The role of academic journals is significant in the reward system of science, which makes their rank important for the researcher's choice in deciding where to submit. The study asks how choices of immediate gold and hybrid open access are related to journal ranking and how the uptake of immediate open access is affected by transformative publish-and-read deals, pushed by recent science policy. Data consists of 186,621 articles published with a Norwegian affiliation in the period 2013–2021, all of which were published in journals ranked in a National specific ranking, on one of two levels according to their importance, prestige, and perceived quality within a discipline. The results are that researchers chose to have their articles published as hybrid two times as often in journals on the most prestigious level compared with journals on the normal level. The opposite effect was found with gold open access where publishing on the normal level was chosen three times more than on the high level. This can be explained by the absence of highly ranked gold open access journals in many disciplines. With the introduction of publish-and-read deals, hybrid open access has boosted and become a popular choice enabling the researcher to publish open access in legacy journals. The results confirm the position of journals in the reward system of science and should inform policymakers about the effects of transformative arrangements and their costs against the overall level of open access. Journals and their rankings have occupied an important part in the reward system of science. Choices of where to have work published influence careers and highly prestigious journals can pave the way in research evaluation processes . The journal ranking system enables investigations of how choices of gold and hybrid open access journals are distributed across the levels over time since all publicly funded publications with at least one author affiliated with a Norwegian institution are registered in a national database. Norway has also implemented PAR deals, which came into effect in 2019. This was a proposal initiated in the The motivation for the study lies in expanding the knowledge of the reward system of science and its effect on open access, which in turn connects to current science policy and its preference for immediate open access and PAR deals. These cause both tension and relief with respect to researchers' choices of journals, particularly in the case of hybrid open access journals, which in most policies are only deemed eligible if part of a PAR agreement. Consequently, there is a need to recognise and understand how policy measures interact with researchers' preferences. To extend the findings beyond the Norwegian context, this study also investigates the relationship between the Norwegian two-level journal ranking and other established journal metrics.The research objective is operationalized in the following research questions, which guide the study together with a review of relevant literature:RQ1: What is the effect of central handling  on researchers' choices of hybrid open access publishing?RQ2: What is the effect of journal ranking  on the distribution of gold open access and hybrid open access articles?RQ3: How does the varying potential for relevant high ranking gold open access journals relate to immediate open access publishing within the different research areas and disciplines?The review is organised in three subsections, starting with outlining useful theoretical perspectives on the reward system in science that help to explain the different incentivizing roles of gold and hybrid open access journals. This is followed by a brief introduction to open access, article processing charges (APCs), and the introduction of PAR deals. Finally, after accounting for the Norwegian context, the review is used to highlight expectations for the descriptive analysis to follow.In the late 1950s, Merton conceptualised the reward system of science and claimed that the “institution of science has developed an elaborate system for allocating rewards to those who variously live up to its norms” . The four institutional norms of science are universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organised scepticism, which together govern the main objective of science: the “extension of certified knowledge” Merton, , p. 270.The journal has become important for the accumulation of reputational capital, up to the point that the journal in which a researcher's work is published can be perceived as more important than the actual research itself  is the most controversial metric precisely because it is applied in the assessment of the individual article or its author(s). Impact factors, therefore, have a significant influence on choices of where to submit articles  on PAR deals and the future of scholarly publishing, emphasises that a barrier to open access publishing is the need to publish in high impact journals for career advancement  their researchers have contributed, as well as where the articles are published . Articles will only be considered for reimbursement if published in a journal registered in a prequalified list, where journals are assigned on either level one  or two (“high”). This assignment is carried out according to a journal's perceived rank and prestige, articles published in a journal on level high also yield a higher monetary return to the institution. The argument for assigning a journal to the highest level is that “the international impact of the channel is of utmost importance and further that ‘in many academic fields, this is measured by the impact factorNational goals and guidelines for open access to research articles in 2017 , a database that covers the production of 102 institutions in the health, institute, and higher education sector. Cristin holds a near complete record of Norwegian publicly funded research and is a type of bibliographical database that holds great potential for monitoring open access and policy compliance . Both sources were enhanced by the following procedures:The database was initially limited to a subset of original scientific journal articles resulting in a dataset of 186,621 journal articles in the period 2013–2021. The dataset was retrieved on 28 February 2022, a date selected because registration of articles due for reporting for 2021 was adjourned at most of the 102 Cristin-institutions.Quantitative studies of open access at the country level face two main challenges  according to the disciplinary hierarchy in the Norwegian publication indicator . Of those, 28,319 were on the normal or high level in 2021. The journal list also holds information on the journal's placement on level normal or high throughout the period. Each journal record was enhanced with data from DOAJ, the Scopus journal list, and Scopus CiteScore data by joining records on one of the possible combinations of ISSN values in the sources. Scopus CiteScore journal list contains metrics data on CiteScore, Source Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP), and Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) .The list of publication channels in the CiteScore, a similar metric as the impact factor, is calculated by the number of citations to publications in a journal in the previous 3 years, divided by the number of published items in the journal. The number of items also includes letters, editorials, and other types of material.SNIP is a field normalised calculation of journal impact based on the ratio of a journal's average number of citations and the “citation potential” in the field given by a wider reference set of comparable journals. The citation potential is the number of citations that a journal could be expected to receive for its subject field, e.g., the average of the comparable journals in the reference set.Scimago Journal Rank is also a normalised measure of journals and is computed by network analysis of citations received by the journals. The methodology includes both the number of citations and their source, with citations from journals with higher levels of prestige having a higher value than those from journals with lower prestige.https://doi.org/10.18710/TBXXCC.All journal and article data were imported, processed, and transformed into a tidy format in R, which also was used to generate plots and figures presented in the results section. The dataset used in the study is made available at The overall level of articles with open access increased from 31.2% in 2013 to 67.8% in 2021 (not including deposited articles), and the annual average growth rate was 4.6%. Up until the introduction of PAR deals in 2019, gold open access had a three to four times larger share of output than hybrid open access, while hybrid had strong growth in the period 2019–2021 following the PAR deals.It should be noted that When considering total output, there are large differences between the four research areas. In 2021 the humanities held a 6.4% share of total articles, the social sciences held a share of 18%, health sciences held a share of 30.7%, and natural sciences and engineering held a share of 44.9%.Even though the levels are consistent with what has previously been found . The mean number of yearly journals with publications in the selection was 6,292 in the period . The coverage of journals with a metric value in the period was respectively mean 81.0% for SJR in the period (ranging between 79.7 and 83.4%), mean 81.0% for SNIP in the period (ranging between 79.3 and 83.4%), and 81.6% for CiteScore in the period (ranging between 80.3 and 83.4%). The yearly mean metric values were calculated respectively for the set of journals assigned to each level high and normal.In summary, the initial findings show strong growth in both the number of published articles and the overall levels of open access in the period. The alignment between the two-tier-system and established journal ranking was persistent over time, it can thus be argued that findings from this study can be extended to other systems where journal ranks are incorporated.The effect of PAR deals was found by isolating the levels of hybrid open access inside and outside PAR deals. The levels are presented in percentages and can be considered to be “market shares in a growing market,” since the total number of publications increased during the period .The increase in the growth rate of non-PAR hybrid and total hybrid is presented in The publish-and-read deals increased the overall levels of hybrid open access from 8.9% in 2018 to 27.2% in 2021. When considering the overall levels of open access , the incNorwegian PAR-deal hybrid open access has primarily added to, rather than replaced non-PAR hybrid open access. To cheque if the level of non-PAR hybrid in the period 2019–2021 was unaffected by Norwegian PAR deals, the hybrid production of all Norwegian universities was investigated, comparing whether hybrid articles were a part of PAR deals or not.The blue and red lines in The same effect was found when viewing the hybrid production rate from the perspective of the journals. As with A possibility the study was not able to control for, was whether the level of non-PAR hybrid open access was affected by PAR deals in other countries. It can be noted that more than 50% of articles published later than 2017 also had international co-authors, pointing to a probable impact on the share of Norwegian non-PAR hybrid.To answer RQ2, the market shares of respectively gold and hybrid open access articles were split into groups according to the journals' level at the time of publishing. This produced a 2 × 2 matrices of shares that were used to:(a) compare the shares of gold and hybrid open access articles on the normal level.(b) compare the shares of gold and hybrid open access articles on the high level.(c) compare the shares of gold open access articles on the high and normal levels.(d) compare the shares of hybrid open access articles on the high and normal levels.As previously explained, there is ~80/20 distribution of the articles per convention. While shares of articles on the same level were directly comparable, comparing shares on different levels required relative shares in accordance with the 80/20 distribution.The relative shares were used in the following comparisons:Comparison of the shares of gold and hybrid open access articles on the normal level (row no. i and row no. iii)(a) i and no. iii in The comparison of row no. Comparison of the shares of gold and hybrid open access articles on the high level (row no. ii and row no. iv)(b) ii and no. vi in The comparison of row no. Comparison of the distribution of gold open access articles on the high and normal levels (row no. i and row no. ii)(c) i and no. ii in The comparison of row no. Comparison of the distribution of hybrid open access articles on the high and normal levels (row no. ii and row no. iv)(d) ii and no. iv in The comparison of row no. The distribution of hybrid open access articles between the high and normal levels may have been influenced by the introduction of PAR deals. To investigate this, the distribution between PAR hybrid and non-PAR hybrid articles on the high and normal levels was calculated separately for 2020 and 2021.Viewed separately, PAR hybrid articles largely followed the same distribution as non-PAR hybrid articles, which also was stable throughout the period 2013–2021.In the preceding section (RQ2), I have shown that researchers had a lower propensity to choose gold open access journals on the high level than on the normal level. This is likely connected to the number of options researchers have. Of 28,319 eligible journals in 2021, 2193 were assigned to the high level and only 113 of those were gold open access journals.y-axis) and the number of available journals (x-axis). For example, in the humanities, 12 disciplines were without any gold open access journals on level high, three disciplines had one gold open access journal on the high level at their disposal, and further five disciplines had two journals available, etc.The distributions in All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) system in Scopus. Of these, 11 journals had more than 10 publications in 2020, suggesting that ambiguous disciplinary classification is unlikely to alter the above result considerably.Mega-journals can cover several disciplines, although most of these are placed on the normal level. It can also be relevant for researchers to publish in journals in neighbouring or related fields. No unambiguous method for controlling for such effects was found during the study. However, it was found that of the 94 journals on level high with articles published in 2020, 50 journals covered more than one discipline in the To answer RQ3, the results from - disciplines (within each of four research areas) with the option of gold open access journals on the high level (in a given year).- disciplines (within each of four research areas) without the option of gold open access journals on the high level (in a given year).This was achievable since each article in the dataset contained information about the journal's level at the time of publication and thus made it possible to reconstruct which disciplines had gold open access articles on the high level in the period 2013–2021. The resulting time series was used to investigate whether the two groups differed in(1) gold open access publishing on the normal level and/or(2) hybrid publishing on level high.c. 80% of totals). The shares contain all published articles in each group added together, which gives more weight to disciplines with a high rate of production. The analysis accounted for natural changes in the data, such as journals moving between levels, and consequently the incidental case that a discipline would be without gold open access journals on level high 1 year. To investigate the first possibility, the two groups were compared in The patterns in the humanities and the social sciences are less distinct, although the group without gold journals on level high in the humanities increased their share of gold articles from 2018 onward more than the group with gold journals on level high.c. 20% of totals). As in Finally, the study investigated the second possibility of whether the absence of gold open access journals on a high level could drive publishing towards hybrid open access on level high. There is however little to suggest that the lack of gold open access journals on level high, has had any impact on publishing in hybrid venues before the introduction of PAR deals.Both groups in both the social sciences and the humanities had low levels of hybrid before the PAR deals in 2019, but higher levels of hybrid than both the health and natural sciences after the introduction of PAR deals.The share of hybrid open access articles increased slowly, from 4.1% in 2013 to 8.9% in 2018. With the introduction of transformative deals in 2019, there was a significant boost in the share of hybrid open access articles, which rose to 27.1% in 2021. PAR deal hybrid articles came in addition to non-PAR deal hybrid articles and seem to have replaced a sizeable share of green open access. It is unclear whether PAR deals have increased the overall share of open access.Expressed in relative terms, researchers' propensity to choose the hybrid option doubled when they chose journals ranked on level high compared to journals on the normal level. Even though PAR deals boosted the overall share of hybrid open access, this distribution between levels did not change.Conversely, researchers' propensity to choose gold open access journals decreased when they chose journals on level high compared to journals on a normal level. The relative share of gold open access articles on the normal level was three times higher than at the high level in 2021. The relative drop in gold open access on the high level corresponded with the overall low coverage of gold open access journals on the high level; 46 out of 87 disciplines were not represented with gold open access journals on level high in 2021.The disciplines within the health sciences and the natural sciences without gold open access journals on the high level also published fewer gold open access articles on the normal level compared to the disciplines with this option. The pattern was consistent throughout the period. There was no similar pattern found in the humanities and social science.The groups of disciplines in the health sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities without gold open access journals on level high, also published more hybrid articles on level high than the group without that option, but only after the introduction of PAR deals. With only two full years of PAR deals (2020 and 2021) in operation, this is a conclusion drawn with some caution. However, in all research areas, the hybrid publishing on level high was boosted by the PAR deals.The discussion will be organised in the same order as the research questions, starting with initial findings relevant to the research questions, the influence of PAR deals, followed by the relationship between journal ranking and immediate open access publishing before ending with disciplinary differences and limitations of the study. The article will then conclude with policy considerations and avenues for further research.First, it should be noted that even if this study is of a descriptive nature and not set up as a correlation study, it has produced quantitative findings in a “controlled bibliographical space” on the country level, with the strength of a near complete national record over eight years. This has avoided known challenges connected to both coverage and baselines of articles  approaches the same share as gold open access (34.4%). The boost in hybrid open access with the PAR deals can be explained by easy and cost-free “ticking of the right boxes” when researchers submit their work to the journal of choice. Hybrid also offers more attractive terms than green open access. The publisher's PDF becomes immediately open and there is no need for the cumbersome act of depositing a previous version of the article in a repository. The large uptake of PAR hybrid open access is likely connected to a corresponding drop in the share of green open access in the period 2019–2021 and suggests that PAR deals have at least to some degree replaced one modality of open access with another. With only 1 year of data (2021), it would be premature to conclude that PAR deals have not added to the total level of open access, although it is clear that if the share of deposited 2021-articles (after embargos have expired) end up at the same level as in 2020 and 2019 (~9%), the total level of open access in 2021 will have levelled out, if not slightly decreased.Publish-and-read hybrid open access articles mainly came in addition to non-PAR hybrid articles instead of replacing them. This finding is somewhat unexpected but was confirmed by two procedures showing there was little change in the overall publishing rates in journals outside PAR deals and that the publication rate for non-PAR hybrid articles largely was the same for all Norwegian universities collectively. Despite the two confirming procedures, there is a possibility that the study was unable to control for: non-PAR hybrid articles in Norway could benefit from PAR deals in other countries where Norwegian researchers are engaged in the co-authorship of articles. This could partly compensate for any PAR hybrid replacement. Whether there is such an effect is a subject for future research.A central finding is how journal ranking relates to researchers' choices of gold open-access journals. Against the backdrop of an increase in both hybrid and gold access articles, there was a consistently lower propensity for researchers to choose gold open access journals on a high level compared to the normal level. This finding should not be confused with the perceived general less prestigious role of gold open access journals in journal hierarchies previously reported in the literature  deals. The main theoretical argument in the study is that the academic journal has acquired a central position in the reward system of science Merton, , which iThe main results are that gold open access publication correlates negatively with the Norwegian journal ranking; high journal rank correlates with relatively less gold open access publications. Hybrid open access correlates positively; high journal rank correlates with relatively more hybrid publications. Whilst PAR deals boost hybrid publishing considerably, journal ranking relates equally to both PAR and non-PAR hybrid uptake.The findings confirm the tension between gold open access publishing and the reward system of science. This tension is connected to research assessment based on journal ranking and is still a barrier to be overcome for open access . PAR deals in other countries likely influence the share of Norwegian hybrid outside the Norwegian PAR deals. Whether there is such an effect, is also a subject for future research. It is of high importance to monitor whether transformative agreements will eventually succeed in converting subscription-based journals at scale  and is also a part of the Oslo Institute for Research on the Impact of Science .Author LW is a PhD candidate at the TIK-Centre at the University of Oslo while holding a position at Sikt, a governmental body reporting to the Ministry of Education and Research in Norway. This position is in the department that holds the responsibility of coordinating open access affairs in Norway.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.


At its core, scientific publishing in healthcare is meant to help society. A scientist is researching and presenting data that will influence decisions for patient care. Some data is meant to help patients in the clinic now, some data might help patients 5 or 10 years in the future. Secondarily, publishing can help the scientist, allowing the author to advance in their career and continue to research and publish. I believe it is safe to say that each Medical Physicist wants to see our scientific community improve and advances made in care for our patients. A crucial step in this improvement is ensuring that all the best minds are working toward this goal. To get the best minds in our community, we must integrate equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) into our scientific publishing process.EDI is a convenient acronym and easy to view as a single idea, but each component should be considered individually. Equity, as defined by the Merriam–Webster, is “justice, according to natural law or right.” It is often used to describe what is “just” and “fair.” It can also often be confused with equality, which is “the quality or state of being equal.” Essentially, equity is fairness and equality is sameness. Equity is often used to describe the resources provided to an individual. Equitable resources could mean providing different resources for different people, depending on their needs. Equity can be a tricky concept, because it can be argued that it is not fair to provide different resources to one group and not another. This also raises the question of merit. It can be argued that resources should be provided to those that have earned them, based on their quality, not on their need. Diversity is “the condition of having or being composed of differing elements.” Regarding scientific publishing, it is easy to think of diversity only in terms of race and gender. But there are a multitude of ways in which people can be different. Diversity should be considered in the data we are collecting, the authors writing the manuscripts, and the editors and reviewers who are reviewing the manuscripts. The definition of inclusion is straightforward, “the act of including: the state of being included.” However, the integration of inclusion can be less straightforward. Often, inclusion, or the lack thereof, is presented in the resources we develop for the public, the language used to invite editors and authors, and the reviews delivered to the authors.EDI is a hot‐button topic and can be polarizing in our community, but it is important to evaluate and discuss. The entire scientific publishing process, from the data we collect to the reviewers reading the papers, has some room for improvement that will ultimately enhance our patients’ lives and our Medical Physics community. The first step in the publishing process, and our EDI evaluation, is collecting and assessing the data.A valuable resource for data in radiation oncology is clinical trials. Over the years, clinical trials have improved to protect patients, incorporating the four principles of medical ethics, including autonomy, beneficence, non‐maleficence, and justice. These principles are essential for developing clinical trials and protecting the patients on whom research is being conducted. Part of ensuring beneficence, non‐maleficence, and justice is considering the diversity of the data being collected. A homogeneous group of research patients could mean that other groups are missing out on the opportunity to participate in the trial and benefit from the testing. It could also mean that the outcome of the data is not applicable to a diverse group of patients, and these other groups are not able to benefit from the treatment. A recent study investigating the exclusion of females in clinical trials found that females were underrepresented compared with their proportion of disease population in cardiovascular trials (41.9% vs. 49%), psychiatry clinical trials (60% vs. 42%), and cancer trials (51% vs. 41%).Diversity should also be considered in the authors writing the publications. A study in 2022 from Kozlowski et al. looked at the racial and gender diversity of authors in scientific publications. From more than 5 million articles, they evaluated 1.6 million distinct US first authors and inferred race and gender. They found that, in health science, Latinx, Black, and White women are overrepresented as authors. However, in physics and mathematics, they are underrepresented.The value of incorporating EDI in the scientific publishing process has been studied in several different ways. AlShebli et al., in 2018, looked at the impact of ethnic diversity in scientific collaboration.Several groups have evaluated the status of EDI in scientific publishing and found that there is room for improvement. Salazar et al., in 2021, found that most editors of top‐cited journals are straight White men.There are several types of unconscious bias that could exist in the publishing process. Bias is a prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group that is usually considered to be unfair. Unconscious bias, also known as implicit bias, is a bias that is formed outside one's own conscious awareness. Everyone experiences unconscious bias, and it is typically based on social stereotypes toward peoples of various races, ethnic groups, gender identities, sexual orientations, physical abilities, education, and more. One example of unconscious bias is affinity bias, which is gravitating toward people similar to ourselves. In scientific publishing, it might mean a reviewer is more likely to positively review an article from an author with similar training, education, or background. Another example is confirmation bias, which is searching for information to confirm one's own beliefs, rather than objectively evaluating the data or information.In 2020, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) hosted a workshop, bringing together 53 publishing organizations to set new standards for diversity and inclusivity within scholarly publishing. From this workshop came the “Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing.”One of the tasks of the joint commitment was to develop standardized questions to collect diversity data. In the publication reviewing process, it is common practice for a blind or double‐blind review, which means the reviewers cannot see the author demographics and the authors cannot see the reviewer demographics. This blind review is an effort to remove bias that could exist based on an author's name and affiliation. Because of this process, it seems natural to ignore gender, race, and ethnicity data for authors, reviewers, and editors because it seemingly helps eliminate bias. However, by not collecting this data, the community is unaware of the diversity, or lack thereof, of the authors, reviewers, and editors. The first task of the joint commitment is to understand our publishing community, so the data must be collected. The standardized questions are as followsCurrently, Wiley does not collect diversity data from anyone within the publishing process, including readers, authors, reviewers, or editors. There is a large amount of data available to evaluate readership and authorship, specifically what country is downloading and submitting data. By collecting diversity data from the readers, authors, reviewers, and editors, publishers can understand the diversity of the Medical Physics community and begin to make changes and ensure that diversity is reflected in every step of the publishing process. At the time of publication, 227 countries have downloaded at least one article from the JACMP over the last 5 years. Compare that to the number of countries with authors for the JACMP, which is only 51 countries. A total of 25 authors in 2022 had unknown country origin. Authors from the United States account for ∼50% of JACMP authors for the last 5 years, but only account for 30% of the downloads.Ensure that inclusion and diversity are integrated into publishing activities and strategic planning.Work to understand the demographic diversity of authors, editorial decision makers and reviewers, such as gender, geography, and ethnicity data.Acknowledge the barriers within publishing which authors, editorial decision makers, and reviewers from underrepresented communities experience and take actions to address them.Define and communicate the specific responsibilities authors, editorial decision makers, reviewers and staff members have toward inclusion and diversity.Review and revise as appropriate the appointment process for editors and editorial boards to capture the widest talent pool possible.Publicly report on progress on inclusion and diversity in scholarly publishing at least once a year.The next task of the joint commitment was to develop minimum standards on which publishers can build. The purpose of these minimum standards is to enable publication leadership to evaluate their performance and progress on inclusion and diversity and take specific actions to improve. The minimum standards are as follows:Each member of the joint commitment has agreed to abide by these minimum standards, but there are no defined methods for the process. Publishers have posted statements on their websites, detailing certain actions they will take to meet these minimum standards. One such action is providing gender equality. An example of this effort is eliminating “manels,” which are panels made entirely of men. As of 2021, about 75% of the AAPM self‐reported as men, 24% were women, and 1% preferred not to respond.Another action to improve diversity in publishing, beyond gender, is encouraging participation from underrepresented groups in both authorship and reviewers. One example of an underrepresented group is those from the global south, including Latin America, Africa, developing countries in Asia, and Oceania. Researchers in this region could face socioeconomic and systemic barriers, limiting their access or opportunities within publishing. For many of these regions, English is a second language, so there are barriers to publishing in major scientific publications that produce manuscripts only in English. There is a push for publications to provide equitable resources to these authors, so they have the same opportunities for authorship as those in the global north. Publishers can provide author services for those who use English as a second language, helping these authors follow English grammar and syntax conventions, develop a clear research story, interpret formatting instructions from the website, and decipher feedback from reviewers.Moving beyond the authors, it is important to consider EDI in the review process, including the editors, reviewers, and reviewing process. The Joint Commitment has tasked the leadership of publications, including the editorial board, to consider EDI in their decision‐making processes. One example is actively seeking diversity when developing editorials, commentary, blogs, and specials issues. Another example is updating the public‐facing resources available about the publication, ensuring that websites and other resources include inclusive language and describe the efforts of the journal to improve EDI. As noted earlier, by Salazar, there is a lack of diversity in editorial boards of journals, so leadership should also seek to diversify these boards. Some methods to improve this diversity includes ensuring inclusive language in the invitation to join the board, asking current board members to nominate colleagues from underrepresented groups, increasing the number of members on the board to gain diversity, and offering a fellowship to train potential board members. Publishers have also been tasked with developing reporting guidelines for diversity in human research. As mentioned earlier, there are underrepresented groups within clinical trials and other human research, leading to unequitable distribution of treatments and outcomes. If publishers require diversity data to be reported in the manuscript, it will bring awareness to the problem.In addition to the editors, the reviewer pool should also be evaluated for diversity and inclusivity. Similar to the editorial board, the reviewer invitation should be evaluated for inclusive language. Additionally, public‐facing resources should be updated to encourage authors to recommend reviewers from underrepresented backgrounds. As mentioned before, an important component of ensuring a diverse reviewer pool is collecting demographic data, which is not commonly performed. It is also important for journals to provide resources to train editors and reviewers, particularly in unconscious bias.Finally, it is important to think about the readers of the journals, evaluating the reach and impact of the journal. There are barriers that could prevent equal access to these scientific publications, such as the cost of a subscription. This will be covered in a subsequent letter to the editor and remains an important component of enhancing EDI within the publication system.The Wiley and the JACMP are committed to advancing equity, diversity, and inclusivity within the journal and the entire publishing process. Some current efforts include the signing of the Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing, utilizing double blind review, and providing open access to all JACMP articles. Future endeavors, aligning with the Joint Commitment, will likely include collecting diversity data from authors and reviewers, pushing the JACMP to the forefront of ethical publishing. We cannot do our best work without including the best minds. As Mother Teresa said, “I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.”


GigaByte, an online open-access, open data journal that aims to be a new way to publish research following the software paradigm: CODE, RELEASE, FORK, UPDATE and REPEAT. Following on the success of GigaScience in promoting data sharing and reproducibility of research, its new sister, GigaByte, aims to take this even further. With a focus on short articles, using a questionnaire-style review process, and combining that with the custom built publishing infrastructure from River Valley Technologies, we now have a cutting edge, XML-first publishing platform designed specifically to make the entire publication process easier, quicker, more interactive, and better suited to the speed needed to communicate modern research.Current practices in scientific publishing are unsuitable for rapidly changing fields and for presenting updatable data sets and software tools. In this regard, and as part of our continuing pursuit of pushing scientific publishing to match the needs of modern research, we are delighted to announce the launch of  GigaByte正式创刊。GigaByte旨在以一种全新的“软件”模式发表研究成果：代码、版本、派生、更新和重演（CODE、RELEASE、FORK、UPDATE和REPEAT）。继GigaScience在促进数据共享和研究的可重复性方面取得成功之后，新创姐妹刊GigaByte力求更进一步。GigaByte发表的文章篇幅简短，审稿过程采用问卷形式，并将这一审稿形式与River Valley Technologies公司开发的定制版出版基础架构相结合，从而拥有了最先进的可扩展标记语言优先（XML-first）出版平台。该出版平台以整个出版过程更简便、快捷、更具交互性为目标而专门设计，以期与当代的研究交流速度并驾齐驱。随着科技领域日新月异地发展，现行的科学出版方式已无法满足其快速的变化，也不利于展示不断更新的数据集和软件工具。有鉴于此，以及我们对“推动科学出版方式以适应现代研究需求”的不懈追寻，我们很高兴地宣布：一本在线的、完全开放获取、开放数据期刊—— GigaScience  as a new type of journal — one that provides standard scientific publishing linked directly to a database that hosts all the relevant data. Aiming to address Buckheit and Donoho’s 1995 complaint that “an article about computational results is advertising, not scholarship. The actual scholarship is the full software environment, code and data that produced the result.” , we were inspired to launch a new type of journal that focussed on making sure the actual scholarship of all types of research was included with the article narrative.In 2012, we launched  and other forms of recognition for our past efforts, we are hungry to do more. One of our biggest frustrations and a major component of what has held us back has been the legacy publishing infrastructure, which, for the most part, still incorporates print-based production processes, and has a decades old codebase. It is no longer fit for purpose in this non-print, online, more data-centric digital age. When carrying out collaborations and integrations with the growing ecosystem of open science platforms, trying to make changes in scientific publishing always had to be ad hoc and shoehorned into legacy publishing workflows. Any technical changes and updates to the system are typically slow and buggy, and have issues with scalability. More, making changes is very expensive, and thus, to make business sense, changes have to be useful for a wide number of journals — all with different needs. Modern, web-literate platforms dominate other fields, so when we are publishing modern, web-literate research outputs, we should publish them in the same manner. The vast majority of publishing platforms remain highly focussed on static, hand-typeset PDFs rather than modern, digital first, XML- (Extensible Markup Language) based technologies.Eight years on we have achieved many of these aims. With data publishing becoming more mainstream as the major publishers have followed our lead, and the journal receiving awards  GigaScience Editorial Board Member Carole Goble, who won the FORCE11 Vision Prize in 2013 with her proposal “Don’t Publish. Release!” . She proposed applying a 21st century software-release-style paradigm instead of an 18th century print-a-book paradigm to scholarly communication. And thus the germ of the idea that would eventually spawn GigaByte was set in motion.An inspirational spark came to us from . In this Kaveh presented embryonic ideas that would eventually becoming RVT’s end-to-end publishing solution, which includes manuscript submission, content management, and hosting using collaborative online platforms  practices for sharing .For The next step in this iterative pathway will be addressed with an article type we plan to release in the future, namely an Update article. This article type will do two things. First, allow publication of substantive additional data and software versions that are immediately useful to the community but would typically have a much-delayed release or indeed might never be released because the authors need to carry out and add analyses to make these “publishable” in the current publishing paradigm. Second, greatly reduce the time to write and peer-review articles as the majority of the narrative (e.g. the Introduction and similar sections) of an Update does not change in any substantive way and can be linked instead of rewritten, allowing reviewers to focus only on the added information in assessing the manuscript. This type of article is made possible by leveraging the ability of River Valley’s XML-first platform to near instantaneously change and produce content on the fly. Watch this space for more information on this new article type.GigaScience, we pushed to break barriers in transparency, reproducibility, and data and tool accessibility: these are our foundational principles. GigaByte, on top of having no obstacles to access article text, supporting data and code, plans to break through even more barriers to continue to move toward truly open science. As a medium built for the web rather than one to replace dead trees, GigaByte aims to move even further beyond the static PDF. To get there, we are collaborating with River Valley Technologies, whose custom-built hosting platform is flexible and can handle myriad widgets and dynamics. We are encouraging submitting authors to include dynamic features and widgets in their papers to allow greatest interaction with their work. If we are not currently able to do it, we and our partner River Valley Technologies are ready and excited to investigate, explore, and evolve to make this possible. We will, of course, be continuing to carry out open and transparent peer review as standard , and peer reviewers will be credited for their hard work with DataCite DOIs that they can display in their online CV and ORCID profiles .With Adding to this, we are looking for ways to make the review process more streamlined, to allow reviewers —who all have limited time— to focus primarily on the specific points we want assessed. To do this we will be using a questionnaire style review, but these will also include optional commenting areas so reviewers are not blocked by a static questionnaire from giving their much-desired additional thoughts. Post-publication peer review and further interaction is encouraged through Hypothes.is integration, for collaborative annotation of our content. So readers don’t just have to passively consume information; they can actively connect and update it.. We will be continuing to identify barriers to speed and dynamic presentation in scientific publishing and finding new ways to improve the reader’s interaction with the content.Another barrier to maximising the utility of scientific research to the international community is the lack of focus and tools to aid the reader of the articles. As a clear example, language and jargon issues limit the ability of researchers not fluent in English to engage fully in the international scientific arena and citizen scientists to be able to contribute and provide perspectives not constrained by the current scientific preconceptions. The dynamic River Valley Technologies platform allows integrated language support. It also includes options for readers to select how they want to view papers, including, for example, the availability to view the article in a dyslexic-friendly font. Demonstrating the potential for novel ways of viewing content built on the open XML, we also showcase the open source eLife Lens manuscript viewer, ensuring full use of the highly structured XML files, and allowing you to view relevant content in side-by-side panes GigaByte APCs as low as possible, and certainly well under the current mean APC in Europe of €1,975 (∼$2160) . A major cost of doing business in publishing goes into the production of articles, which is typically a manual process to layout and create PDF and XML formats of an article; a lot of this work is still wedded to the print process. The RVT publishing platform has a fully automated production process, enabling us to eliminate that cost and pass that savings to authors. Additionally, our aim is only to cover costs: not to take advantage of grant funds that are aimed at promoting research, and not to make a profit for any business or investor. Following the FAIR Open Access Principles we will also provide transparency on our costs so that authors and granting organizations have a clear understanding of what an APC covers . For authors looking for the greatest savings, that time is now — as there are no APCs for the first 6 months.A final barrier… the cost of publishing. Time is money, as they say, and reducing the time from research to publication is a major goal of ours. But, while the advent of open access publishing has eliminated barriers to accessing information, it has not eliminated the cost of publishing. To be sustainable, open access publishers have moved to having Article Processing Charges (APCs) to cover costs. In moving to open access, publishers have eliminated a major barrier to information, but another barrier has been erected: the ability for some researchers to be able to afford to publish. While we cannot eliminate our costs, we are working hard to make GigaByte and our formal call for papers, we include some articles to give people an idea of the types of functionality our platform provides in addition to the text, and links to data and source code. An example of our new interactive approach to publishing is in our launch Data Release: “Data for 3D Printing Enlarged Museum Specimens for the Visually Impaired”. This presents enlarged museum specimens that were 3D printed for various interactive exhibits at the National Museum in Bloemfontein, South Africa . In describing the data production and re-use potential, the digitised versions of these interactive museum exhibits are equally interactive for GigaByte readers, with links to downloadable 3D models in our GigaDB repository  and in an embedded Sketchfab window in the article that allows the reader to inspect the model and interact with it through their browser . We also include links to the Thingiverse repository  where the 3D printing community can find and download the models and share back their adaptations. Taken from this paper, Figure Feaella Capensis). Fun fact: these are also known as ‘book scorpions’ as these tiny arachnids were first described by Aristotle, who likely came across them among scrolls in a library where they would have been feeding on booklice. This article’s data for these book scorpions is a brilliant virtual demonstration of how we have moved well beyond books and scrolls that are prone to an ecosystem of beasts living off them to a digital world that allows us to disseminate, recreate, and remix knowledge — free of barriers such as geography and access (and arachnophobia).With the launch of Although digital resources are not prone to booklice, they do have their own risks with “bit rot” and other forms of digital degradation. To mitigate these, we follow best practices, using Crossfef and DataCite digital object identifiers for our textual and data content, and we are members of the CLOCKSS sustainable dark archive to ensure the long-term survival of our textual content. Our integrated GigaDB repository is undergoing CTS certification, and we insist that the data supporting our articles are hosted in trusted data repositories under CC0 public domain waivers.GigaScience, we encourage authors to make use of protocols.io to post their detailed methods and then simply cite that in the article . In GigaByte, we are moving to make this even more closely linked to the article. Among our launch articles is a new frog genome  demonstrating where the protocols have been integrated into the protocols.io repository , increasing the interactive nature of our papers with more plugins, and bringing in execution and data quality checks in the data and code review process. This will be done both via automated tools and using independent validation through efforts like the CODECHECK certificate of reproducible computation first showcased in We encourage you to contact any of the editors to begin conversations about specific needs in your research communities for promoting large-data access, sharing, use, and reuse. GigaScience 创刊，它作为一种新型期刊，将标准的科学出版直接与数据库相关联，存储所有相关数据。为了解决Buckheit和Donoho在1995年提出的问题：“一篇关于算法的文章只是在做广告，而非学术。真正的学术是由完整的软件环境、代码和数据及其共同产生的结果构成的” ，我们推出了这一新型期刊，致力于确保在文章中包含各类研究真正的学术成果。2012年，和其他形式的表彰，均是对我们过去努力的认可，我们渴望做的更多。然而，阻碍我们前进的主要因素之一就是传统的出版基础架构，该基础架构的大多数功能仍与印刷生产流程相关联，代码库也十分陈旧，不再适合于非印刷、在线、以数据为中心的数字化时代。在与不断发展的开放科学平台生态系统进行协作和集成时，改变科学出版方式的尝试始终是临时性的，且不得不将其强加在传统出版工作流程中。在技术上更改和更新出版系统通常十分缓慢且有诸多漏洞，并且存在可扩展性问题。此外，更改系统非常昂贵，因此，从商业角度出发，对系统所做的更改必须对很多期刊都有用，虽然所有期刊的需求本就各不相同。现代的、基于网络的平台主导着其他领域，因此，我们应以相同的方式发表现代的、基于网络平台的研究成果。目前，绝大多数出版平台仍依赖于静态的、手工排版PDF，而不是基于现代的、数字优先、基于可扩展标记语言（XML）的技术。八年来，我们完成了大多数的目标。在获得各大出版商的认可后，数据出版变得越来越主流，期刊也获得了各种奖项（例如，2018年荣获 Prose“期刊出版创新奖” GigaScience编辑委员会成员Carole Goble在2013年凭借“Don't Publish. Release！” 的提议荣获FORCE11视觉奖，她提议在学术交流中采用21世纪的软件版本模式，而不是18世纪的书籍出版模式。这一提议给我们带来了启发，最终萌生了创立GigaByte的想法。。Kaveh在会上提出了一些初步设想，这些想法最终将成为RVT的端到端出版解决方案，包括投稿、内容管理以及利用合作的在线平台进行托管。GigaScience中首次展示的可重复计算过程的CODECHECK证书等 。我们希望您喜欢这些示例文章，这里看到的创新仅仅是个开始。新的基础架构为我们提供了一块空白画布，供我们适应和改变，从而摆脱旧的出版基础架构的诸多限制。未来发展路线包括发表更新文章（Update articles，如上所述），使用更多插件增强文章的交互性，以及在数据和代码审查过程中增加管理和数据质量检查。这既可以通过自动化工具来完成，也可以通过使用独立验证来完成，诸如若您的研究团队在促进大数据访问、共享、使用和再利用方面有任何特殊需求，欢迎您联系我们的任何一位编辑咨询。


Microbiology Resource Announcements and two research journals, mSystems and Applied and Environmental Microbiology, will serve as an initial experiment to promote open and reproducible science.As part of society-wide efforts to promote open access in science, the American Society for Microbiology journals are piloting the publication of companion articles highlighting rigorous data resources. The simultaneous publication of original research and data resource articles will increase awareness of, and access to, verified data sets that are critical to scientific progress. Companion articles in  The impact, reproducibility, and rigor of experimental science are predicated on how easy it is to access, reanalyze, and interpret the scientific data that support findings published in primary research articles. Equally important is access to tools developed to generate or analyze scientific data. The “Open Science” framework aspires to disseminate research products, findings, tools, and interpretations in a format that is accessible to all levels of society , 2. DespMicrobiology Resource Announcements (MRA) was envisioned as a platform through which microbiologists could publish tools, genetic resources, “omics” data sets, databases, and workflows—any resource useful to the microbiology community at large. Throughout the years since its launch, the journal’s editor in chief and senior editors have further refined MRA’s mission to ensure that resources are easily accessible, reproducible, and clearly annotated for the microbiology community. An MRA announcement allows authors to provide clear methodological information about how the data were generated and analyzed and also provide open access links to the raw data. These pieces of information go hand in hand. For example, without understanding how an experiment was designed and run on an Illumina MiSeq system, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to reuse the raw reads published in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive.MRA add value. The MRA review process is much like that of any journal, but it is driven by the reviewers’ focus on the resource’s availability and utility. Careful evaluation of the resource ensures that the authors’ description in their MRA manuscript matches the accession numbers and DOIs provided. Specific details, such as the parameters used for all bioinformatic software involved in generating the resource and the provision of the material in question, are required by MRA. These types of details may be easily overlooked during the review of primary publications, in which reviewers often focus on the interpretation of the scientific results and not necessarily the nitty gritty of the resource itself. MRA provides a “verification stamp” on the resource; it has been thoroughly checked by two experts in the field and gone through extensive review to ensure that the resource is as open—and useful—as possible to the community.Evaluation and validation of scientific resources through MRA companion articles to increase the rigor, accessibility, and reusability of the resources being leveraged in your primary research articles. In this pilot endeavor, MRA joins forces with two ASM journals, Applied and Environmental Microbiology (AEM) and mSystems, that are committed to best practices in data sharing and accessibility. This partnership will allow authors to submit original research articles to AEM and mSystems with MRA companion articles focused on expanded, rigorous analysis of data resources reported in the primary article. A companion article may have an authorship order different from that of the primary publication as needed to showcase the contributions of other members of a research team and support their career progress. Importantly, the MRA companion article is peer reviewed under the highest journal standards to provide much-needed verification and validation of data resources that are essential to repeat and further advance research. These resources—thanks to the evaluation at MRA—will provide collaborative resource pools to facilitate meta-analyses while also enhancing the utility of the primary source.We are excited by the potential of The launch of this pilot program at ASM journals recognizes the value of data resources and addresses the need to curate these valuable resources in formats that are both accessible and usable for scientists. We will be evaluating how the community responds to this opportunity, and we will look for ways to improve its utility. We welcome your feedback! So, please, reach out and tell us how you think companion articles could be improved to realize their full potential.


Science and science reporting are under threat. Knowingly or not, researchers and clinicians are part of this debacle. This is not due so much to the notorious replication crisis, as to our acceptance of lowering common morality for personal gains, including the widespread, deprecable phenomenon of predatory publishing. Rather than fiercefully countering this loathsome practice, academics are accepting, often supporting a masquerade solution: paying several thousand dollars to publish for all their own papers. This new policy will create a disparity across richer and poorer disciplines; will result in concentrating even more in the hands of large, rich, Western institutions, also penalising younger researchers; will kill observational studies and exploratory research; and will make disseminating science depending more on finances than on quality. This article calls for the full awareness of the academic community on the risks of the current situation in scientific publishing. Science and science reporting are under threat. Knowingly or not, researchers and clinicians are part of this debacle. This is not due so much to the notorious replication crisisChris Chambers, describing the current methodological sins hampering the thoroughness of scientific publications, laid out his forthright manifesto on how to avoid the pitfalls of favouring “good results” over good science. The most frequent of such drawbacks are summarised in Anyone skimming through the daily list of dubious papers, highlighted by the laudable Retraction Watch, should be alarmed by the sheer volume of blunder and fabrication tarnishing scientific articles. One way to contrast this dangerous drift is to require that all data on which a report is based be made available for scrutiny, re-analyses and criticisms. Authors should honour this golden rule, reviewers should demand to see the data, editors should insist that they be transparent, and publishers should assist their archiving in accessible repositories.Too often, names are added to the list of authors, even if their contribution does not qualify them as authors. An author of a scientific paper is anyone who contributed substantially to the study, by designing it, collecting considerable amount of the data reported, analysing or interpreting them. All authors are accountable for the content of the manuscript they sign. Anybody else associated with the study should be acknowledged for their specific work, but not listed as an author, see, for instance, the recommendation of the ICMJE or the criteria laid out by CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy). In particular, authorship should not be offered as an honorary homage to someone in a position of power, nor should it be used as a bargaining chip to obtain career or other advantages. In short, an author is someone who actively partook to the study, practically or conceptually; hence, for example, offering access to a group of patients does not qualify the clinician as author . Moreover, if used thoroughly and systematically, CRediT may also provide a mechanism to reveal any unbalanced division of tasks and workload due to gender or other personal demographics of the researchers involved in the studyEthics is relevant. Which ethics body approved the reported study or permitted the report of the observation should always be explicit in the manuscript. Avoid the cliché of simply parroting the mantra phrase, “The study received ethical approval and is conducted according to the Declaration of Helsinki.” Be specific and consider ethics as integral part of the study processScientists and clinicians blame journalists for poor science reporting in the media. However, often exaggeration in the news is due to the researchers bragging about their findings in academic press releasesThe idea generally held about reviewing is that it would benefit from an overhaul, changing its status from a quasi-hobby to a mandatory duty of each academic. Reviewing  time should figure in the workload models of universities, it should be taught formally to early career researchers, and possibly it should be financially rewarding for the individuals or their institutionsThe process of peer reviewing is not perfect, does not prevent despicable errors, and does not impede very bad research from entering the literatureth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press” (1978)The scientific community should resist the pressure to shortening reviewing time to deadlines incompatible with thoroughness. In Commencement Address at Harvard, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stated that, “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20Indeed, the publishing arena is now marred with the problem of a deluge of below-par publications in unscrupulous outlets. Let us trace our steps to analyse how we got here.cOAlition S, launched Plan S which establishes the principle that academic journals should gradually increase the quota of papers they publish in Open Access (OA) starting at the beginning of 2022. The outcome of this policy is that publishing each single academic paper will be charged several thousand dollars. Individual researchers, agencies funding their work, or the institution where they operate will have to bear such expenses. The reaction of the academic world has not been to fight against this decision, rather individual universities, institutions, learned societies and even individual research groups are trying to navigate the system by establishing bilateral deals with the publishing houses, allowing their affiliated researchers to publish their papers at discounted fees. These deals involve packages including a fixed number of papers that each group will be allowed to publish with a particular publisher at no extra cost. The benefit would be that all published material will be made available to everyone in OA.At the end of 2018, the initiative However, the new policy will also carry severe consequences: (1) Institutions will not cover the entire costs of publications, part of which will have to be met by individual researchers, creating a disparity across richer and poorer disciplinesThis proves to be a typical case of the so-called Cobra Effect, which bedevils well-intended policies that fail to properly consider their unintended consequences.The cobra effect loosely refers to unintended and unforeseen consequences of policies designed in good faith and with the view of bettering the current situationPublishing in OA is on the increase. The lofty founding principles of OA were to counter the power and fight against the revenues of established, private publishing houses by making freely available all papers reporting studies funded by public moneyHowever, there is no such a thing as a free lunch, and soon it became clear that the authors themselves had to fork out the expenses of OA, hence draining resources from the research process itself. Moreover, far from decreasing the market dominance of the established publishing companies, OA boosted their income by adding authors’ publishing fees to the subscriptions , whilst increasing academic costs. The most harmful outcome of OA though has been paving the way to predatory publishing.Predatory publishing is a pandemic that has infected science disseminationYet, blinded by their hubrisThe advent of these predatory outlets represents a real menace to the integrity of science disseminationThe well-meant Plan S and the crooked predatory marked are two sides of the same coin: in a market dominated by pay-to-publish, who will have an interest in guaranteeing rigor and quality? Not publishing companies, who will gain more by publishing more, not the researchers who may jump at the chance of easy publication and not the readers who, not realising they may be exposed to drivel, will enjoy free access to journals previously hidden by paywalls.Fortunately, not all is contemptible; there are also good OA initiatives, including journals managed by Learned Societies, as well as new formats promoting thorough science, like Pre-Registrations also available in OA regime.To counter publication biases and poor methodology, the format of Registered Reports was nearly launched a decade ago. Registered Reports is a format of publication whereby the proposed experiments are peer reviewed before the research is carried out and, if accepted, will be published independently of the results. The format was first adopted by Cortex in 2012The scale and severity of the problem is daunting. The scientific community should actively discourage the shortcuts of deceiving publishing, promoting a thoughtful and responsible dissemination, and embracing ethical reporting and sharing of data, putting an end to the current pandemic of unsound and immoral practices.


Conservation Physiology was launched jointly by the Society for Experimental Biology and Oxford University Press. Much has been accomplished since 2012 including publishing over 600 papers in the journal and helping to build a sense of place for aspiring and practicing conservation physiologists  and a reference book . Another phenomenon that has been documented in several fields, including ecology, is the ‘decline effect’ whereby early studies on a topic document extreme effect sizes with highly significant findings  that aim to contribute to the evidence bases that ultimately guide decisions by governments and policy-makers, the consequences of lapses in integrity are potentially more far reaching than in ‘blue sky’ science that is further removed from translational outcomes. Integrity and behaviour are individual responsibilities . There iConservation Physiology has the potential to increase integrity and reproducibility of results by setting high standards in experimental design and statistical power of potential contributions and by mandating high levels of transparency. When working on rare or imperilled species or in challenging environments  there is also a trade-off in that sample sizes may be constrained , we encourage the highest standard of ethical behaviour. Scientists should rapidly disclose the discovery of their own mistakes to the journal and request a correction. Similarly, should an error occur during production, a correction should be requested (noting whether it is the fault of the publisher or authors).Conservation Physiology embraces the spirit of the FAIR principles (see https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/) whereby data (and code) associated with papers are findable, accessible, interoperable and repeatable. As a journal we are just transitioning from encouraging such actions to a requirement for full data accessibility  as a requirement for publication. At the outset, we advise to give people the benefit of the doubt. First, alert the corresponding author of potential concerns. If those concerns are not adequately addressed by the corresponding author working with the journal, then alert the journal directly.Open data and improved transparency make it possible to scrutinize other researchers’ data  need someone to step in as their advisor, offer postdoctoral positions, provide collaboration opportunities and to not judge them as tainted for having unknowingly been mentored by someone who did not have their best interests in mind.One positive outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been associated with a rise in mental health burden, is an increased awareness of the need to show compassion, cultivate social belonging and create supportive networks  does not gauge the quality of your science or the relevance to policy-makers, just public attention (positive or negative) and the online reach of your work. Yet, steps have been made to incorporate such scores into evaluation mechanisms , how we value research outputs  and evenConservation Physiology is an open-access model journal, we do not have all of the limitations in disseminating our findings as other scientists do when publishing in other journals. In essence, anyone in the world with an internet connection can access Conservation Physiology articles. Yet, the language and format may still be an accessibility barrier. Are those working outside of academia who make management and conservation decisions necessarily going to sift through the traditional format of a journal article and the jargon used to find the pieces of relevant information to make evidence-based decisions that inform policy? Maybe not. Do secondary school teachers have the time or bandwidth to do the same but to find new ideas, developments and conservation issues to communicate to the next generation in their classrooms? Maybe not. However, such stakeholders and ‘next users’ of conservation physiology findings can find the relevant messages through more accessible channels, such as those previously mentioned, where avenues for communicating science use more accessible language, visuals and media. Sections like ‘Conservation Physiology in Action’ in Conservation Physiology, where 500-word editorial- or journalism-style pieces are written about up-and-coming studies  coupled with a captivating illustration are published almost monthly and highlighted on social media. This not only highlights the work and authors and helps to train young scientists to communicate in a non-jargon, accessible way, but it also gives another avenue of accessibility to those that may need the information. Graphical and video abstracts that are now required by many journals do the same. This need for alternative communication strategies applies to all scientific findings, no matter if they are published in an open-access journal or not. Indeed, there is a profound need to advocate for science communication training, the use of alternative avenues for disseminating our work and putting pressure on those deciding if we are successful or not, including our colleagues and peers, to incorporate the reach of our work and uptake of our findings into those success metrics.Limitations in disseminating scientific findings and making them accessible have already been experienced by all of us since early 2020 with the global pandemic , but it is important to note that limitations and accessibility issues with scientific findings have perhaps always been experienced by many communities and demographics worldwide. Because Key performance indicators need to shift accordingly as well. While we have advocated for including altmetrics into gauging our performance, other non-traditional metrics need to be considered, including but not limited to the following:number of reads/downloads of peer-reviewed papers ;briefings to government, management, industry and business;public outreach programs;public talks, lectures and seminars;organizing writing retreats, working groups and workshops; andprofessional development, training courses and research training for students, staff, stakeholders and next-users, including laboratory/team meetings and practice talk sessions.If we, as conservation physiologists, can first commit to putting more emphasis on these accomplishments  with ourselves, and second, highlight those achievements in others  and underscore how important these accomplishments are to the next generation, then we can make steps towards changing the model of success. Changing the model by which we gauge our success and that of our colleagues will help in advocating for equity, inclusion and accessibility with those we work with and where the impact of our work is felt.Conservation Physiology takes the issues raised here seriously. Here are some of the changes that we have made or will be making for 2022.The editorial team at Conservation Physiology website to support authors with this transition. Our goal is to eventually ensure that all data (and code) are shared in accordance with the FAIR principles.A requirement for data associated with accepted manuscripts to be available in an online, open-access repository. Exceptions will be considered but must be strongly justified (e.g. sharing data on the space use of an imperilled species could lead to its exploitation). This takes effect for all papers submitted beginning 1 January 2022. We provide additional detail and resources on the A requirement for data and code to be shared with referees and editors should it be requested as part of the peer review process.A commitment to investigate any issues that arise related to published content in the journal and to do so fully, rapidly and objectively. Readers are encouraged to contact the editorial team should they have concerns about the academic integrity of any content. Our team has experience with such investigations and has adopted best practices . This is intended to enable more meaningful and efficient truth seeking while minimizing conflict.Conservation Physiology. Referees unable to deliver critiques in a respectful and professional manner will be excused from future review duties. We have also added a message to peer reviewers in the reviewer portal reminding them to use a respectful and constructive tone.A commitment to creating an ethos of kindness and respect for all interactions within our community. This is particularly relevant to the peer review process where our approach will be thoughtful and supportive with a focus on providing guidance to improve content even if material is deemed inappropriate for Conservation Physiology will require a statement of author contributions that acknowledges the ways in which individual authors contributed to the work and the elements for which individuals accept responsibility. We adhere to the CRediT approach (All papers in We wish to end by thanking the members of the conservation physiology community. Because we are small, supporting each other, amplifying our collective voice and working together is particularly important. Realizing the goals of conservation physiology—not just in terms of generating actionable knowledge but in creating a community of practice that furthers the development of the next generation of conservation physiology professionals—will require the collective efforts of all. Challenges remain—from the continuing challenges arising from COVID-19 (Most authors hold an editorial position on the journal but were not involved with handling the paper in an editorial capacity.All authors contributed to conceptualization, writing and editing.


Perspectives on Medical Education to write a commentary on Rees et al.’s article about journal choice [right audience, you still want many readers in your audience of interest. Accordingly, my question for you is: which audience should read your work?”“Good question! Let’s have a dialogue. I just received an invitation froml choice . Our lun“Until not so long ago writing a book was the preferred channel for science, after millennia of oral knowledge transfer. For centuries, book owners were owners of knowledge, and libraries temples of knowledge, the preferred whereabouts for scholars. Then journals, with regular appearance and subscribers, became more convenient: new knowledge was simply delivered to your door mat. Now the internet is quickly replacing books and printed journals. Many excellent health profession education (HPE) books still appear, and I belong to those buying them, but I have mixed feelings about their impact. Even high-quality chapters, usually written by invitation, are read by too small an audience. Were they published as journal articles, they would probably be better read and cited. I have written books, but seldom meet people who read, let alone own them. A book is not a sensible option for your manuscript.”Perspectives on Medical Education pioneered this in HPE, by offering diamond open access, i.e., without costs for readers or authors. Yet to find articles, you now search for authors or topics, rather than journals. I use Google Scholar a lot, more than good-old PubMed. Topics and authors come first, and I look at the journal of a paper to gauge its credibility. But browsing email alerts of quality journals does make me aware of interesting things I was not looking for. Alerts are my preferred subscription.”“Well, the future of publishing may look quite different from now . Major membarras de choix than being limited in number [https://tinyurl.com/53zh3ddu) [“Unlike decades ago, the choice of an HPE journal is rather an n number . I keep 3zh3ddu) . Rees et3zh3ddu) . Clearly“Think of making a list of three, and anticipate rejections, as the top HPE journals accept 15% or less of all submissions. Rees et al. found that successful authors value things like the journal’s audience, editor reputation, impact, access, speed of processing, and the fit of their manuscript with the journal’s scope [“Ha! You touch on a critical issue here. The JIF does reflect whether the journal’s articles are being cited, but don’t let that determine your decision. Metrics also have limitations. Any metric of quality that becomes a target in itself ceases to be a good measure and will be gamed (Campbell’s and Goodhart’s Laws) . If a re“Wait. Remember that quality takes time. Scientific journals can be trustworthy only if they scrutinize the quality of articles. My grandfather, born in 1892, cherished the credo ‘if printed, it must be true’. Now, in times of uncertainty and ‘fake news’, credibility must be earned, and serious scientific literature has the moral obligation to maintain that standard. Peer review is not perfect, but it is the best method we have and it takes time. In quality journals, articles have been critically reviewed by at least three to five scholars. Journals that offer rapid publication should be distrusted. For example, today I received four personalized invitations from such journals to submit a manuscript, adding to another 13 in the previous four days, all from different journals. Such predatory journals promise fast reviews, high impact and rapid open access publication, but are really just after your APC. Do not respond, even if personalized and referring to one of your previous articles. Serious processing takes time. Expect to wait at least six months before seeing a successful paper published online, prior to issue assignment. What is new is the option to deposit unreviewed empirical work as a preprint on an open access repository, such as arXiv.org, bioRxiv.org or ResearchSquare.com. These serve the rapid exchange of scientific advances, and some HPE editors encourage this , 8.”“Yes! Even among credible journals. If you have never published, you would not know it, but if you have, you can see that editorial decisions may just refer to review comments, may include personal comments of an associate editor, and may, on top of that, include comments of the Editor-in-Chief who ultimately makes the decision. The ‘lazier’ journals have the reviewers do all the work by just confirming their recommendations, and having them review the revisions too, without forming an original editorial opinion—not much editing in their editor roles! I prefer journals with quality editorial processes. In some cases, these journals help editing, explain how they arrive at decisions and value reviews by publishing their criteria –13. Take“Basically, you can’t tell. Reviewers may be good or not so good, and editors should not always follow their advice; they should replace reviewers who make superficial, brief or derogatory comments. Reviewer quality is not something I think of when choosing a journal. As a regular reviewer myself, my judgments are not different for different journals, but sometimes I comment ‘this seems better for a different type of journal’. Having said that, top journals likely attract better reviewers. When pressed for time I tend to accept review invitations from the most credible journals, leaving others, sadly, with more difficulty finding reviewers. Some journals encourage reviewers to engage junior researchers. I must say, writing my reviews with others improves their quality. So why don’t you join me in an upcoming review?”Perspectives, the journal that originated in the Netherlands!”“Ah, you are challenging me now. The answer is no, but I can’t help but have a biased sympathy for


Dear Reader,We look back to a great year with many changes.In January, I took over from Prof. Ortmann as Editor in Chief of Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics. He gave me the task of developing an already well-run journal.To this end, it was initially important for us to place the management function on several shoulders. I am therefore very grateful that we were able to recruit Prof. Nicole Sänger, Prof. Bernhard Krämer and Prof. Andreas Hartkopf. They are currently collaborating as Deputy Editors in Chief and covering the subject areas of reproductive medicine, general gynecology, and oncology, while the overall management of the journal and the subject area of prenatal and obstetric medicine is in my hands. All submitted manuscripts are assigned to us for a first review. Only papers with a realistic chance of being accepted are then re-assigned to Associate Editors who manage the peer review process.We are also very grateful to Dr. Bettina Walter-Thorwart, who supports the journal as Managing Editor, and to Ms Barbara Pedrotti, who is our essential link to Springer.It would not be possible to manage and develop the journal without these strong pillars.Of course, the Associate Editors are crucial for a timely evaluation of the manuscripts. Our group includes now more than 25 experts in their field in gynecology and obstetrics. They invite reviewers, evaluate the manuscript based on the reviewers’ assessments and provide recommendations to Nicole, Bernhard, Andreas and me who make the final decision. A special thanks also goes to our Reviewers. They ensure that the peer review process is filled with life and that only high-quality papers are accepted. 698 diverse colleagues have participated in the peer review process in 2022. We are particularly grateful to Prof. Katharina Rall, Prof. Markus Hoopmann, Dr. Susanne Schüler, Dr. Emel Canaz and Dr. Felix Neis, who have done more reviews than anyone else this year. We work hard to reduce the turnaround time and we are on a good way. On average, in 2022, we provided a first decision within 38 days after submission compared to 48 days in the previous year.In the last 12 months, we have received more than 2,800 manuscripts from all over the world. We would like to thank all the authors who consider publishing their work with us. Unfortunately, we had to reject 82% of the submitted manuscripts. I know how painful and unsatisfying the rejection of a paper can be with its significant burden of research commitment. However, we can only accept a small proportion of the papers that are delivered to us. Still, we would like to encourage everyone to send us their papers; we will take care of them in a timely and professional manner.https://www.springer.com/journal/404/updates/23115614.IF (2021) reached a value of 2.493. We are indebted to those authors who contributed to the rise of IF with their outstanding papers and to our Editors and Reviewers for their hard work and the restless commitment in selecting the best journal contributions for publication. Take the opportunity to read the most important journal articles, which are available free of charge at The marked growth of yearly article downloads shows the rising impact of the journal in the research community: + 35% in 2020, + 41% in 2021 and a further 27% increase in usage is expected in 2022. We aim to reach the milestone of 1,000,000 yearly downloads in 2023.https://www.springer.com/journal/404/updates/23115864.We invite you to stay updated and have a look at what your peers are reading most at Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics is now active in Twitter at https://twitter.com/ArchGynObs and a monthly report on more mentioned papers through social media is available at https://www.altmetric.com/explorer/report/c1a1ddfa-6c7d-42b8-8370-41203f1a3f34. Follow us and get engaged!The Journal social media attention is significantly rising over the most recent years: + 20% in 2020, + 31% in 2021 and we expect to double mentions in 2022 compared to the previous year. Since we are aware that social media are playing a more and more active role in academic research, in 2022 we welcomed our Associate Editor, Prof. Florin-Andrei Taran, as Journal Social Media Editor. There are many more changes that have already been made and that are on their way. One significant innovation is the introduction of special issues that will focus on one specific disease. We start this month with an issue on endometriosis. It includes a very nice series of high-class article reviews, expert opinions, and original papers focused on this cutting-edge topic.We hope you enjoy it and look forward to suggestions for future contributions.We wish you a good start in 2023!Stay healthy and safe.Kind regards,Prof. Karl Oliver Kagan,Editor-in-Chief.


The Plant Cell. A particular “black box” may be the prereview consultation session, as this important stage in the evaluation of their submissions is obscured by the authors and reviewers. What is the process of manuscript consideration, and how do we determine whether a manuscript is sent for external review? This process builds on the work of my predecessor, former Editor-in-Chief Sabeeha Merchant  by multiple editors, and the letter explaining the decline decision aims to provide specific details about the assessment, reducing the number of rounds of review for many manuscripts. We also aim to make the decision about external review quickly; the median turnaround from submission to decline without external review over the last 18 months was 7 days. For these manuscripts declined without external review, the letter should clearly state whether or not we will reconsider the work and the extent of revisions that would be needed. We often encourage authors to submit elsewhere for more rapid publication.Authors may wonder how manuscripts are considered and evaluated at hant see  who implThe Plant Cell first go through an internal check to ensure the files are in order. Until recently, this was handled by our excellent but now retired Manuscript Manager, Annette Kessler , but they perform equally in terms of handling manuscripts.We also have a cohort of rotating Assistant Features Editors (AFEs); these are talented early-career scientists and, currently, all are postdocs who have undergone a rigorous selection process for their appointment to the journal . While tThe Plant Cell must impress the readers with their novelty and be viewed as opening new lines of investigation or pushing the field forward significantly. Initiating external review of a manuscript that we judge would fare poorly is not a good use of our reviewers’ time, and typically only delays the eventual publication of a paper in another journal for which it is a better fit.The most pleasing outcome of the prereview consultation session is that the paper is sent for external review, handled by one of the editorial board members participating in the prereview discussion who viewed the work positively. However, roughly half of the original submissions are declined without external review. The reasons for a decline without review are varied—perhaps the work is a poor fit for the journal or otherwise outside of the scope of what we publish. Insufficient novelty is a common basis for declining a manuscript without review, meaning that the impact of the discovery was judged by the editors to be weak or insufficiently interesting. We receive many manuscripts describing solid, well-executed work but for which there is little enthusiasm among multiple board members. Papers published in The Plant Cell publishes only the highest quality of work, maintaining standards set at the founding of the journal over 30 years ago, a decision to decline without review in the case of data quality concerns is also of service to the authors. There is nothing worse than having your published work called into question, particularly if the basis for this is a quality metric that can be determined from the raw, downloadable data, or from missing controls, or poor experimental design. It is to everyone’s benefit if such issues can be identified before a manuscript is reviewed.A manuscript may also be declined without review if the prereview discussion identifies fatal flaws, like poor experimental design, lack of replication, critically-important-but-missing controls, or unsatisfactory presentation of the work . Sometimes these are correctable, and we might encourage resubmission if the authors can address the concerns. While our primary aim is to ensure that The Plant Cell or another journal—the paper is surely going to be submitted again somewhere. I believe that this is one of the attributes of The Plant Cell that makes it special, that even a rejection comes with insights and considered responses from experts in your field. Decision letters are written by the handling editor and read, revised, and approved first by the Senior Editor and then by me before being sent to the corresponding author. We have set our standards high, and match this with rigorous assessment by professional academics even before review. Our aim is to help the authors, only reviewing work that has a good chance to make it through to acceptance, at least from our first-pass assessment. We also want papers published in The Plant Cell to set the standard for the community, which is why we occasionally publish commentaries  that discuss issues that we have repeatedly encountered in evaluating manuscripts. See, for example, our commentaries on BiFC , although the extent of overlap in the findings may be a matter for discussion in the authors’ cover letter. Preprints have also helped to clarify the importance of freeing researchers from the stress of being scooped, as it’s possible to show a snapshot of the status of work at a point in time, even if peer review and revision take much longer. We do not consider preprints to count as a prior publication that impacts novelty.The Plant Cell. We are keen to publish the best work of our community, plant biologists, and through the process of evaluating your work, we try to provide helpful feedback. Ultimately, the most satisfying outcome for editors is to shepherd excellent work through the process of review and revision and to see the publication of that work and the impact of the advances that it represents. I hope your excellent work will end up in our pages.I hope this has given greater clarity on our processes and the consideration that is given to manuscripts that you submit to


Greetings of the Season, best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a wonderful year ahead, and thanks for all your support throughout the year. We take this opportunity to give you a brief update regarding the current state of the journal.Human society is still in the grips of a COVID-19 pandemic. Although we are experiencing a better situation after worldwide vaccination, new variants of the virus are the main problem. Certainly, this situation has an impact on both scientific research and publication. In this editorial, we aimed to highlight different aspects of Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences (IJBMS) metrics including the trends of CiteScore and impact factor, analysis of submitted and accepted manuscripts, etc. The percentages of submitted, rejected, and accepted manuscripts in 2018, 2019, and 2020 have been presented in The subjects of manuscripts submitted to IJBMS in the three recent years were summarized in In 2019 and 2020, the number of published articles was increased from 15 to 17 in each issue. About 90% of published articles were original . IJBMS eSome modifications were done in the journal’s website in the guide for authors section including conflict-of-interest, publication ethics, and article retraction based on Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. The FAQ section was updated and the author’s contributions statement was added for manuscript submission. Although we face some problems in the IJBMS editorial office such as prolongation of the review process, simultaneous submission of manuscripts to different journals, withdrawal after submission, submission of manuscripts by unrelated persons, etc., a better situation will be expected following implementation of COPE guidelines.Happy New Year!This editorial is a good chance to thank all our colleagues, associate editors, reviewers, and the authors whose contributions are what really make a journal great. And we thank the editorial office and the the publishers for their competence and efficiency.