation, employment, and research evaluation, wherepublications are a form of capital . Second,We also suggest that the relationships between gift-giving in peer review andits encompassing economies were relatively stable throughout the second halfof the 20th century, thus allowing researchers to get used to the dynamicsemerging from their intertwinement. However, these relationships are beingreconfigured due to various ongoing, momentous, shifts.First, historically, the growing importance of indicators like the JIF combinedwith increased competition for academic employment encourages researchers inthe publishing ecosystem to more explicitly think like investors . AlthougMoreover, the constitutive feelings of obligation that underpin the revieweconomy are likely affected by the growth and differentiation of theintellectual production of STS as a field . In smalAnother pertinent development is the changing commercial and research fundingmodels that underpin scholarly journal publishing in STS. For a long time,there was an unquestioned commercial structure based on subscription bundlespaid by libraries , which aIn the following section, we briefly describe the methods we relied on tocollect and analyze interview data on the strategies STS journal editorspursue to organize and maintain a peer review gift economy in the face ofsuch diverse pressures. The subsequent empirical analysis outlines thesestrategies in significant detail, with our narrative being structuredaccording to the main steps of the editorial process: screening manuscripts,assigning reviewers, drawing together review reports, and making decisionsabout acceptance.This study draws on semi-structured interviews with 74 STS scholars and tworepresentatives of commercial publishers. Based in different geographicalregions , all acaOur academic informants are associated with 10 STS journals, which represent asample of both well-established and more recently founded journals, as wellas outlets with a specific thematic or geographical focus . ForeacWe conducted the interviews between November 2019 and June 2020. Focused onpractices of writing, editing, and reviewing scholarly literature, theyranged between 45 and 120 minutes and were transcribed in full. We analyzedthe transcripts using the Nvivo qualitative data analysis software package(Release 1.0). More specifically, we coded the material according toiteratively refined categories that focus on diverse aspects of editorialwork and the peer review process, for example, “becoming an editor,”“recruiting reviewers,” and “role of metrics.”Social Studies of Science andScience, Technology, & Human Values. Yetseveral of our respondents referred to a perception of there not beingenough journals for STS scholarship, and the existing journals notproviding enough room for more specific debates. A number ofrelatively recent journals, in fact, position themselves in explicitcontradistinction or complementarity to the established journals; forexample, Valuation Studies,Catalyst, or Engaging Science, Technology andSociety. Another important element in shaping theprofile of a journal in recent years is the inclusion in the Web ofScience and assignment of a JIF. High JIFs have a significant effecton submissions, with the most visible journals witnessing a doublingor even tripling of submissions in recent years. At least some ofthese submissions are likely at the direct expense of non-indexedjournals. The emergence of such contingent journal profiles isrelevant to our analysis because it heavily configures theresponsibilities of their editors.Journals do not exist in isolation but position themselves vis-à-visco-existing and partly competing publishing outlets. Within the field,two of the oldest STS journals are widely considered particularlyimportant: [T]he number of submissions to [the journal] increasessteadily, not fast but steadily every year. (…) That[current figure is] about 50% more than we were receivingwhen I started as [editor] [several] years ago (…) so wehave been aiming for a higher desk-reject rate but that isnot exactly related to the movement of the field. (…) Ihave been wanting to have in play at any one time, acertain number of manuscripts, because otherwise it getsoverwhelming for me and the editorial team. But it alsobecomes challenging to find reviewers.To understand the high ratio of desk rejections in themost coveted journals—often around 50 percent —onemust appreciate that reviews are rarely one-off activities. Rather, afirst round of reviews often induces a longer process of re-reviewing,with unclear outcome. Sending out a manuscript for review thusconstitutes a significant commitment of resources and time.A major challenge for editors with highly ranked journals, which areoften disciplinary “core” journals, is to manage the correspondingincrease in editorial and review labor through thorough initialscreening and desk rejections of manuscripts. As one informant explained:So, what we try to do is protect all of our reviewer poolfrom reading lousy papers. (…) [A colleague of mine] (…)stopped reviewing for one journal because they felt thatthey were always being asked to take out the trash. Theywould send them just lousy papers and it would be, like,their responsibility to give them a justification forturning it down. And so while I am a little concernedabout making that decision so far upstream, thealternative is that the reviewer pool will dwindle.Another informant  noted that, as aresult, “papers that are either less well developed or more [out onthe] margins of STS [may] not [be] getting the chance to get feedbackfrom reviewers, essentially.” This points to a paradox in a field likeSTS, which sits at the margins of many disciplines. As submissionsincrease, for whatever reason, editors seek to organize and manage afragile peer review gift economy at the risk of a retrenchment ofdisciplinary boundaries. It is, then, important to consider in moredetail the criteria editors apply in screening manuscripts.Screening simultaneously serves an affective function in managing variousrelationships. On one hand, editorial screening must demonstrablyhonor the effort of the author even in the case of desk rejections.These should be justified, however briefly and without unnecessaryharshness, because authors are always potential reviewers. Manyeditors therefore make sure to carefully reread desk rejection lettersbefore sending them out to submitting authors. Screening is also acrucial practice for cultivating and maintaining a pool of committedreviewers. Reviewers may feel disrespected if they are assignedclearly underdeveloped or otherwise unsuitable manuscripts. The resultmay be careless or overly critical review reports, as well as alikelihood that the reviewer will think twice before accepting anotherreview assignment in the future. One informant put it in particularly drastic terms:Big Data & Society, maybe Ican submit to Social Media + Society (…)that’s not a great way of going about writing quality worknecessarily, but it’s an option for people who want toquickly publish papers. (Author and reviewer #40)[T]here are more places you can submit to, so it almost kindof lowers the stakes of getting a rejection. And if I getone from Digitalization of publishing further limits personalinteraction, for example, by making it optional for authors to includea letter justifying the rationale for submission. At the same time,authors sometimes actively evoke personal obligation in the submissionprocess. Some editors reported that some authors bypass the onlinesubmission platform by sending a personal email with a manuscript inthe attachment. This is partly done to check whether an article issuitable, but partly also in the hope that personal interaction willincrease the chances of surviving editorial screening .A first criterion could be described as an attempt to discern theintentions and sincerity of the submitting authors. Some submissionsare preceded by a long-standing history of previous exchanges andpersonal acquaintance between authors and editors. However, anincreasingly common situation is that submitting authors have littleapparent prior knowledge of STS, sometimes picking a journalspecifically because of its high JIF. Yet another possibility is thatauthors submit to a journal primarily to get reviews and test thewaters but are not willing to revise the paper if it doesn’timmediately meet the approval of the referees. Many authors appear tooperate not with a specific journal in mind, but with a hierarchicallist of journals that they “slide down” until they get accepted,thereby minimizing waste in their production of articles. One of ourinformants suggested that the growth of the journal landscape combinedwith career uncertainties especially for younger scholars facilitatessuch a productivity-oriented approach:Trying to stitch together the fabric of our field, and notlet each year be something completely different. The nextnew habit. So I talked about this being double gated. Soone side of the gate is like the new stock, trying to finda way to let in the new stock. Even if maybe the reviewsare not that strong. And the other is to try and avoidbecoming captives to one or another perspective, for lackof a better word.The transactional character becomes particularly clear incases where editors feel that authors make opportunistic use of STS references.Another boundary that I end up drawing is (…) when I getpapers from adjacent disciplines that are drawing on theSTS literature, but (…) in a way that really speaks totheir own home discipline and doesn’t speak to STS…I’llsee a lot of papers where it’s, like, people discoveringactor-network theory or, kind of, the power of materiality(…) but when it comes to our journal it doesn’t reallyadvance the conversation within STS because people aregoing to look at that and be like, “hell yes, materialitymatters.” The funneling of manuscripts toward highly visiblejournals also directly affects screening practices in less establishedoutlets. Fewer submissions and less visibility across academiccommunities generally reduce the need for screening manuscriptsupfront, sometimes limiting it to a very basic check of adherence toformal guidelines. Also, there is more room for “working with theauthor.” The editor of a more recently established journal emphasizedtheir willingness to provide a sounding board for researchers who donot have access to informed feedback from colleagues at their homeinstitutions . At first sight an altruisticgesture, such extra effort also constitutes a special form ofexpectation toward the submitting author, namely that their submissioncan thereby be turned into a particularly robust contribution thatwill help consolidate the status of the journal.Editorial screening is of course also informed by more specific epistemiccriteria, which are fraught with questions of indebtedness andreciprocity in their own right, albeit in ways that are more akin totrading than gift-giving. Especially editors of general journalsexpressed a sense of obligation to acknowledge and represent theintellectual traditions of STS, while ensuring enough room forsubmissions that innovate in terms of analytical frameworks, criticaloutlook, or research topics. This “essential tension”  between Catalyst,which is meant to provide an outlet that is theoretically andpolitically sympathetic to explicitly feminist STS scholarship. Thedecision to submit a manuscript is often preceded by informalcommunication through which authors exchange their views “about whatjournals are supportively run and what journals are unsupportivelyrun” . As a result, the journal does not attractmany submissions by authors who are not already familiar with relevantdebates. A more focused journal profile thus makes it easier foreditors to organize and manage the peer review gift economy.Differentiation of the journal landscape can also promote a form ofselective obligation on the part of authors. Some journalsintentionally abstain from seeking indexation in the Web of Science,either to avoid the various concessions required as part of theindexation process, or as part of a political choice not toparticipate in what one informant called the “impact factor machine”. Such positioning amounts to a powerfulself-selection criterion for authors, thus creating and consolidatingcommunities that define themselves by opposition to intellectualmainstreams. An example is the journal And then it turned out that the…desk editor was reallyoverwhelmed and bombarded with publications and at somepoint just reached out and said, “Look, I need someone todo screening for me. Like I basically just have too manysubmissions. Would you like to be a screener?” So not sortof an official editor, but working in that role of going,“Here’s a pile of papers, go through them. Tell themwhether they are worth my while to even look at and thenexclude the ones that don’t.”One journal covered in our sample operated with aconsistently collective approach to editorship at the time of ourinterviews, meaning that all editorial decisions including screeningand final acceptance are made by a group rather than individuals,either via email or in virtual meetings. An informant  emphasized the connection between the collective editorship modeland the intellectual profile of the journal. The political content ofthe submissions, they argued, requires a distributed and particularlytransparent process.[T]he move in the field to want to matter to politicsrequires modes of publication that can handle the ethicalcharge of those works (…) there’s you know, been seriousproblems with the model of the lead editor, a single leadeditor who then works with a managing editor who’ssubordinate to them.Such distribution of responsibilities of course is highlylabor intensive and thus directly undermines the economizing functionof screening. However, the increased workload is partly offset by thetightly knit structure of this particular epistemic subcommunity andby a consequently much smaller number of potentially unsuitablesubmissions.The subjective judgment inherent in screening manuscripts raises thequestion of how responsibility for this important editorial task isdistributed. Several informants indicated that they aim to avoidconcentrating too much authority in a single individual  and that screening should ideally be carried out by twoor more members of the editorial team . Feasibility in practice naturally depends onthe sheer volume of submissions. Interestingly, and in contrast to theview that screening is inevitably a gate-keeping mechanism favoringestablished academics, some journals also entrust it wholly to juniorresearchers. One informant  recounted how ajournal editor recruited them as a screener early in their career:Many editors approach inviting reviewers as a challenge of intellectualmatch-making; that is, identifying “people who (…) [the author(s)]really should be in further conversation with, so that they canactually get a paper that contributes more specifically to STS”. In principle, there is a common recognitionamong our informants that acting as a reviewer is a responsibility tothe community and that peer review should ideally be a form ofintellectual co-creation. Lack of institutional recognition for reviewwork, however, has historically provided a powerful incentive againstdoing too much of it. We found that editors engage in diverse forms ofwork not only to cultivate a sufficient pool of available reviewersbut to ensure that these reviewers perform their task under the rightemotional, social, and epistemic conditions. If these are not activelycreated, review assignments—if they are accepted at all—risk degradingfrom constructive feedback to mere gate-keeping.We have already mentioned one activity to achieve such favorableconditions, namely thorough screening of manuscripts, which is partlya gesture of respect toward reviewers. Aside from this, the challengesfor editors in constituting a peer review gift economy significantlydiffer across journals; prestigious journals generally find it easierto recruit reviewers because of their visibility, while newer and lesswell-known journals cannot count on the journal’s prominence toattract referees. Statements by our informants, as well as recentresearch on publishing practices in other fields , suggestSmaller and less well-known outlets often have to rely on alternativestrategies to ensure the supply of review labor. One informant associated with a more recently founded journalexplained how their involvement in the STS community over many yearshas resulted in the accumulation of a large number of favors owed tothem personally by others. They try to convert these favors intoreviewers. In other words, personal relations among a senior scholarand their colleagues are mobilized to create a reviewer pool fromscratch.But even editors of more prestigious journals spoke about the importanceof reviewers being committed to the field/journal, which emphasizesthat reviewers are not “fungible”—that is, some will write more usefuland constructive reports than others. A number of editors alsosuggested that particularly established and well-known scholars aregenerally not as likely to accept review invitations as one would hope. This may of course be due to the fact thatsuch individuals get a disproportionate number of requests to beginwith. In response to such difficulties, many journals have expandedtheir editorial or advisory boards in recent years, in the hope thatthis will make the members more likely to take on handling ofsubmissions and review requests.Social Studies of Science used to aim forno fewer than five reviewers per submission up until the 1990s (author& reviewer #16). This commonly resulted in very contradictoryreports and the consequent need for the editor to take a side—often atthe risk of appearing biased in favor of certain approaches.The challenge of ensuring review labor is further complicated by thegrowing need for this labor to be suitably diverse in epistemic terms.To be sure, STS was already quite diverse in the 1980s, comprisingsuch normatively opposed traditions as Mertonian sociology of science,SSK, Marxist critique of science, and actor-network theory. However,there were overall fewer active STS scholars and scholarlycommunication took place in a small range of journals. As a result ofthis coincidence between community and communication channels,scholarly debates were more generalist in orientation. Differentconceptual traditions competed in providing mutually incompatibleanswers to a relatively limited set of questions: for example, isformal scientific discourse a faithful depiction of the underlyingwork, or is it a selective and self-serving representation? In such acontext, the challenge for editors lay not so much in recruitingenough reviewers, but rather in adjudicating between them. Toillustrate, And there may be just a handful of people that are reallyworking on that specific thing from that specific angle,with those specific data gathering and analyticaltechniques, that when you go to find a reviewer, it’seither, well, “I don’t have the expertise for that,” or,(…) “I know who the author is, so I’ve already read thepaper.” And (…) that suggests to me that the readingpractices are getting narrower and narrower. Editors must of course walk a fine line between suitableepistemic fit and avoiding cronyism . While this particular journal isaffiliated with a major publishing company, the editorial teamintentionally abstains from using the automated communicationfunctionality, instead aiming for “boutique interaction” withreviewers. Personalized correspondence is not just a matter ofpoliteness and negotiating review deadlines, it is also crucial forgetting feedback on reviewer competences. By contrast, commerciallyoperated reviewer databases draw on keywords previously submittingauthors have assigned to themselves to describe their expertise.Reviewers here are sourced from across the entire journal portfolio ofthe respective publisher according to a platform logic, thus makingkeywords lose any community-specific connotations. The actualepistemic fit becomes hard to assess even if keywords appear suitablefor a submission, not to mention the difficulty of gauging thecommitment of a potential reviewer to a given journal.Tapuya and East AsianScience, Technology and Society. Some journals alsohave begun to adopt a dedicated policy for submissions from outsidethe Global North, where authors are paired with at least one reviewerfrom the same geographical region . Rather thansimply a selection mechanism, the epistemic exchanges induced throughpeer review here serve as a vector to change regional researchlandscapes.The notion of a good fit in assigning reviewers to manuscripts has inrecent years been further complicated by considerations ofrepresentation. We have already emphasized that submissions especiallyto highly visible journals over the last 15 years have vastlyincreased. But while there are now overall more authors gettingpublished, these are disproportionately from North American andEuropean countries that historically dominate STS. Areas that do notyet have strong institutional capacities, or that have developedcapacities in different languages and thus different publishingmarkets, are at risk of becoming even more marginalized in comparison.In reaction to this trend, a variety of journals with an intentionallygeographical focus have been founded in the course of the lastdecades; for example, Finally, a relatively recent challenge for editors is managingsubmissions in relation to turnaround time. Before digital journalmanagement systems became widely used, correspondence among editorsand reviewers was based on email and letters. Editors generally triedto keep an eye on review times and sent reminders to reviewers butoften without systematic tracking . This created the possibility for manuscripts to “getlost” (author and reviewer #52). Journal management software nowadayskeeps track of timelines and sends automated reminders to reviewers.As a general rule, many journals encourage reviewers to submit theirreports within four weeks, although average review times are likelymore in the area of six to eight weeks .Several commercial publishers, moreover, track and advertise averageturnaround time on journal websites in the hope of encouraging moresubmissions. At the same time, our interviews—although not designed toinvestigate this issue systematically—do not suggest very significantdifferences in average review times across journals. This makes senseinsofar as different journals face distinct but ultimately equallypronounced challenges. Very prestigious journals find it easier torecruit reviewers but also attract more submissions. Lesswell-established journals have fewer submissions to process but oftenhave a harder time recruiting reviewers and less bargaining power innegotiating review deadlines.A completed set of reviews is often considered a second potential cut-offpoint after the initial screening, where editorial teams have to gaugehow much work is still necessary to make a manuscript publishable andwhether further investment of editorial resources and time iswarranted. Such decision-making, however, is again imbued with effortsto organize and maintain community relations while containingcentrifugal forces.[I]f I’m writing to somebody because of a topic I don’tnecessarily have any sense whatsoever about how to readtheir reviews and what sorts of personal relationshipsthere are. So I had a manuscript—a review came in a fewweeks ago (…). It was a glowing, positive review. Sort ofover-the-top positive. I have no idea whether the revieweris best friends with the author. Another challenge arises when review reports are eitherpolarized or particularly lukewarm. While historically decliningnumbers of reviewers per submission makes the former scenario somewhatless frequent than in the past, it still occurs rather commonly. Insuch cases, editors can make suggestions to the author for how to dealwith the reports. For example, should they rather follow thecontradictory comments of reviewer A or B? The exact level ofeditorial attention, however, is again constrained by their contingentworkload .A first type of difficulty has to do with the intricacies ofcommensurating review reports . For edi[Y]ou’ve got to make the call as to whether or not, withintwo rounds, the argument is basically going to get thereor not. That’s probably one of the biggest zones where Iend up exercising a lot of editorial judgement, (…)knowing the author, because I can see the author and I’mnot blinded to the author, maybe having interacted withthis author before, or maybe having, you know, seen thepath of the paper so far, do I think that this paper isactually going to get revised in time, essentially?At all times, editors have to maintain cordiality intheir communication with authors. This particularly goes forrejections, since authors may still be contacted with review requestsin the future. One informant reported that they commonly edit overlyharsh review reports before passing them on, but ideally in a way thatis respectful of the reviewer’s opinion .A further consideration in editorial decisions is what use authors arelikely to make of the review outcomes. In case of substantialrevisions, it is not straightforward that authors are willing tofundamentally rework their submission. Especially where a confirmationof acceptance is required for a tenure review or a job application,they may simply decide to resubmit to another journal. Editorscommonly take into account previous interactions with authors toassess the likelihood of such scenarios:Our material also suggests that attention to metrics and constraintsrelated to funding models of scholarly publishing condition editorialdecision-making practices at least to some extent. Several editorspointed out that upon applying for assignment of an impact factor fortheir journals, Clarivate Analytics initiated a review process but didnot provide much detail about its exact workings. Indexation doesappear to include desk research to assess whether a review process isin place as well as consideration of acceptance rates to gaugeselectivity. However, especially the latter criterion can be difficultto meet for new journals that have not yet received many submissionsin the first place. Looking back on a failed application forindexation, one informant  reflected that it wouldbe useful to adopt a stricter approach to interpreting review reportsand so increase the percentage of “revise and resubmit” decisions,which formally count as rejections for Clarivate. For more establishedjournals that already have an impact factor, metrics become an issueonly when they noticeably drop . All of theeditors we interviewed emphasized that acceptance decisions areunaffected by metrics, but they also reported that publishers doprovide them with unsolicited advice on how to increase impactfactors. One such piece of advice is to systematically treatmanuscripts submitted by particularly well-known authors as engines toincrease citation rates.Moreover, the OA funding model based on APCs is a general concern for editors .Many worry that this will undermine their efforts at organizing andmanaging community relations in the sense that especially youngerauthors and authors from non-Western countries may find themselveswithout access to the necessary resources. Some journals try tocounteract these dynamics by granting OA waivers to deserving authors.However, such corrective action is problematic, because it requireseditors to mobilize additional funds and because it intertwinesconsideration of economic and intellectual aspects in editorialdecisions.An analytically relevant, final part of the editorial process iscopy-editing. Use of a shared intellectual jargon is widely considereda crucial element of academic communities but is especially hard tomaster for younger and non-anglophone scholars. There are commercialediting services, but charges in the area of US$1,000 per article makethem prohibitive for many scholars. Journals affiliated with largecommercial publishers typically do have the possibility to outsourcethis labor to publisher staff. Since these typically have nofamiliarity with the jargon and conceptual traditions of the field,however, this can be ineffective. Editors therefore often take on thiswork themselves .The tensions arising within the peer review economy of STS journals in recentyears are reminiscent of accounts of gift economies that are graduallyreconfigured through commodification layered on top of them . In the On one hand, the growing competition for publications in a relatively smallnumber of journals forces editors to economize review attention throughvarious forms of triage, effectively making the ability to establish whollynew ties with submitting authors a finite resource. To the same extent,already established ties in the shape of personal acquaintance or previousinteraction come to play a particularly important role; for example, infinding suitable reviewers but also in gauging whether authors can beexpected to rework submissions to meet the expectations of journals. Ouranalysis suggests that leveraging personal ties in the review gift economy,while traditionally associated with bias and cronyism , is to sAt the same time, however, editors across journals are acutely aware of theneed to expand traditional cycles of gift exchange and avoid overreliance onexisting ties. This is not only a requirement to foster novel forms ofknowledge but also to ensure the long-term sustainability of the peer reviewgift economy as well as its intellectual and geographical diversity.Paradoxically, then, editors need to temper the very forms of social andepistemic boundary drawing on which their curatorial strategies otherwiserely, albeit at the risk of wasting precious journal resources. Openness ineditorial work after all means the possibility of disappointment; forexample, when investment of attention and labor in a submission are notreciprocated or exploited, or when the very novelty of manuscripts requiresa particularly significant investment before reciprocal action can berealized.What alternative strategies for organizing and managing a scholarly gifteconomy can be imagined that are not based on differentiation and selectionand thus on perpetuating the decollectivizing tendencies implied by academiccareer structures and publishing business models? We offer two startingpoints in what should ideally become a wider debate among STS scholars.A first concrete opportunity is to fundamentally rethink notions of epistemicfit in reviewer match-making. Currently, it is common sense to aim forpairing specialized submissions with equally specialized reviewers. Butwhile this encourages sophisticated exchanges along shared lines of inquiry,the resulting differentiation of the communal discourse undermines theestablishment of further cycles of gift exchange. Editors couldalternatively think about matching authors and reviewers with complementaryor simply unrelated specializations to foster integration of new argumentsin a more widely accessible discourse.Social Epistemology Review and Reply Forum, whereauthors and reviewers for the eponymous journal are invited to have an openconversation after publication of an article based on their exchange duringthe review process. This not only connects writing of a review report to thepossibility of authoring a digital publication but also establishes newrelations of mutual indebtedness among scholars who are no longer separatedby anonymity.Second, we also propose community-led experimentation with new technologies forpeer review, albeit in ways other than the simplistic technological fixesoffered by commercial publication infrastructure. To be sure,infrastructural tools are useful to tackle well-defined issues likeplagiarism , but the


Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease  was established in 2016 [ in 2016 , being o“The definition of impact factor is the number of citations in the given year, for the articles published in that journal during the last two preceding years, divided by the total number of citable items, which were published in that journal in the previous two years.” An impact factor of this magnitude, in the medium or good category, for a first impact factor, is a credit to all the researchers supporting the MDPI open access platform and authors of general manuscripts and work specific for the various Special Issues of the journal. TMID now has one of the highest impact factors in the field of tropical medicine, ranking 6th out of 24 titles (Q1); the journal ranks 11th out of 39 titles (Q2) in the category of ‘Parasitology’, and 59th out of 94 titles (Q3) in the category of ‘Infectious Disease’. It is a wonderful achievement for MDPI and the TMID Managing Editor, Beryl Liu and Publishing Manager, Peter Roth, particularly in promoting informative Special Issues and developing an efficient review and publication cycle.Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases very attractive to authors and institutions, and the editorial staff can anticipate an increase in the number of manuscripts submitted. We hope it will also focus attention on The Australasian College of Tropical Medicine, and help it to advance its mission in the field of tropical medicine. Having an official impact factor will make


The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.Susan Sontag .In proposing this Research Topic, we were interested in hearing accounts from practitioners and scholars who are involved in studying the narratives associated with LGBTQ+ experiences across a range of educational, community and cultural domains. Research continues to suggest that queer young people experience higher rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm compared to their heterosexual peers  which may increase expectations of further rejection  in different contexts  orient and provide valuable insight into effective strategies for coping (or not) with professional/ personal obstacles and adversity and stigma. The authors, in narrating the pedagogy of the “abjected,” offer up another lens, a different worldview which is a significant critical presence of interruption in the contemporary performativity of heteropatriarchal and cis gender normativitites. Goodson and Gill  have notAll authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


Epilepsia Open wish to bid farewell to one of our most valued associate editors, trusted friends, and colleagues, Ettore Beghi, who passed away on October 10, 2022.It is with great sorrow that the editors of Epilepsia Open was founded. He had since been tirelessly working towards enriching and improving the quality of the content published in our journal, as associate editor, always offering his advice, encouragement, and precious ideas to raise the journal to a highly successful course. Ettore brought his unique expertise, knowledge, and interest in epidemiology, quickly attracting a large number of articles reporting on the epidemiology of seizures, epilepsies, or their comorbidities across the globe. He would always offer a gracious personal message to the authors of the manuscripts he handled. Until the very last time when he was able to participate in our editorial virtual meetings, Ettore was always active, smiling, collegial, and prolific with ideas.Ettore Beghi had been invited to our editorial board in 2016, when Istituto Mario Negri in Milan (1981), and served as a research fellow in the department of medical statistics and epidemiology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota (1982–1983). He had been the head of the laboratory of neurological disorders of the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri and a contract professor of neuroepidemiology at the University of Milan. His medical and research career was notable for seminal studies in the epidemiology of epilepsy but also extended to other neurological disorders, such as peripheral neuropathy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson's disease, headache, and strokes. He authored 642 manuscripts.Ettore Beghi was born in Milan, Italy, on August 15, 1947. He studied medicine (1972) and neurology (1976) in Milan, obtained a Master of pharmacologic sciences research at the Epilepsia Open and Epilepsia. Ettore was a coordinator of the European ALS registry and the Italian Epilepsy Study Group and a pioneer of multicenter neuroepidemiological studies in Italy. He was a valued teacher and mentor to many.Ettore Beghi's scientific and academic achievements have been recognized through the Ambassador for Epilepsy award of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE). He had served on numerous committees as a chair or member, including chairing the ILAE commission on the epidemiology of epilepsy and the neuroepidemiology section of the American Academy of Neurology. He had served on numerous editorial boards, including the editorial boards of Over the last 8 years, our journal had been fortunate to share his enthusiasm for epilepsy research and excellence, humanity, and dignity that was apparent in every interaction with Ettore. We are grateful to him and his family for sharing him with us, and we express our most heartfelt condolences to his wife Maria Lidia, his children Massimiliano, Emanuele, and Nadia, and his grandchildren. He will be missed, but his memory, contributions, and accomplishments will live on.


The eLife Early-Career Advisory Group discusses eLife’s new peer review and publishing model, and how the whole process of scientific communication could be improved for the benefit of early-career researchers and the entire scientific community. Scientific progress relies on the rapid communication of trustworthy results within the scientific community. However, the current system for communicating new scientific results is slow, inefficient, and biased . One conAnother problem is that many in the scientific community implicitly assume a strong correlation between the quality of a scientific article and the journal in which it was published. As a result, early-career researchers are encouraged to chase publications in certain journals  in order to be competitive when it comes to securing fellowships, grants and jobs . This viIn recent years preprint servers such as bioRxiv and medRxiv have had a major impact on publishing in the life sciences and medicine because they allow scientists to publish their work when they feel it is ready, rather than having to wait for it to go through peer review and be published in a journal; indeed, it is now common for scientists to post a manuscript as a preprint at the same time as they submit it to a journal .More recently various organizations have been leading efforts to promote the peer review of preprints. For example, OpenReview and PREreview are platforms that enable any scientist to review preprints, while Review Commons is an initiative led by EMBO that combines the public peer review of preprints with submission to a number of associated journals. In 2020, eLife announced that it would only review articles that were available as preprints , and it All scientists are under pressure to publish, but early-career researchers face additional pressures when it comes to publishing. In particular, they are mostly on fixed-term contracts, so they are often preparing for their next career step, which requires them to rapidly demonstrate their productivity in their present position, most importantly through their publishing track record. However, it can take many months – or even years – for an article to be published under the current system, which seriously disadvantages early-career researchers . While tJournal titles and impact factors should never be used as proxies for research quality when making decisions about fellowships, grants and jobs.We – as members of the eLife Early-Career Advisory Group – are strongly opposed to any form of research assessment that focuses on where a manuscript was published rather than on the merits of the research itself. We therefore believe that journal titles and impact factors should never be used as proxies for research quality when making decisions about fellowships, grants and jobs. We also deplore the emphasis on publishing in journals with high impact factors for two major reasons: first, journal impact factors only meaningfully evaluate journals, not individual manuscripts ; second,In this article, we discuss how the new eLife peer review and publishing model can affect the challenges that the current publishing system imposes on the scientific community in general, and on early-career researchers in particular. We also share our vision for the future of peer review and publishing in order to further increase efficiency, inclusion and equity, and to promote responsible behaviours in science.eLife recently announced that, from early 2023 onward, it would eliminate accept/reject decisions after peer review. Under this new model every manuscript that is sent for peer review will be published as a ‘reviewed preprint’ on the eLife website: this will include the preprint, public reviews by the eLife reviewers, and an eLife assessment written by the editor and reviewers . This asAs scientific manuscripts are rarely universally perfect or universally flawed, the eLife assessments and public reviews will better reflect the details and nuance of the peer review process – both of which are lost when the peer review process is reduced to a binary accept/reject decision. While the new eLife model is therefore more transparent to readers, it also benefits authors who are incentivised to further improve their work while maintaining control over their own research program. The model therefore represents an important step towards giving all stakeholders an equal voice in the peer review and publishing process, and provides an opportunity to make the dialogue between authors, editors, and reviewers more fair and inclusive.The new model will also allow negative results to be published, which will increase transparency in research and help protect early-career researchers and their mental health from the unpredictable nature of research as they seek to build a career . The eLiAs scientific manuscripts are rarely universally perfect or universally flawed, the eLife assessments and public reviews will better reflect the details and nuance of the peer review process.The new model marks a shift away from eLife as a journal publisher to eLife as an organization that peer-reviews preprints. In this model the author – rather than the editor and reviewers – decides when  to publish their reviewed preprint as a final Version of Record (in addition to deciding when to first publish the work as a preprint). Importantly, just as many funders have embraced preprints as evidence of scientific productivity, some are now also starting to embrace reviewed preprints. For example, EMBO now considers a first-author reviewed preprint as equivalent to a publication, which is one of the eligibility criteria for their postdoctoral fellowships .We believe that the new eLife model has the potential to make the scientific publishing system more just, equitable and inclusive. At present peer review by journals often disadvantages scientists, especially early-career researchers, from developing countries and other marginalised backgrounds . For insWhile we strongly support the new eLife model, we feel it retains some features of the current publishing system that remain problematic. First, the new model continues to rely on editorial triage, with a relatively small number of editors deciding which preprints are peer-reviewed and subsequently published as reviewed preprints by eLife. We therefore believe that eLife needs to establish mechanisms that will actively prevent any bias and inequity during this selection process. Decisions must be made in a way that is transparent and based on a clear set of rules in order to ensure that early-career researchers and minority scientists are not disadvantaged due to a lack of social networks or reputation.In this context, eLife needs to increase its efforts to diversify its board of Senior and Reviewing Editors, and to make greater use of early-career researchers as both reviewers and editors . We therWe are aware that many scientists, especially early-career researchers, are concerned that publicly receiving negative reviews and assessments for their preprints will somehow follow them through their careers and/or tarnish their reputation. However, the common vocabulary used in eLife assessments is intended to encourage editors and reviewers to provide constructive feedback. Thus, while committing to the new approach might seem risky, we are optimistic that the benefits far outweigh the risks. Moreover, eLife already has measures in place to mitigate these risks – such as consultative peer review, which results in more constructive feedback to authors.The new eLife model has the potential to make peer review and the publication process faster, fairer, and more inclusive, rigorous and transparent.We accept that high-quality peer review and the publication of reviewed preprints at eLife come at a cost (currently set at $2000), and we call on eLife to be as transparent as possible about the costs involved , and to pledge that the cost charged will reflect the actual incurred cost. Waivers must also be available for those who cannot afford to pay, and clearly defined eligibility requirements for waivers should be made public. In order to further increase equity, we believe that – in the long term – the costs of peer review and publishing should be covered directly by funding agencies. We also feel that the scientific community as a whole further needs to rethink how reviewers can be adequately credited and compensated in the future. We strongly believe that working towards a more equitable and efficient peer review system should not be a solitary mission by eLife, but an effort by the entire scientific community including other journals and organizations.It will also be important to build support for reviewed preprints in the scientific community, especially among funding agencies. While several funding agencies such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute , the WelThe new eLife model has the potential to make peer review and the publication process faster, fairer, and more inclusive, rigorous and transparent, and we as the eLife Early-Career Advisory Group wholeheartedly support it. We have identified several challenges and risks associated with the implementation of the new model, and we will therefore continue to make recommendations for future improvements to the editorial leadership of eLife. We strongly believe that such bold steps are needed to revolutionise research communication in order to ultimately build a more effective and inclusive research culture.The authors are all past or present members of the eLife Early-Career Advisory Group (ECAG) and, as such, receive a small amount of financial compensation from eLife.


In an attempt to make scientific research and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, the Open Science movement has emerged. Its aim is to make knowledge more transparent, accessible, and reusable, so that it is easily shared and developed through professional or social networks. It involves promoting open research publication, campaigning for open access and pursuing a wider dissemination and engagement in science through transparently providing access to all the component aspects of scientific enquiry. These developments make it easier to publish data and code, access manuscripts and communicate scientific knowledge.An open research platform is a combination of a preprint server and a scientific journal, aiming to improve the rigour, reproducibility and transparency of the academic record. The uploaded preprint will be visible on the online platform and after going through the review process it may be published (Version of Record). The readers of the article will be able to navigate through its history, reviews, and previous versions – watching the peer review process in action, and seeing how the article is improved before moving from a posted preprint to a published article. This will increase the transparency of the review process and help the readers assess the robustness of the manuscript’s content. Our open research platform will accept a variety of manuscript types such as Research Articles, Short Communications, Methods, Study Protocols, Data Notes, and Case Reports. It will also be considering new article types in the coming months and years, in response to the needs of our community.Access Microbiology open research platform! More specifically, we are aiming to include a series of manuscript review tools on the platform. Before posting their manuscript as preprint, authors will have the chance to use these tools to improve their article. For example, three pieces of software will check that the article complies with our editorial or ethical policies, examine whether the genome sequences that are included are correctly linked and accessible, and detect areas of the text where language has been accidentally replicated from other pieces of published research. We have spent a number of months working with the developers of these tools, testing them and presenting them during a series of focus groups to determine their usefulness for reviewers, authors, Editors and readers. These reports will be accessible for readers alongside the peer review reports and the Editor’s decision comments.There are many very exciting innovations in our Access Microbiology can improve the discoverability, reuse and citability of their work by making the data open and easy to access by clearly referring to the data deposited in their article. Authors can communicate their research rapidly upon conclusion of their experiments, receiving a citable DOI while the peer review process continues. Furthermore, for the research community, preprints posted on the platform can facilitate future collaborations and can improve the speed at which important research can be conducted and disseminated. Finally, in the fields of environmental research and healthcare, the real-world impact of research is enhanced by its rapid and effective dissemination, which can then affect policy decisions and practical response plans, and allows these researchers to ensure the precedence of their discoveries.First of all, for the authors, publishing in Editors-in-Chief forAccess Microbiology


Antimicrobial Stewardship and Healthcare Epidemiology—ASHE. The journal is committed to the rapid dissemination of high-quality, timely, evolving science and implementation knowledge in the field of antimicrobial stewardship and healthcare epidemiology. With an Open Access model, it serves professionals all over the world, regardless of the income status of their country. We are committed to diversity in professional background, nationality, and sex across the editorial team, such that journal leadership reflects not only the membership of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America but also the antimicrobial stewardship and healthcare epidemiology community at large.As 2021 draws to a close, we pause to reflect on this year’s launch of Although not yet a full year of age, ASHE was officially launched with an inaugural editorial publication on June 23, 2021. Since then, we have published 22 original investigations, 13 concise communications, 10 research briefs, 10 invited reviews, 3 commentaries, and 4 letters to the editor across a diversity of perspectives in healthcare epidemiology and antimicrobial stewardship. In addition, we published the proceedings from SHEA Spring 2021. Last, our goal to include colleagues in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has been affirmed by recently published manuscripts from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.The most immediate measures of success include the 167 submissions, 14,208 article downloads, 443 Altmetric mentions, and 3 citations. As a new journal, we have exceeded expectations on multiple fronts, including the number of papers published and the overall impact of content published.We deliberately sought an editorial team that represented the diversity and background of not only SHEA membership but also the fields of antimicrobial stewardship and healthcare epidemiology. The team includes pharmacists, pediatricians, and nurses in a variety of geographic locations and healthcare settings. We anticipate a growing diversity of voices and perspectives in ASHE. Because ASHE is an Open Access journal, the version of record of every article is made freely available to all immediately upon publication, with additional usage rights. Although most authors have access to funding to cover article processing charges or are at institutions that have signed a Read & Publish agreement with Cambridge University Press, we strongly believe that there should be no financial barrier to publication in ASHE. Thus, we have instituted a comprehensive waiver policy. We have an automatic waiver scheme for World Bank–designated LMICs and for any other authors who are unable to pay the article processing charges in full or in part; these authors can request a discount or waiver from Cambridge University Press. In addition, SHEA members are entitled to a 50% discount for the article processing charges.Importantly, the successful launch of ASHE reflects multiple elements, among which the support of SHEA leadership has been hugely influential. The Cambridge University Press partnership, collaborations with ICHE and the SHEA Publications Committee, and the overwhelming enthusiasm and content contributions from SHEA membership and the healthcare epidemiology and antimicrobial stewardship community at large have enabled the success of ASHE in its inaugural year.We look forward to the coming year with hope, enthusiasm, and greater aspirations. We invite you to contribute your best work related to antimicrobial stewardship, infection prevention, occupational health related to infections, and stewardship related to infectious diseases diagnostic tests, particularly as they relate to healthcare-associated infections and antimicrobial resistance. In addition to the traditional types of articles, such as original articles, review articles, concise communications, research briefs, and letters to editor, we invite you to contribute 2 new article types. One is “reflections in healthcare epidemiology,” which share interesting cases and vignettes encountered in professional practice along with leadership takeaways. The second new article type is “careers,” which is primarily oriented toward learners and early career professionals and aims to support, guide, and promote careers related to healthcare epidemiology. Please check out our journal website for more information.We would like to reiterate that we are deeply grateful for all the contributors, reviewers, and readers who continue to grow the scope, relevance, and impact of ASHE as an influential Open Access journal. We look forward to greater engagement with you in the coming year.


Biology Letters should be the stand-out journal of choice for potential authors.Competition for authors among broad spectrum journals covering evolutionary biology, ecology and global change biology is intense and increasing with the advent of new online-only journals. In such a publishing ecosystem, it is important to be clear why Do you have a clear, concise scientific finding that you would like to present to biologists from various disciplines? Do you want to reach a wide audience quickly following a thorough and fair peer review from a Royal Society journal?Biology Letters! We publish exciting papers of broad appeal to its wide readership. Emphasis is on rigorous study designs that allow clear robust conclusions to be drawn across the broadest range of biosciences. Working with a word limit of 2500 words for research and opinion piece manuscripts and 5000 words for reviews , our authors keep to the point, when reporting on their study design, results, limitations and wider significance. This Biology Letters template lends itself to powerful discoveries that can be articulated concisely in a small number of well-crafted paragraphs and one or two essential figures.Consider publishing your new results in Biology Letters editorial process starts with a Board Member who recommends reviewers, and concludes with the Handling Editor who provides a decision based on the reviewer comments and the Board Member's appraisal. The process is fair and helps us attain a thoroughly vetted manuscript of the highest quality, with both biological science experts and methodologist editors working to edit submissions. Our excellent team of editors always seek to obtain highly qualified reviewers who can provide a timely and well-informed assessment of a submission.Our format is advantageous to readers and reviewers, as well as authors. It means readers can read the paper and get the information they need quickly without having to dig through a full-format article. It also means we have exceptionally fast review and publication times while maintaining high quality . Rapid review times should, however, not be mistaken for a lack of rigour. The Biology Letters is  strongly supportive of early career researchers (ECRs). We are excited to report that we will soon be launching an ECR best paper prize. Please check our Twitter feed for further information on this development. To further promote ECR activities, we are publishing a New Talent collection that will carry a range of papers illustrating the breadth and depth of ECR research activities. Look out for these papers in our Special Features page—https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/special-features—where you can also see all the Features we have published. Have an idea for a Special Feature that you would like to guest edit? Contact the editorial office at biologyletters@royalsociety.org with your proposal.We are instigating several new initiatives in the coming months which I'm delighted to highlight here. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/citation-metrics.Owing in part to our regular media coverage of our excellent papers, we have attained our highest Impact Factor since our launch and we want to thank our contributing authors, the Editorial Board and referees for their advice, expertise and advocacy—it truly has made a real difference in the quality of the work we receive and publish. As signatories of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), we recognize that other metrics exist and these can be found on our metrics page here: Biology Letters is the efficiency of our editorial staff in handling, processing and publishing manuscripts. I would like to offer sincere thanks to our Publishing Editor, Surayya Johar, our Editorial Coordinators, Raminder Shergill and Charlotte Lindsay and our whole Production team for their efficient editing and production of the journal over the past 12 challenging months. We are grateful to all them for of their hard work. Importantly, we continue to thank all of our authors, readers, reviewers and the editorial board for their support of the journal over the past year that has contributed to our success.The key to the success of


Open Science, a global movement created by the scientific community, has undertakenefforts aimed at increasing the popularity of scientific knowledge production and makingthe results of scientific research widely accessible to society. Open Scienceprinciples, which aim to make research outcomes freely available through scientificjournals or open access repositories, and to promote transparency to their processes,replication and reproducibility, have generally been well received by the scientificcommunity. Its transparent, accessible and collaborative nature is widely recognized,but discussion of potentially reckless aspects for implementation, such as the costs ofparticipation and the need for a favorable policy agenda, are also in focus.,As this "umbrella of strategies" spreads, some questions become more frequent: how can wepromote equity from such an inequitable basis, after all? The venue for the "openscience party" has been set, but the capacity of the guests to take part in it has notbeen the same. Surveys show that the article processing charges (APCs), charged byinternational open access journals have increased sharply and constituted a barrier tothe visibility of scientific production of researchers globally.Science has been deeply marked by advances and setbacks, in Brazil. Even in the early2000s, the structural working conditions, regional imbalances, funding options andconflicts between the public and private sectors were already seen as challenges.Regarding scientific journals published in Brazil, the scenery is not different. If, onthe one hand, Brazil has a significant number of open access journals, thanks to theleadership of the SciELO Program, on the other hand, lack of financial support hascaused some journals to start charging APC in recent years and has even put thesustainability of SciELO at risk.In this context of financial constraints and discouragement to both journals published inBrazil and researchers, we have been faced with a health crisis caused by the COVID-19pandemic. The response of the scientific community was immediate and consistent, gainingprominence even on the international scene. With regard to health care professionals whoare responsible for the care of people, the demand for timely access to reliable sourcesof information became even more evident during the pandemic, whether to obtain dataabout the risks inherent to work, or for training related to the care provided.Epidemiologia e Serviços deSaúde - RESS), given its mission to contribute to the improvement ofservices offered by the Brazilian National Health System (SUS), considers theseprofessionals as an important part of its target audience. In order to reinforce thisapproach, a study contribution box was included in the articles published as of 2022, inwhich the "implications for services", as well as new dissemination strategies areshown. In addition, RESS contributes to the promotion of Open Science, allowingpublications free of charge to researchers whose results of analyses and studies havebeen developed within the SUS. Several other Public Health journals have also investedin science communication strategies, in order to be recognized as a reliable source ofinformation, a movement of the utmost importance, since open access content is promoted,and its evidence is mostly generated in the national context and without languagebarriers, which often reduces professionals’ access to articles publishedinternationally.Epidemiology and Health Services journal (As such, we believe that we are consolidating a path to overcome "publication circuits",in which the scientific community discusses among themselves, however, healthprofessionals are not included. Broadening the discussion on the role of nationalscientific journals in order to promote the dissemination of knowledge and strengtheningof Open Science in the American continent context, or globally, is still necessary, andcan contribute to the inclusion of society, in the defense of the scientific communityand policies aimed at promoting equity, as a pillar for the implementation of OpenScience. We can work in such a way that repercussions of this movement also reach thebase of the pyramid, and not only the top, thus, this will result in a condition of moreequitable participation in this "party", which is a RESS commitment.


Brain Activity Patterns During Dreams” for the journal “Frontiers in Neuroscience.” The RT was mainly complied within the year 2020, which was the most difficult time as it fell during the COVID-19 pandemic period. As we all know, fighting against COVID-19 is a challenge for all of us, especially for our authors and reviewers.Together with Dr. Roger Ho, I would like to thank the 21 authors, 12 reviewers, and frontiersin.org who worked with us for the Research Topic (RT) “Nevertheless, when the RT was launching, we successively received six manuscripts. We agreed on publishing four of them since we had to stick to the standards of the journal and the scientific publication criteria. We are very grateful to all endeavors from all our crew members.Ruby has stated, the neural bases of dreaming are still unclear instead of being fully elucidated. This opinion also acts as a further call for discovering more brain working patterns underlying dreaming in coming years.Although the number of papers is small, authors have presented a broad area of cerebral activities during dreaming. The four Research Topics ranged from normal sleep physiology to clinical sleep disorders and from integrated brain signals to neuroimaging techniques. From a limited angle, these papers have described brain activities regarding dreaming. Even though these lab investigations, literature reviews, and opinion expressions are based on on-the-spot observations, they are the result of ongoing work representing the neural bases during dreaming. As We are also glad to see that these four papers have received great early notice with excellent Altimetric scores and by other scientific evaluations. Both Roger and I are very clear-minded and we now look forward to seeing the further progression in this area, and we are very confident that our wishes will be accomplished soon.Both authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


Polymers was released. Polymers was published as a quarterly journal. The year 2023 marks the 15th anniversary (15th issue) of the journal, and over the years, Polymers has published more than 18,500 papers. Today, the published papers receive more than 1,000,000 views per month, with readers in more than 150 countries and geographical regions [Polymers over the past several years. We value the contributions of both the authors and the reviewers. The goal of Polymers is to help scientists in the field of polymer research to achieve their publication objectives and increase awareness of the latest developments in polymer science, rendering this research openly accessible for the whole scientific community.In 2009, the inaugural issue of Open access (OA) publishing unlocks research that would otherwise be hidden behind paywalls, enabling researchers to share scientific information and data at moderate author charges and ensuring free access for every reader. This creates more equal opportunities among scientific communities around the world .Polymers and consider your own experience.The OA model is not perfect, and there is still room for improvement. Of course, OA is also a business model. However, I encourage readers to ask themselves, honestly, which is preferable? A few million authors (scientists) paying for the publications, or billions of readers paying for access to them? Are extra charges for color images fair, when papers are mostly read online? I am not criticizing other publishing models, but rather, would like to encourage a fair discussion on the advantages and disadvantages. As in many fields, there is never one best model. This discussion is more about the best working and—as far as possible—fairest model. MDPI is a responsible and innovative publisher that acts to benefit scientific communities as a service provider, rather than a product provider. We encourage our readers to spread the word in the scientific community. Instead of talking about us, talk with us! Additionally, and more importantly, try publishing with Polymers offers traditional peer review combined with a fast and cost-effective publication process. All Polymers articles are peer-reviewed and accepted by our Academic Editors, who are either Editorial Board members or Guest Editors. The names of the editors who accept the articles after peer review are mentioned in each manuscript, and this certainly helps to ensure accountability in the editorial process. Many of our authors opt for open peer review, which renders the review reports openly available alongside the published article [ article .Polymers has staff spread across seven offices globally, offering an around-the-clock service to authors and editors in different time zones. We handle administrative tasks  to reduce the time spent by authors on issues that can easily be handled by publishers.We strive to render the peer review process more rigorous, and so we are always adding new features to help our reviewers. We provide a guideline for the peer review report, and all peer review reports received are checked to ensure that they contain valuable comments for the authors. MDPI takes peer review seriously and holds a yearly Peer Review Week, as well as different webinars, on the subject ,5,6,7,8.Polymers is an environment of continuous change, learning, and improvement. Every year, we collect feedback from our Editorial Board members and collaborators, and on this basis, we decide what changes must be made in order to render the publishing process more transparent and to fulfill as many of the needs of the scientific community as possible. In addition, constructive criticism is always welcome, and the Polymers team aims to handle all feedback with high priority.Polymers conference, “New Trends in Polymer Science: Health of the Planet, Health of the People”, was held in Turin, Italy [Last year was fruitful but also posed challenges for our journal. Most importantly, the second n, Italy . It was Polymers to improve and ensure the quality of its published works. Moreover, they are role models for a successful career in science. With respect to successful careers, Polymers will continue its efforts to support young scientists in particular. We seek to do this through travel grants for conferences, PhD thesis awards, and the bi-annual Young Investigators Award, in addition to the Best Paper and Outstanding Reviewer awards.We seized each challenge to better understand how we might provide support for the polymer research community. In 2022, we welcomed 13 new female advisory board members. All are well-respected professors and distinguished scientists, who will further help We look forward to shaping the next fifteen years of the journal and count on you—our authors, readers, and reviewers—to aid us in this project.


PLOS Biology, highlight some of our editors’ favorite moments from the past year across the life sciences, and thank our editors, authors and peer-reviewers.As 2022 draws to a close, we look back at some of the recent changes that have taken place at  As 2022 draws to a close, we look back at some of the recent changes that have taken place at PLOS Biology, highlight some of our editors’ favorite moments from the past year across the life sciences, and thank our editors, authors and peer-reviewers. Elsewhere in the life sciences, environmental DNA opened a window into the past, enabling us to reconstruct ancient ecosystems, AI enabled us to predict the structure of almost every known protein, and, following controversies in the field [slow cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease.2022 will be a memorable year for many reasons. The war in Ukraine, rising living costs across vast swathes of the world, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with all its repercussions have cast a shadow over the past year, but there have been reasons for hope too. The UN Ocean Conference ended with PLOS Biology, 2022 brought several changes too. Our editorial board grew to include 263 academic researchers across 29 countries as we said goodbye to 25 Academic Editors and welcomed 72 new ones. Our neuroscience editor Gabriel Gasque also sadly left us to take on an exciting new role at protocols.io. In his place, we welcomed Kris Dickson to the team, who has brought with her a wealth of knowledge about scientific publishing and all aspects of neuroscience. We were also fortunate to host Suzanne de Bruijn as an editorial intern for part of the year. You can learn more about her experience with us in a blog post she wrote for the PLOS Biologue, which has also played host this year to a new series of “Behind the paper” blog posts from authors of recently published studies, telling the stories of the twists and turns that took their research projects in new directions.At Another big change in 2022 came in our magazine section. I joined the journal at the beginning of 2022 as the magazine section editor and have enjoyed getting to grips with the amazing variety of topics we cover in our Perspectives, Community Pages, Essays, and Unsolved Mysteries. This year, we published our first Consensus Views, a new article type for the magazine section. These pieces provide guidelines or recommendations on topics of wide interest to the life sciences community, and have so far included topics as varied as recommendations for optimal levels of light exposure for human health .Mendel’s legacy in modern genetics to mark the 200th birthday of Gregor Mendel, and a collection on Ocean solutions for a sustainable, healthy and inclusive future to explore potential solutions to mitigate the impacts of human activity on ocean ecosystems in line with the UN Ocean Decade. We already have plans in place for some exciting collections in 2023, so watch this space!As the magazine section editor, I also have the privilege of overseeing special collections of articles that aim to raise awareness of specific events or issues. In 2022, we published a collection on As well as launching a new type of magazine article, 2022 also saw the publication of our first Pre-Registered Research Articles  . For the2022 also saw a return to in-person attendance at conferences. As editors, we have particularly relished being able to meet researchers again face-to-face and catch up with the exciting new developments in our respective fields after such a long break. That said, virtual conference attendance has also been a boon for us, enabling us to dip our toes into unfamiliar topics and learn from and interact with researchers from parts of the globe that are often underrepresented at scientific meetings. We attended around 40 meetings in 2022 and are busy planning our conference schedule for 2023, so do look out for us at meetings you might be attending.PLOS Biology papers from this year as some recommended reading to see you through into the New Year  provirus group in normal human tissues” by Burn et al . In thisMy choice is “Erebosis, a new cell death mechanism during homeostatic turnover of gut enterocytes” by Ciesielski et al . This stPLOS Biology in 2022 and without whom this journal would not exist, to thank you for reading, and to hope that 2023 brings more excellent science that can change the future for the better, for all of us.All that remains is to thank the authors, reviewers and Academic Editors who have contributed to


The British Journal of Biomedical Science (BJBS) has come a long way since it was first published as the Laboratory Journal now over 100 years ago, back in 1913. Its latest impact factor exceeds that of some of the most well-known pathology journals; emphasising the quality of the science now being published.It is and always has been the official journal of the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS). Consequently, its articles reflect the scientific interests and specialties of IBMS members. Traditionally, the membership has been predominantly biomedical scientists employed in the health services of the UK and other countries, frequently in discipline specific areas such as Cell Sciences, Blood Sciences, Infectious Sciences, Genetics and Molecular Pathology. However, the IBMS membership profile is changing to include increasing numbers of members from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, and universities, both in the UK and from overseas. The skill sets of biomedical scientists working in the health services are also rapidly changing, with an increasing number of advanced practice and consultancy roles necessary to meet the growing demands of a modernised pathology service, and with many advanced practitioners and consultant biomedical scientists now having doctoral qualifications.Drosophila spp. and Caenorhabditis elegans, through to translation of the findings to human clinical trials and predicting response to targeted therapies. Biomedical scientists in hospital laboratories are familiar with testing for established biomarkers as part of their day-to-day work. However, these established diagnostics started their embryonic life many years earlier as hypothesis driven research, subsequently tested on cell lines or animal models prior to their testing in clinical trials and eventually impacting on patient management. Set against these backdrops, the aim for the BJBS is to retain its deeply embedded foundations in the full range of disciplines that comprise biomedical science and therefore represent the interests of the many hospital-based members of the IBMS. However, in order to attract articles from the broader biomedical science communities, the journal will continue to grow by including a greater number of papers involving fundamental biomedical research that investigates the function and mechanisms of the disease process, the findings of which in years to come may be translated into new diagnostic tests that influence patient management. In short, we wish to encourage research submissions that reflect the whole of the bench-to-bedside journey.The term biomedical science is used globally to describe the range of life sciences underpinning medicine. As such, biomedical research covers the whole “bench-to-bedside” journey, ranging from initial mechanistic and functional studies on cell lines, or even tiny organisms such as Dermatopathology and Associated Laboratory Investigations in the Study of Skin Disease edited by Dr Guy Orchard. We also have a Special Issue focusing on Women in Science which ties in with the IBMS’ celebration of 100 years of female members. We hope it will serve the community by shedding light on female researchers and provide them with a platform to showcase their work and their role in open science. With this in mind, for this Special Issue, we invite submissions from female biomedical scientists on a range of research topics related to the investigation and treatment of disease, to include but not limited to; cancer, the microbiome, cardiovascular disease and infectious disease. To complement the scientific content within the published articles we also invite authors to provide some personal reflections on life in academia that will be included within the published paper. If you wish to submit an article to either of these Special Issues or indeed to act as a Guest Editor for a new theme for which you have a passion, please do contact us at the journal, we would love to hear from you (bjbs@frontierspartnerships.org).A new feature of the journal which the Frontiers open access model supports is the introduction of Special Issues. These are a series of articles grouped on a central theme with a Guest Editor, soliciting and editing the compilation. Currently, we have a Special Issue on The BJBS has recently changed publishers from Taylor and Francis to Frontiers, which is fully open access and online. This allows the reader free access to articles published without having to subscribe to the journal, or to pay to view it. The advantage to authors is that their work can be read immediately by anybody in the world with internet access, from the moment that it is published. The value of this to the global research community was exemplified during the pandemic when most journals, even those normally requiring payment to view, made all COVID-19 related articles free to read with the aim of disseminating the results of important COVID-19 research as quickly as possible. However, as the saying goes; “there is no such thing as a free meal” and in pre- and post-COVID times, it would ordinarily fall on the authors to pay an article processing charge (APC) to publish in open access journals, and this charge can be substantial. Thankfully for IBMS members wishing to publish in the BJBS the APC is waived and members can publish their research for free.Working closely with the Editor-in-Chief and the publishing team at the journal are four Deputy Editors who are responsible for handling the submitted articles and sourcing experts in the field to review the articles; Dr Andrew Blann, Dr Guy Orchard, Dr Mark Hajjawi and Dr Yuh Fen Pung. In addition, the editorial board members are appointed based on their expertise in different areas of biomedical science and their experience in reviewing papers. As the journal continues to grow, we will expand the editorial board to provide an increased range of expertise.In March 2022, the IBMS held its biennial conference at the International Convention Centre, in Birmingham, UK with over 3,000 delegates in attendance. In addition to the main programme, biomedical scientists presented over 80 posters or short communications on a range of research topics. In order to capture and record the valuable contributions being made by IBMS members, the journal will work with Frontiers to publish all accepted abstracts in an e-book to be accessed via the journal’s website. This will commence with the next IBMS Congress in 2023.In summary the BJBS, working in symbiosis with the IBMS, aims to deliver a quality publication that reflects the growth and impact of biomedical scientists and biomedical research on World health. In order to achieve this aim we greatly look forward to working with you and in receiving articles from across the globe.