Open access initiative is a “talk of the town” in scientific community in recent years. Many open access publishers have an auto-waiver policy for resource limited countries. It is still not documented that whether submissions from auto- and non-waiver countries take the same time to be accepted by the editorial office or a sense of priority works for non-waiver groups.p = 0.6983).Analyzing 248 articles published in BMC Research Notes in 2013 we have found that average 143.8 ± 5.134 and 138.4 ± 12.01 days respectively for non-waiver and auto-waiver countries were required by the editorial office to accept a submission (From this current investigation it is quite evident that both categories of submissions, coming from auto- and non-waiver countries, are equally treated by the for-profit open access journals and thus it can be concluded that no sense of priority works in case of submissions those come from non-waiver countries. The concept of OA is widely labeled as either “green” or “gold” open access. While the second one, gold open access, is considered by experts  as OA joThe basic concept of author-pay OA publishing is the author, or the author’s institution on behalf of the author, will pay a “publication fee”, which is frequently termed as “article processing charge”, for an article to be published in an OA journal. In this process the article remains open, either freely downloadable as PDF document or available as HTML or in any other format so that the readers do not need to pay or subscribe to read the article.Despite few negative criticisms ,5 OA pubPeer reviewed journals follow a complex “author-editor-reviewer” interrelationship process. The process starts with the author submitting a manuscript to a journal, the editor initially assess the suitability of the submission and if suitable send it to peer reviewers following their own peer review policy. The reviewer submits his report and after assessing the pros and cons the editor takes the decision to publish or to reject the manuscript. So, the process demands coordination and synchronization among the author-reviewer-editor. There are many cut off points where a delay may occur and more time may be required for a particular submission to be accepted. The first hurdle in this process is to get a “go” card from the initial editorial processing. A delay in this point may result in a delayed acceptance of the manuscript. So, a sense of priority may work for the submissions coming from non-waiver countries and thus the editorial office may prioritize the submissions on the basis of capability of the author to pay the processing fee. And if there is, submissions from countries that get an auto waiver may take more time to be accepted by the editorial office over regular (non-waiver) submissions.This article will test whether the OA publishers who offer a waiver on article processing charge treat all the submissions equally or not. However, it is worth mentioning that there are many non-profit OA journals, usually operated by educational institutions or societies; do not charge the authors any article processing fee. This article will deal only with Gold OA author pay journals.O = author’s ability to pay has no effect on time required to accept a submission, and the alternative hypothesis H1 = submissions from auto-waiver countries take more time to be accepted than submissions from non-waiver countries. If we can establish that HO is true we may prove that no sense of priority works in case of accepting a manuscript though the article processing charge is waived.Our null hypothesis, HTo prove our hypothesis we have considered first 250 articles published in 2013 in BMC Research Notes. We have selected this particular journal as (a) it is published by BioMed Central, one of the most popular well reputed OA publisher; (b) it is not a subject selective journal and publishes across all fields of biology and medicine; (c) encourages publishing short publications, scientifically sound, high quality but not necessarily novel in its field thus allowing submissions around the world both technologically advanced countries and resource limited countries; (d) offers auto waiver to low-income economies or lower-middle-income economies as of September 2012, and which have a 2011 gross domestic product of less than 200 billion US dollars .We excluded two articles from the analysis; one by Schwarte et al.  as it hap value less than 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant.The time span of a submission was calculated by subtracting the date of submission from the date of acceptance using Microsoft Excel. Two tailed non parametric T test was performed to confirm whether auto- and non-waiver groups differ in terms of total time required to accept the manuscripts and one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to observe any difference in average submission-to-acceptance time span for different type of articles using GraphPad Prism 5.0 for Windows. A p = 0.4033). Average time required to accept different type of articles is presented in Table Among 248 articles being analyzed, 136 (54.84%) are research articles, 55 (22.18%) short reports, 81 (32.66%) technical notes, 45 (18.15%) case reports, 4 (1.61%) correspondences and 1 (0.40%) project note. ANOVA was performed for 247 articles excluding the project note as only one such article was found amongst the articles being analyzed. ANOVA confirms that type of articles is not associated with submission-to-acceptance time span  from date of submission to date of acceptance. Whereas, in case of countries entitled to have an auto-waiver the average time to be accepted by the editorial office was 138.4 ± 12.01 days. Figure p = 0.9218).There are some extreme outliers in the non-waiver group. We have found three articles those took more than 365 days to be accepted. If we exclude these three articles from the analysis, no significant difference is observed in the results and in this case for non-waiver group the average time span for submission-to-acceptance is 139.6 ± 4.592 with a non significant difference for auto- and non-waiver groups (p = 0.4033).It is statistically evident that there is no significant difference between auto- and non-waiver groups in terms of accepting a manuscript to be published in a for-profit OA journal. However, the total time required for a manuscript to be accepted is perhaps related to many other factors; i.e. finding potential peer reviewer(s), total time required to complete peer review by the reviewer(s), authors’ promptness to respond to the reviewers comments. Moreover, linguistic quality of the submission also might play an important part in the process. A manuscript written by a non-native English speaker might need additional work to improve quality of written English, thus extra time might be required for all parties concerned in the overall process. Furthermore, one can argue that type of article  may also play an important role in case of total required time. But as per the peer review policy of the publisher all type of articles undergo the same standard rigorous review process, regardless the type of article. Our analysis also confirms this as ANOVA reveals that article type is not statistically related to submission-to-acceptance time span (F = 1.003, It is interesting to note that there are few articles which were immediately accepted upon submission. For instance, the article by Brorson et al.  requiredSo from this current investigation we can conclude that though the submissions by authors from auto-waiver countries enjoy a full waiver in many OA journals they are equally treated by the editorial office and no sense of priority works in case of non-waiver or auto-waiver countries. In other words we can say the financial part of the editorial process is sufficiently separated from the quality assessment process of the journal. However, every year if the publishers themselves publish this data it would make OA publishing more enjoyable, interactive and transparent.The author is a member of the editorial board of International Current Pharmaceutical Journal, an open access journal and received 30 USD for reviewing manuscripts for the journal. He is also a non paid Associate Editor of Stamford Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences which is also open access.


The article reflects on open access as a strategy of changing the quality of science communication globally. Successful examples of open-access journals are presented to highlight implications of archiving in open digital repositories for the quality and citability of research output. Advantages and downsides of gold, green, and hybrid models of open access operating in diverse scientific environments are described. It is assumed that open access is a global trend which influences the workflow in scholarly journals, changing their quality, credibility, and indexability. Access to scientific resources is essential for analyzing available evidence-base, designing research studies, and writing scholarly papers. It is equally important for reviewing and editing journal submissions and books, which require validation of facts, references, and tracking of redundant or plagiarized material. For academics, broad access to periodicals, theses, books, and presentations is an indispensable tool for upgrading knowledge base and translating it into the skills of their trainees. This is why the world’s top academic institutions provide full access to a variety of electronic and print sources for their faculty and students; libraries digitize their print collections and expand links to electronic periodicals, particularly to open-access journals.With the advent and wide use of digital technologies for science communication in the last two decades, the concept of access to scholarly resources has changed. Given the dire need for information immediately accessible after publication, most established publishers launched digital repositories or e-libraries for their individual and institutional subscribers . The US National Library of Medicine went further and designed PubMed Central as a free digital library of full-texts indexed in PubMed and PubMed Central. Institutional and individual repositories have been launched and rapidly grown to facilitate access to scientific information, networking within professional communities, and research collaboration. Perhaps the best example of such an initiative is ResearchGate, a networking platform for scientists, which encourages sharing raw scientific data and published articles to change the global science discourse. Finally, many brand new open-access journals have appeared on the internet, followed by a trend of transforming subscription journals to fully or partially open-access media. In fact, most journals in small professional communities and non-mainstream science countries turned the challenge of digitization and open access into an opportunity of presenting their best research papers to the global community and advancing science in their countries.Croatian Medical Journal is one of the best examples of a national open-access journal, which made full-texts of its articles freely available online, reached out to the international community, got archived in PubMed Central, and increased its citation rates to the level of the journal with the highest impact factor in Southeast Europe  of 1.58 in 2013. The rapid growth of BMJ Open is not surprising as the PLOS One, a flagship open-access journal of science and medicine published by Public Library of Science (US), has already reached a record of more than 69 000 articles, archived in PubMed Central since its launching in 2006, with the latest JIF of 3.73 and total cites of 133 246. These successful examples highlight the viability and impact of the new publishing model. The latter is also reflected in the constantly growing number of organizations mandating open access, with 177 institutions and 81 funding agencies being registered at the ROAR as of August 1, 2013  turned to be the most difficult issues for most of the traditional or new journal publishers operating the open access model. The UK research funders, for example, mandated allocation of a fraction of their funds to open access, though this measure did not lead to an increase of total expenses for research projects. Such an initiative can influence the authors’ preferences of their target journals and boost the so-called gold open access, which requires payment for publishing and opening access immediately after the publication. Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, Dove Medical Press, and Libertas Academica are among the open-access publishers who successfully implemented the gold model through diverse sources of payments and avoided jeopardizing the quality of accepted papers. For example, BioMed Central has a reasonable article-processing charge of Ł1290, which can be discounted and waived for authors from low-income countries and for those lacking research funds. However, many other publishers, particularly those exploiting the “author-pays” option, have been strongly criticized for lowering publishing standards in an attempt to increase the number of papers with processed payments ,14. One What may serve as a more sustainable and unbiased model for publishing, disseminating, and preserving scholarly papers is the green open access. Its main advantage is that the author publishes a paper in a journal and then self-archives its pre- or post-print version in an individual, institutional, specialist, or central repository such as PubMed Central. The green model is sustainable trough the subscription fees and other lawful financial sources. Its openness, however, varies, depending on the embargo period imposed on public archiving the contents after publication, which ranges from 6 to 24 months. Green open-access papers are usually published under a Creative Commons (CC) license, facilitating free distribution, reuse, and remix of the contents for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credits to the primary source . One of A large number of journals published by professional societies, which serve interests of small communities, generate essential revenue from advertisements and subscriptions. It seems that the hybrid open access is the most suitable publishing model for this set of journals, which diversifies financing through paid open access to separate articles and traditional income from subscriptions . The hybApparently, open-access publishing is becoming a global trend. The absolute majority of government agencies, universities, and professional societies are now transforming their subscription journals to open-access media, while most commercial publishers are launching a large number of brand new open-access journals . Such a The implementation of open access has also changed webometric and bibliometric figures for most scholarly journals by attracting attention of the users to the easily accessible online contents. A controlled trial comparing full-text downloads and new visitors at the eleven journals published by the American Physiological Society found significant advantages of the articles made open in the first six month after publication over their subscription matches . When ciIn conclusion, the open-access movement is gradually changing the ways of scientific research, literature search, journal editing, publishing, and archiving. Advances in digital publishing are forming the base for improved formatting, readability, and rapid distribution of research data. In the wake of changing the system of publishing, however, what concerns most is the quality of publications and unjustified rise of article-processing fees . While t


Traditional pre-publication peer review of scientific output is a slow, inefficient, and unreliable process. Efforts to replace or supplement traditional evaluation models with open evaluation platforms that leverage advances in information technology are slowly gaining traction, but remain in the early stages of design and implementation. Here I discuss a number of considerations relevant to the development of such platforms. I focus particular attention on three core elements that next-generation evaluation platforms should strive to emphasize, including (1) open and transparent access to accumulated evaluation data, (2) personalized and highly customizable performance metrics, and (3) appropriate short-term incentivization of the userbase. Because all of these elements have already been successfully implemented on a large scale in hundreds of existing social web applications, I argue that development of new scientific evaluation platforms should proceed largely by adapting existing techniques rather than engineering entirely new evaluation mechanisms. Successful implementation of open evaluation platforms has the potential to substantially advance both the pace and the quality of scientific publication and evaluation, and the scientific community has a vested interest in shifting toward such models as soon as possible. Yet he lived during a period of history (the third century BC) not known for meticulous record keeping, and our appreciation of his seminal contributions consequently depends largely on good fortune. Because of his correspondence with the scholars Conon and Dositheus at the library of Alexandria, we now know of his seminal contributions to geometry and mechanics—work that formed the basis of numerous engineering advances and mathematical discoveries in subsequent centuries Heath, ,b. But aModern technology has now solved the problem of preservation; contemporary scientists can rest assured that virtually every scientific article published today will exist in digital form in perpetuity. One might intuitively expect that this alleviation of the preservation bottleneck would also eliminate the selection problem; after all, if it costs virtually nothing to publish and preserve, why bother to suppress a scientific manuscript that could be useful to someone else down the line, however, improbable the odds? Yet in many respects, the scientific community still behaves as though record keeping were a difficult enterprise and paper a scarce commodity. We spend months waiting to hear back from reviewers at journals with 90% rejection rates, anguishing over the prospect that our work might not see the light of day, even though we could disseminate our manuscript to the whole world at any moment via the web. We rely heavily on a select few individuals to pass judgment on our work, even though dozens or hundreds of other researchers are likely to form an informed opinion of its merits within days of official publication. And while we wait for the reviews to come in, we silently fret over the possibility that we might be “scooped” by someone else, even though all it takes to establish scientific precedence is one timestamped upload in a preprint repository.http://plos.org) have a restricted scope and limited userbase .The continued reliance on an anachronistic publication and evaluation model is striking given the widespread awareness of its many limitations Smith, . Many scsocial web. In many respects, the challenges faced by popular social web applications—spanning everything from Amazon to Netflix to reddit to Last.fm–closely resemble those involved in evaluating scientific work: How can we combine disparate ratings from people with very different backgrounds and interests into a single summary of an item's quality? How do we motivate users to engage with the platform and contribute their evaluations? What steps should we take to prevent people from gaming the system? And can we provide customized evaluations tailored to individual users rather than the userbase as a whole?Understandably, norms take time to change; what's surprising is perhaps not that scientists still rely on publishing and evaluation models developed centuries ago, but that they do so in the face of available alternatives. While the scientific community has been slow to embrace emerging information technology, that technology has itself evolved very quickly, and now supports tens of thousands of websites featuring a prominent social component—what has come to be known as the In the rest of this paper, I discuss a number of principles that should guide the implementation of novel platforms for evaluating scientific work. The overarching argument is that many of the problems scientists face have already been successfully addressed by social web applications, and developing next-generation platforms for scientific evaluations should be more a matter of adapting the best currently used approaches than of innovating entirely new ones . Unfortunately, under the current model, consumers have no way to evaluate the process that led up to a final decision, or to review any of the interactions between authors, reviewers, and editors. This opacity increases the likelihood of incorrect judgments about a paper's merits, and runs completely counter to the cumulative and open nature of the scientific enterprise. If we don't know who said what about a manuscript and how the manuscript's authors responded, we run a high risk of overlooking or repeating potentially important mistakes.Current evaluation practices might be defensible if there were empirical evidence that such practices achieve their goals; but formal studies consistently suggest that conventional pre-publication peer review is of limited utility in establishing the quality of manuscripts . A recent random-effects meta-analysis of 48 studies, comprising 19,443 manuscripts, estimated an inter-rater intra-class correlation of only 0.34 . This model appears so financially successful that Nature Publishing Group and SAGE have both recently launched their own competing open-access, broad-scope journals (Scientific Reports and SAGE Open). To put it bluntly, between megajournals like PLoS ONE and thousands of specialized second- and third-tier journals, we already are publishing virtually everything. But we're doing it very slowly and inefficiently. So the real question is no longer whether or not the scientific community should transition to an open publishing model , it seems clear at this point that the ship has already sailed. With a modest amount of persistence, scientists can now place virtually any manuscript in a peer-reviewed journal somewhere Chew, —and ofte Harnad, ; it's hoTo combat the opacity of the current peer review system, openness and transparency should be central design features of any next-generation scientific evaluation platform. In this context, openness doesn't just mean making reviews of papers accessible online; it implies a fundamental level of transparency and data accessibility that should reside at the very core of new platforms. Multiple layers of information—including nearly all the data amassed by that platform over time—should be freely available and programmatically accessible to interested parties.Arguably the single most important desideratum for a next-generation evaluation platform is providing open access to the reviews, comments, and ratings of manuscripts generated at all stages of the evaluation process. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether reviewers should be forced to disclose their identities (see below), there is little reason to withhold the content of reviews and ratings from the public—at least in aggregate form . Making evaluations openly accessible would have several substantial benefits. First, it would allow researchers to evaluate the evaluators; that is, researchers would be able to determine the quality of the reviews that influence the reception of an article, and adjust that reception accordingly. Unscrupulous researchers would, for instance, no longer have the power to reject competitors' work by providing excessively negative reviews, since those reviews would themselves be subject to evaluation. Second, when implemented on a sufficiently large-scale, an open database of evaluations would provide a centralized forum for discussion of scientific work, which currently occurs in a piecemeal and much less efficient fashion elsewhere online and offline. Third, open access to reviews would allow researchers to receive credit for evaluating others' work, and hence provide greater incentive to participate in peer review.All three of these principles are already embodied in many existing community-oriented websites. One particularly effective example is implemented on the popular social news website reddit (reddit.com), which features threaded conversations that allow users to comment and vote on both original submissions and other users' comments. Submissions and comments can then be sorted in a variety of ways . The result is a highly efficient collaborative filtering system  to pseudonymous or entirely anonymous posting. The sociological question will then arise as to how much transparency of identity is desirable, and how to best motivate that degree of disclosure. A strong case can be made that some data should remain private by default (except in the aggregate); for instance, it would probably be a bad idea to force public display of users' ratings of individual articles. While greater transparency may generally be a good thing, we shouldn't let the perfect be an enemy of the good: if the only way to encourage widespread adoption of a next-generation evaluation platform is to allow pseudonymity or anonymity that seems preferable to building an idealistic platform that no one wants to use. And as I discuss in more detail below, there is good reason to believe that given a well-structured reputation management system, most users would voluntarily opt to disclose their identities.Application programming interfaces (APIs) play a central role in modern web applications. Public APIs allow third-party developers and users to plot custom bicycle routes on Google Maps, to “mashup” different YouTube videos, and to integrate Twitter streams into their own websites and applications. API-based access to the data generated by a successful scientific evaluation platform would facilitate the development of novel third-party applications, in turn spurring greater adoption of a platform and promoting further innovation. Given a platform that aggregates citation data, ratings, reviews, and comments for every paper in PubMed, and makes such data accessible via API, third party developers could build a broad range of applications—for instance, article recommendation tools , specialized aggregators that selectively highlight a subset of articles defined by some common interest, and customizable evaluation metrics that allow users to generate their own weighting schemes for quantitative assessment of articles, journals, researchers, or institutions.http://api.plos.org), which provides access to article-level metrics  for tens of thousands of PLoS articles, and the Mendeley API (http://dev.mendeley.com), which provides programmatic access to a crowdsourced research database of over 100 million articles and growing. An explicit goal of these APIs—and in the case of Mendeley, of an accompanying release of usage data for nearly 5 million papers —is to support development of new research tools such as article recommendation systems (discussed in the next section). These releases represent only the beginning of what promises to be a deluge of publicly accessible data relevant to the evaluation of scientific output.Although the deployment and adoption of research-related APIs is still in early stages, several services have already begun to provide public API access to their data. Notable examples are the Public Library of Science (PLoS) API  now provide nearly effortless ways to identify new products and services we (as opposed to other people) are likely to enjoy  based on thousands of data points rather than three self-selected letters of recommendation. The novelty or distinctiveness of a researcher's individual publications could be assessed using algorithms that evaluate similarity of content across articles, pattern of citations to and from other articles, co-authorship, etc., thereby counteracting the pressure many scientists feel to maximize publication rate even if it results in redundant publications Broad, . The relDeveloping an array of such metrics would be an ambitious project, of course, and might be beyond the capacity of any single organization given that funding for such a venture seems likely to come primarily from the public sector. But the public availability of rich APIs would off-load much of the workload onto motivated third parties. The recent proliferation of metrics such as the h-index Hirsch, , g-indexIn the longer term, the development of a broad range of evaluation metrics could lead to sophisticated new weighting schemes optimized for highly specific evaluation purposes. Instead of relying solely on recommendation systems to identify relevant articles, researchers would be able to explicitly manipulate the algorithms that generate summary evaluations of both individual articles and researchers' entire output. For instance, a hiring committee could decide to emphasize metrics assessing innovation and creativity over methodological rigor, or vice versa. An editorial board at a general interest journal could use metrics quantifying breadth of interest  to select preprints for “official” publication. Science journalists could preferentially weight novelty when selecting work to report on. The degree of customization would be limited only by the sophistication of the underlying algorithms and the breadth of the available research metrics.Providing a high degree of personalization and customizability wouldn't completely eliminate subjective criteria from evaluation decisions, of course—nor should it. But it would minimize the intensive effort researchers currently invest in filtering the literature and identifying relevant studies; it would reduce reliance on evaluation heuristics of questionable utility ; and it would provide objective bases for decisions that currently rely largely on subjective criteria. In view of the low reliability of classic peer review, and the pervasive finding that trained human experts are almost invariably outperformed by relatively simple actuarial models , which has long enabled users to rate and review papers, with the goal of encouraging interaction between readers and/or authors. In theory, such a platform offers substantial benefits to the scientific community. If everyone used it regularly, it would be very easy to tell what other people—including leading experts in the field—thought about any given article. Unfortunately, the PLoS platform provides virtually no incentive to participate, and may even offer disincentives  social influence on the community. Not only is the long-term goal—whether making money or building an online community—not emphasized on these websites; it's largely invisible.As with many of the other problems discussed above, social web applications have already addressed—and arguably solved—the challenge of incentivizing a userbase to participate. Indeed, virtually every website that relies on user-generated product ratings and reviews faces much the same challenge. For instance, Netflix's business model depends partly on its ability to find you movies that you'll enjoy. That ability, in turn, depends on sophisticated quantitative modeling of movie ratings provided by Netflix users. Without the ratings, Netflix wouldn't be able to tell you that you're likely to enjoy A priori, it seems reasonable to expect the same type of model to work equally well for scientific evaluation. Many scientists decline invitations to review manuscripts because they can't spare a few hours on relatively thankless labor, but few scientists would be too busy to make a single 5-point rating after reading a paper—especially if it doing so helped the system recommend new papers. The long-term goal of creating a centralized platform for evaluation of scientific manuscripts wouldn't require much emphasis; done right, researchers would be happy to use the service simply as a recommendation engine or bibliography management tool. More sophisticated features  could then be added incrementally without disrupting  the appeal of the core platform.mendeley.com)—already appears to be taking precisely this kind of “passive” approach to community building. Initially billed as a web-based bibliography management tool, Mendeley recently introduced a public API that provides access to its data, and has already begun to add social networking features and statistical reports that could soon form the basis for a community driven recommendation system (http://dev.mendeley.com). Crucially, Mendeley has been able to grow its enormous crowdsourced database  simply by providing an immediately valuable service, without ever having to appeal to its users' altruism. The success of this model demonstrates that the same principles that have worked wonders for commercial services like Netflix and Last.fm can be successfully adapted to the world of scientific evaluation. The challenge lies not so much in getting users to buy into long-term objectives that benefit the scientific community as a whole, but rather, in making sure that the short-term incentives that do drive initial user engagement are naturally aligned with those longer-term objectives.Notably, at least one popular service—Mendeley  evaluations. The development of new evaluation platforms will make it easy to quantitatively measure, and assign credit for, such contributions. The emerging challenge will be to ensure that such platforms also provide sufficient incentives for researchers to engage in desirable but historically underappreciated behaviors.http://stackexchange.com), a network of over 50 question and answer sites geared toward professionals in different areas. While the most popular SE website (Stack Overflow) caters to software developers, the network also features a number of popular Q&A sites populated by academic researchers, including mathematics, statistics, physics, and cognitive science exchanges. A key feature of the SE platform is the use of a point-based reputation system. Users receive and award points for questions, answers, and edits that receive favorable ratings from other users. In addition to providing an index of each user's overall contribution to the site, users attain additional privileges as they gain reputation—e.g., the ability to promote, edit, or moderate others' questions. Thus, the system incentivizes users to participate in prosocial activities and penalizes unhelpful or low-quality contributions.Here, again, scientists can learn from the social web. Reputation systems are at the core of many popular social web communities, including a number that cater explicitly to scientists. A common feature of such communities is that users can endorse or rate other users' contributions—e.g., indicating whether comments are helpful, whether product reviews are informative, and so on. A particularly relevant model is implemented on Stack Exchange (http://mathoverflow.net), where many prominent users are tenured or tenure-track professors in mathematics-related fields at major research universities—many at the top of their fields. The success of this model demonstrates that, given the right incentives, even busy academics are willing to engage in online activities that, despite their obvious value to the community, previously weren't viewed as creditable scientific contributions. Consider a telling quote from a recent Simons Foundation article  their offline reputations. This is most apparent on MathOverflow . But when the points in question are awarded for prosocial activities like asking and answering research questions, reviewing others' work, providing data, writing software, and giving advice, the scientific community stands to reap large benefits. Moreover, in addition to incentivizing prosocial contributions, SE-like reputation systems provide at least two other benefits. First, the reputation scores generated by platforms like Stack Overflow are themselves valuable in evaluating users' contribution to the scientific community, since a high reputation score by definition denotes a user who has made many positive contributions to the scientific community—mostly through channels that established metrics like citation counts don't adequately assess. Second, the ability to assign credit for contributions outside the traditional scope of scientific publication should incentivize contributions from many people who currently lack the means to contribute to science in more conventional ways. In particular, trained scientists who work at teaching positions or in non-academic settings would have a way of contributing in a meaningful and creditable way to the scientific enterprise even if they lack the time and resources to produce original research. Thus, carefully designed reputation systems stand to have a transformative effect on the communication and evaluation of scientific output.post hoc). A major benefit of such an approach is that it would allow diligent authors to solicit feedback from competing  researchers, while penalizing less careful authors who rush to publish without soliciting feedback first. In contrast, under the current system, recommending critical reviewers is a risky and generally detrimental proposition.Supposing new technological platforms do eventually transform the scientific evaluation process, an important outstanding question concerns the role of the traditional, journal-based evaluation model centered on pre-publication review. What happens to this model in a world populated by the kind of evaluation platforms envisioned here? Broadly speaking, there are two potential answers. First, one can envision hybrid evaluation models that combine the best elements of closed/pre-publication review and open/post-publication review. For example, one common argument in favor of pre-publication review is that it improves the quality of a manuscript prior to its public release . There would be no need to expend effort actively trying to eliminate conventional journals; a well-designed evaluation platform should be agnostic with respect to the venue (if any) in which manuscripts originally appear. Moreover, from a pragmatic standpoint, adoption of new post-publication evaluation platforms is likely to occur more rapidly if such platforms are presented as complements to conventional review rather than as competitors.That said, it's easy to see how sophisticated post-publication evaluation platforms might ultimately obviate any need for conventional journals, and many commentators have argued that this is a perfectly logical and desirable end result  by pulling data from academic search engines and repositories. For example, many services like PubMed and ArXiv.org provide API access or free data dumps, ensuring that the evaluation platform can remain up to date without requiring any user input. The evaluation platform should link to all articles on the original publisher/repository website (when available), but should not take on the responsibility of facilitating access to articles. Articles that are currently behind a pay-wall would not become publicly accessible in virtue of having a discussion page on the evaluation platform website; the system would  operate in parallel with the traditional publishing system rather than in competition.At the core of the platform is a collaborative filtering approach that allows any registered user to rate or comment on any article in the database. These ratings and comments can then used to sort and rank articles and users in a variety of ways (see below). The simplest implementation would be a reddit-like voting system that allows users to upvote or downvote any article in the database with a single click Figure . More soA key feature of the reddit platform  is threaded discussion: users can comment on and rate not only on primary documents , but also other comments Figure . This feTo incentivize users to comment on and review papers (and participate in threaded discussions of those reviews), the evaluation platform should feature a robust reputation system that combines basic features of the reddit system with additional features found in the Stack Exchange platform. The reddit system awards users “karma” points for sharing links and writing comments that are favorably rated by other users; in the context of a scientific evaluation platform, users would receive points based on ratings of their contributed articles on the one hand and their comments and reviews on the other (these commenting and authorship metrics would be kept separate). Each user's reputation and a summary of their contributions would be viewable from the user's public page. Standard filtering and search options would be available, allowing other users to see, e.g., what an individual's top-rated or newest articles or comments are.Much as reddit features “subreddits” geared toward specific topics and niche interests , articles in the database would be organized by topic. A core set of topics could be automatically generated based on keywords ; thus, for example, navigating to the /keyword/neuroimaging subdirectory would display a ranked list of all articles tagged with the “neuroimaging” keyword , relevance (using a recommendation system akin to Netflix or Amazon's), and recency (newly added articles would receive a boost). By default, the same algorithm would be used for all users (as on reddit). However, as discussed above, allowing users to customize the algorithm used to rank articles and/or weight researchers contributions would greatly increase the utility of the basic platform by enabling individuals or groups with specific goals to filter articles or users more efficiently .To facilitate community engagement and allow third parties to use evaluation data in creative new ways, a public API should be provided that enables programmatic access to nearly all platform data .Importantly, these features need not all be implemented at once. In particular, recommendation systems, customizable ranking algorithms, and a public API, while all desirable, could be added at later stages of implementation once the basic platform was operational. Of course, many other features not mentioned here could also be added later—e.g., social networking features, integration with third-party evaluation metrics , a closed-review phase that allows users to solicit reviews privately before an article's public release, and so on.On Spirals, Archimedes amusingly reveals that, on at least one occasion, he deliberately sent his colleagues in Alexandria false theorems, “so that those who claim to discover everything, but produce no proofs of the same, may be confuted as having pretended to discover the impossible” (Bombieri, In the preface to To take a long view, one might argue that such inefficiencies are not the end of the world; after all, science is a cumulative, self-correcting enterprise Peirce, . Given sThe author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.


Plagiarism is the wrongful presentation of somebody else‘s work or idea as one’s own without adequately attributing it to the source. Most authors know that plagiarism is an unethical publication practice. Yet, it is a serious problem in the medical writing arena. Plagiarism is perhaps the commonest ethical issue plaguing medical writing. In this article, we highlight the different types of plagiarism and address the issues of plagiarism of text, plagiarism of ideas, mosaic plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and duplicate publication. An act of plagiarism can have several repercussions for the author, the journal in question and the publication house as a whole. Sometimes, strict disciplinary action is also taken against the plagiarist. The article cites examples of retraction of articles, suspension of authors, apology letters from journal editors, and other such actions against plagiarism. The essence of good medical writing, or for that matter, any kind of scientific writing, is a clear, concise, accurate, and honest presentation of the scientific idea. Medical writers often have to write within tight deadlines. Additionally, medico-marketing writing also involves a lot of competitive pressure to be able to present a drug, device, or healthcare service in a fair fashion.Some of these fallacies are unintentional and easy to remedy. For example, when an article does not score high on clarity or lacks conciseness, the deficiency is typically unintentional. A writer with a good grasp of the concept and language can often amend these fallacies with some practice. This is not enough. Accuracy and honesty are very important requisites when it comes to good scientific writing.Perhaps, the most widely recognized unethical practice in medical writing is plagiarism. Plagiarism can be of different forms—some may be subtle and may not be classified under scientific misconduct. Others may amount to misappropriation and therefore to scientific misconduct that can have both ethical and legal implications.“plagiare” which means to “kidnap.”The use of the word “plagiarism” in the English language dates back to the 1600s. It is derived from the Latin word The World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) defines plagiarism as“… the use of others’ published and unpublished ideas or words  without attribution or permission, and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source.”Plagiarism may be detected at the level of the author, the reviewer, or the editor. A first-hand proofreading by the author himself sometimes alerts him of any inadvertent plagiarism. In such cases, the author simply corrects his mistake before submitting the manuscript to the journal. Sometimes, after the author has submitted the manuscript, he may realize that certain portions of text he had written may be deemed as plagiarized. He can then write an apology to the concerned editor and halt the publication.The reviewer is a facilitator both for the editor and the author. He helps the editor by providing a critical, scientific, and a fair review of the manuscripts. The reviewer also helps the author by making specific recommendations for revision. If a reviewer detects that a particular portion of the text is not appropriately or accurately referenced, he suggests the author to make amendments. The reviewer can also recommend rejection of the article, clearly explaining the reason for such rejection, when he detects plagiarism.Depending on the reviewer and editor’s judgment, subtle forms of plagiarism, if unintentional, sometimes may not be labeled as scientific misconduct or require a legal sanction. The reviewer may simply point out the error and instruct the author to amend it.However, in its more severe forms, especially when it is intentional, plagiarism is considered a serious offence. If an author is found guilty of such an offence, his article may be retracted. The journal’s editorial board may issue a publication ban on him. The case of plagiarism may be reported to his employers and/or the professional bodies that the author may be a member of. Once this happens, it could lead to loss of funding for his research, loss of professional dignity, and even loss of employment.The final decision of rejection or acceptance lies with the editor of the journal. Even if a manuscript has been passed by the reviewer, the editor can still reject it if he detects fraud or plagiarism.What happens when whole or part of an article is copied from another source, and editors overlook the instance and the article goes into print? In such a case, if plagiarism is detected at a later stage, it leads to loss of reputation of not only the author(s) but also the reviewers, editors, and the journal as a whole. This could affect other journals under the same publication banner. The very essence and public respect for science and its truthfulness is lost in the process.Anaesthesia and Analgesia when it was found to have been plagiarized from five other published manuscripts, one of which was written by an Indian author.12] descr™,[™,[™.[Earlier, plagiarizing text from an article also required considerable hard work. One had to visit libraries and go through volumes of literature and read several textbooks to be able to copy relevant ideas and text. Even access to such resources was limited. Today, with the advancement of technology, plagiarism is easy. The practice seems to have increased manifold due to readily available internet access, simply because information is easily available online which can then be copied.“Cut-copy-paste ”seems to be happening across the world and is significantly prevalent in India as well. We have to understand that though technology makes plagiarism easy, it also makes detection of plagiarism even easier. There are both paid and free online software that can easily detect even short phrases that are copied verbatim from the original source. Sometimes, simply a Google search is sufficient to detect plagiarism. Some oth™, WCopyFin™,[™, and Cros™,[™,[™.To do this (plagiarism) overtly demonstrates your brashness. To do it covertly amounts to cowardice. To do it efficiently qualifies as an expertise; since ultimate success of a theft essentially lies in the theft passing undetected.”One does not need to copy entire paragraphs or even a single sentence to be guilty of plagiarism. Copying of a few phrases only can also amount to plagiarism of text. If a reviewer places two documents together and it is obvious that some text in one has been copied from the other, he can then label it as a plagiarized article. In Sapatnekar’s words, “To do tborrowing the ideas and opinions from an original source and a few verbatim words or phrases without crediting the original author. In this case, the plagiarist intertwines his or her own ideas and opinions with those of the original author, creating a confused, plagiarized mass.”The American Medical Association Manual of Style describeThis is the more common form of plagiarism. The sentence or paragraph structure is almost similar to the original source with a few words and phrases here and there which are in the author’s own words. When the original author is not acknowledged and the reference not cited properly, such interlacing amounts to plagiarism. When the referencing is proper and quotation marks are adequately used, it is clear which of the words are by the author and which are from a different source. Unless this is done honestly, it could leave the reader confused.If plagiarism is theft, self-plagiarism refers to stealing one’s own work. There is controversy on whether self-plagiarism actually amounts to scientific misconduct.Sometimes, the author may borrow significantly from his/her own previous work. In scientific journals, the reader expects to read original articles and any kind of self-plagiarism violates such expectations of the reader. However, suppose an author has been writing textbooks on, say Anatomy or Physiology, how does he make sure that no portion of what he has written before is repeated in his future books? He simply cannot change the human anatomy or physiology in order to avoid being labeled as a“self-plagiarist.” So what does he do? Common consensus is that he should seek permission for reproduction from the copyright holder (if the copyright has been transferred to the publisher). He must cite the original book, chapter, or article properly. The key here is disclosure and transparency in doing so. As long as he lets the editors and the end readers know that the work had been published elsewhere and provides proper citation for them to be able to judge which portions have been reused in the new article or chapter, he is being transparent and this could be considered fair play.With respect to the issue of how much overlap is too much…a rule of thumb that some editors have applied when considering the amount of overlap between two review articles (not book chapters) has been overlap of more than one-third of the material.”A member of WAME’s Ethics Committee says: “With reThe“publish-or-perish mantra ”adopted by academics and research scholars may be a step toward better prospects for a promotion or reward. But, it results in huge volumes of duplicate or redundant publications since each researcher tries to publish as many papers as he possibly can.Some authors may submit the same article for publication in different journals without clearly mentioning to each group of editors that they are doing so. They do so to increase their chances of publication. This is unethical. Even a substantial overlap with a previously published article, without acknowledging the publication and the original authors, can amount to plagiarism and copyright infringement.salami slicing. Instead of publishing a large study as a single article, sometimes authors “slice” it into several smaller articles. Should very large, complex longitudinal studies with multiple measures designed to test multiple related hypotheses be then published as a single article? What does one do when there is tight restriction on the length of a single manuscript? The editor can take a call on publishing very long manuscripts and short reports as needed. To improve the reporting of clinical trials, many journals now follow the CONSORT  2010 checklist.[Duplicate or redundant publication may be seen in several forms.122021 Th1220Sometimes, authors submit the same article to two or more different journals within a few weeks’ gap. In case both the journals have published it, the article that was published later has to be retracted.24 NationIf an article has originally been published in a non-English journal and the author wishes to publish a translation in an English journal for wider circulation or he wants to republish an article from an English journal in a local language, he needs to follow the Uniform Requirements issued by the ICMJE . He must The problem with duplicate publication is not just the ethical issues involved. There is wastage of resources. For each article that is accepted for publication, editors have to reject or delay the publication of several other articles due to lack of space. Duplicate publication of studies can lead to erroneous meta-analysis and distort the evidence base of clinical decision making. This can have a large impact on the healthcare delivery.plagiarism begins very early in science.” It probably starts with the seminar presentations students make early during their professional studies. Most theses/dissertations submitted by medical students are copied from previously published material. A Croatian study[Plagiarism is extensively prevalent in the academic community. In an editorial, Satyanarayana says,“plian study showed tian study found thian study shows thEthical medical writers must always acknowledge the original source of the idea, text, or illustration.They must remember to enclose within quotation marks, all the text that has been copied verbatim from another source.When paraphrasing, they must read the text, understand completely, and then use only their own words.Even when explaining somebody else’s ideas in their own words, it is important that they properly acknowledge the original source.When not sure if the idea/fact they wish to include is common knowledge, a medical writer must cite references.They must cite references accurately. The writer must read the instructions to authors to know what style they need to use. Biomedical journals commonly use the Vancouver style. Some texA medical writer should avoid writing multiple separate articles if he can present a large complex study in a cohesive manner in a single article.Along with the manuscript, he should submit a cover letter to the editor, clearly stating any instances of overlapping from previous publications and asking for advice.Last, but not the least, if he feels he has unintentionally used somebody else’s ideas or text without appropriate referencing, he needs to write to the editor of the journal for advice. Confession is always better than to be caught stealing.


Experimental Hematology & Oncology (eHO) is a new open access online journal that emphasizes preclinical, patient-oriented and translational aspects of research. The journal differentiates from others in the field by making a deliberate effort in publishing clinical trials with "negative" results and basic science studies with provocative findings. The focus of the peer-review mechanism for eHO will be on the technical merit of the study and not on demanding a long list of additional experiments that hinders rapid information dissemination.As a scientific discipline, medicine can only be advanced by experimentation. Experimentation could either validate or refute a hypothesis. Unfortunately, today's publication climate strongly favors publication of positive research findings, especially with clinical trials.  Medicine is moving rapidly from experience-based practice to more scientific and evidence-based endeavor. Sharing information in real time not only makes scientific sense but also could be life-saving. There have been instances of a number of drugs whose adverse health effects were not made publicly available for several years after the drug had been released onto the market. It is our opinion that many lives could be saved by publishing information such as this more widely and in a more timely manner. For example, Gemtuzumab ozogamicin (Mylotarg) is a calicheamicin-linked monoclonal antibody against CD33, approved to treat relapsed acute myelogenous leukemia in 2000. It was voluntarily withdrawn from the market in June 2010 due to the possibility that the drug may increase patient death and provided no additional benefit over conventional therapies [eHO. eHO is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal that encompasses all aspects of hematology and oncology with emphasis on preclinical, patient-oriented and translational aspects of research. eHO aims to publish original work, hypothesis, commentaries and timely reviews in the field of hematology and oncology.In the spirit of open access and rapid dissemination of information, we are proud to launch eHO will strive to be the hub for disseminating new knowledge and discussing controversial topics for both basic scientists and busy clinicians in the fields of hematology and oncology.The intention of this journal is not to compete, but complement the existing journals in the field. With open access, rapid turnaround time from submission to publication and online live comments from readers, Authors will be pleased to know that the philosophy of this journal is to leave the judgment of the scientific interest of the work to the readers. Instead, the editorial and publication team  will foceHO does the publishing! The winners will be the patients and the scientific community!For the vast majority of physicians and scientists, this will mean that you do the science and discovery,


Molecular Autism has been accepted by Thomson Reuters for tracking and is due to receive its first official Impact Factor in June 2014. Since its inception in 2010, Molecular Autism has grown significantly, with the number of published articles increasing from 15 in 2010 to more than 45 in 2013. Since its launch, Molecular Autism has published over 95 articles. Many of our publications are highly accessed and highly cited, which has contributed to a very strong interest in the journal and submissions are steadily increasing. We have published excellent research across all aspects of autism, in keeping with our broad focus on basic, translational, and clinical research relevant to the etiology, pathobiology, and/or treatment of autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.We are pleased to announce that Molecular Autism free of charge. We are also pleased that clinicians and researchers worldwide, who may not have the resources afforded by major universities, can access all articles at no cost.We have attempted to ensure a rapid peer-review process such that articles are published in a timely manner; even with our stringent review process, the average time from submission to the first decision is less than 6 weeks. As an open access journal, all articles are immediately and freely available, contributing to the increase in access and readership; before the end of 2013 we had an average of 20,000 accesses per month, and November 2013 saw a record of 33,000 accesses. We are especially pleased that families who have a relative with autism or a related neurodevelopmental condition can access all articles in Molecular Autism Twitter account and authors can obtain statistics about their articles, such as how many times these have been accessed and discussed on social media websites. These statistics can be retrieved by selecting ‘Article metrics’ in the right-hand column of each article.Links to publications are now listed on the We would like to thank our distinguished international Editorial Board for their efforts on behalf of the journal, and our publisher, BioMed Central, for their in-house contribution to the speed and efficiency with which manuscripts are processed. Most importantly, we thank our authors and our hard-pressed reviewers.We invite scientists to continue to submit empirical and review articles of the highest standard, either reporting molecular data related to autism, or at other neural, cognitive or clinical levels, but where there may be some relevance for the overarching goal, which is to better understand the causes of autism and how best to support individuals with this diagnosis.


Pre-publication peer review of manuscripts should enhance the value of research publications to readers who may wish to utilize findings in clinical care or health policy-making. Much published research across all medical specialties is not useful, may be misleading, wasteful and even harmful. Reporting guidelines are tools that in addition to helping authors prepare better manuscripts may help peer reviewers in assessing them. We examined journals' instructions to peer reviewers to see if and how reviewers are encouraged to use them.We surveyed websites of 116 journals from the McMaster list. Main outcomes were 1) identification of online instructions to peer reviewers and 2) presence or absence of key domains within instructions: on journal logistics, reviewer etiquette and addressing manuscript content (11 domains).Only 41/116 journals (35%) provided online instructions. All 41 guided reviewers about the logistics of their review processes, 38 (93%) outlined standards of behaviour expected and 39 (95%) contained instruction about evaluating the manuscript content. There was great variation in explicit instruction for reviewers about how to evaluate manuscript content. Almost half of the online instructions 19/41 (46%) mentioned reporting guidelines usually as general statements suggesting they may be useful or asking whether authors had followed them rather than clear instructions about how to use them. All 19 named CONSORT for reporting randomized trials but there was little mention of CONSORT extensions. PRISMA, QUOROM (forerunner of PRISMA), STARD, STROBE and MOOSE were mentioned by several journals. No other reporting guideline was mentioned by more than two journals.www.equator-network.org/).Although almost half of instructions mentioned reporting guidelines, their value in improving research publications is not being fully realised. Journals have a responsibility to support peer reviewers. We make several recommendations including wider reference to the EQUATOR Network online library ( The medical literature is plagued by poor reporting of research studies hindering its utilisation in clinical practice and further research. This is unethical, wasteful of scarce resources and even potentially harmful http://www.equator-network.org/resource-centre/library-of-health-research-reporting/) (accessed 25th October 2011).Since the early 1990s, groups consisting primarily of research methodologists and medical journal editors have developed reporting guidelines as tools to help improve the quality of reporting in health research papers. Usually in the form of a checklist, flow diagram and/or explicit text, reporting guidelines specify the essential items required for a clear and transparent account of what was done and what was found in a research study, focusing on issues that might introduce bias into the research. The most widely recognized guidelines are where possible, based on empirical evidence and reflect consensus opinion of experts in a particular field. Reporting guidelines complement generic advice on scientific writing and journals' own specific instructions to authors. Such guidelines include CONSORT  Although initial evaluations of reporting guidelines have found that their use is associated with modest improvements in the quality of reporting www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/29/) (accessed 20th October 2011). However, despite this aspiration the ubiquitous use of pre-publication peer review has failed to eliminate errors, inconsistencies and methodological weaknesses in all areas of published medical research www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmsctech/856/856.pdf) (accessed 28th July 2011).Peer review is primarily seen as a way to improve the quality of published research reports by filtering out “bad work” and is widely viewed as a “seal of approval” that certain standards have been met, particularly for non-expert readers Peer review informed by reporting guidelines could improve the completeness of information provided in reports of research. Knowing that manuscripts will be assessed using reporting guidelines may also enhance their use by authors when writing their research report thus raising the quality of manuscripts submitted to journals. This in turn may ease their review and hasten the review process.The primary aim of our study was to assess current practice regarding the provision and content of journals' instructions for peer reviewers of submitted manuscripts, particularly the extent to which reviewers are encouraged or required to use reporting guidelines. A secondary aim was to review the journals' publishers' websites to examine whether any online resources were provided for peer reviewers.In July 2010, we carried out a basic PubMed search for any literature reporting a survey of journals' instructions to peer reviewers and their inclusion of reporting guidelines. We identified none. Following completion of data extraction we carried out a more comprehensive literature search , to identify any similar studies with which to compare our results. We searched Embase, PubMed and Cochrane Methodology Register databases. Search terms included MeSH headings for editorial policies, guidelines as topic, peer review, publication/standards, publishing/standards, periodicals as topic/standards, editorial, authorship, and free-text terms for requirement, instruction, policy, guideline, standard, recommendation, author, reviewer, contributor, journal, peer reviewer, editor, and individual reporting guideline acronyms. We still identified no previous study directly examining this issue.We attempted to report this study according to an appropriate reporting guideline but are not aware of one of direct relevance for this type of study. STROBE is designed for epidemiological studies. We consulted a recent overview of guidance on reporting survey research http://hiru.mcmaster.ca/hiru/journalslist.asp). When accessed on 1st September 2010 this list contained 120 titles covering disciplines of medicine, nursing, and occupational and physical therapy. We were interested in journals receiving manuscripts reporting original research. Four of the McMaster list publications did not fit this category and were excluded. Our final journal sample comprised 116 journals  Journal Club , journal impact factor (2009 Thomson Reuters), editor contact details and name of online manuscript submission system. Journals' online instructions to peer reviewers were retrieved and saved both in a print and electronic format if provided. We noted whether, in addition to the core “instructions” text or document, any other form of online guidance was provided. This might include reference to a journal editorial, articles, or slide presentations.Due to limited resources only one author (AH) extracted data. However, a standardised approach to data collection for each journal was used. AH examined the freely accessible areas of all 116 journals' websites between 29th September 2010 and 8th April 2011. Information relating to each journal was extracted from various web pages and collated in a project database (Microsoft Office Excel 2007). We recorded details about the journals' publisher, affiliation with any professional society, whether a general or specialty journal, number of issues per year, whether a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)  suggests further requests yield few additional responses.www.equator-network.org/resource-centre/library-of-health-research-reporting/) or any reference to the EQUATOR Network as a source of information about reporting. When reporting guidelines were mentioned in the instructions to peer reviewers the exact wording used was recorded.For all online “instructions to (peer) reviewers” retrieved either as text in a webpage or as a separate text document, their content was coded by one author (AH) according to the presence or absence of key domains . The codInstructions provided directly to peer reviewers that we received from editors were coded in exactly the same way as the online instructions .We reviewed the websites of all publishers of sample journals to identify any generic resources freely provided for peer reviewers. We examined whether individual journals clearly pointed reviewers to these publisher resources.In our email contact with all editors we invited them to share any comments on their experiences or thoughts about using reporting guidelines during peer review. This was an open-ended exploratory invitation and any text received from editors by email was collated thematically.All 116 journals in the sample had a website. Eighty-one of the journals (70%) were produced by commercial publishers while professional societies served as publisher for the remaining 35 (30%). Seventy-four of the 116 journals (64%) were affiliated with one or more professional societies and 82 (71%) were members of COPE (as listed on the COPE website).Sixteen of the 116 journals (14%) were general medical journals and the rest specialty medical journals. The most frequently represented clinical specialties were orthopaedics , nursing (10), clinical neurology (9), cardiac and cardiovascular systems (7), surgery (6) and anaesthesiology, endocrinology and metabolism, paediatrics, rheumatology .The number of journal issues published per year ranged from 4–52 with a median of 12 issues per year (IQR 12–12). The sample journal impact factors ranged from 0.87 to 47.05 ). Median impact factor was 3.65 (IQR 2.50–6.23). All but two of the journals used an online manuscript submission system for processing manuscripts.All 116 journals had websites but only 41 (35%) provided openly accessible online instructions to peer reviewers. All 41 of these instructed peer reviewers about logistics e.g., what are the journal's processes and timescales, how to use the electronic manuscript review system, how to structure the review. Nearly all, 93% (38/41), described standards of behaviour expected from peer reviewers e.g., to declare any conflicts of interest, to uphold the responsibility for confidentiality, to show respect/politeness/graciousness/courtesy to authors, to aim for constructive criticism to enable the improvement of manuscripts, to be professional/non-emotional/objective. One journal stated “We avoid reviewers who are chronically slow, sloppy, too harsh or too lenient”.Ninety-five per cent (39/41) of the journals' online instructions contained explicit directions to reviewers about assessing one or more aspects of the content of the manuscript . Most ofNursing Research, did instruct peer reviewers to use the CONSORT checklist . These tended to be in the form of general references or statements about reporting guidelines or standards suggesting they may be useful to the peer reviewer or asking in general whether the author has followed them rather than explicit instructions about exactly how to use them in the peer review process. One journal, hecklist .www.consort-statement.org/), five referenced the superseded 2001 publication only www.consort-statement.org/extensions/). Reference to these extensions was rare, only two journals mentioned CONSORT for abstracts All of the 19 journals that mentioned reporting guidelines named CONSORT, the guidance for reporting randomized controlled trials (RCT). Twelve of these provided the URL for the CONSORT website (www.prisma-statement.org/) were each mentioned by four journals. PRISMA superseded QUOROM in 2009 so consequently four journals were out of date in their guidance identified in the six months up to April 2011. If we consider both guidelines together then an acknowledgement of a reporting guideline for reporting systematic reviews of RCTs was identified for peer reviewers by eight journals (42%).With regard to reporting guidance for systematic reviews of RCTs, QUOROM www.stard-statement.org/) for reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy was mentioned in five journals. Reporting guidance for observational studies STROBE www.strobe-statement.org/) was referenced by four journals and MOOSE for meta-analyses of observational studies STARD Twenty-seven (23%) of the 116 journal editors responded to our email. Nineteen editors confirmed the availability of their online instructions already obtained and did not provide us with any additional information. Eight editors of journals that did not provide online instructions supplied us with the instructions they email directly to reviewers following acceptance of the invitation to review. These instructions were coded as detailed in www.jvascsurg.org/).Further information was provided online by 19 (46%) journals. Eleven cited articles about peer review published in their own or other journals. These included Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine www.nature.com/authors/peer_review/index.html), Elsevier (www.elsevier.com/wps/find/reviewershome.reviewers), BMJ Publishing Group Ltd (www.resources.bmj.com/bmj/reviewers) and Wiley-Blackwell  (www.nurseauthoreditor.com/forreviewers.asp) . All provided information about the processes of peer review, the purpose and history of peer review and encouraged debate and research about various methods of peer review. Individual journals did not routinely direct reviewers to their publishers' resources from their instructions to peer reviewers. However the specific practice depended largely on use of manuscript submission systems. For example, Elsevier published 25 of the journals in our sample. Eighteen of these journals directed peer reviewers to Elsevier reviewers' resources from within the Elsevier Editorial System (EES). The seven Elsevier journals that did not use EES did not alert reviewers to Elsevier's resources.We found useful web resources for reviewers from four publishers of journals in this survey: Nature Publishing Group  of the journals provided their instructions to peer reviewers in this way. We suggest that all journals take this simple step towards transparency.http://www.icmje.org/urm_full.pdf) (accessed 21st Oct 2011) for authors of research papers. Whether such a notion is desirable or feasible, and which body might oversee its development, is an open question. Others have proposed this idea previously. Frank http://eyes.cochrane.org/).http://trams.jhsph.edu/trams/index.cfm?event=training.launch&trainingID=132 (accessed 25th October 2011).The majority of journals' instructions to peer reviewers included guidance about journal logistics, peer reviewer etiquette and the content of the manuscript . However, the level of detail and explicit instruction varied greatly across journals. There is not one universal standard “consensus” set of instructions for peer reviewers akin to the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals” developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors  of the 41 sets of instructions to peer reviewers that we accessed from journal websites in this survey mentioned reporting guidelines, suggesting the potential value of these tools is not being fully realised. This underuse may stem from three factors.http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/research_report_guide.html) (accessed 23rd February 2012) and the UK General Medical Council (GMC) “Good practice in research” document.  (accessed 27th February 2012). Some funding bodies now include reference to reporting guidelines in their investigator resources, e.g. UK NIHR HTA “Resources for Authors” (http://www.hta.ac.uk/investigators/rfa.pdf) (accessed 23rd February 2012) and the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) “MRC good research practice: principles and guidelines” document (January 2012 draft for consultation) (http://www.mrc.ac.uk) (accessed 27th February 2012) which includes the statement “G.7 Agreed standards, such as the CONSORT Statement , and the ARRIVE guidance  should be observed.”First, there may have been a lack of awareness of their existence. Many organisations are now helping to raise awareness of these tools. These include the US National Library of Medicine guide . Research in this field is ongoing but currently there is some evidence that introducing CONSORT within journals is associated with improved quality of reports of RCTs Medicina Clinica (which did not mention reporting guidelines in its instructions to authors). Authors received feedback from reviewers and the quality of their manuscript was assessed before and after responding to reviewers' comments using the Goodman Scale Third, there is the issue of exactly how to use reporting guidelines in the peer review process. A few randomised trials have been conducted comparing strategies for peer review which have included reporting guidelines. Cobo and colleagues Nearly half (19/41) of the journals in our survey that provided online instructions also used additional formats for informing peer reviewers. However, it is not known which methods or formats may be best for educating reviewers The larger publishers of journals in this survey had prepared online resources for peer reviewers but there was inconsistent linkage between journals and these resources. More journals could direct peer reviewers to generic resources provided on publishers' websites. A survey of peer reviewers might inform how useful they find the information provided online by journals and publishers.Peer reviewers are volunteers and difficult to recruit due to high workloads and competing time pressures www.publicationethics.org/resources/code-conduct) (accessed 12th December 2011). The EQUATOR Network has previously formulated a number of recommendations for actions that journals and publishers might take to help improve the quality of published health research Journal editors and publishers have an ethical obligation to support peer reviewers to strive for transparent and accurate reporting of research. Over 70% of the journals in this sample were members of COPE which clearly identifies this responsibility in its Codes of Conduct for journal editors and publishers (http://hiru.mcmaster.ca/hiru/HIRU_McMaster_PLUS_Projects.aspx) (accessed 27th February 2012). Some of the newer and more innovative open access publishers, including PLoS (www.plos.org/), BMC  and BMJOpen (www.bmjopen.bmj.com/) are not currently represented in the McMaster list. These journals may be more likely to advocate the use of reporting guidelines. For example, “BMC Pediatrics supports initiatives aimed at improving the reporting of biomedical research. We recommend authors refer to the EQUATOR network website for further information on the available reporting guidelines for health research, and the MIBBI Portal for prescriptive checklists for reporting biological and biomedical research where applicable. Authors are requested to make use of these when drafting their manuscript and peer reviewers will also be asked to refer to these checklists when evaluating these studies”. http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcpediatr/about#reporting (accessed 12th December 2011). Our study sample is, however, a reasonable sample of journals  that are widely read by clinical practitioners and would therefore be expected to be aiming to maximise the quality and utility of their articles.Our survey provides a snapshot of the availability and content of health journals' instructions to peer reviewers particularly with regard to reporting guidelines. We recognise that the survey has several limitations. We acknowledge that identifying a method to select a sample of journals for this type of study is problematic. Our sample was relatively small (n = 116) sample drawn from the McMaster list. These were mostly “traditional” journals “selected based on suggestions by librarians, clinicians, editors, and editorial staff, Science Citation Index (SCI) impact factors; systematic examination of the contents of each selected journal for at least 6 months; and by ongoing yield of articles that meet basic inclusion criteria for assessing the quality of studies concerning the cause, course, prediction, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, and treatment of medical disorders” Click here for additional data file.Box S2Examples of guidance about peer reviewing manuscript content.(DOCX)Click here for additional data file.Box S3Examples of how reporting guidelines were mentioned in journal's instructions to peer reviewers.(DOCX)Click here for additional data file.Box S4Recommendations for journal editors: how to improve the peer review of submitted manuscripts.(DOCX)Click here for additional data file.Table S1Journals included in survey of instructions to peer reviewers.(DOCX)Click here for additional data file.


We are witnessing dramatic and exciting shifts in the very foundations of mental health and psychiatry -3. At thBiology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders (BMAD) is a new open access peer-reviewed journal that publishes highly innovative basic, translational and clinical research that advances our understanding of mood and anxiety disorders. The journal welcomes research in all areas relevant to the disorders at the level of their underlying mechanisms. Research areas of interest include but are not limited to: pathophysiology, predictive risk markers, treatment predictors, individual differences and developmental trajectories of mood and anxiety disorders. Experimental approaches include but are not limited to: neuroimaging, psychophysiology, behavioral and molecular genetics, pharmacology, gene-environment interactions, and non-human animal models.BMAD is to create a venue for cutting-edge research that will become the destination of choice for the best work in the field. We are dedicated to providing an outlet for contributions that advance the field in any significant way. We believe that BMAD will be an important platform for presenting the findings of those interested in the biology of mood and anxiety disorders at any and all levels. The enthusiastic response from colleagues in neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, psychophysiology, pharmacology and genetics who have graciously committed their time and expertise by joining the Editorial Board of BMAD [Our idea behind  of BMAD  is testaBMAD thus believe that there is a need for a dedicated journal in this highly diverse field, and given the rising popularity of open access publication, we thought that a new open access journal in our field was particularly timely.Continued progress in understanding the biology of mood and anxiety disorders is critically dependent on the integration of knowledge gained across many disciplines, methodologies and model systems; currently such knowledge is divided across publications in many journals, none of which is focused entirely on the biology of mood and anxiety disorders. The Editors of BMAD. Fisher and colleagues report on a multimodal PET/fMRI study demonstrating that the balance between excitatory 5-HT2A and inhibitory 5-HT1A receptors in the medial prefrontal cortex determines, at least in part, the functional responsiveness of the amygdala. These data provide unique insight into specific molecular mechanisms through which a common treatment target, namely 5-HT signaling, modulates a corticolimbic circuitry heavily implicated in the pathophysiology of mood and anxiety disorders. Murphy and Frodl present findings of altered white matter pathways in depression derived from a meta-analysis of diffusion tensor imaging studies. Their meta-analysis reveals specific decreases in the functional integrity of the superior longitudinal fasciculus in patients with major depressive disorder. Finally, Waters and McCormick describe the challenges involved in examining the effect of exogenous corticosterone on anxiety-like and depressive behavior in adolescent rats. Such diversity will continue to be featured in the forthcoming months, including reviews on facial emotion processing in major depressive disorder, evoked potential studies in post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and validation criteria in animal models of anxiety and depression, as well as original research on the involvement of the habenula in PTSD.The three publications in this inaugural issue highlight the diversity and breadth of relevant research we seek to encourage and promote at BMAD to our community.Open access will allow key findings in our field like those above to be readily accessible and far-reaching because they will appear online and without charge to readers for access. An online journal also means more rapid reviews and shorter time to publication. Articles will be published online immediately upon acceptance and soon after listed in PubMed. For an interdisciplinary field, dispensing new knowledge quickly is critical. A fixed article-processing charge will be levied to cover the publication costs; there are no additional page or color figure charges . We woulWhile the open access format will allow us to publish articles without the constraint of page limitations, we are pleased to provide a specific forum for Brief Reports of less than 1500 words, which are no longer supported by many journals in psychiatry and neuroscience. We hope that the availability of the Brief Report format will allow for even more rapid publication of highly novel and influential research. Finally, the online format permits the journal to generate a cover for every article we publish. We therefore provide the opportunity for authors of each article to highlight their work through their chosen cover image.BMAD are committed to making this new venture a success for all investigators exploring the biological processes underlying mood and anxiety disorders. We hope that you share our vision and will join us in making the journal the primary outlet for research in our field and an invaluable resource not only for our scientific community but for all who share an interest in mental health.The Editors of


European Journal of Psychotraumatology (EJPT). In December 2010, a handful of articles were published, forming volume 1. Since then, EJPT has shown a strong increase in the number of publications, citations, and downloads , in addition to costs for promoting the journal, website maintenance, etc., work the publisher needs to do in order for EJPT to be a top scientific journal.EJPT takes advantage of a few different sources of income. Low APCs (article processing charges) have been introduced, which are below those typically charged by other open access publications. Members of ESTSS receive up to a 75% rebate as a member benefit. As mentioned above, ESTSS has financially supported the journal from the start of December 2010, in part, through a 3-year grant (2012–2014) from The Netherland's Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) (Incentive Open Access fund). This initial support meant that we were able to waive fees for ESTSS members, which was helpful during the start-up phase.To cover these costs, EJPT via a link from the journal's website. ESTSS makes it possible for the Society to receive such contributions as tax-exempt income.It will soon be possible to make a donation to the ESTSS to support and they now provide funding to cover open access charges; see, for example, the Wellcome Trust policy or that of the British research councils, RCUK. Of special interest to European researchers is that the European Commission recently announced that Open Access will be mandatory for all scientific publications related to projects funded under Horizon 2020, the EU's Research & Innovation funding program for 2014–2020. Again, Open Access seems to be the way forward.A growing number of funding agencies and research councils are requiring Open Access to publications based on the research they have supported, EJPT will move from the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License to the CC-BY license.Hand in hand with the research funders’ demands for Open Access, many also require that all articles be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) License, which means that anybody may copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and adapt it—remix, transform, and build upon the material—for any purpose, even commercially. As from 2014, EJPT has applied for an impact factor, and the publisher's contact point at the Science Citation Database has indicated that we should have a decision by year's end. We are optimistic about receiving a response. We are aware that this is important to our publishing authors and will continue to press for a decision.In academia, one thing tends to count above all else: the number of publications one has published in the highest ranking journals—highest ranking, that is, according to the Impact Factor. The impact factor still seems to determine the prestige of a journal, and by proxy, the work of individual authors who publish in that journal even though their article has never been cited. EJPT has just recently introduced so-called Article-Level Metrics (ALM), based on a code developed by PLOS. After the abstract of each article, the author—and indeed anybody who is interested—can follow the number of downloads of his/her article, where and how many times it has been cited and referenced, if it has been shared through social media, and the number of comments it has received in various forums such as LinkedIn or Twitter. This is a very powerful tool for authors to judge the reach and influence of an article and perhaps share this information with peers, employers, and funders.While we await an official impact factor, we are able to turn to alternative metrics. With the possibilities afforded by the Internet and tagging of online publications, other types of metrics are entering the scene that may well in the longer perspective outmanoeuvre the Impact Factor. EJPT and ESTSS board members is an article by Marylène Cloitre, Donn W. Garvert, Chris R. Brewin, Richard A. Bryant, Andreas Maercker (With almost 60 papers, it was not easy to choose, but the paper that was most mentioned in a voting round among Maercker , entitleMaercker Other papers that stood out this past year are “Susceptibility to long-term misinformation effect outside of the laboratory” by Lommen, Engelhard, & van den Hout,  which haWe have introduced “Personal views”, a new section, for critical and thought-provoking contributions. The first one is an interview with Stevan Hobfall (Te Brake & Dückers, http://www.ejpt.net/index.php/ejpt/about/editorialTeam.Since the beginning of 2013, we are very pleased to have Dr Jane Herlihy, clinical psychologist and director of the Centre for the Study of Emotion and Law, London, UK, joining us as Associate Editor. She will share this job with Dr Stuart Turner. Also, we have a new statistics editor, Dr Rens van der Schoot, an expert in multivariate statistics, structural equation modeling, and Bayesian statistics. Please find details of the full editorial team here Miranda OlffDepartment of Psychiatry, Academic Medical CentreUniversity of Amsterdam & Arq Psychotrauma Expert GroupDiemen, the Netherlands