Wiley is proud to announce the launch of Health Science Reports. I talked to the Editor in Chief, Dr. Charles Young, about the journal, its philosophy, and its contribution to scientific communication in the health sciences. We are pleased to announce the launch of Health Science Reports (HSR), a new Open Access, international journal, covering all aspects of clinical research, from basic and translational studies, to public health and medical education and practice.The journal is led by Dr. Charles Young, Chief Medical Officer at Capita Healthcare Decisions and Emergency Physician at St Thomas' Hospital, London, UK, and is supported by an international editorial board.The journal will accept articles based on objective criteria, namely, scientific and methodological soundness, without any requirement for perceived impact or significance. We think this is an editorial stand that accelerates the communication of science and provides a better service to authors and the community as a whole. In addition, the fact that Health Science Reports is an Open Access journal means that published research will be freely and readily accessible to anyone, anywhere, allowing fast access to medical and clinical research.I asked Dr. Young a few questions about his background and the journal.1I trained in emergency medicine and still work as an Emergency Physician one day each week at St Thomas' Hospital—the other side of the river Thames from the Houses of Parliament in London. For around the last 20 years, most of my time has been spent working with healthcare research and information. Some of my jobs in the past have been Executive Editor at The Lancet medical journal, Editor in Chief at the BMJ Evidence Centre, and Vice President for Global Clinical Solutions at Wiley, where I was also lucky enough to be the founding editor of another Open Access medical journal, Clinical Case Reports. While I was at Wiley, I worked closely with the Cochrane Library editorial team and I am still part of the Cochrane Editorial Board. My interest in research really started when I was a lecturer in emergency medicine at Imperial College. I didn't particularly enjoy doing research myself , but I became passionate about understanding how a particular piece of research affected our understanding of a clinical area or question, and how that research could be used to influence the behaviour of clinicians, patients, or carers to improve health.2Most people involved in biomedical research and publishing know that despite an increasing number of health‐related journals, it can still be very hard for authors to publish high‐quality research or opinion‐based articles. Most publications evaluate submitted research based on the novelty of the findings, and reject sound science that isn't viewed as cutting edge or doesn't fit into the journal's specific scope. This model assumes that we know now what will be viewed as important in the future. However, as understanding grows over time, it is common for research and opinion which was not seen as relevant initially to become important in a specific context. At HSR, our aim is to help address both of these issues. We will publish high‐quality research and opinion which clearly addresses important contemporary questions so allowing authors a much needed publication vehicle. In addition, we will publish high‐quality research and opinion which although does not appear to address an immediate health science need, may form an important component in the scientific record whose relevance only becomes clear at a later date. As HSR is an Open Access journal, the value of this type of research will be available to anyone who needs to access it whenever they need to access it.3There are two key differences between HSR and some other biomedical publications. The first is our relentless focus on providing the highest quality service to our authors, our reviewers, and our teams of advisers. The second important difference between HSR and other Open Access journals is our willingness to publish high‐quality submissions the importance of which will only become clear in the future. Although we may have an idea about what we need to know today, it's often much harder to understand what we will need to know tomorrow!4Anyone who wants to publish high‐quality research or opinion in a health‐related area! HSR has extremely high‐quality standards and a rigorous peer review process, and we are always keen to review new submissions. We also realize that HSR may not be the first journal an author chooses to submit their work to, but our aim is to ensure every author receives an efficient and courteous service.5An extremely good service! My view is that we are here to serve the needs of our authors, while recognising the hard work and important contributions our reviewers and advisers make. I have published in many different journals through my career and often get the impression that those journals somehow feel they are doing authors a favour by publishing their submissions. In fact, the reverse is true. At HSR, we realise how fortunate we are when authors submit their work to us, we realise how much time and effort those authors will have already invested in that work, and we realise how important it is for us to manage those submissions efficiently. Clearly, we will not be able to publish every submission we receive but we should be able to make a decision quickly and communicate effectively with our authors every time. As Editor in Chief, I am extremely fortunate to have such amazing Strategic Advisory and Editorial Boards as well as a brilliant in‐house journal team, and a very significant number of highly skilled peer reviewers. Together we can offer a really unrivalled publishing experience for authors and an amazing learning environment for all our advisers and reviewers.6At Wiley, we are fortunate to publish a broad range of different health science journals. All of those journals have different styles and manuscript requirements and not all of the submissions any particular journal receives will be appropriate for publication in that specific journal. When a journal receives a high‐quality submission which is not suitable for publication, the Editor gives the authors the choice of their submission being passed on to a more suitable journal. This avoids the need for resubmission and allows the authors another chance to have their work published in an important biomedical journal. This is a really important way for us to improve the service we give to authors overall and an equally important way for HSR to see submissions which may not otherwise have been possible.7It's hard to know how HSR will develop as it is so early in its lifecycle right now. My initial focus is to emphasise the breadth of coverage, our focus on really providing a very high‐quality service, our willingness to consider work which other journals may consider as irrelevant and our ability to work with authors to help improve the quality and impact of their publications if they need us to. I am very excited to be part of the HSR team, and as a team, we are very excited about how we can drive the future of health science research.8We are excited about the journal's future and its opportunity to provide an important forum for the communication of research in the health sciences. Even after a very recent launch, we are getting an increasing number of direct submissions, highlighting the immediate need for Health Science Reports. As work to improve health through the publication and dissemination of important health science research, we look forward to your participation as an author, reviewer, reader, or even better—all three!


Research that has been sponsored by pharmaceutical, medical device and biotechnology companies is often presented at scientific and medical conferences. However, practices vary between organizations and it can be difficult to follow both individual conference requirements and good publication practice guidelines. Until now, no specific guidelines or recommendations have been available to describe best practice for conference presentations.This document was developed by a working group of publication professionals and uploaded to PeerJ Preprints for consultation prior to publication; an additional 67 medical societies, medical conference sites and conference companies were also asked to comment. The resulting recommendations aim to complement current good publication practice and authorship guidelines, outline the general principles of best practice for conference presentations and provide recommendations around authorship, contributorship, financial transparency, prior publication and copyright, to conference organizers, authors and industry professionals.While the authors of this document recognize that individual conference guidelines should be respected, they urge organizers to consider authorship criteria and data transparency when designing submission sites and setting parameters around word/character count and content for abstracts. It is also important to recognize that conference presentations have different limitations to full journal publications, for example, in the case of limited audiences that necessitate refocused abstracts, or where lead authors do not speak the local language, and these have been acknowledged accordingly. The authors also recognize the need for further clarity regarding copyright of previously published abstracts and have made recommendations to assist with best practice.By following Good Practice for Conference Abstracts and Presentations: GPCAP recommendations, industry professionals, authors and conference organizers will improve consistency, transparency and integrity of publications submitted to conferences worldwide. Company refers to any medical commercial organization involved with research, such as pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies and medical device manufacturers.Company-sponsored refers to all types of research  that is directly sponsored and/or funded by a company. While this classification does not necessarily include research performed under other types of funding arrangement, such as investigator-sponsored or investigator-initiated trials or research (where companies are not involved with conference presentations or publications), those involved in submitting investigator-initiated study material to conferences are encouraged to consider following these recommendations.Conference is used to refer to meetings, often organized by academic societies, that invite submissions  presenting research findings on an aspect of medicine or science. Such conferences have a scientific (or programme) committee that reviews and selects presentations to be given at the meeting from the submitted abstracts.Abstract refers to those submitted for consideration to scientific and medical conferences (see above).Presentation refers to posters or slides developed from abstracts accepted for presentation at such conferences.Lead author refers to the person who normally presents study findings at a conference and is usually listed as the first author. This is often the Principal Investigator.Society sponsor refers to a member of the society that is holding the conference, who acts as sponsor (or guarantor) of a submitted abstract.Presenting author refers to the person on the author list who attends the conference and presents the poster or abstract.Non-author presenter or local presenter refers to a person who presents on behalf of the author group, but who is not listed as an author.Research that has been sponsored (see the ‘Note on terminology’ section for precise definitions of these terms) by commercial organizations  is often presented at scientific and medical conferences. These conferences are pivotal for the presentation of data from ongoing research projects and clinical trials to the relevant audience and are often the first opportunity to disclose and discuss potentially practice-changing data. They facilitate early communication of data long before publication of a full manuscript and also provide the opportunity to present results of additional analyses such as secondary and/or exploratory endpoints and post hoc analyses. However, while abstracts submitted to conferences are reviewed by a scientific committee for suitability and interest to the audience prior to acceptance, it is important to note that they are not considered peer-reviewed as they are not subject to the same rigorous peer-review process as are journal articles. Poster and oral presentations based upon accepted abstracts are rarely, if ever reviewed. Furthermore, a recent systematic review showed that less than 50% of all studies accepted as abstracts went on to be published in full following presentation at a conference . While iWhile there are recommendations on the preparation of journal articles and qualification for authorship , and guiThese recommendations were developed after informal discussions among a group of individuals who have wide experience of working with authors to develop abstracts, posters and slides for oral presentations reporting company-sponsored research. The main impetus for this article arose from a meeting regarding GPP3 updates (with which some of the authors had been involved). Prior to this meeting, two authors had noted that even the revised GPP3 guidelines contained limited advice for conference abstracts and presentations. Meeting participants discussed the requirement for clearer guidance and formed a working group to address this gap. At this point, invitations to join the group were extended to potential authors known to have previously presented relevant research at meetings of the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) or had a known interest in conference presentations. This also ensured a broader global representation and improved the balance between pharmaceutical and medical communication agency representation. The authors all work or have worked for pharmaceutical companies and/or medical communication agencies (see the ‘Competing interest’ section for specific details). After a search for recommendations and guidelines on this topic revealed nothing specific (either in ICMJE or in a search on EQUATOR), the authors developed an initial outline for this article; individuals worked on pre-agreed sections and then a collective review of the full draft, comprising all sections was completed (see ‘Authors’ contributions’ for specific details). The resulting article was posted as a preprint on PeerJ  on 19 OcThe recommendations are given here by topic, and so there is some overlap by intention, to ensure that all the key elements for any given topic appear together and allow readers to browse by topic.Author listings should reflect those who did the research and can take accountability for its conduct, and for the analysis and interpretation of the findings. Criteria for authorship of conference abstracts and presentations should generally be the same as those for full publications, although there can be occasions where local presenters may be included as authors, for example, where a conference requires a presenter to be listed as an author.All authors should be involved in the development, and approve the final version, of any abstract, poster or slides that bears their names. For studies involving large numbers of researchers it may be most efficient for a subgroup of those involved in the studies to develop conference abstracts and presentations (similar to the use of a writing group to develop publications from large studies).Posters and slides should list key contributors and describe their contributions to the research and development of the presentation.ClinicalTrials.gov, EudraCT, PROSPERO) should be included on abstracts, posters and slides.Study registration numbers  and publish this information with the abstract;include a field for sponsor information on abstract forms (outside the word or character limit) and publish this information with the abstract;include a field for disclosing medical writing support on abstract forms (outside the word or character limit) and publish this information with the abstract;use ORCID identifiers  to idennot set arbitrary limits on the number of authors, and permit the use of study group names; anddistinguish between authors (meeting the ICMJE criteria) and any additional individuals (who are not authors or contributors) included in the submission, for example, as a result of a requirement for a society member to sponsor submissions. With limited space in any printed book of abstracts, this information might be restricted to appearing with the online version of the abstract.Conference organizers should:1.1.1 The author listing on conference abstracts and presentations should reflect the people who did the research or contributed substantially to the design of the study or to the interpretation of the results, and who were involved in the development of the presentation and who are willing to take responsibility for the findings. Authorship and author order should be agreed by all authors (see 1.1.5 for factors to consider). While the authorship criteria recommended by the ICMJE are widely used for journal articles , GPP3 reprimary conference presentations should, ideally, be agreed at the start of the research, and author listings for subsequent secondary abstracts and presentations should be finalized well before work starts on the secondary material 3.1.4 All named authors should contribute to the development of, and approve, the presentation (see 1.1.1). Authors should be given sufficient time for presentation development and review. Making significant changes to posters or slides after all-author approval should be avoided. If changes must be made after approval, the actual final version must be sent to all authors. As with journal articles, for large studies, it may be most efficient for a subgroup to coordinate the development of a presentation (similar to a writing group for an article). This should be considered when deciding authorship.3.1.5 Each author’s contributions to the study and to the development of the presentation should be listed.3.1.6 Conference presentations should include a list of contributors who have made a significant contribution to the research or the presentation, regardless of whether they are listed as authors or attending the meeting. Ideally, permission for such acknowledgment should be sought in writing.3.1.7 Because abstracts are usually submitted several months before a conference, they may contain interim or preliminary findings. Therefore, by the time of the conference presentation, some details may have changed. If research findings change substantially between abstract submission and conference presentation and affect the conclusions of the research, we recommend that authors alert the conference to this discrepancy. This is particularly pertinent in the case of oral presentations . Regardless of whether the new data change the conclusions of the research, we recommend indicating (e.g. in a footnote) any data that are different from those on the accepted abstract.3.1.8 Authors or sponsoring companies may involve professional medical writers in the production of posters and slides. Authors should agree to these arrangements and work closely with any writers, editors and/or designers throughout the development of the presentation. Such support should be disclosed on the presentation, along with source(s) of funding .3.2.1 While there are platforms where posters can be made permanently available (e.g. on conference websites or platforms such as F1000 Research), some journals regard this as prior publication which may jeopardize full publication. Authors should therefore check the policies of their target journal(s) and of the sponsor or funder before agreeing to a poster being publicly posted.3.2.2 Posters are not peer-reviewed by conferences and may not describe all aspects of the research. Posters should therefore not be viewed as a substitute for a full article in a peer-reviewed journal. However, if a poster is publicly available , it may be cited until the full publication is available, although some journals consider citation of posters as unpublished information rather than full citations. See Section 6 for citation best practice.3.2.3 The lead author should be given the first option to attend the poster session(s), but this role may be taken by other authors or a local presenter (if no author can attend or if no authors can present in the language of the conference). The poster presenter should ideally be agreed before the abstract is submitted, although it is understood that circumstances may change by the time of the actual conference (see 1.3.1).3.2.4 While disclosures, funding sources, acknowledgements and contributions should be clearly noted on the main poster, supplementary sources can be used to expand on these if there is not enough room for detailed information, and may be accessed via a QR code (or similar link). Such content should normally be available until the research is published, in full, in a journal (at which point the link should be deactivated). If QR codes (or similar technology) are used to provide copies of the poster or to link to other scientific content, these should only be available to conference attendees, unless the conference elects to make the posters freely available after the conference. Links for the QR codes may be time-limited to close once the conference is finished. Supplementary materials may include translations. Supplementary material should be provided under the same usage conditions as the poster and indicate who is the copyright holder or licensee.3.3.1 While the lead author is normally expected to present study findings at conferences (and is given the first option to do so), this may not be possible due to local language requirements, availability to travel, or personal circumstances, etc. If the lead author chooses not to present study findings, another author may give the oral presentation. If none of the named authors is available or able to give the presentation, a non-author presenter may present the findings if all authors agree to this and the conference permits it . The presenter should be agreed before the abstract is submitted (and only changed if that person becomes unavailable). The lead author should discuss the contents of the presentation and the interpretation of the findings with the presenter  before the conference to ensure the authors’ views are correctly represented.3.3.2 If a non-author presenter gives a presentation on behalf of the named authors (or study group), this should be indicated at the beginning of the presentation. The presenter’s conflicts of interest should be noted on the disclosure slide.3.3.3 Recordings of oral presentations may be posted online by conference organizers but, as with posters, care should be taken to ensure this does not jeopardize full publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Slides alone  may be hard to interpret and not provide full context, so care should be taken if these are made publicly available. As with posters (see 3.2.4), online sources may also be considered to host supplementary materials for presentations if they are made available after the presentation. If slides are made publicly available, this should not occur until after the presentation has been given and should only occur with the agreement of all authors and sponsors, who will need to consider any restrictions around the posting of the data and possible ‘prior publication’ concerns for later use (see 6.1.2).3.3.4 Some scientific meetings offer Continuing Medical Education (CME) credit for attendance at oral presentations. Local regulations and requirements of the accreditation body for this must be respected.4.1. It is permissible to present the same research findings at more than one conference if both the first and subsequent conferences allow this. This practice may be referred to as an ‘encore’ . However, presentations of the same findings to the same audience should be avoided.4.2 Although encore abstracts are not considered to be redundant publications , some conferences elect only to accept findings that have not been presented at other conferences, and such requirements must be respected.4.3 When considering encore abstracts, the authors and sponsoring company should decide whether it is most appropriate to submit identical abstracts to multiple conferences or whether it is better to emphasize different aspects of a trial (e.g. those of interest to different audiences). Use of study identifiers can help identify that multiple conference abstracts and presentations are from a single study. However, to avoid any confusion, we recommend that encores should be specifically identified as such  . We also recommend that previous presentations should be listed on the presentation, if accepted.4.4 Conference organizers should consider including a means of identifying encore abstracts (e.g. including details of prior presentations) on the abstract submission form. This information should not be included in the abstract word or character count.4.5 Addition of new data to a previously accepted abstract may not necessarily constitute a new abstract: conference guidelines should be consulted to confirm if this is acceptable. If no specific guidelines are provided, then as a general guide, if the new iteration adds any new data other than an update on analyses already contained in a previous abstract, then the new iteration should be regarded as a new abstract.4.6 Where encore abstracts, or updated abstracts that include previously presented data, are accepted, their presentations should indicate that this is not the first time of presentation, for example, by a statement on the poster or slides such as “Data/some data first presented at [conference name and date]”.What is the overlap, if any, with the audience of the earlier conference ?Are there any differences in the licensing status of any products mentioned in the presentation between the first and subsequent conference locations? For example, if the first presentation occurred in a region where a product is licensed, but later presentation(s) will take place in a region where it is not yet licensed, this fact may need to be reflected. For international meetings, remember that participants will attend from several regions, so the licensing status in different countries should be clarified.Presentation at multiple meetings might delay and/or potentially jeopardize the full publication of research in a peer-reviewed journal. Companies should consider whether resources would therefore be better spent on ensuring a timely submission to a journal rather than preparing several encore abstracts and presentations.4.7 Encore checklist: When deciding whether to submit an encore abstract to a conference to reach different audiences, authors and study sponsors should consider the following points.5.1 Copyright transfer or publishing licence agreements that are executed during the abstract submission process are common when abstracts are to be formally published . These agreements relate only to the abstract, not to any subsequent presentation, unless explicitly agreed otherwise.5.2 Copyright in a presentation is normally held by the authors, unless they have assigned it either to the conference or the sponsoring company. Re-use of a poster  normally requires permission from the copyright holder(s). It may therefore be simplest for authors to assign usage rights to the sponsor company if encore presentations or other types of re-use are planned. If a company author is included, then the copyright for that individual’s contribution rests with the company (not the employee).5.3 If a conference wishes to acquire usage rights for abstracts, slides, or posters, we recommend that the conference offers an open access option under a Creative Commons (CC) licence. We encourage the use of the least restrictive CC-BY licence, which will allow authors and sponsoring companies the usage rights for subsequent presentations, as well as future publications. If presentations contain third-party material to which the authors do not hold copyright, it should be the responsibility of the conference organizers to clear rights for any further usage. The authors cannot be expected to anticipate the future use of materials by the conference organizers.5.4 As for any publication, permission must be sought for use of third-party copyrighted material (e.g. a figure) in a presentation (and again for any encore presentations). Material should not be altered simply to avoid having to obtain permission from the copyright holder.5.5 Peer-to-peer presentation at a scholarly conference by a researcher is generally considered to be fair dealing (UK)  or fair 6.1 References (or citations) in scientific texts provide readers with source or background material and are used to justify or support statements. To be useable, the referenced material must be both permanently accessible and reliable; therefore, citations to full publications in journals that apply rigorous peer review are the ideal. However, if citations are needed for research that has not yet been fully published in a peer-reviewed journal, abstracts that have undergone scientific review (and on the basis of that have been accepted for presentation by a conference) may be cited, especially if they have also been published in a journal and are therefore permanently accessible and discoverable. Abstracts should not be cited after the full (primary) publication has been accepted by a journal.6.2 Posters and slides are not peer-reviewed by conferences and are often not permanently or widely accessible or discoverable. Citations to posters or slides should therefore be avoided (see 6.1). However, if a poster or slide set is publicly available , it may be cited until the full publication is available . Authors and sponsor companies should ensure that publishing posters or slides online does not jeopardize full publication in a peer-reviewed journal.6.3 To avoid citing conference posters or slides, companies should consider other dissemination routes such as listing findings as ‘Data on File’ .6.4 If specific findings that were presented at a conference are omitted from a journal article (e.g. because of space constraints), they could be made accessible as supplementary material.These recommendations summarize the authors’ collective experience with a view to outlining the underlying principles for best practice and providing guidance on the practicalities for navigating conference requirements. We did consider whether some of our recommendations could be accomplished by amendments to company–author agreements, but decided that such recommendations for ‘good practice for author agreements’ were beyond the remit and scope of this article and that GPP3  adequatehttps://gpcap.org).It is earnestly hoped that future input from conference organizers and societies, as well anyone involved in submitting research to conferences, will augment and strengthen these recommendations. We therefore welcome feedback via the website (


Peer review to allocate funding for researchers and projects has faced difficulties lately and come under criticism. Various alternatives and improvements are being tested to address these problems. Peer review has been the most important mechanism for quality control in science for decades. In its basic form, it involves a group of scientific experts who judge the work of other scientists in order to allocate research funding, select scientific papers for publication, award recognitions, evaluate job applications and promotions, select presentations for conferences, and, more recently, investigate cases of scientific misconduct. As such, the academic enterprise's facility for generating knowledge and technologies depends in no small part on peer review to decide which ideas and projects should be supported. Overall, the peer‐review system is widely accepted and understood by the majority of researchers and trusted by policy makers. Given its efficiency and the widespread trust it enjoys, the Royal Society dubbed it as “the only effective way of properly assessing the quality of research proposals”.the academic enterprise's facility for generating knowledge and technologies depends in no small part on peer review to decide which ideas and projects should be supported.However, peer review has also been accompanied by criticism since it became the method of choice to assess the quality of science. Is it really an appropriate system for selecting the best people and the best ideas? Can reviewers be really objective when they have to judge their peers? In particular, as more researchers compete for grants, fellowships and academic positions, the task of reviewers is becoming increasingly difficult and time‐consuming, and some are concerned that that the peer‐review system is becoming overburdened.ad‐hoc‐only, panel‐only and ad‐hoc plus panel review. The ad‐hoc‐only review collects written comments from individual reviewers using the NSF's electronic system; the panel‐only method is based on in‐person discussions among reviewers; and many NSF grant schemes collect reviews through a combination of both methods (https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/2016/nsb201641.pdf). Some funding agencies, such as the European Research Council (ERC) or Cancer Research UK (CRUK), use a two‐stage review process, in which peer reviewers first screen the outlines of proposals, and, in the second step, evaluate the full applications.What is referred to as “peer review” for allocating funding is actually a range of different approaches to collect peers’ expertise. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) for instance uses three variations: th century when scientific discoveries were discussed by scholars at meetings of the Royal Society in the UK. Peer review in the modern sense—that is, the organized search for expert's assessment on scientists’ discoveries—began with scientific publishing. The Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions is the first scientific journal that has used it to select manuscripts for publication.Expert assessment was common practice as early as in the 17https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget). The US National Science Foundation (NSF) assigned more than 90% of its funding for research based on peer review in 2017 (https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/2018/nsb201915.pdf), and the ERC distributed a 1.8 billion Euro budget using peer review in 2017 (https://erc.europa.eu/projects-figures/facts-and-figures). Wellcome Trust, one of the largest private funders in the world for biomedical research, distributed about GBP 640 million in grants in the financial year 2017/2018, using external and internal reviewers (https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/people-and-projects/grant-funding-data/grant-data-2017-18).The extensive use of peer review for distributing research funding coincided with the expansion of government funding of research in the USA and Europe after War World 2. Since peer review has become the main mechanism for distributing resources from governments and philanthropic funders, RAND Europe calculated that more than 95% of public funding for medical research in the UK was allocated by peer review each year. This year's budget for the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), is US$39 billion; it awards more than 80% to more than 300,000 researchers using peer review . The ERC engages 375 panel members plus 2,000 external referees for each call. In 2017, they reviewed more than 8,000 applications across all ERC schemes. The same year, the German Research Foundation (DFG) requested 22,500 reviews from more than 14,900 reviewers. These numbers are likely to increase, as the number of scientists competing for grants and funding grows. Many journals already notice a “reviewer fatigue”: more than 40% of researchers worldwide decline review requests owing to lack of time (https://publons.com/community/gspr). As the burden on individual researchers is increasing, reviewers find it increasingly difficult to devote enough time for high‐quality reviews. According to a researcher “There is a limit to how much a reviewer can do, and at some point, the criteria for evaluating get blurred and confusing.” .In 2015, the NSF engaged 16,255 scientists to evaluate 51,588 proposals and estimated that the total time spent by reviewers amounted on average to 360 person‐years with each reviewer spending about 3.9 h in writing one review, not counting the time spent participating in panels , which uses a different method of evaluating funding proposals.Most evidence is anecdotal, but there are famous examples of bold and revolutionary research projects that were turned down by peer review, such as the NIH's rejection of Craig Venter's proposal to apply his newly developed technique of whole‐genome shotgun sequencing to sequence the genome of the In addition, various criteria used by peer reviewers to allocating funding—notably the numbers of publications, citations and the name or impact factor of the journals where scientists publish their research—are being criticized for limiting creativity and the exploration of untested ideas. Such factors are believed to encourage applicants to publish as many papers as possible in one field, and even cut corners and exaggerate the significance of their results. Indeed, focusing on publications alone would quite likely have prevented creative thinkers such as Fred Sanger from getting funded. Sanger, who won two Nobel Prizes and revolutionized biological research, did not have many publications in high‐impact factor journals, and switched fields to tackle bold and untested ideas.https://bbsrc.ukri.org/documents/1511-understanding-app-rates-by-female-academics/), as well as lower success rates for non‐white applicants Another weakness of peer review is the potential influence of conscious or unconscious bias on reviewers’ decisions related to research field, affiliation, nationality, gender, age or ethnicity of the applicants. While there is no clear evidence, some funding agencies for instance found lower success rates for female scientists . If metrics were the main selection criteria, one could argue, why would we need peer review at all?These inherent weaknesses raise the question whether peer review is actually the best method for selecting the best people or projects. Some have tried to answer this by looking at the results of projects and researchers but the criteria have mainly been based on publication metrics: the number of papers produced, the numbers of papers published in high‐impact journals and the number of citations of those papers. Some studies found a positive correlation between reviewer's scores and bibliometric measures of funded projects, but a number of other analyses found only weak or no association. Similar comparisons based on career progressions of successful and unsuccessful applicants have found no significant difference either [preprint: Another problem with peer review is that the aim of the selection process is sometimes not clear to either the funders or reviewers. The question whether peer review is good at selecting the best people or proposals is linked to the goals of the funding scheme. Is the aim to identify future success, to reward past success or to achieve specific scientific or social goals? Is it to select researchers who publish more papers or more high‐impact factor papers, or to select future leaders, or scientists who can accomplish the proposed research projects?Given the problems of peer review, some have proposed to eliminate it altogether. One alternative would be distributing the available funding equally to all qualified researchers without any selection, so everyone would receive the same amount of money … focusing on publications alone would quite likely have prevented creative thinkers such as Fred Sanger from getting funded.https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/budget). The managers come from academia or industry, serve for a maximum of 4 years and are personally responsible for the success or failure of the funded project. They are in close contact with researchers to monitor progress and can stop projects that are not performing as expected. The decision‐making process is fast and empowers the managers to fund risky and unconventional research projects. DARPA had an important role, for example, in the development of computer technologies that preceded the Internet, and in biology, when it funded Eckard Wimmer's de novo synthesis of the polio virus in 2002 that paved the way for whole‐genome synthesis.Another way to select applications is relying on expert administrators to directly select proposals for funding, rather than seeking advice from external experts. This method is used by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which employs 100 qualified programme managers to distribute about US$3 million every year (https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2005/nsf05053/nsf05053.jsp). The Wellcome Trust (WT) launched the Leap Fund in 2018 to fund high‐risk research projects in the health and life sciences. It is led by a CEO who decides which ideas to fund, which level of ambition and risk to allow, and who can reallocate funds as he/she sees appropriate (https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/wellcome-launches-%C2%A3250m-leap-fund-place-big-bets-bold-research). Applying this method to other funding schemes with smaller budgets might be difficult, but it will be interesting to see the outcomes of the WT scheme, and to compare it with traditional peer review.Other agencies use variants of this model. The US National Science Foundation employs managers from academia to choose projects for their Small Grant Scheme for Exploratory Research (https://www.macfound.org/programs/fellows/strategy/). This method can also help to reduce conservatism, because scientists wanting to change fields or applicants with unconventional ideas can be funded on the basis of their past performance.Other changes have been suggested and implemented to address the weaknesses of traditional peer review. Some funding agencies ask peer reviewers to focus only on applicants’ past performance, rather than judging the validity of the proposed projects, with the idea that past success is the best predictor of future performance. The MacArthur Fellows Programme in the USA uses this method for funding projects in all areas (https://www.hhmi.org/scientists) to carry out basic biomedical research. HHMI evaluates the overall quality of the science carried out by the applicants rather than the proposed projects. Moreover, it explicitly encourages researchers to take risks, explore unknown fields, and take failure into account. This comes with long‐term funding for seven or more years for “HHMI investigators” and has yielded 29 Nobel Prizes. A study comparing the careers of HHMI investigators and NIH investigators found that the former produce more high‐impact papers at a much higher rate than NIH scientists, and suggests that the HHMI funding scheme is effective in stimulating researchers to explore new research areas This is the stated goal of the Investigator Programme of the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes (HHMI), a large US non‐profit organization who “fund people, not projects” (https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/documents/our-approach-to-grants.pdf). The BMGF's funded research programmes have contributed, to, among others, innovative research on HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, the eradication of polio, improved water quality and sanitation and research on neglected tropical diseases.Other philanthropies have adopted different methods to spend their funds efficiently. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is the largest private foundation with assets of about US$46.8 billion. The BMGF has formulated clear and practical goals and uses a straight‐forward decision‐making mechanism to achieve these. Rather than waiting for applicants to propose ideas and projects, it proactively identifies suitable applicants and solicits them to apply for funding. Internal programme officers are responsible for monitoring the performance of the funded project and work with the grantees to achieve the foreseen goals .The NSF is one of the few public funding agencies that specifically selects projects not only based on the intellectual merit of the proposals, but also on its potential broader impacts, such as the promotion of teaching and learning, the inclusion of under‐represented groups, and other benefits to society . Indeed, an analysis of the effect of blinding applications in the first stage and disclosing identities in the second stage of the assessment of grant proposals in Spain found that reviewers did change their evaluation once they could see applicants’ identities Anonymizing applications could help to reduce bias and encourage scientists to apply with unconventional and out‐of‐the‐box ideas. This is the idea behind the https://www.mrc.ac.uk/documents/pdf/reviewers-handbook/). An evaluation of a training video for grant reviewers in the USA found that explicitly explaining the definitions and meaning of the rating scales used by the NIH and drawing reviewers’ attention on the consequences of their scorings, improved rating scale interpretation and application, both for experienced and unexperienced reviewers. The authors suggest that this highlights the importance of defining clear criteria and making reviewers aware of what is expected from them and why Other measures to prevent or limit bias that have been implemented by funding agencies include training reviewers, publishing clear conflict of interest policies, providing reviewers with clear guidelines on the evaluation criteria, and making them aware of potential biases. The MRC in the UK has published online guidelines including assessment criteria and advice on how to control bias .Another idea that has gained increasing interest is involving non‐experts into the review process: patients and their families, care takers and even the general public. The rationale behind patient engagement in biomedical research is obvious: the knowledge and personal experience of patients and their families can help to increase the quality and the validity of the research, and contributes to achieving the ultimate goal of improving patient care or developing new therapies. The Patient‐Centred Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), an independent, non‐governmental organization, was the first major US funding agency to involve lay persons, patients, patient families and care givers in peer review in 2012. The Rare Disease Foundation in Canada involves patients and parents in the review process of their Microgrants for research into rare diseases to evaluate the potential impact on care, and the priorities of patients and their families .An even more radical version is involving the public at large, together with scientific experts, in evaluating research proposals. The rationale here is that a wider range of knowledge and experience improves transparency, limits the danger of bias and contributes to addressing social benefits. Moreover, as the public are the main funder of research, it is fair to involve representatives in the process of deciding how the money will be spent. Health Research Board in Ireland, the largest funder for health‐related research in the country, started a pilot public review scheme for its Investigator‐Led Projects in 2017 and recruited participants via advertisements in the radio and other channels. During the first step of the project, public reviewers provided feedback directly to the applicants, and they will be involved in the expert panels that make the final funding decisions. The initial evaluation of the project was positive: researchers said that the public reviewers did have useful suggestions for their proposals and most of them would revise their applications accordingly  Peer review: a system under stress. PLoS Biol 12: e1002010Gurwitz D, Milanesi E, Koenig T (2014) Grant application review: the case of transparency. https://www.pmcsa.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/Which-science-to-fund-time-to-review-peer-review.pdfGluckmann P (2012) Which science to fund: Time to review peer‐review? New Zealand Office of the Prime Minister's science advisory committee. Evaluating Grant Peer Review in the Health Sciences. A review of the literature. Santa Monica, CA: RAND CorporationIsmail S, Farrands A, Wooding S (2009) What do we know about grant peer‐review in the health sciences? Santa Monica, CA: RAND CorporationGuthrie S, Ghiga I, Wooding S (2018) Acad Med 91: 1080–1088Kaatz A, Lee YG, Potvien A, Magua W, Filut A, Bhattacharya A, Leatherberry R, Zhu X, Carnes M (2016) Analysis of National Institutes of Health R01 application critiques, impact and criteria scores: does the sex of the Principal Investigator make a difference? http://frithmind.org/socialminds/2017/07/28/fighting-bias-with-quota-and-lottery/Frith U (2017) Fighting bias with quotas and lottery, Social Minds blog. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 111: 5773–5777Alberts B, Kirschner MW, Tilghman S, Varmus H (2014) Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws. Science 343: 262Brenner S (2014) Frederick Sanger (1918–2013). CookDeegan RM (1997) Does NIH need a DARPA? Issues in Science and Technology 13: 25–28eLife 5: e13323Fang FC, Bowen A, Casadevall A (2016) NIH peer review percentile scores are poorly predictive of grant productivity. Am J Eval 37: 238–249Lindner MD, Vancea A, Chen M‐C, Chacko G (2016) NIH Peer Review – Scored review criteria and overall impact. Science 348: 434–438Li D, Agha L (2015) Big names or big ideas: do peer‐review panels select the best science proposals? PLoS One 3: e3480Bornmann L, Wallon G, Ledin A (2008) Does the committee peer‐review select the best applicants for funding? An investigation for the selection process for two European Molecular Biology Organization programmes. mBio 7: e00422–16Fang FC, Casadevall A (2016) Research funding: the case for a modified lottery. Polit Theory 37: 375–397Stone P (2009) The logic of random selection.


As we celebrate our anniversary, the PLOS Biology editors discuss recent initiatives taken by the journal  and look ahead to the next fifteen years. PLOS Biology marked its fifteenth anniversary on October 13 (tober 13 . The yeaPLOS Biology has achieved a lot in fifteen years, but it’s clear there is still much to be done (The hope was that the obvious benefits that digital technology offered by removing barriers to accessing scientific information would catalyse radical change in the scholarly publishing landscape. Progress in research publishing and dissemination, however, has not kept pace with advances in technology. As open access advocate John Wilbanks notes in the movie Paywall: The Business of Scholarship  (a very  be done .PLOS Biology has overturned the myth that an open access business model and top-quality science are mutually exclusive. It has also been instrumental in catalysing a range of important transformations in scientific communication from its rigorous implementation of PLOS’s data policy to expand the definition of what can and should be shared, to the new complementary research policy that showcases the value of replication. I’m proud that PLOS Biology has achieved all of this while also providing excellent service to its community of authors. As we look to the future, there is plenty more work to be done and PLOS Biology continues to lead the charge with the next wave of change: expanding our definitions of what should be published and how it should be assessed and curated.In its first fifteen years, Fifteen years ago, open access publishing was in its infancy. PLOS along with BioMed Central were making waves in the publishing industry, hoping that scientists and civic-minded publishers would embrace open access publishing as a public good. But the waves proved too small to create a groundswell. Subscription-based publishers reluctant to lose a steady source of income by converting to open access subverted the goals by simply adding open access options while enforcing paywalls to most scientific content. And decisions about the quality of research continue to rely on journal title as a proxy for value and impact. As a result, although more researchers are aware of open access, they continue to aspire to publish in journals that check career-advancement boxes, with little thought to how publisher business model affects the ability of science to progress. Initiatives like DORA—founded to identify ways to improve how research is assessed—have helped raise awareness of the fallibility and inappropriateness of metrics like the impact factor , yet theOverturning entrenched norms, especially those backed by powerful interests, is never easy. But some developments offer reason for hope; Plan S in the European Union is an open access policy announced recently by a group of European national funders, with support from the European Commission and the European Research Council, which commits to eliminate paywalls in science; these funders will mandate that after 1 January 2020, access to research publications generated from all research that they fund must be fully and immediately open access . QuestioAside from influencing access to scientific research, publishers have the potential to change the scientific process itself. Much has been made in recent years about rigour and reproducibility in research; some have called this a “reproducibility, or replication crisis” , a charaPLOS Biology expanded its scope to publish ‘research into research’ in the form of Meta-Research Articles [We knew there had to be a better way. In early 2016, Articles . These aPLOS Biology formalised a ‘complementary research’ policy that gives authors of a complementary study six months from the publication of the first article to submit their manuscript to PLOS Biology [We’ve also attempted to address the counter-productive pressure for scientists to publish first by dispelling the negative connotations of being ‘scooped’; earlier this year  Biology . With thPLOS Biology, along with most of the other PLOS journals, now offers submitting authors the option of having us facilitate posting a preprint of their manuscript on bioRxiv. This journal-to-preprint model helps achieve much earlier open access to those research results while the manuscript is under review.Alongside this, PLOS Biology has also embraced and enforced the PLOS data policy [In the last year, we’ve also taken steps to acknowledge the inherent value of research outputs that are often overlooked by adding two new article types: ‘Short Reports’ and ‘Methods and Resources.’ The former validates publication of exploratory research without all the mechanistic bells and whistles, and the latter recognizes researchers who focus more on creating tools or datasets for their research community. With a view to better recognising other types of research outputs, a policy  and we sa policy ,12.PLOS Biology has long distinguished itself by using a unique peer-review model that partners in-house professional editors with trusted advisors in the scientific community on every reviewed manuscript. We remain indebted to our partners on the Editorial Board who ensure an unbiased and expertly guided assessment and review process. Rather than looking for reasons to reject, our goal is to help researchers publish their quality science. When faced with opposing recommendations if appropriate we mediate cross-reviewer commenting, and we sometimes publish even if there are still open questions as long as any caveats are clearly stated in the manuscript or in an Editor’s Note [r’s Note –16. As wPLOS Biology is focussing on how we can address other research pain points, and how we fit into the current STM publishing ecosystem while simultaneously working towards open research. We’ve spent the last five years closely focusing on our editorial processes and improving author service. We’re committed to adapting to the needs of the community, innovating and experimenting in the publishing space, and redefining selectivity for publication assessment. In August this year, PLOS signed an open letter committing to publishing peer review reports for all PLOS journals [PLOS Biology is poised, ready to adapt and evolve, and remains dedicated to the goal of accelerating progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.As we proceed through our teenage years, journals . What thPLOS Biology, we continue to publish high-quality, rigorous science, and we’ve been showcasing blog posts each month throughout 2018, featuring an article selected by one of our hard-working Editorial Board Members. Each post highlights that editor’s favourite article along with their commentary on its importance [Meanwhile, to celebrate 15 years of portance .PLOS Biology editors urged readers to help improve the journal to maximize the benefits derived from the time, money, effort and intellectual capital invested in the scientific process [In the first editorial of the inaugural issue, the  process . The edi


Finding a good quality reviewer, retaining them and setting up an efficient peer review system are some of the important challenges which the editors are faced universally.Although in the historical perspective the editorial peer review developed slowly and haphazardly but it became institutionalized only in 1940.2In the developing low income countries including Pakistan, research culture has not developed much though the situation is now changing for the better. The contribution of these countries to the overall medical literature remains very negligible, hence the process of peer review has also progressed very slowly. Once we asked a senior faculty member in a medical university, “can I send you a manuscript for peer review? His response was, Yes I will pass it on to my resident”. In another case a manuscript was sent for review to the head of a tertiary care institution after he agreed to review it. Later enquiries revealed that he had passed it on to one of his juniors for review and the quality of the review when it was received was also lazy and left much to be desired. This just reflects the attitude of senior faculty members who are too busy and have least interest in such academic activities. There are numerous studies which show that young researchers and those affiliated with teaching institutions are better reviewers.3It was in 1970 that the concept of external peer review blossomed in cardiology. This resulted in critique of papers by outsiders of equal competencies. Dack, the editor of American Journal of Cardiology started sending papers for external review. However, he considered the feedback as advice rather than an authoritative word. Once he is reported to have rejected three papers which had received positive reviews and when he was questioned about his decision, his response was “I read every word of every paper and every review? I know the reviewers, strengths, weaknesses and biases. I ask for their opinion and I am not asking them for their vote. I am the editor, this is my journal; I make the decisions and I take the responsibility”.4There is no denying the fact that peer review does improve the quality of the manuscripts and also provide useful expert opinion to the editors which helps them in making the final decisions whether to accept or reject the manuscripts but it is not without flaws and disadvantages. Some researchers now even question whether the peer review has failed to achieve its objective.Peer Review could be single blind, double blind and open peer review is the latest and considered the best though all these systems have their own advantages and disadvantages. Richard Smith the former Editor of BMJ felt that open peer review would be more useful. BMJ was initially reluctant to opt for it but later on it was proved that Richard Smith was right. Hence BMJ started practicing open peer review system when Richard Smith was its Editor.2Another recent idea of review adopted by few journal is OE system, in which papers are evaluated post-publication in an ongoing fashion by means of open peer review and rating. Through signed ratings and reviews, scientists steer the attention of their field and build their reputation. Reviewers are motivated to be objective because low-quality evaluations will negatively impact their reputation.5Like editors, the reviewers can also be biased, jealous, ignorant, incompetent hence their reviews can be unreliable, unfair and fail to validate or authenticate. Some researchers also feel that peer review tends to block work which is innovative or contrary to the views of the reviewer thus causing un-necessary delay in publication. Open peer review does make the reviewers more accountable but it has the drawback that junior reviewers may fear reprisal by the established authors, it favour established authors, and it may create resentment and animosity and may result in higher acceptance rate.2However, it is important that the editors should be receptive to new ideas, innovations that has scientific merit and provide them platform to dissiminate. The editors must use the reviewer’s comments as an advice which is not at all binding because it is not uncommon to receive some lazy reviews and editors must tell the reviewers about that. Readers for long have trusted journals to be reliable source of information but the situation has changed a lot during the last four five decades. The trust that physicians used to place in journals has evaporated since the peer review process does not work anymore the way it was expected to be?It is now widely believed that academic medicine is also getting polluted with the every passing day. In the past the researchers were blamed to receive financial incentives to give positive results of research projects, clinical trials and suppress negative results.7Many reviewers do not have enough time to read each paper sent to them carefully, sometime they pass it on to their other colleagues, at times juniors or even residents. It is almost impossible to find good reviewers these days. Sometimes the reviews received are superficial and not helpful. Some reviewers may be spending just a few minutes and then write the report and when the reviews come too late, the editors are under pressure to accept their opinion even if they are inadequate and biased. In such circumstances some editors may be reluctant to overrule the reviewers fearing that they might refuse to review the paper again. Many editors also have a desire to keep the reviewers happy.2At the same time, many new journals or those who have not yet been recognized by their respective country’s regulatory bodies attract very few submission and they are all the times struggling to fill up their pages. Hence they will accept whatever they get irrespective of the quality of paper. Some believe that now peer review remains just a formality. Peer review is dead as it no longer achieves the objective. Posting on a preprint server may replace the traditional peer review process entirely;8Another study by Jawaid SA et al showed that performance of reviewers and quality of their review was mostly dependent on their interests in academics. Best reviewers were retired medical teachers personally known to the editor, those who had attended some training course/workshop on peer review. Editors tend to overuse the efficient reviewers which can lead to burnout syndrome which will then affect the quality of review.9Yet another study reported that the authors, editors and reviewers should have the common goal of enhancing the quality of the communications. It can be achieved if the trio establishes an ethical and professional alliance free of bias and monetary gains and interest- an emerging trend among all those involved in the publication of research.10In view of all this changing scenario the greater responsibility lies with the editors who must critically analyze and review the reviewers’ comments and suggestions. It is the quality of their review which should eventually guide the editors how much weightage they should give to the reviewers’ comments and suggestions while taking a final decision to accept or reject a paper. The decision will vary from reviewer to reviewer.


Science advances through rich, scholarly discussion. More than ever before, digital tools allow us to take that dialogue online. To chart a new future for open publishing, we must consider alternatives to the core features of the legacy print publishing system, such as an access paywall and editorial selection before publication. Although journals have their strengths, the traditional approach of selecting articles before publication  forces a focus on “getting into the right journals,” which can delay dissemination of scientific work, create opportunity costs for pushing science forward, and promote undesirable behaviors among scientists and the institutions that evaluate them. We believe that a “publish first, curate second” approach with the following features would be a strong alternative: authors decide when and what to publish; peer review reports are published, either anonymously or with attribution; and curation occurs after publication, incorporating community feedback and expert judgment to select articles for target audiences and to evaluate whether scientific work has stood the test of time. These proposed changes could optimize publishing practices for the digital age, emphasizing transparency, peer-mediated improvement, and post-publication appraisal of scientific articles. This Perspective article proposes new practices for scientific publishing that align better with today's digital environment than do legacy practices. Most scientific work in the life sciences is still disseminated using a process inaugurated by the Royal Society in the 17th century, with the notable addition of peer review in the middle of the 20th century. This process starts with authors submitting a manuscript to the journal of their choice, where editorial selection and peer review culminate in an editorial thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision that determines whether the article is accepted for publication or rejected. If it is rejected, sometimes after several rounds of peer review, the author starts all over again at a different journal, typically until the paper gets accepted for publication somewhere.When print was expensive, it made sense for journals to select what to publish and to charge subscription fees for a hard copy of the journal. But the internet allows us to envision and build a more open publishing environment in which nobody is shut out of research results through subscription paywalls, and internet- and community-driven approaches—not editorial selection before publication—filter the literature. The traditional journal approach of selecting papers before publication strikes us as outdated because it is often slow, costly, and harmful for science. It is slow and costly for authors and funders, because cycles of rejection and revision consume time and resources that may improve articles but also create an opportunity cost for advancing science in new directions. The delay in getting research published hurts science because research that isn’t published is equivalent to research not done, at least from the perspective of the broader scientific community and the public. Editorial selection also consumes the time and resources of selective journal publishers and peer reviewers, who spend much of their effort rejecting papers. A high rejection rate makes it expensive for selective journals to switch to an open-access publishing model because open-access fees are currently collected for published, not rejected, articles. Editorial selection before publication therefore raises the cost of open-access publishing and impedes the full transition to open access. Finally and most importantly, editorial selection before publication is harmful for science because it has turned scientific publishing into a game of “getting into the right journals,” which shapes academic career advancement and the behavior of scientists in undesirable ways.Despite the costs, scientists play this game of “getting into the right journals” because winning it has become crucial for advancing a scientific career. Funding, hiring, and promotion decisions are increasingly influenced by where scientists publish, not what they publish . AlarminDespite these shortcomings, funders and employers continue to use the JIF in funding and employment decisions. The JIF rose to prominence during the expansion of the life science community, because funding and hiring panels began increasingly confronting two assessment challenges—large numbers of candidate scientists and specialized research areas outside the expertise represented by the panels. The solution that all decisions should be made by experts “who read the papers” does not easily scale to situations in which evaluators lack either time or expertise to evaluate the work’s intrinsic merit. Therefore, if we want to dissuade from the use of journal-level metrics in the evaluation of scientists, we will need to develop mechanisms that make expert evaluations more discoverable, including easy-to-use article-level metrics that reflect relevant quality features of individual articles.Although journals shouldn’t be blamed for an academic incentive and reward system that uses their selections as a shorthand in academic evaluations, they clearly contribute to the persistent use of journal-level metrics. Journals have become brands that promote their name (and impact factor) to the scientific community. Journal branding stifles discoverable and article-level evaluations of scientific work in the following ways:Most journals keep peer reviews confidential among editors, reviewers, and authors. This secrecy gives editors more flexibility to decide what to publish, but it leaves the community with the publishing decision as the only visible outcome of the peer review process and thus the journal brand and the JIF as the only evident indicators of quality and significance.High–impact-factor journals maintain position at the top of the journal hierarchy by keeping selectivity artificially high. High–impact-factor journals in the life sciences are publishing fewer papers today than three decades ago, despite significant growth of the life sciences community . Just liJournal branding conflicts with the correction of publication errors. Although journals retract papers with serious flaws, most erroneous publishing decisions are not corrected by journals. They are discounted among experts, whereas the flawed, misinterpreted, or overinterpreted articles continue to appeal to unsuspecting funding and hiring panels.The forces of nontransparent quality controls, artificial selectivity, and articles “written in stone” all contribute to the persistence of the JIF and to prestige journal brands. Getting into these journals can, for some scientists, even become more important than actually getting the science right. In this hypercompetitive publishing environment, researchers are tempted to exaggerate their work’s impact, to choose research topics deemed suitable for top journals, and to refrain from open sharing of data and other research outputs.In summary, although the traditional journal-based publishing process has strengths, it too often restricts access through paywalls, wastes resources, delays dissemination of research findings, and shapes the evaluation and behavior of scientists in undesirable ways.To drive scientific publishing forward, we propose several long-term changes. Although these changes could be implemented independently, together they promise to significantly increase transparency and efficiency.Change peer review to better recognize its scholarly contribution.Shift the publishing decision from editors to authors.Shift curation from before to after publication.We could increase the quality of peer review and provide recognition for this activity –8 if we Publishing peer review reports and author responses for a manuscript, anonymously or with attribution, would reveal the rigor of the peer review process and open up to interested readers the scholarly exchange that accompanies the publication of an article. Today, transparency is the exception. We believe it should become the norm.Peer review that is independent of journals focuses on feedback to the authors and evaluation of technical quality and originality of the submitted work. It reverses the trend in which peer review has morphed into a means of assisting editors in deciding whether a paper is suitable for their journal. It is important to identify papers of unusual significance and broad interest, and peer reviewers can contribute to that appraisal in a journal-agnostic fashion by properly describing the originality and scientific context of the work in question.Consultations among peer reviewers—whether through virtual feedback on individually submitted peer reviews or a joint report after consultation among reviewers —could efIf peer review becomes a more constructive dialogue through these measures, reviewers may increasingly opt to sign their reviews. Signing of peer reviews ultimately aligns better with the notion that peer review deserves credit as a labor-intensive scholarly activity and important service to the scientific community. But we recognize that peer reviewers may not be as forthcoming with their critiques if signing reviews becomes compulsory, particularly when the author is an established scientist who may be able to affect the career of the reviewer. The technology exists to allow peer reviewers to remain anonymous while still receiving credit for their peer review efforts. This “dynamic anonymity” protects vulnerable reviewers but gives them the option to lift their anonymity at a later time. One step toward recognizing peer reviewers would be to index peer reviews with their own digital object identifier (DOI), as some journals and Publons already do ,11, makiThe independence of scientists is at the heart of the research enterprise. Indeed, academic scientists lead the design and the execution of their own research plans after obtaining a principal investigator position and funding. This concept that scientists are in charge of the research process should be extended to the final step of the research workflow—the dissemination of the primary research results. Today, journal editors decide when primary research is published. Shifting the publishing decision from editors to authors would fundamentally change the roles and motivations of authors, peer reviewers, and editors and open the door to publishing and evaluation practices that, we believe, are right for the digital age.Authors would benefit from deciding when to publish original and revised articles because they could avoid excessive rounds of peer review and revisions they consider unnecessary. Reviewers would benefit because their peer review burden would decrease. But this shift begs the question of how authors can be motivated to only publish rigorous work and not prematurely rush to publication. The following are a few considerations.The scientific community and publishers should define appropriate standards and quality controls that must be satisified by all author-posted articles . PLOS and bioRxiv are collaborating on certification badges that signal quality controls that have been perfomed on author-posted preprints . Open daPublishing the peer review reports increases visibility of quality control, keeps authors honest, and motivates constructive feedback.A desire to have one’s articles selected and highlighted by editors and peers will continue to motivate authors to publish high quality work. In an author-driven publishing process, article selection (curation) would happen after publication (see below).We believe it makes sense that, in an open publishing environment, research is shared by authors and then scrutinized through discoverable peer review and filtering mechanisms after publication. If discoverable, peer review reports and post-publication evaluations contribute to the authors’ reputation and become powerful motivators for authors to publish their best possible work and revise it in response to reasonable and legitimate reviewer concerns. And if an author decides to stand by a paper despite serious criticism from peers, at least those criticisms will be accessible to readers, who can decide for themselves whether they agree with the author’s or the reviewers’ point of view. This is arguably better than the situation today, in which authors can publish any work somewhere, though not necessarily in their journal of choice, usually without critical reviews that highlight potential shortcomings.How could scientists find work of interest in a sea of primary articles posted by authors and improved by peer reviewers? This requires filtering or curation of primary research articles for specific audiences  or broader audiences. Experts would find valuable content in their own research field through powerful search engines. Because search algorithms will only get better in the future, we expect that many specialized journals that currently curate a large fraction of the literature will become obsolete.Time-consuming curation by experts would be more critical for research findings that claim to be highly significant and of broad interest, because many potential readers may not have the expertise or time to evaluate the work themselves. In the current publishing ecosystem, selective journals serve this important curation function by selecting papers for publication. Given that scientists continue to rely on these selections, we can presume these journals do as good a job as one can expect curating articles prior to publication. But the accuracy of these selections would improve after publication, when the scientific community has time to interact with the work and start the process of validation. Pre-publication curation is, in effect, a bet on the future influence of a selected article, whereas post-publication curation is closer to reporting wins or losses. In particular, post-publication curation offers the following advantages.Post-publication curation can leverage the community of expert users—scientists who actually use, reproduce, and build on the published data. Peer review before publication has become a serious challenge because life sciences research is increasingly interdisciplinary with data analysis, not data generation, as the rate-limiting step. How can we expect the few peer reviewers to verify significance and conceptual advances before publication, when this job could take a significant fraction of the time it took the authors to produce their analysis in the first place, and when the reviewer’s expertise often doesn’t cover all aspects of the described work ?Post-publication curation can continue over time and highlight many different features of articles, unlike a one-time, thumbs-up publishing decision at journals.Post-publication curation can in principle cover the entire published literature, beyond articles submitted to a particular journal.Effective post-publication curation offers the promise of alternatives to journal-based metrics like the JIF.bioRxiv as the biggest server [Author-driven dissemination in the life sciences already exists on publishing platforms. The defining feature of publishing platforms is that they empower authors to make publishing decisions. Preprint servers share author-posted articles before they undergo peer review at a journal, with no delay to dissemination. The arXiv preprint server has been used for decades in the physics community. Preprints enjoy increasing popularity in the life sciences, with t server . Publisht server .Open-access publishing platforms are positioned to increasingly complement—and perhaps eventually replace—journals as major publication venues for primary research articles. High-volume publishing on these platforms allows primary research to be published faster, because authors decide when to publish original and revised articles. The platforms are typically cheaper than journals because they don’t include expensive editorial curation associated with high rejection rates. Overall, the combined cost of publication on platforms and post-publication curation can be significantly lower than the current cost of journals because many primary research articles may not need post-publication curation; in fact, some fraction of specialized articles may not even need formal peer review, because the few scientists who access these articles on preprint servers can quickly evaluate rigor and quality of the data themselves.We envision a platform infrastructure that enables different providers to offer diverse services—publication of versioned articles from preprints to the final version of record, quality controls before publication, peer review, copy editing, post-publication curation, etc. One business model would enable service providers to charge a fee for service. Competition among service providers could create an environment of experimentation on publishing platforms that would, over time, identify the most valuable and cost-effective services. There is an argument for research funders to financially support publishing platforms and the services that run on them, at least until publishing volume has increased to levels that can sustain the platforms through service fees. Current leaders in this effort include the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which support their own open research platforms ,20, and eLife is exploring the impact of forgoing editorial rejection after peer review [Bioverlay uses academic editors to select preprints for peer review. Alternatively, scientists could self-select to review preprints [Some journals could become publishing platforms over time, shedding editorial gatekeeper roles. A publishing trial at r review . The edir review . Bioverlreprints . FurtherAs high-volume publishing platforms continue to grow, we’ll need curation services that select articles of interest for specific target audiences. Today’s selective journals and scientific societies could be well positioned to provide such services. Future curation journals could retain many of their current features, including subscription income, independent editors and editorial boards, and nontransparent evaluations. They could exploit the above-mentioned advantages over the curation at traditional “publishing” journals in the following ways.F1000Prime does. A particularly valuable curation service would be to identify significant claims in published articles that are questionable or could not be validated in the community. Today, such judgments are largely restricted to the privacy of expert circles. If discoverable through reputable curation services, these judgments could motivate authors to publish rigorous research. The multidimensional nature of curation after publication means that it could capture nuances and complexities much better than traditional journals, in which both “positive” and “negative” curation typically boil down to simple decisions—whether to publish or whether to retract.Some selection criteria could be similar to those journals use today, including “of broad interest,” “of unusual significance,” “potentially groundbreaking but controversial,” or “rigorous and elegant.” Alternatively, curators could flag articles that are personal favorites, as To illustrate what this input could look like, consider the following process: Every few months, an advisory board of experts nominates articles for a given set of categories. The selection that follows the nomination process can be informed by a mix of crowdsourcing, i.e., tallying the votes of board members, and editorial judgment, i.e., weighing comments from board members. The combination of community input and independent editorial oversight ensures that the selection process is not a simple popularity contest. Selection of an article is signaled by tagging the article with a badge (see below) and can be justified with a short review.Post-publication curation journals confront at least two significant challenges.Established scientists are already overburdened with peer review requests from journals. On the upside, scientists wouldn’t be asked to conduct a full technical peer review but to select articles they (and their trainees) have already dissected in detail. And starting post-publication curation with early-career group leaders and trainees may further mitigate this challenge: early-career scientists are not yet overburdened with peer review duties, have the most to gain from building an alternative evaluation and reward system in academia, and are still directly involved in hands-on research. Trainees could be engaged in curation through mentored journal clubs, similar to their engagement in the review of preprints through preprint journal clubs . UltimatEven if curation after publication is deemed highly valuable, it remains an untested business model. Research funders could support curation services initially, but academic libraries would ultimately have to subscribe to them to make them sustainable. It may be difficult to monetize the selection outcome itself, but scholarly reviews that justify the selections could be subscription worthy. There are opportunities to develop and experiment with new models of curation to explore what is most valuable for the scientific enterprise and sustainable for providers.One way to dissuade the use of journal-level metrics like the JIF in the evaluation of scientists is to develop better proxies that reflect quality features of articles. Post-publication curation offers an opportunity to develop such proxies in the form of “badges.” Badges would capture the selection of articles in a shorthand form and would be attached to papers in a discoverable and searchable manner. Like post-publication curation, badges could be multidimensional. Authors could contribute to badging through structured citations—e.g. by flagging research and methods articles that were foundational for a given article, similar to the practice at the Current Opinions journals, which mark references that are “of outstanding interest” and “of special interest.”  CurFinally, some badges could take full advantage of internet capabilities and be generated automatically through crowdsourcing and analytics over time . Altmetrics represent one existing example of article-specific metrics that aggregate citations, downloads, social media mentions, etc. . A disadWe envision a publishing model in which dissemination and curation of scientific work are separated, making both processes more efficient and effective ,29. To aSuccessful scientists have a vested interest in the current system. The notion that publication itself serves as a trusted “stamp of quality” is deeply ingrained, and scientists adhere instinctively to a more or less agreed-upon hierarchy of journals for judgment, reading preferences, and evaluations. As authors, they chose journals based on prestige and quality but are shielded from associated publishing costs because their libraries pay for subscription licenses. As peer reviewers, they provide critical and time-consuming services and, in exchange, gain privileged access both to unpublished work and to the “right” editors. Scientists may also interpret a call for change as an implicit criticism that they don’t execute their role well enough despite investing significant effort. It is easy to blame individuals, like editors or the “third reviewer,” for mistakes in publishing decisions. But the problems we describe here are systemic and not resolved by tackling individual misjudgments that will always be part of scientific evaluations.Over time, however, we believe that the scientific community will come to support a progressive open publishing model that accelerates discovery and empowers scientists. Authors would spend less time and resources on getting their work published, and peer reviewers might need to review less often. Even post-publication curation could turn out to be effort neutral if it grows at the expense of pre-publication curation. To move forward, we encourage the community to push for progress on core issues such as the following.How can we optimize the structure of peer review and the selection of peer reviewers for platform publishing? How do we determine what level of peer review an article needs in the first place—none, basic, premium? How can the peer review reports be structured—with scores and short statements of key features—to contribute most effectively to subsequent post-publication curation and badges?How do we set up an infrastructure and culture for post-publication curation? How do we decide on suitable categories for selection? How should we identify work that didn’t stand the test of time?Finally, what business models are best suited to support sharing of primary research articles on platforms and post-publication curation?Publishers, scientific societies, academic institutions and their libraries, and funders can play critical roles in addressing these issues. Publishers can experiment with publishing platforms. Scientific societies can use the expertise of their members to orchestrate fee-for-service peer review on publishing platforms and subscription-based curation services. Libraries may be able to support curation journals when publication of primary research articles shifts towards cheaper publishing platforms, liberating funds that are currently spent on traditional subscription journals.Open Research Funders Group, a community of practice.Research funders are uniquely positioned to promote change because we sit at the nexus of two interconnected functions—the sharing of research outputs and the evaluation of scientists. Many funders see it as our responsibility to support practices that disseminate research outputs openly and efficiently and evaluate scientists’ work based on intrinsic merit. The evaluation of scientists in academia places heavy emphasis on where and how much they publish, rather than what they publish. If these incentives don’t change, scientists will continue to publish in a manner that perpetuates the current problems. Changes in academic incentives cannot come from publishers. Funders and academic institutions need to commit to evaluate science and scientists independent of the publication venue . DevelopIn addition to supporting changes in the academic incentive system, funders can catalyze changes in publishing by encouraging and supporting publishing platforms, pilot studies on peer review, and new forms of post-publication curation. Such pilots should measure their impact on authors, reviewers, and readers and should be scalable. Their outputs should contribute to the evaluation of scientists and scientific work.By fostering an environment for experiments in publication and evaluation and continuously assessing and building on effective practices, we can together develop services that best support science in the digital age. We stand to gain fairer, more effective ways to communicate findings, share data, and develop the next generation of scientists. At Howard Hughes Medical Institute, we believe this is the future of publishing. We are moving toward it.