There is an abundance of free online tools accessible to scientists and others that can be used for online networking, data sharing and measuring research impact. Despite this, few scientists know how these tools can be used or fail to take advantage of using them as an integrated pipeline to raise awareness of their research outputs. In this article, the authors describe their experiences with these tools and how they can make best use of them to make their scientific research generally more accessible, extending its reach beyond their own direct networks, and communicating their ideas to new audiences. These efforts have the potential to drive science by sparking new collaborations and interdisciplinary research projects that may lead to future publications, funding and commercial opportunities. The intent of this article is to: describe some of these freely accessible networking tools and affiliated products; demonstrate from our own experiences how they can be utilized effectively; and, inspire their adoption by new users for the benefit of science. Online sharing now ranges from posting opinions, 140 character nuggets on Twitter, updates and discussions on LinkedIn, photos or videos via free platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo, presentation slides on SlideShare and so on. The specificonline media sites preferred in each country across the world differs. Despite the prevalence of social media tools, the vast majority of scientists do not use these tools to help share, evidence and amplify theirscientific research1. We believe there are a number of reasons that most scientists do not use these tools. It could be because few people would even think of using online media tools for their scientific research, or because they do not understand the potential value. The lack of credit for sharing pre-published data, code or other forms of research outputs, especially in terms of citations that can contribute to career progression, may also be an issue. Maybe scientists do not see this activity as a valuable use of their time or they require initial guidance to help navigate use of these tools. Other issues include fear of being scooped, and the idea that if your work is solid, it should be able to stand on its own merits without needing to be “amplified.”In the past 40 years, society has undergone considerable changes driven by the development of affordable personal computers, the internet and most recently, mobile devices, which allow widespread connection to the internet. In turn, these technologies have shaped how we interact with each other and form online networks. Since 2000 there has been an almosta growing list containing over 400 tools and innovations in scholarly communications, and some of these can be used for online sharing. This list reinforces the breadth of software tools available, and demonstrates how this can be confusing for any scientist to know where to start. With new tools being developed, it is difficult to keep track, determine what works, and optimize their use, especially in the context of science. For example, Kramer and Bosman (2017) manage2. Recently Ware and Mabe3 projected between 1.8–1.9 million scientific articles are now being published every year, while contributing one aspect of Big Data for science4. In recent years, there has also been an explosion in the number of new Open Access publishers, a number of which seem to be focused on the profit potential of this new marketplace aspredatory open access publishers. This exploitative open-access publishing business model charges publication fees without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals. This could allow scientists to game the system by publishing even poor quality science in predatory journals, effectively padding their resume. This was tested in an elaborate sting when a spoof research article was accepted by dozens of open access publishers5. It even extended to allowing fake editors roles on their editorial boards6. Such dubious practices in the publishing world, especially in terms of gaming a publication record can unfortunately extend to the use of online networking and sharing tools to boost online profiles and game altmetric scores (vide infra).As the world has changed in the past three decades, scientific publishing, seen increasingly as the currency of science for at least 50 years, has also seen a dramatic shift. Since publishing of the first modern journal in 1665 , a staggering number of scholarly articles have been published, reaching the milestone of 50 million by 2009GitHub). The process of research publication is now non-linear, with a potentially infinite variety of dissemination steps that could be taken between hypothesis to publication and beyond . This will increase in the future.This has many potential implications, one being a way to extend the life of a scientific publication and its enmeshing in a network of other electronic outputs. Another is the considerable effort that would be required to fulfill even a sampling of these approaches. Examples of the increasing importance of these non-traditional sources of scientific information is the increasing prevalence of links to Wikipedia, blog posts and code-sharing in reference lists associated with references in scientific publications  is the current system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions and, similarly, theExcellence in Research in Australia project (ERA). While there are various subjective judgements regarding the “impact” of a publication  for a research effort and ultimately for the performance and impact of a scientist, it should be obvious that in our present time the sharing, networking and outreach of research work could bring benefits. What those benefits actually are, and how to deliver them reproducibly, is one of the mysteries of this new scientific networking ecosystem. How does one use technology to maximally increase the visibility of your research outputs and potentially lead to breakthroughs that benefit humanity? This could be seen as the ‘new alchemy’ of science. Suggested benefits might be broader reach for a publication and Altmetric scores (vide infra) that could be used by granting agencies or others for assessing the scientist. By engaging or participating in online media for example, scientists can be empowered by using and adopting the tools available to them to share and improve access to their research, facilitating networking and potentially resulting in greater impacts on their career. However, these benefits come at a cost as they require time and effort that could distract from other efforts, such as research, writing grants, reviewing, mentoring and so on, and they are not yet in the standard workflow of the scientist.The vast majority of researchers depend on research funding in order to progress their science. However, acquiring research funding continues to be a challenge, with only 20.7%  ofBased on our collective experiences over the past five years, we believe there is a significant return on investment, and it is far higher than simply relying on publishers to invest informed and targeted efforts in sharing a scientific publication. This in fact rarely happens unless the publisher, or you, invest in a press release, but the vast majority of publications are certainly never picked up by the general press, primarily due to the sheer volume of scientific papers being published. For a publisher producing many thousands, if not tens of thousands of publications in a year, investing efforts to share information about one publication above and beyond one tweet, or a rudimentary blog post on their website, is highly unlikely. If publishers were to promote each article, book or report they publish, this would flood their communication channels, thus creating too much noise. Their own marketing efforts would be less effective through mass communication and may also reduce reach, especially to the overwhelmed specific target audiences that would benefit from the author's research. Ultimately, the best person to raise awareness is the author(s) themselves who can leverage their own networks, whether through electronic tools or personal interactions. These may be as effective as a press release when it comes to spreading the word on what is likely a hot topic relevant to few scientists in a specialized field.nanopublication”, although the longevity of some of these tools is questionable. This effort does not have to wait until publication as you could tweet ideas at the very earliest stages of the research depending on your level of openness, especially in regards to open data, as well as concern for being scooped by people following you. In the process of our own experiments to determine the benefits and paths towards online sharing of our research, we have identified at least four steps that the reader could put into action. These four steps are toexplain,share, andgather evidence of increased awareness of the work, as well asgather feedback from the community. These efforts may only take a few minutes of a scientist’s time, which is a fractional investment compared with the hundreds to thousands of hours spent on the scientific research from conception to publication. These steps, in turn, may increase impact of the research efforts.A scientific publication is considered the most basic and historical path to “sharing” the product/s of one’s research. This is also generally considered the final output detailing the purpose for a particular piece of research, provides enough detail to reproduce the work and access to sufficient data . Nowadays however, even a tweet with links to further scientific information or data can potentially represent a “altmetrics”,vide infra), leading to new collaborations, new funding or even facilitate new discoveries. While there is certainly no shortage of software tools available to share and amplify research efforts, we will discuss a small number of free tools that we use ourselves, of course others are likely to have their own personal favorites. We hope this serves to whet the appetite, encourage further exploration to find out what tools work best for you to meet your objectives, and even form the foundation to discover new or other tools not identified in this piece.Investing additional efforts into sharing data, research outputs such as presentations, or the final published products of the research work, may directly benefit a scientist’s career  saving time by using integrated tools; 2) sharing your work using a small number of online services for dissemination and amplification; 3) tracking and providing evidence of your “impact” on research to potentially help with research funding applications; and/or 4) furthering your outreach to those outside your own network and perhaps engaging with the general public. Once you have defined your focus, you will be better positioned in terms of deciding what software services to use and whether to utilize a mixture or concentrate your efforts on one or two only. Your institution, colleagues, collaborators or even publishers may also have some recommendations for you or may already be partnered with specific services of which you can take advantage.Slack orYammer, which are generally used for private communication and sharing. While these newer tools may be important for science and collaboration within small groups, they are useful in extending your online network more broadly. Clearly, the changes we have seen with technology may not predict what we will see in future in terms of communication style and utility as technologies themselves can redefine communication styles, as is the case with the 140 character tweet. Throughout this article we will point to examples of our own profiles on these various online tools as examples.We separated these software tools into four specific categories: networking, sharing, tracking and amplification. We acknowledge that the lines between many of these are actually rather fuzzy and that networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are primarily used for sharing. Many of these tools actually serve more than one particular function, and our article is acknowledged to be subjective and based on our own experience and usage. There are obviously more generic tools that have long existed, for example email, and newer tools likeLinkedIn. WhileLinkedIn has a primary role to form connections and expose your career to potential employers and partners, it is likely thede facto networking tool for many professional scientists. LinkedIn is also the number one networking site for business and crosses all domains. The networking of scientists, business and investors offers potential opportunities for innovation and commercialization. Other platforms  are more geared towards research. LinkedIn offers both free and paid levels of service and, to date, we have only used the free services. We think that anyone creating a LinkedIn profile should invest a minimal effort in terms of adding a “professional” photograph, a career history back to their research training (i.e. college or university), a minimum of two to three research publications, and links to public presentations on other sites (vide infra). We also suggest that career interests be listed and some efforts invested in building out a network of work colleagues, ex-supervisors, co-authors, etc. We believe that LinkedIn be considered as an opportunity for career-networking,not family event and activity sharing, and to maintain the highest level of professionalism on this site. The ‘networking effect’ will likely result fairly quickly in new contacts reaching out to join your network, and we suggest being somewhat selective in accepting these offers. Some proposed filters for accepting new contacts include: 1) whether you have met them face-to-face; 2) the size of overlapping networks (for example when you have ~10 contacts in common); and 3) when you have already had either phone or email contact with the person. As well as recommendations from those you have worked directly with, the endorsement facility of LinkedIn allows members of your network to identify and endorse you for specific skills and this, in particular, can be valuable in terms of having a publicly acknowledged list of capabilities visible to the LinkedIn user base. An example of such an endorsement list is shown in8. The associatedGoogle Analytics for the site shows that these postings are very effective in driving traffic to the site, commonly a few dozen visits within a day of posting an update about the site. This can be informative about your network and perhaps beyond, in that good news travels fast. One or more scientific publications can be associated with the profile to illustrate latest research efforts and we suggest association of your highest profile publications with the site. Ideally LinkedIn would make use of Digital Object identifiers (DOIs) and would allow a resolver service, such asCrossRef, to display the publication details rather than forcing manual entry as it does at present. DOIs are one of the primary ways that scientific online tools integrate their data streams . Besides using LinkedIn to share links to your latest publications, one can also insert PowerPoint presentations, PDF files and other document forms using the embed functionality available viaSlideShare (described in more detail later).For those who use the site, they will have noticed business managers sharing their greatest coaching ideas or meaningful quotes. A scientist can use the same facility to post an update regarding present activities or simply something of scientific interest to share with followers. In this regard, the site can be considered as a more expansive version of Twitter. Some of these types of updates can be incredibly useful as tools to highlight a recent achievement for your group or collaborators. From our experience, a tendency towards keeping them brief and adding an image certainly helps in obtaining more views and ‘likes’. We have used this facility to provide updates on new papers or grants received as well as updates on specific projects. We have found that positive or engaging news can quickly gather momentum  and can drive contacts that lead to offline follow up. As an example, AJW posts updates on LinkedIn regarding his most recent project, the CompTox Chemistry DashboardTinyURL,Goo.gl URLs orBitly to track the number of times people click on your link (as clickthroughs). However, it should be remembered that some services are currently banned in countries like China (e.g. Google), so you may want to ensure you are using “global friendly” services for this purpose. In our opinion LinkedIn is a pivotal tool and the purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft9 would indicate that it will be more closely integrated with their products, maybe even extending to include an integration to theirMicrosoft Academic site that operates in the same space asGoogle Scholar Citations. The regularity of updates regarding new publications and presentations can be representative of your productivity, and requires active attention to your LinkedIn profile. The sharing of articles, presentations and science news that interests you can also help drive attention to other people’s work and elevate interest in it. For sharing via the site, we suggest using URL shortener services likeResearchGate and Academia. There are several tools for networking your publications. Two of the most popular areResearchGate andAcademia. While there are differences in functionality, both sites provide similar abilities in terms of sharing preprint manuscripts, presentations, posters and other forms of general communication of your science. For example, one author’s (AJW)Academia site lists ~250 publications, presentations, book chapters, magazine articles and other research outputs and has had ~30,000 views. Thedetailed analytics page includes geographical details, views and downloads and Academia’s measures of impact). A recent study in PLOS ONE10 states that papers uploaded to Academia receive a 69% boost in citations over five years.418 contributions as of 19th March 2017 and provides a reach ofca. 15,000 researchers, who can learn about his publications, presentations and postings to the site. It should be noted he also barely uses this software, as he prefers to put his efforts elsewhere. Academia and ResearchGate, when used to develop a network of followers, both offer an excellent communication path for sharing activities and research outputs with the community using the sites. These sites require some considerable effort to respond to requests and engage with others if you are to fully maximize their value.ResearchGate appears to be more expansive in terms of what can be hosted on the site and can include, for example, datasets, project updates, patents, working papers, code, and negative results. Users are encouraged to fill out their complete profile, and list awards and their previous work experience at a minimum. It also provides a forum for technical questions and answers, and most recently, allows users to group publications and data into ‘projects’. SE’s profile includesIt is important to note that any uploads of published work to these services requires permission from the publisher. A strong movement from publishers, which is beginning to take momentum, puts pressure on these services to ensure they educate their users on appropriate copyright. You may find the publisher will contact you if they feel that your published work is listed on ResearchGate and conflicts against your agreed copyright. To ensure that ResearchGate is used without risking a breach of copyright, it is necessary to read the Copyright Transfer Agreement or transfer license associated with the publisher to see how the paper can be shared. Open access policies can be checked on the journal’s website or by usingSHERPA RoMEO, a site that presents policies based on a journal title or ISSN search.approaching two billion users as of May 2017. While we acknowledge the penetration, versatility and general global acceptance of Facebook as a platform, we collectively use it for sharing with friends and family mainly, only rarely sharing links to some of our scientific works. We prefer to separate career activities from personal pursuits, but acknowledge that this is also a personal choice. For younger generations this may be inverted, their followers on Facebook may be colleagues rather than family and for them it would be seen as appropriate to share on Facebook, on Instagram or on group chat site, such asWhatsApp. Instead, for sharing we use alternative online tools as outlined below.Currently, the most widely adopted social sharing platform is Facebook,Blogs. All three of us have managed blogs for a number of years and two invested considerable amounts of time in sharing opinions, data and ideas (SE andAJW). We have developed collaborations of value, asked for opinions and guidance and used them to share information regarding our (or others) latest research efforts, industry research and news/updates. Overall though, it seems that there is less interest in blogging, probably due to the amount of time needed to develop content and we ourselves more commonly share information now in smaller soundbites (via Twitter and LinkedIn). We also try to reach other networks by being guest bloggers on the blogs of others or news services and using these other sites to share data. There are so many other applications now available for sharing relative to just a few years ago that we will therefore focus our discussion on those sites that we use on a more regular basis.“Small nugget sharing”: Twitter/Google Plus. In many ways both Twitter and Google Plus are for sharing bite-sized communications, presently limited to only 140 characters for Twitter, butpossibly to be extended. In terms of sharing, it is an ideal application for pointing your network to papers, publications, data sets, and blog posts via embedded short links. Networking retweets can drive attention to these various types of resources. It is simple to use and push out a URL to something you wish to share can drive attention easily, though only for a fairly short period of time. Once an item of interest has been prepared on some other form of social media, or a website link to a publication requires sharing, Twitter and Google Plus then become ideal ways to point to these items. Examples of nugget sharing include letting people know in advance that you will be at a conference , or live tweeting at a conference11. One of the primary reasons that we use these platforms is for amplification of our publications (vide infra). Both AJW and SE have initiated collaborations and specific data sharing activities via Twitter. For example, SE attended a meeting and shared the need for an application to build on a Green Chemistry dataset that was available only as a PDF file. What was initiated as a public Twitter exchange resulted in a mobile application being available within a few days12, an example of a specific collaboration initiated via 140 character exchanges. Another example is a Twitter exchange that gained support for a new chemical identifier associated with the EPA CompTox Chemistry Dashboard added toWikidata. Also, an open research project on Ebola (SE) was initiated, which in the space of two years facilitated the identification of new antivirals, publications17 and an eventualNIH grant. Others have described how Twitter can be used by scientists to extend network networks and ultimately find jobs18 and, in our domain of chemistry, for sharing “Real-time Chemistry”.more expansive guidelines available on how to do this. Taking advantage of the communities of followers on Twitter and Google Plus is only possible, of course, once you have established a community. Building a community requires engaging in the platform by following other users who post interesting content, by engaging with the content, sharing other people’s content and posting your own. Developing your own following is an incremental process, which may take years and there areMedia sharing: Presentations, preprints and videos. Most scientists present their work at conferences, either as talks or posters. Without using online sharing tools, the only people who would see your presentations, which commonly take hours of time to put together, would be limited to the people at the meeting. However, online tools for sharing and distributing these same presentations can result in a much broader reach, and importantly, keep the work alive for a period much longer than the limited presentation time, and associated audience, at the conference. One commonly used presentation sharing platform isSlideShare (acquired by LinkedIn in 2012). An advantage of these websites is that they both belong to the same company (Microsoft). This allows a relatively simple process for associating a presentation with your profile with one click (“Add to Profile”) to make the presentation visible ; 2) a narrated version with voiceover to capture the presentation is made and published to YouTube; 3) the YouTube embed function is used to insert the video to the second slide on SlideShare; and, 4) a viewer will then have the choice to view the slide deck, download it for local storage, and if they want they can hear the author also present the slide deck with the voiceover.visible . SlideShVimeo orWeibo, may be an option. We think that scientists should not mix their scientific movies  with family movies!While we acknowledge that the most popular global video sharing platform is YouTube, there are geographical issues, not only based on language, in terms of all countries accepting the sharing platform. Streaming content in China via YouTube is an issue and other platforms, such asData sharing. There are myriad platforms available for data sharing, and it is difficult to be exhaustive in this short article as, depending on the particular domain of science, there will be biases. Climate science, versus chemistry, physics or medical sciences have their own favorite platforms. We have experience of theDryad Digital Repository,figshare andMendeley data for sharing most data types. Other sites can be used for specific types of data sharing. For example,PubChem for sharing BioAssay data. For the purposes of this article we focus only on the figshare site for data sharing, as we have the greatest experience in terms of using this platform, as well as the fact that it is nowintegrated with many publishers that we have published our articles with . Importantly, figshare offers the advantage of creating DOIs that give unique persistent identifiers that can then be resolved across platforms. Datasets published to figshare can be embargoed, cited in a manuscript, and made open at the time of publication. This provides important benefits as now specific datasets are fully citable (via DOI), the number of views and downloads are directly tracked, the altmetrics can be measured and, overall, there is significantly more insight into how data is used and accessed over simply putting a file as supplementary info with a publication. An example of a shared dataset, including views, downloads and an associated “Altmetric donut” is shown inAltmetric Attention Score and is designed to identify how much and what type of attention a research output has received. The colors of the donut represent thedifferent sources of attention and the details regarding how the score is calculated areavailable online.CC-BY Creative Commons license, and then use them in our publications. In this way, we are not transferring copyright of our figures to the journals and other people who wish to use our figures do not have to request permission as they are already in the public domain. figshare is also a platform where we share our presentations, posters and preprints  on figshare, we can then share details via Twitter and use the associated DOI to cite our datasets again on ResearchGate. figshare also allows us to share figures before they are used in manuscripts, define them with aCode sharing. It is advantageous to those that produce computer code, as a part of their scientific output, to be able to share it and allow others to consume it. Major code repositories, such asGitHub andSourceForge, offer many advantages for collaborative software development and versioning, so have great utility in their own right. They are integrated into online sharing platforms, thereby ensuring that code updates are transmitted across the community, keeping the audiences, who may require code access, informed of new depositions that they can consume. Most scientists may never use these repositories, but they are of central importance in the science ecosystem and other data sharing tools can learn from them. There are other reviews regarding the adoption of these platforms and readers are pointed tothese for more detail19. We, like many others, believe that code used in projects that is then used to deliver software underpinning, for example, data processing, analysis and reporting, should be citable and ultimately be a part of the altmetrics feeding a scientist’s acknowledgement for their contributions to science.h-index. There are evenprograms available so you can generate your own statistics.As scientists, one of our interests is to track our publication records, have access to our citation statistics, and, potentially measure the impact of our work. Impact can be estimated by a number of statistics, such as theet al and the release of the “altmetrics manifesto”, altmetric statistics have started to gain general acceptance within the community as measures of interest in a scientist’s work. This acceptance is likely to increase as their algorithm becomes more mature and produces increasingly relevant results. Altmetric statistics not only take account of standard publication metrics, such as citations, article views and downloads, may also track views and downloads for presentations and videos, and include measures of attention for discussion (via blogs) regarding publications online on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Altmetric statistics may also attempt to measure the impact of the reuse of data sets and code. This, to many, may seem incredibly complex and go far beyond just tracking “the paper” itself, but this is the world that is evolving. A number of tools attempting to integrate and track these altmetrics impact statistics have been established. These includeImpactStory,Altmetric andPlumX. This section discusses some of the sites we use for managing our publication records and tracking our classical citation statistics, as well as those that we use for measuring our impact in the realm of altmetrics.In recent years, catalyzed specifically by the work of PriemORCID,Google Scholar, andMicrosoft Academic Search. While other platforms, such as ResearchGate, do an excellent job of informing us via emails when there are new publications to associate with our profile, once we have confirmed the associated publication as appropriate, we use it more as a networking site and catch-all for the bulk of our research outputs (see earlier). These three sites are more focused on simply tracking publications and, in the case of ORCID, it expands to include presentations listed on figshare (via the DOI integration). Each of these websites is free to use for an individual scientist, while ORCID also offers access to an institutional package (vide infra) that allows organizations to mesh together contributions for their staff into an institutional representation of activity.For the purposes of “publication and citation tracking” we use:ORCID. An Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID iD) is a unique numeric identifier for a researcher that is free to claim and can be obtained simply by registering at thewebsite. Almost four million identifiers have been claimed (or issued) at the time of writing. The ORCID iD is a derivative of previous efforts byClarivate Analytics  to produce theResearcherID that has a distinct benefit of disambiguating authors and their association with publications, which is an issue for other sites (see later for a distinct example of this problem with Google Scholar). Once a scientist has claimed their unique identifier, they are responsible for defining the content associated with it, including whether they wish the content to be public or private. They can add a short biography and associate a number of their websites and public profiles with the ORCID site. Increasingly, these identifiers are expected or accepted bypublishers at the time of manuscript submission, andfunding agencies are also starting to use them. The website allows for an online resume to be assembled from publications by searching based on your name and editing the list as necessary. The data collected are then available via an application programming interface and, for example, can be used by publishers to use on their own platforms for enhancing the linkages between an authors’ publications. As a starting point, it is possible to upload a list of publications in a standard format, such asBibtex orEndNote. It is also possible for a scientist with a ResearcherID to connect and migrate the existing content to ORCID and expand from that point. The ORCID application programming interface and authorization module allows connectivity between web-applications. Since the ORCID iD itself has value independent of the capabilities of the website as a representation of a scientist’s publication record and resume, obtaining an ORCID iD is, in our estimation, one of the primary entry points into the scientific networking regime today and we encourage registration. Inclusion of the ORCID into PowerPoint templates for presentations shared online, and on other scientific networking and data sharing sites ensures that a simple web search in the future will aggregate the majority of your public works labeled with the identifier. We also add the ORCID iD either on the first or last slide of our slide decks with the intention that it is captured by the search engines, allowing a simple search to provide us a list of ORCID indexed works.Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search.Google Scholar (GS) is a free website for assembling what is effectively a list of your publications and their citations. GS also provides metrics, such as the h-index, that we have found to be generally much higher than in the Web of Science (WoS), which could be because it includes self-citations, whereas WoS does not. There have beencomments that GS is a better predictor of actual citation numbers than WoS. GS is useful for searching for publications and perhaps picking up citations that the commercial tools are missing. We have seen a worrying recent trend in terms of auto-associating publications, and recentlyAJW identified that 70 publications had been associated with his GS profile and had to be manually deleted. Profile maintenance is therefore necessary by the user, and there has to be careful curation and pruning on an ongoing basis.Microsoft Academic is much like GS, but we have found it to be less useful because it was unable to capture citations to our publications.“Alternative metrics”: Plum Analytics, Altmetric, ImpactStory. These tools aggregate the citations from blogs, tweets, Facebook, etc., and use their own algorithms to derive a score for each paper. Twitter is commonly a major contributor in terms of social media counts, and a weighted approach in terms of the importance of a social media event can be taken into account. For example, Altmetric give a news item a higher weighting than a tweet. Interestingly, ResearchGate also derivesa score for each author, though it remains a littleunclear how the score is calculated.Kudos. The emerging area of author support tools has very limited research findings available (e.g. data and code). However, Kudos has been recently highlighted as useful in this regard20. While there are plenty of websites for an author to post their papers and preprints, enriching these research outputs to add more information about what commentaries have been made about the work, linking to additional presentations, datasets, etc., is less supported in general. Kudos tracks citations (supported only by WoS statistics at present), altmetrics on publications (supported by Altmetric currently), and other statistics, like usage, where available . It also provides a dashboard of an author’s papers using a CrossRef DOI as the basis of the data feed and can be linked to your ORCID account  have an opportunity to directly make the association and comment as appropriate, regarding the value and nature of the related information. The enrichment capability offered by the Kudos platform delivers a valuable capability to the authors of the publication: the ability to keep the publication up to date by linking to related information, for example, blog posts regarding the work, media coverage, presentation slide decks from conferences, later publications by the authors themselves or derivative works by other scientists. One of the authors (AJW) coined the term “forward citation” to refer to this capability, as citations are retrospective in nature and point only to earlier work. Enrichment of an article can continue to keep the research reported in a publication updated with follow-on information as later works of various types are associated. An example of this from the author’s list of publications is associated with the synthesis of the chemical known as “Olympicene”, a small molecule synthesized during the time of the 2012 Olympic Games as a form of molecular commemoration. Theanalyzed user data and found that 51% of registered Kudos users were STEM researchers sharing their work, 29% were social sciences researchers and 8% were humanities researchers. This demonstrates the engagement of STEM researchers, and how they are leading the way in using innovative tools to disseminate their research. However, with seven to nine million active researchers a year3, Kudos only has around 1% penetration into the research community, so there is huge growth potential here for these types of services to help more of the scientific community.In June 2016, Kudos and the Altmetrics Research Team at the Centre for HEalthy and Sustainable CitieS (CHESS), and the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University Kudos;Altmetrics;ORCID). LinkedIn already allows aggregation of users into organizations so that they can stay informed, connected and follow and post updates (seehere andhere). Being aware of your institution’s research in terms of what is being disseminated, what the comments are out in the public domain via the social networks and media is certainly of interest to any organization. For example,Altmetrics data can help track the influence of an institutions work on public policy and helps provide insight into value of research outputs. Since these tools can give almost immediate details about the public engagement with work outputs as soon as it is published, this ensures that it is bring interpreted correctly and addresses any potential issues resulting from follow on reports. In terms of funding, many of these sites can be valuable in engaging new collaborators and sponsors, as well as providing information valuable in obtaining future support. Online activity benchmarking relative to other peer organizations can be important in terms of identifying contributions and productivity.This article has primarily focused on the benefits of these tools for the individual researcher in terms of sharing their research and work outputs in the forms of data, presentations, publications and other outputs. A number of the tools also offer capabilities to track “organizational impact” . This points to the somewhat temporary nature of internet exchanges and the challenge of maintaining and archiving these for future retrieval. Science is meant to be data-driven and objective, yet open to discussion and reinterpretation relative to multiple hypotheses. Historically this has been paced relative to the release of relevant publications to the public. Peer-review has been limited to a small audience prior to publication, commonly between three and five scientists, and then released to a larger community for consumption. Historically, responses to articles would be based on letters to the editor and would be slow to move into press, likely with exchanges behind the scenes between editors, authors and potential critics. Post-publication peer-review is now facilitated by publishers, allowing direct comments to be posted against articles, in general with moderation, butan average of 6000 per second as of this writing. Blog posts are loaded and commented on. Thenumber of English Wikipedia pages is approaching 5.5 million, with about 750 pages added every day, and multiple edits being made at any point in time. Can we depend on theInternet Archive Wayback Machine to capture all of this content? While the Wayback Machinedid capture the decayed page regarding the oxidation by sodium hydride , it is highly unlikely that capturing all internet knowledge is even feasible as the machine takes irregular snapshots. As with the information contained within books, as with knowledge itself, internet content can decay and morph yet society, science and humanity continues to move forward unabated. Not all contributions and engagements in the online networking world will make a difference and we can only hope that there is useful signal in the noise. Hundreds of millions of tweets are exchanged every day,WhatsApp, with a worldwide user base of 1.3 billion users, is not used by any of the authors yet! We are not alone in terms of ignorance of the app; however, it was also omitted from the recentTimes Higher Education listing of social media for academia. Perhaps this app represents an untapped tool for communication and networking in science. We imagine that the software tools used in five years by scientists are likely to be different, though some of the existing sites will persist, so there may be a hurdle to overcome before engaging with a new software application. Social media tools overall can be viewed as a conversation container that is most relevant when it is current and with value that degrades over time; i.e. a tweet from five years ago might not be as relevant as when it happened. This also raises the question of longevity, as these efforts would not be around as long as the papers, which could be useful for many years or decades.The public online networking, tracking and amplification tools described in this article that can be used for raising awareness of scientific outputs are just the tip of the iceberg. We acknowledge that our efforts invested in them would dissipate if the software tools cease or are overtaken with new offerings. For example,https://www.slideshare.net/AntonyWilliams/;https://www.slideshare.net/ekinssean/). Our involvement in sharing data, research activities, presentations and publications has developed over a period of almost a decade. AJW haspresented dozens of times at educational institutions and governmental organizations. SE most recently presented his experiences at theAAPS conference. LP has supported hundreds of scientists and authors in numerous disciplines over the years to help them publish, disseminate and increase the impact of their research. In addition, LP also advises publishers and libraries on how best to support their researchers. During these efforts, there are a couple of common observations. Adoption of online media tools appears to be generational with much faster uptake by early career scientists and later generation scientists generally avoid them.Some scientists see participation in the use of open data-sharing, posting their presentations and putting efforts into amplifying their research as not an appropriate or useful activity. Similarly, there appears to be true advocates of openness, especially with the increasing drive towards open access publishing, but we have certainly met scientists who take a very neutral or skeptical position on open science and sharing in general.Adopting a new application must either offer some specific advantages over existing apps or include ways to incorporate your information to avoid re-entering data. If you want to learn more about our personal use of online media for science communication and how it has evolved over the years, please review our supplemental materials  is valuable for sharing presentations and documents, figshare  for sharing citable data, Kudos for post-publication enhancement by associating with later or relevant works, and Twitter for bite-sized sharing into a large network of potential engagement. While a scientist may not see much traction with one tool, coordinating how to use more than one is the key, which should lead to seeing the benefits from engaging with this ‘new alchemy’. We think you will quickly discover what works best by measuring activities and what gives the most impact, as it may be different for each scientist.The approaches outlined here regarding sharing details about a scientific manuscript, or simply a research study and associated data, also offer a number of potential positive effects that can contribute to the quality of science. The historical approach of peer review was to, hopefully, both improve and ensure the quality of the science and the published output. Sharing research data, presentations, posters and preprints allows for early feedback on both the results and preliminary findings and thereby offers the opportunity to get feedback from peer groups and reviewers. This can certainly help contribute to the quality of science before the final published record in a journal is established.The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Mention of or referral to commercial products or services, and/or links to non-EPA sites does not imply official EPA endorsement. The expanding world of on-line dissemination and sharing and conversations surrounding scientific research can be daunting for many scientists. Williams, Peck, and Elkins are certainly qualified and experienced in this area. And, their article "The new alchemy" will certainly be useful to many as they try to figure out how best to navigate this online environment.  The greatest benefit to this article, is the clear description of what the different on-line platforms are meant to be and what they are best used for. Readers are sure to find the authors examples and guidance helpful. I am glad that they have written this manuscript and think that F1000 is an ideal place for publication.  There are two issues that I wish the authors had commented on a little more extensively.  The first is "impact." I appreciate that the article is meant to lay bare what tools are out there for scientists to use in sharing their research. I also appreciate that "impact" is a loaded term and is exceedingly difficult to gauge (and is often done poorly). But, it remains that it is what many scientists focus on. I have personally found that tools like Plum Analytics and ImpactStory and Altmetric are useful in helping me to compare my article-level metrics to those of my peers and to those of other articles published in the same journal. What these tools specifically try to measure is the effectiveness of how well you are able to share your content across these online tools that the authors describe. Ultimately, we scientists need a reason to share our work. For selfish reasons, I think that many scientists will find benefit to these "impact" tools.  The second theme that I would have liked the authors to frame slightly differently is "post-publication peer review." The scientists who engage with F1000 do not need to be told the benefits of post-publication peer review. However, it would have been gratifying for me to see the authors list sites that have post-publication review options as a way of sharing research rather than just in the sections on "potential downsides." Science is not static. That sentiment goes for published science as well. Scientists would be wise to welcome and actively engage with post-publication peer review. It is this active engagement that is key for making sharing worth-while. Sharing for the sake of sharing is only a half-step. If a scientist wants to have lasting effects, fully engaging in the process of sharing is absolutely required.  I applaud the authors for putting this article together. I know that there are many within the scientific community who can benefit from their commentary.I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. This is an interesting paper that is hard to classify, as it doesn't fit neatly into any one category of article. It is a mix of best practice recommendations for and a review of online networking, data sharing, and research activity distribution tools for scientists - a blend of fact and opinion, part editorial and part research paper. On the plus side, this is a very helpful overview and evaluation of many of the ever-increasing tools and services available to help scientists promote and share their research online, from a group of people who understand why and how to use them. Gathering all this information into a single paper is a real service to the community and should, I hope, prompt more scientists to follow the authors' advice, and : "encourage further exploration to find out what tools work best for you to meet your objectives, and even form the foundation to discover new or other tools not identified in this piece."LinkedIn has a primary role to form connections and expose your career to potential employers and partners, it is likely the de facto networking tool for many professional scientists." These and other unsupported statements are most likely correct, however, they would be more credible if supported by evidence in the form of published research, as is the case for much of the paper. However, the paper is weakened by the fact that there are a number of points when the authors express their own opinion without providing any evidence to back it up. For example, from the Introduction: "We believe there are a number of reasons that most scientists do not use these tools. It could be because few people would even think of using online media tools for their scientific research, or because they do not understand the potential value. The lack of credit for sharing pre-published data, code or other forms of research outputs, especially in terms of citations that can contribute to career progression, may also be an issue. Maybe scientists do not see this activity as a valuable use of their time or they require initial guidance to help navigate use of these tools.” Or, from Categories of Tools (Networking): "While  By the authors' own acknowledgement, the article is based largely on their own experiences. They are clearly expert and long-term users and consumers of the tools and services they describe, which makes the information they share very helpful, especially for those who are less expert. But their experience is also, inevitably, limited by their own geography (USA and UK) and specialisms (chemistry). So the challenges of sharing via social media in China, for example, only get a brief mention. And as they point out: "these are not necessarily the best tools available for every individual scientist’s use case... The most appropriate sites for physicists and biologists to share their data may well be very different." Overall, I found this a very thorough and helpful contribution to the literature on online tools and services for researchers. It would be even more valuable if could be updated regularly with information about new tools and services, taking into account the needs of a wider population of researchers by discipline and region.I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.


Behavioral Sciences administrative team, the inaugural Editor-in-Chief, and the fine groups of editors and reviewers have all made to provide access to high-quality scientific papers from around the globe. I felt that coming in as the second senior editor would mean filling big shoes, as is said; and it indeed has been a significant job getting up to speed. Nonetheless, I am proud of the work that we have done to continue to take Behavioral Sciences forward, and to help make it a more significant option for open access publication of research addressing the cognitive and behavioral sciences.It has been almost one year now since I agreed to become the Editor-in-Chief for this important open access journal, for which I have served as a member of the editorial board since its early inception. As a guest editor for two series with the journal, and a regular editor for multiple submissions, I have come to have great respect for the efforts MDPI and the As I think about goals for the near future, I find myself increasingly considering ways to enhance the focus and quality of the submissions received. A journal such as this, with a broad based interest in the intersection of cognitive science, behavioral medicine, social science, public health, and neuroscience, is one poised to enhance and extend ways of thinking about the individual and community simultaneously; to consider how to understand what fosters learning, memory, and problem solving, so that these capacities may be strengthened and more effectively utilized to address the needs and challenges of a diverse world. Utilizing new knowledge regarding capability and capacity across animal species, as a tool for better understanding human potential, is a secondary emphasis; one that extends our ability to think well about the interrelationships we hold with our environment, and our evolutionary history. Special Issues that seek to address complexities that arise in response to intersectional identities, and the impact that global interactions have on these challenges and opportunities, are particularly of interest. Thinking both interdisciplinarily and transdisciplinarily are equally needed as we continue to build our understanding of what it means to be evolving and growing in the 21st century.Behavioral Sciences is to become highly regarded as a home for scientific work of rigor and excellence. This journal most attracted me because it represented in its early development a setting for exploration of the multiple paths that lead to an understanding of behavior. It remains that, but can be so much more. Our task, those of us on the editorial team and those providing the scientific reports for publication, is mutual—to define more directly a focus on how behavior develops and is guided, across levels of organization and system. And to consider directly the socioeconomic, cultural, environmental, and epigenetic factors that transact and influence how we think, feel, and choose the paths that define us.Over the long term, I believe the main task for I look forward to your contributions to this adventure.


Physiological Reports has been one of the most rewarding activities I have undertaken in my professional life.To be a founding Editor‐in‐Chief of a journal is always going to be a ride into the unknown, but taking on this role for When I was appointed, the heavy lifting had already been done by the staff of the two societies that own the journal, The Physiological Society and the American Physiological Society, and our publisher Wiley, leaving me the pleasant task of appointing an editorial team and board, developing and directing editorial policy, and then in April 2013 hoisting a flag up and letting the physiological world know we were open for business.Physiological Reports and the team have achieved in the intervening years. We have published almost 1700 papers so far and attracted authors from 60 countries. We have been joined by the Scandinavian Physiological Society. We do not use perceived impact as a bar to acceptance and so have covered all areas of physiology. Take a look at the papers we have published, and I think like me you will have your belief in the value and the breadth of physiology reinforced. We are seen as the home for those wanting to publish their science in an open access journal, but importantly, a journal that adheres to rigorous ethical and peer view standards. And it is the peer review process that has perhaps surprised me the most during my time with Physiological Reports.I am immensely proud of what As authors we can all point to the deficiencies of the peer review system for our papers; from reviewers who do not recognize our genius and ground breaking work, to those who appear motivated out of less than the goodness of their hearts. As an editorial team we discussed having double blind peer reviewing  to having reviewers put their name on reviews, as well as having an open and highly iterative reviewing process. All these and other proposals have been discussed as a mechanism to help fix a broken system, and have vocal supporters.I have, to my surprise, been reaffirmed in the view that the classical peer review system, with anonymous reviewers, works remarkably well almost all of the time. One quickly learns that one scientist's, “minor revisions” can be another's, “major revisions”; some of us have our glass half full and others half empty. On occasions editors have to decide if a reviewer's recommendation to reject is due to a fatal design flaw, lack of rigor, confidence sapping carelessness and so forth, not seen by the other reviewer, or is because of umbrage taken, hackles raised, and a touch of dyspepsia. The judgments of Solomon have to be made by editors, and it can be a struggle, but unlike the baby in Solomon's choice, not a life or death decision. The overwhelming number of reviews have been constructively critical, fair, consistent, and delivered on time.Physiological Reports is to work with authors to get good science published; we are not looking for reasons to reject papers, due to concerns about printing costs, workload, and trendiness of the field or judgments around impact of the paper. Incidentally, very few of our authors take up the option of requesting their work is not sent to certain people. Could this be because we want our rivals to know what we are doing and experience what their thoughts are on it, and have faith in the peer review process?I enjoy reading authors' responses to reviewers' comments (sometimes for the wrong reasons!) and seeing how papers are improved via the peer review process. Most authors engage with the comments and appear to be happy with the judgments of their peers and the occasional “good catch,” which will have spared them future blushes. I appreciate that my opinions are on the rosy side, partly because the policy of Review Locator is a proprietary platform for text analysis and entity mapping that suggests potential reviewers for each paper. I like this because not only is it helpful, it is also free from biases, as it is gender and geography neutral. We are also using and evaluating Publons, one of several platforms designed to give credits to those who review.Getting reviewers for papers, especially those in small fields, can undoubtedly be a challenge, and even an Editor‐in‐Chief only has so many friends and favors she can draw on. Technology however has helped. The task of establishing a journal and its processes from the ground upwards was a learning curve for all of us on the team:, Tom Kleyman (Deputy Editor‐in‐Chief), and Associate Editors Julian Davis, Gareth Leng, Meena Rao, Robert Semple, Larissa Shimoda and Morten Thomson, and the 100 strong editorial board, without whose wisdom, hard work, and patience the journal would not have succeeded. From the societies I need to warmly thank all their publications staff, but especially their leaders, Rita Scheman and Simon Rallison. Wiley is fortunate to have excellent staff who have been with us all of the way, Jackie Jones, Jesse Olander, and Fiona Seymour, whose professionalism has been unwavering.Physiological Reports – I will have to learn a new routine but am certain the journal will go from strength to strength under its new editorial team. The journal is extremely fortunate to have recruited Tom Kleyman as its new EiC, and I know he will lead Physiological Reports to new heights. Submit your paper now!For almost five years I have started most days with a cup of coffee and logged in to


Journal of Circulating Biomarkers (JCB) regarding a more strategic approach to branding and attracting a high quality variety of articles. More emphasis is placed on fostering engagement with academic and industry sources operating at the cutting-edge of translational technologies applied to the field of circulating biomarkers  and with those in the investment arena seeking and providing private funding for this area of research.This editorial article summarizes the achievements and current challenges for the  We are proud to announce that during the past year we have experienced several ongoing developments, one of which has been the expansion of our editorial board with key opinion leaders in the circulating biomarker field including Yvon E. Cayre , Alain Charest , Yong Chen , Daniel Haber , Pavel Laktionov  and David T. Wong , all of whom contribute as part of our associate editor's team. Additionally, Aled Clayton , Aleksandra Fučić , Stefan Holdenrieder , Hongjun Kang , Ming-Lin Liu , Jan Lotvall , Jie Ma , Pierre-Yves Mantel , Dario Marchetti , P. Shannon Pendergras , Eva Rohde , An Song , Matthew J. Wood , Bruce R. Zetter  and Hanyu Zhu  serve as members of our editorial board.Myc and EGFR amplifications in circulating extracellular vesicles in mouse tumour models. We also published a paper on circulating free DNA and the influence thereof following lung parenchyma surgical manipulation.In 2014, we published high quality papers covering research topics in the area of cell-cell communication via exosomal heat-shock proteins, the function of erythrocyte-derived extracellular vesicles in malaria as it pertains to understanding their role in immune regulation and cell-cell communication, the development of stem cell-derived exosomes as a cell-free regenerative medicine, as well as the detection of human c-http://www.biopharmaresearchcouncil.org/), spearheaded by its Executive Director, Joanne Gere. The BioPharma Research Council has been developing a vibrant community for scientists as they navigate today's complex science environments. Our unique resources – including close relationships with leading companies and suppliers – and agile approaches have established recurrent opportunities for breakthrough discussion and debate throughout the drug discovery process and delivery pipeline. This partnership/collaboration resulted in the establishment of a short course titled, “Extracellular Vesicles: The Transition from Tissue to Liquid Biopsies”, which was conducted as a four-session webinar series in October and November 2014. The goal of the course was to provide, at an introductory level, an exchange between researchers from within academia and industry pertaining to the characterization of the applications of EVs in clinical and translational research, eventually to be implemented within clinical practice. We were able to utilize our editorial team to present topics that included: “Overview of Extracellular Vesicles” by Jan Lötvall, MD, PhD; “Clinical Diagnostic Applications of Extracellular Vesicles” by Johan Skog, PhD; “Commercialization Aspects of Extracellular Vesicles” by Alexander “Sasha” Vlassov, PhD; “Extracellular Vesicles: Therapeutic Hurdles” by Eva Rohde, MD; “Funding Opportunities for Extracellular Vesicle Research” by Angel Ayuso Sacido, PhD. A meeting dispatch was published online and is available on the JCB website . From this experience, we learned that coordinating the preparation process of such webinars required approximately six months. We plan to continue several webinar series on circulating tumour cells and cell-free circulating DNA later this year.In addition, we are pleased to have established a partnership/collaboration with the BioPharma Research Council .Finally, we launched a special issue titled, “The Biology and the Clinical Utility of Circulating Tumor Cells”, with a focus on detecting the latest findings in CTC research and clinical value. More details are located in the news section of the As we continue to strive to publish the best scientific research in all fields related to circulating biomarkers, the editorial team aims to focus on additional topics such as cell free DNA and disruptive technologies, among others.http://www.editorialmanager.com/exo/default.asp. In addition, we are expediting the acceptance to publishing time for our authors and will request informal opinions from our editorial board for borderline cases.JCB accepts original and review articles, as well as editorials, perspectives, short research reports, protocols and methods, notes to the editor, letters to the editor and meeting dispatch reports. We would also like to mention that InTech Publishing have decided that JCB will not apply any article processing charges for authors whose research papers have been accepted for publication in Volume 4/2015 of the journal. All manuscripts are peer-reviewed for scientific quality and the review process is conducted entirely online. The editorial manager facilitates the manuscript processing time, thereby reducing costs and providing a better experience to both our authors and reviewers. We have received numerous positive comments about this evolving electronic system and are indebted to InTech for managing this programme for us. For more information, please review our new manuscript submission system at JCB will continue to partner with scientific societies and academic and industry leaders in order to advance the field and to allow free access to knowledge in the area of circulating biomarkers.We gratefully acknowledge the editorial team and publishers for making the continued success of the journal possible.


The so-called impact factor (IF), introduced in an attempt to order scientific journals according to their influence in a particular field, is a dangerous instrument more related to competition among journals, which proudly wear their IF badges as a sign of status, than with scientific research . Moreove1–Although the reasons for this widely extended misuse of the IF are complex, the accountability of scientists themselves may be taken as a clear manifestation of the economic and sociopolitical theory known as the “tragedy of the commons,” in which the short-term self-interest of individuals prevails over the global profit of public good (“common”) . TherefoHowever, blaming scientists for adopting the IF as a criterion for submitting their work for publication is as easy as it is unfair. They cannot choose freely, since it is not only their own professional reputation that is at risk but frequently the very survival of their research groups. Today, the concession of research projects, grants, or fellowships is in the hands of panels, whose members are reduced in number and are not specialists in all of the fields under review. Although their final decision is supposedly based on rigorous reports issued by recognized experts, there is always a certain discretionary margin. The scientific community has universally accepted that the so-called “top journals” only publish the most relevant papers, which are at the frontier of new knowledge. Thus, the IF emerges as a “unifying parameter” that applies equally to all research groups, regardless of their line of work. As a consequence, two journals with the same IF but from different fields will have identical scientific value for the evaluators, who assume the degree of a journal’s relevance to be applicable to all published articles, with no exception, making it impossible to measure the true single value. Viewed through this prism, the IF might be considered an “objective leveling index,” although it would be dangerous to use any kind of statistical data out of context –3.–Quite apart from the above, we think it is important to analyze the responsibility of journals’ editors in the possible misuse of the IF. Indeed, and no doubt involuntarily, the editors themselves play a part in this obsession with the IF, leaving aside, of course, their unquestionable ethical behavior. During their tenure, they are the guardians of their journal’s prestige and it is only logical that they wish to publish the work of consolidated groups of renown. As a counterpart, they may be more demanding with groups of less acclaim in their field or those that propose novel hypotheses that are not immediately sustainable by hard experimental evidence.Therefore, editors have become rigorous filters of quality control. It is common to receive a responsive message stating that, while our work is excellent, its publication exceeds the capacity of the journal. Thus, the corresponding editor regrets that it cannot be considered for review because so many good papers are received in the editorial office and, unfortunately, they are forced to reject most of them. On other occasions, the trouble is that the manuscript is “beyond the scope” of the journal in question. Strictly speaking, this is not the editor’s fault because, after all, he or she is responsible for the yearly IF review. However, it is perhaps questionable to what extent the prestige and scientific weight of a group  should be determining factors in the initial acceptance of an article for review while papers of a similar level from less well-established groups are rejected.As a corollary, we are firmly convinced that editors should be prevented from submitting research articles to the journal that they serve. Beyond the fact that they act as filters of the articles’ scientific quality, editors must frequently resolve discrepancies between authors and reviewers and have the final decision on a paper’s acceptance. Therefore, submissions from their own research group will, almost inevitably, be judged with more permissive criteria. Because each area is served by a large number of journals, it would seem very easy to avoid such doubt: “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.”


PLOS Genetics is pleased to announce a new initiative to use PPS for identifying and soliciting manuscripts, as part of PLOS’ overall mission to improve the efficiency and accessibility of science communication . As part of that effort, we now have a dedicated team of editors who will focus on identifying manuscripts on PPS that are potentially suitable for publication in PLOS Genetics.What’s the first thing you do after making a cool new discovery? If you’re like us, you run up and down the hallway, propelled by excitement, eager to show your latest result to your colleagues. But the hallway is a pretty limited audience, so we soon turn to publishing our work in a peer-reviewed journal to show it to the whole world . That’s when the fun of discovery can come to a screeching halt and turn into dreary hours of formatting and online form submission only to wait weeks, if not months, for your manuscript to wend its way through the peer-review system. Preprint servers (PPS) can short-circuit those cheerless steps, at least for a time, and allow the fruits of your labor to be seen immediately by all who are interested. In addition to increasing the visibility of authors' work, PPS provide opportunities for journals to identify manuscripts that are good fit for their audience. In that vein, Wikipedia’s list of academic journals by preprint policy to check before submitting). In the interim, the research community can benefit from your findings, leave helpful comments, and make suggestions about how your study can be improved. There is growing recognition at PLOS Genetics (and in the scientific community more broadly) that PPS like arχiv (https://arxiv.org/) and bioRχiv (http://biorxiv.org/) play an increasingly important role in the scientific publishing ecology. Concomitant with the rise in popularity of PPS, a marketplace of preprints is now emerging. Publishers can now seek out and identify high-quality manuscripts deposited in PPS and compete to invite the authors to submit their work to a particular journal. We at PLOS Genetics believe this competitive intellectual marketplace will benefit working scientists in many ways. Most importantly, having journals recruit manuscripts will reduce the time spent getting your paper into review at a suitable journal, ultimately shortening the time it takes for your work to reach your target readership and thereby extending its window of influence. We also believe that preprints will continue to increase in value as professional currency for hiring committees, grant panels, and tenure and promotion committees. This trend can already be seen with the recent National Institutes of Health biosketch format rules (NOT-OD-16-086), which now allow preprints to be listed. We hope that our new initiative to solicit manuscripts from PPS will offer a clear incentive for more authors to embrace the use of preprints in biology.PPS are online databases that store and distribute scholarly works prior to publication. Once you’ve written your manuscript as you normally would, you can upload it to a PPS and submit it whenever and wherever you like for peer-review and publication  makes initial submission to PLOS Genetics  as easy as a single click. As this is a new initiative, we expect the process for soliciting manuscripts from PPS to evolve over time, and we welcome feedback about how to make this system work best for the PLOS Genetics community.Our Preprint Editors will use a combination of their own judgment, a reading of the comments posted to the preprint server, and some automated tools to identify candidate manuscripts. They will then initiate a rapid consultation with editors on our board who have relevant specific expertise to determine if the manuscript has the qualities that would make it successful at our journal—it reports a significant advance in its field, would be of interest to the broad genetics community, and is technically excellent. After identifying exciting candidate manuscripts, the Preprint Editors will contact the authors and invite them to submit their work to PLOS Genetics are excited to grow with the needs of the scientific community, and we hope you’ll be as excited as authors to join us. We look forward to seeing your manuscripts on PPS so PLOS Genetics can have the chance to compete for your best work.We acknowledge that PPS will not be right for every manuscript or every author, so we want to reassure readers and authors that nothing at the journal is going away. We’ll still be doing business as usual, but now we’ll now be doing it with an extra option that has an eye towards the future. We at


This article provides a quantitative analysis of peer review as an emerging field of research by revealing patterns and connections between authors, fields and journals from 1950 to 2016. By collecting all available sources from Web of Science, we built a dataset that included approximately 23,000 indexed records and reconstructed collaboration and citation networks over time. This allowed us to trace the emergence and evolution of this field of research by identifying relevant authors, publications and journals and revealing important development stages. Results showed that while the term “peer review” itself was relatively unknown before 1970 (“referee” was more frequently used), publications on peer review significantly grew especially after 1990. We found that the field was marked by three development stages: (1) before 1982, in which most influential studies were made by social scientists; (2) from 1983 to 2002, in which research was dominated by biomedical journals, and (3) from 2003 to 2016, in which specialised journals on science studies, such as Scientometrics, gained momentum frequently publishing research on peer review and so becoming the most influential outlets. The evolution of citation networks revealed a body of 47 publications that form the main path of the field, i.e., cited sources in all the most influential publications. They could be viewed as the main corpus of knowledge for any newcomer in the field. Peer review is key to ensure rigour and quality of scholarly publications, establish standards that differentiate scientific discoveries from other forms of knowledge and maintain credibility of research inside and outside the scientific community Bornmann . AlthougWoS2Pajek  by searching for all records including “peer review” among their keywords. By using the program Batagelj , we tranOur effort has a twofold purpose. First, it aims to reconstruct the field by quantitatively tracking the formation and evolution of the community of experts who studied peer review. Secondly, it aims to reveal the most important contributions and their connections in terms of citations and knowledge flow, so as to provide important resources for all newcomers in the field. By recognizing the characteristics and boundaries of the field, we aim to inspire further research on this important institution, which is always under the spotlight and under attempts of reforms, often without relying on robust evidence .These data were stored in a partition DC: w had a WoS description; and year contained the work’s publication year from the field PY or CR. We also obtained a vector NP: w. We built a CSV file titles with basic data about works with Using Batagelj , we tranThe dataset was updated in March 2016 by adding hits for the years 2015 and 2016. We manually prepared short descriptions of the most cited works  and assigned them the value A first preliminary analysis performed in 2015 revealed that many works without a WoS description had large indegrees in the citation network. We manually searched for each of them  and, when possible, we added them into the data set. It is important to note that earlier papers, which had a significant influence in the literature, did not often use the now established terminology  and were therefore overlooked by our queries.WoS2Pajek produced networks with sets of the following sizes: works After some iterations, we finally constructed the data set used in this paper. The final run of the program We removed multiple links and loops (resulting from homonyms) from the networks. The cleaned citation network Figure To acyclic network’s nodes, we can assign levels such that for each arc, the level of its initial node is higher than the level of its terminal node. In an acyclic citation network, an example of a level is the publication date of a work. Therefore, acyclic networks can be visualized by levels—vertical axis representing the level with all arcs pointing in the same direction—in Fig. In the following section, we look at some statistical properties of obtained networks.q—the number of papers on peer review divided by the total number of papers from WoS  Glaser, BG, Strauss, AI: The Discovery of Grounded Theory, 1967; (67) Merton, RK: The Sociology of Science, 1973; (97) Lock, S: A Difficult Balance, 1985; (72) Hedges, LV, Olkin, I: Statistical methods for meta-analysis, 1985; (173) Cohen, J: Statistical power analysis, 1988; (87) Chubin, D, Hackett, EJ: Peerless Science, 1990; (60) Boyer, EL: Scholarship reconsidered, 1990; (51) Daniel, H-D: Guardians of science, 1993; (55) Miles, MB, Huberman, AM: Qualitative data analysis, 1994; (64) Gold, MR, et al.: Cost-effectiveness in health and medicine, 1996; (53) Lipsey, MW, Wilson, DB: Practical meta-analysis, 2001; (58) Weller, AC: Editorial peer review, 2001; (69) Higgins, JPT, Green, S: Systematic reviews of interventions, 2008; (130) Higgins, JPT, Green, S: Systematic reviews of interventions, 2011.Table We also found that works having the largest outdegree (the most citing works) were usually overview papers. These papers have been mostly published recently (in the last ten years). Among the first 50 works that cited works on peer review most frequently, only two were published before 2000—one in 1998 and another one in 1990. However, none of them were on peer review and so we did not report them here.boundary problem  was available only for works with a WoS full description. In these cases, we limited our analysis to the set of works with a descriptiontemporal networktimetime pointsT(v) and link activity sets T(l) are usually described as a sequence of time intervals. If a link l is active in a time point t then also its endnodes u and v should be active in the time point t. The time It is important to note that we obtain a time slice or footprint of t. Let We denote a network consisting of links and nodes active in time, Here, we presented a simple analysis of changes of sets of main authors, main journals and main keywords through time Tables , 3, 4, 5Because of an increasing growth of interest  and Johnson_D . In 2006–2015, we found an increasing presence of Chinese (and Korean) authors: Lee_J, Zhang_L, Lee_S, Wang_J, Wang_Y, and Wang_H. Because of the “three Zhang, four Li” effect  all these names represent groups of authors. For example: Lee_J  and Zhang_L .Nature, Science, Scientist, but also specialized journals on science studies such as Scientometrics. The third one on the list is a rather new (from 2006) open access scientific journal, that is, PLoS ONE.More interestingly, our analysis showed that researchers in medicine were more active in studying peer review, though this can be simply due to the larger size of this community. Out of 47 top journals publishing papers on peer review, 23 journals were listed in medicine (see Table Phys Today (–2000), Lancet (–2005), Science, Nature (–2010), and Brit Med J (–2015). In the period (1971–1980) two medical journals New Eng J Med (1971–2000) and JAMA (1971–2015) joined the leading group. JAMA was in the period (1981–2005) the main journal. In this period, most of the leading outlets were medicine journals. In the period (1981–1990), Scientometrics (1981–2015) and Scientist (1981–2010) significantly contributed. In the period (2006–2010), Scientometrics was the main journal and PLoS ONE entered the picture of the leading group, joined in the period (2011–2015) by BMJ Open. Together with Scientometrics, these two journals were the most prolific in publishing research on peer review, whereas in the period (2011–2015), Science, Nature, JAMA, BMJ and Learn Pub disappeared from the top.Table We also analyzed the main keywords (keywords in the papers and words in the titles). While obviously ’review’ and ’peer’ were top keywords, other more familiar in medicine appeared frequently, such as medical, health, medicine, care, patient, therapy, clinical, disease, cancer and surgery as did trial, research, quality, systematic, journal, study and analysis. More importantly, it is interesting to note that ’refereeing’ initially prevailed over ’peer review’, which became more popular later see Fig. .preprint transformation. The preprint transformation replaces each work u from a strong component by a pair: published work u and its preprint version A citation network is usually  acyclic. In the case of small strong components (cyclic parts) it can be transformed into a corresponding acyclic network using the We first restricted the original citation network s and a common sink node t  method  in an acyclic network based on their position. It calculates counters n that count the number of different paths from some initial node (or the source s) to some terminal node (or the sink t) through the arc . It can be proved that all sums of SPC counters over a minimal arc cut-set give the same value F—the flow through the network. Dividing SPC counters by F, we obtain normalized SPC weightss-t path passes through the arc  (see Batagelj (Pajek).The Batagelj  and BataIn the network weights “” sectionweights “” sectionmain path method. The main path starts in a link with the largest SPC weight and expands in both directions following the adjacent new link with the largest SPC weight. The CPM path is determined using the Critical Path Method from Operations Research .In order to determine the important subnetworks based on SPC weights, Hummon and Doreian  proposedPajek:seed arcs and expands them in both directions as in the main path procedure.A problem with both main path methods is that they are unable to detect parallel developments and branchings. In July 2015 a new option was added to the program Both main path and CPM procedure gave the same main path network presented in Fig. Before 1982: this includes works published mostly in social science and philosophy journals and social science books;From 1983 to 2002: this includes works published almost exclusively in biomedical journals;From 2003: this includes works published in specialized science studies journals.Our analysis found 48 works on the main path. After looking at all these works in detail, we classified them into three groups determined by their time periods:American Journal of Sociology, American Sociologist, American Psychologist and Sociology of Education, and three foundational books. The most influential authors were: Meltzer (1949), Dennis (1954), Merton (1957), Polany (1958), Crane , Bayer and Folger (1966), Storer (1966), Cartter (1966), Cole and Cole (1967), Zuckerman and Merton (1971), Ingelfinger (1974), Cicchetti (1980), and Peters and Ceci (1982). The most popular topics were: scientific productivity, bibliographies, knowledge, citation measures as measures of scientific accomplishment, scientific output and recognition, evaluation in science, referee system, journal evaluation, peer-evaluation system, review process, peer review practices.This period includes important social science journals, such as JAMA. It is worth noting that JAMA published many papers which were presented at the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication since 1986. Among the more influential authors were: Rennie , Smith , and Jefferson with his collaborators Demicheli, Drummond, Smith, Yee, Pratt, Gale, Alderson, Wager and Davidoff . The most popular topics were: the effects of blinding on review quality, research into peer review, guidelines for peer reviewing, monitoring the peer review performance, open peer review, bias in peer review system, measuring the quality of editorial peer review, development of meta-analysis and systematic reviews approaches.This period includes biomedical journals, mainly Scientometrics, Research Evaluation, Journal of Informetrics and JASIST. The most influential authors were: Bornmann and Daniel  and Garcia, Rodriguez-Sanchez and Fdez-Valdivia . Others popular publications were Lee et al. (2013) and Moustafa (2015). Research interest went to peer review of grant proposals, bias, referee selection and editor-referee/author links.Here, the situation changed again. Some specialized journals on science studies gained momentum, such as Cuts and islands are two approaches to identify important groups in a network. The importance is expressed by a selected property of nodes or links.islands—maximal connected subnetwork such that values of selected property inside island are larger than values on the island’s neighbors and the size (number of island’s nodes) is within a given range  , we found 26 link islands see Fig. . Many ofFor the sake of readability, we extracted from Island 1 a sub-island of size in range , which is shown in Fig. This article provided a quantitative analysis of peer review as an emerging field of research by revealing patterns and connections between authors, fields and journals from 1950 to 2016. By collecting all available sources from WoS, we were capable of tracing the emergence and evolution of this field of research by identifying relevant authors, publications and journals, and revealing important development stages. By constructing several one-mode networks  and two-mode networks, we found connections and collective patterns.However, our work has certain limitations. First, given that data were extracted from WoS, works from disciplines and journals less covered by this tool could have been under-represented. This especially holds for humanities and social sciences, which are less comprehensively covered by WoS and more represented in Scopus and even more in GoogleScholar  in cleaning the dataset manually would help filtering out irrelevant records. However, by using the main path and island methods, we successfully identified the most important and relevant publications on peer review without incurring in excessive cost of data cleaning or biasing our findings significantly.WoS2Pajek additional options to create short author names that will allow manual correction of names of critical authors.Secondly, another limitation of our work is that we did not treat author name disambiguation, as evident in Table JAMA; and after 2003, with works published more preferably in science studies journals .With all these caveats, our study allowed us to circumscribe the field, capture its emergence and evolution and identify the most influential publications. Our main path procedures and islands method used SPC weights on citation arcs. It is important to note that the 47 publications from the main path were found in all other obtained lists of the most influential publications. They could be considered as the main corpus of knowledge for any newcomer in the field. More importantly, at least to have a dynamic picture of the field, we found these publications to be segmented in three phases defined by specific three time periods: before 1982, with works mostly published in social sciences journals ; from 1983 to 2002, with works published almost exclusively in biomedical journals, mainly This typology indicates the emergence and evolution of peer review as a research field. Initiatives to promote data sharing on peer review in scholarly journals and funding agencies , publications on peer review significantly grew especially after 1990.


Egyptian Journal of Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery (EJNPN), the official publication of the Egyptian Society of Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery (ESNPN), a peer-reviewed, open access journal publishing articles in the field of clinical neurosciences, including neurology, psychiatry and neurosurgery. The journal presents cutting edge research on clinical, technical, ethical and social aspects of clinical neurosciences.We are honored to announce the new launch of the First, we must acknowledge our colleagues who are joining us in the editorial office currently in Cairo, Egypt. They represent the true motivators and dynamos for the journal. Leading the scientific publication in the neurosciences field in Egypt, the Middle East and North Africa; the EJNPN was first published in 1960. Throughout the years, the journal has been indexed by several indexing services, including EMBASE and Scimago journal ranking. At the meantime, we are working closely with other relevant indexing services including PubMed Central and Web of Science to ensure that articles published in the EJNPN will be available in their databases when appropriate.Taking the next step towards better indexing, ranking, reader’s exposure and targeting more authors from around the world, the journal moved to Springer Open – Springer Nature, through an agreement with the Egyptian Knowledge Bank as an open access and free-of-charge journal. Open access allows the journal to reach a larger set of authors and readers Suber  with higAuthors hold copyright for their work and grant anyone the right to reproduce and disseminate the article, provided that it is correctly cited. This complies with the policies of several funding bodies including the Wellcome Trust, NIH and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janka5 .The EJNPN operates a double-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers do not know the names or affiliations of the authors and the reviewer reports provided to the authors are anonymous. Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two to three experts who will be asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is scientifically and ethically sound and coherent, whether it duplicates already published work, and whether or not the manuscript is sufficiently clear for publication. Reviewers will also be asked to indicate how interesting and significant the research is. The Editors will reach a decision based on these reports, and where necessary, they will consult with members of the Editorial Board Janka9 . ArticleWe welcome your research and scientific work to be submitted to the EJNPN Janka10 . We promM. Ossama Abdulghani—The Editor-in-Chief, EJNPN.Ahmed M. Abdelalim and Khaled O. Abdulghani—The Associate Editors, EJNPN.


This is the second issue from the editorial offices in snow‐deprived Minnesota. A variety of papers are presented for your edification, thanks to the patient authors and associate editors who I prod to move things along. The backlog has been reduced, and even though I am disappointed about a few papers that are taking way too long to review, I am delighted by the selection and rejection rate. John Horton will be rotating off the Editorial Board, as he is Chair of ACMP and that is a big job. I have yet to identify the proper individual (brachytherapy expertise) who will join us. Getting people to serve as AE's as well as reviewers is getting harder as each of us are becoming more accountable for our “day job” productivity. I will thank John for a yeoman job and being such a gracious person.Reviews of emerging technologyClinical problems solutionsEquipment evaluation and review articlesNew clinical techniquesTechnology integrationTask Group recommendation implementationQuality assuranceContinuous Quality ImprovementHealth Physics and radiation protectionChanging regulatory standardsResource planningProject analysisAdministrative issuesBusiness managementPractice accreditationMedical‐legal issuesAt RSNA I was asked by one of the brightest members of AAPM what makes JACMP different from Medical Physics. This is an important issue, as the manuscript management and online availability differences have essentially been erased. The free availability worldwide is one remaining distinction and that could be removed if Medical Physics would allow unfettered web‐based access to all its manuscripts after one year. A number of journals do this, as the income has already been earned and it gives the authors further exposure. So what remains is content. But one of my friends who has a “bear trap” mind asked, “The papers in JACMP look like those in Medical Physics?” Being the new person in the “hot seat” I decided to find the original “vision” for JACMP. Managing Editor Richard Stark provided the following “Examples of Topics Covered”:So has JACMP published articles in much of these areas? The answer is some, but honestly not most. The reasons are numerous. Perhaps the “vision” is unrealistic (some topics are better as newsletter fodder). Then, again, the voluntary or solicited submissions in these areas has not been forthcoming because the vision has not been publicized, there is really nothing to say, or no one wants to waste time on these areas as they are not “academic.” As captain of the JACMP ship, I will re‐steer the rudder. The types of papers we seek will be clearly delineated, and an attempt will be made to meet this vision both in voluntary and solicited submissions. In my opinion, the continuation of JACMP depends on publishing papers that tell us how to practice Clinical Medical Physics , as opposed to the scientific underpinnings of the field .Other news… My request for immediate publication online at acceptance (rather than accumulation to a certain deadline) was turned down by the ACMP Board. This will be revisited in a few months. We are about ready to migrate to a new electronic manuscript handling system, which has been beta tested by Medical Physics and is now their only means of submission. The current system has some interesting quirks and Manuscript manager Sarah and I are looking to take the new system for a “spin.” Also being considered is the simplification of the journal name to Clinical Medical Physics (if available). There may be some additional reasons this is attractive, and I hope to be able to fill you in on this and related developments next time.ecmc@mayo.edu) with any suggestions for how the Journal can better serve your needs both as a reader or, better still, as an author!!I really look forward to visiting you each time in this “Editorial.” It is an opportunity for me to update you, thank you for support, and ask you for ideas. Please feel free to e‐mail me (Edwin C. McCulloughEditor‐in‐Chief