Preventing Chronic Disease (PCD) as we embarked on a journey to advance the journal’s mission and vision and achieve priorities. I was appointed editor in chief of PCD in October 2016, and this column marks my one-year anniversary. My first column, in February, established that I would publish 3 columns this year to announce actions and appointments, discuss timely public health topics, and update readers on the journal’s priorities. I also identified 10 priorities for the journal in 2017: It was a remarkable year for Adopting a multilayered approach to peer reviewSecuring additional associate editorsPromoting global public health perspectivesEnsuring scientific integrityPublishing collections of articlesAccelerating the dissemination of critical researchIntroducing a new article type to focus on implementation evaluationMaintaining the Student Research Paper ContestDeveloping tools and resources for novice authorsEnhancing our brand as an innovator in scholarly publishingPCD readers with updates on each of these priorities, toward which considerable progress has been made.In this final Editor in Chief’s Column for 2017, it is important to me to provide PCD carefully examined its peer-review process, and thanks to an expanded team of associate editors, we added an additional quality control stage to the process. Each manuscript is first screened to ensure it aligns with the journal’s mission and publication standards. A manuscript that meets these initial submission requirements is assigned by me to one of our associate editors, who determines whether the manuscript should undergo peer review. The associate editor then makes a recommendation on the manuscript on the basis of his or her assessment of the peer reviews, and as editor in chief I make the final decision. In addition to adding a new layer to our peer-review process, we began using a rating system to evaluate the quality of reviews, so associate editors can select the best reviewers and ensure that manuscripts are assessed by highly qualified, independent, and experienced peer reviewers. This multilayered peer-review process established important quality control checkpoints, positioned authors to receive valuable feedback on the scientific and programmatic content of their manuscripts, and improved the quality of manuscripts accepted for publication. In addition, these enhancements influenced the journal’s acceptance rate, which decreased from 32.5% from January through August 2016 to 26.9% for the same period in 2017.PCD assembled an impressive group of researchers and practitioners capable of recommending manuscripts for publication on the basis of merit, appropriateness, and the highest ethical standards in scholarly publishing. In October 2016, PCD had 3 associate editors. Since then, PCD has appointed 16 new associate editors with experience in population health, health systems, implementation evaluation, geographic information systems, health economics, behavioral health, and applied epidemiology. To ensure the stability of the journal’s institutional knowledge while still allowing room to recruit new expertise to meet future research and programmatic priorities, we established appointment terms of 2 years, 3 years, and 4 years. All associate editors undergo training on the journal’s mission, direction, and publication standards for all article types; on the logistics of the journal’s manuscript system; and on how to provide meaningful feedback to authors. The increase in the number of associate editors in critical research areas has assisted the journal in providing relevant and useful feedback to authors, reducing manuscript review time, and improving the quality of manuscripts submitted and accepted for publication. To learn more about the background and experience of our associate editors, please see www.cdc.gov/pcd/about_the_journal/associate_editors.htm.PCD recognizes that understanding the conditions that shape health in various settings and geographical locations is critical to advancing public health and medicine. PCD established a priority to serve as a resource to researchers and practitioners internationally, recognizing that factors influencing health in the United States are similar to those in other countries. We have worked closely with our editorial board to identify strategies to increase submissions from experts who are conducting population health interventions that address diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular health, and other public health topics in other countries. From January through August 2017, the journal received 89 submissions from countries outside of the United States — including Australia, Canada, Germany, Guatemala, Israel, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, and Taiwan — an increase of 20 manuscripts from this same period in 2016. Ten of these manuscripts, mostly original research articles, were accepted for publication. Readers can anticipate articles describing international efforts to prevent and control diabetes, education of children about stroke prevention, use of geographic information systems technology to monitor multiple chronic conditions, and how public health surveillance systems are being used to monitor and track health conditions.PCD recognizes that several factors can contribute to situations of scientific misconduct — lack of confidence, pressure to publish in established journals, competition within disciplines and professions, desire for prestige and recognition, lack of consequences established by the journal, and poor research and writing skills. PCD takes the matter of ensuring scientific integrity seriously, and we took steps to provide our editorial board, associate editors, peer reviewers, and authors with guidance on the journal’s expectations for preparing and disseminating findings to the public health community. We have sought to educate them about the need to ensure scientific integrity at all levels: analyzing and reporting results, determining authorship, acknowledging and obtaining approval to use copyrighted material, recognizing how previous research helped to advance reported findings, and disclosing conflicts of interests. Information on PCD’s policy on scientific integrity was refined and can be reviewed on our Editorial Policy page: www.cdc.gov/pcd/about_the_journal/editorial_policy.htm.PCD is often approached by authors and organizations interested in publishing multiple articles that address a common theme. In November 2016, we released new guidance on submitting proposals for collections. Articles published in PCD collections undergo the same rigorous peer-review process as regular submissions to ensure that their scientific and programmatic content meets the highest standards of scholarly research. During the past year, we worked closely with authors of articles in 2 collections.The first collection, “State and Local Public Health Actions to Prevent and Control Chronic Disease,” recognizes that chronic diseases often occur simultaneously and result from interrelated risk factors. This collection showcases how 4 programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — diabetes; heart disease and stroke prevention; nutrition, physical activity, and obesity; and school health — can work together to address state and local efforts to improve health outcomes. Articles in this collection describe the use of 3 primary strategies: 1) improving environments and settings to promote positive health behaviors; 2) improving the delivery and use of quality clinical services and other health services to prevent and manage high blood pressure and diabetes; and 3) increasing links between communities and clinical organizations to support prevention of diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity.Childhood obesity is a global public health problem. Obese children are at high risk for becoming obese adolescents, placing them at risk for developing chronic diseases later in life. In addition, obese children are more prone to have emotional and psychological challenges than are children who are not obese. The second collection, “The Childhood Obesity Research Demonstration (CORD) Project: Real-World Implementation of Multisetting Interventions to Address Childhood Obesity,” focuses on real-world implementation of evidence-based interventions in multiple settings — schools, early child care and education centers, health care facilities, and the community — with the goal of improving healthy eating and physical activity among low-income children.PCD encourages authors and organizations interested in reviewing previously published collections and finding guidance on submitting a proposal to visit the Collections section of our website: www.cdc.gov/pcd/collections/index.htm.Articles in these 2 collections describe original research not previously published in indexed scientific literature. Throughout this year, we identified several ways to accelerate the dissemination of critical research: streamlining author submission requirements; identifying and securing reviewers with a track record of high-quality and timely peer reviews; and emphasizing promotion of the Research Brief. A Research Brief is essentially a shortened version of an Original Research article. It offers authors an opportunity to have their work reviewed more quickly and published in a shorter turnaround time. From January through August 2017, the journal received 65 Research Brief submissions, and 19 of these manuscripts were accepted for publication. The accepted Research Briefs cover diverse topics, such as the role of age and acculturation in diabetes management, aspirin use for the primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease, prevalence and correlates of sleep apnea among US veterans, and concordance of blood-pressure–control estimates using thresholds derived from treatment guidelines. We will continue to identify ways to publish rigorous research and evaluation findings — by using quality controls, modifying the formats of article types, enlarging the pool of experienced and reliable reviewers, and maintaining a robust management system — to quickly move manuscripts through all stages of review, production, and publication.PCD developed a new article type, Implementation Evaluation, which provides readers with information on how public health programs and interventions are developed and evaluated on the basis of diverse factors  in real-world settings. Implementation Evaluation articles offer an opportunity for authors to present results from tailored, setting-specific evaluation methods and approaches. As such, Implementation Evaluation articles are positioned to discuss how evidence-based programs and interventions can be adapted in other settings. Since its launch in March 2017, PCD has received 10 submissions that examine effective ways to integrate population-based interventions, practices, and evaluation methods into routine clinical, public health, health care, school, worksite, and community settings.In March 2017, PCD is committed to providing opportunities for young researchers to contribute to public health and develop critical writing and reviewing skills. We are pleased to showcase in this week’s release the winners of the 2017 Student Research Paper Contest. This year, instead of having one winner, we introduced 4 categories of winners: high school, undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral. We have 5 winners this year, rather than 4, because the caliber of submissions in the doctoral student category was so high that our panel decided on 2 winners. Special thanks go to our editorial board for their assistance in serving on the reviewing panels to identify this year’s winners.PCD received a record 72 contest entries this year, compared with 37 in 2015 and 59 in 2014. We were thrilled to see this number of high-quality entries. We recognize that these entries would not have been possible without the support of faculty mentors working closely with students to develop their research competencies and scientific writing skills. Although we could not name every entry as a winner, we thought several nonwinning submissions were of sufficient merit to warrant peer review. PCD has accepted and will publish a total 19 manuscripts, all of which will be available soon on PCD’s Collections page. For more information on this year’s contest and access to the 5 winning student research articles, please see this week’s Table of Contents: www.cdc.gov/pcd/index.htm. For information on our 2018 Student Research Paper Contest rules and expectations, please visit our Announcements page: PCD/announcements.htmwww.cdc.gov/. Student entries must be received electronically no later than 5:00 PM EST on Friday, February 23, 2018.It is important to note that student researchers, regardless of category, had to meet our standard to serve as first authors — that is, the person who conducted or led the research described in the manuscript and prepared the first draft. PCD is committed to assisting authors with tools and resources for strengthening skills and building confidence in scientific writing. This year our editorial staff reviewed and revised the journal’s instructions for authors, and the updated content is provided in our new “Author’s Corner”: PCD/for_authors/index.htmwww.cdc.gov/. In addition, editorial staff members updated information on PCD’s Types of Articles page and provided detailed information for authors on the requirements for each: PCD/for_authors/types_of_articles.htmwww.cdc.gov/.PCD finalized a new section on the following topics: 1) Top 5 Reasons Manuscripts Are Rejected; 2) Top 5 Mistakes in Tables; 3) Top 5 Mistakes in Reporting Statistics; and 4) Top 5 Mistakes in Figures. This new section was developed on the basis of PCD’s years of experience in working with authors to improve manuscripts as well as guidelines published in the AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors — 10th Edition and other resources describing how to present statistical information to medical and public health audiences. The section was designed to help authors to position their manuscripts for acceptance. Authors can access this guidance by visiting the Author’s Corner: www.cdc.gov/pcd/for_authors/index.htm.PCD is committed to enhancing the journal’s brand as an innovator in scholarly publishing. During the past 4 months, PCD implemented a Simplified Submission pilot program to reduce the amount of time authors spend in the process of submitting manuscripts. The pilot program has been a tremendous success; instances of manuscripts being returned to authors for formatting corrections have dropped from 45 to 4 since the program began, and manuscript check-in time has decreased from 1.12 days to 0.68 days.PCD has introduced another pilot program to offer opportunities for PCD’s top peer reviewers to receive continuing education (CE) credits. The pilot is only one of the avenues PCD is exploring to recognize excellence among our peer reviewers in providing thoughtful, comprehensive, and timely reviews. PCD is now looking into recognizing reviewers for their excellence through their ORCID ID or Publons profile — interactive mechanisms that link people with their professional activities. As editor in chief I have made my own commitment this year to recognize these important contributions, and I have emailed many of our top reviewers to express my appreciation for the quality of their reviews and emphasize how critical these reviews are to the journal’s success.PCD has increased efforts to promote articles to the news media by distributing media summaries through the CDC Newsroom (www.cdc.gov/media/PCD/index.html), increasing social media outreach, and releasing podcasts. PCD rebranded its podcasts as “PCD Sound Bites” and developed and introduced a new logo. To track the success of these outreach efforts, PCD is working to identify additional metrics to monitor the uptake, citation, impact, and visibility of PCD articles.PCD’s biggest achievement in working to improve its brand is conducting the journal’s first-ever external review. PCD invited a distinguished panel of health and medical professionals to assess the journal’s progress and to identify ways to strengthen PCD’s ability to disseminate cutting-edge programmatic, research, and evaluation findings. Although PCD has always been considered a valuable resource to a broad audience of readers, we are ready to take the journal to the next level. In June 2016, we invited 7 experts in public health, scientific writing, and scholarly publishing to examine the journal’s strengths and areas of growth and answer a series of fundamental questions about the journal’s focus and direction. The panel provided their expert opinions on PCD’s mission, scientific quality, scope, audience, editorial standards and protocols, metrics and analytics, distribution platforms to communicate with readers, and future priorities. PCD is reviewing feedback from the external review panel’s report, and during the next 3 months we will engage in discussions with our editorial board and associate editors, CDC’s senior leadership, and PCD staff members to refine the journal’s mission statement and vision statement. We will redefine the primary topics of interest and decide which topic areas the journal will no longer consider. We will share more details about the journal’s new direction with our readership early next year. Please stay tuned for exciting enhancements geared to uphold PCD’s commitment to be an influential journal promoting the best science and practice in public health.And finally, perhaps PCD will continue to identify and implement ways to improve our authors’ interaction with every aspect of the journal, from submission to publication, and provide timely guidance so that authors have the best chance of receiving favorable peer reviews. For the growing number of student authors, the journal created a more level playing field in the Student Research Paper Contest by establishing categories for different levels of education. PCD continued its brand as an innovator, from improvements in the journal’s website and submissions process, to creative ways to recognize our top peer reviewers, to developing the best processes to ensure timely, courteous, and responsive service from PCD staff members.This year has been one of tremendous progress and success for the journal. We are committed to securing the necessary expertise among the journal’s editorial board and associate editors to recognize the best scientific and programmatic contributions in public health. PCD could not have achieved these 10 priorities without a carefully considered plan of action. Furthermore, PCD could not have achieved them without the shared support of readers, authors, peer reviewers, editorial board members, associate editors, staff members, and senior leadership in CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Thanks to these many people for their unwavering support of the journal.


After restructuring the editorial process of the Brazilian Journal of CardiovascularSurgery (BJCVS) in 2016, rewarding the good reviewers for their excellent performance isa goal set by the publication team.The reviewers are the ones who are responsible for spreading the valorization and thequalification of our scientific publications in the national and internationalscope. in2014, the author expresses concern about the sustainability and quality of the peerreview system, a fact proven by his own experience and his colleagues when receivinginadequate opinions, showing a lack of understanding of the content by the reviewer. Theincreasing number of online journals in recent decades has been contributing toreviewers’ overload. In addition to that, the editorial policy of some open accessjournals is to publish articles whose methodology is valid and which “has its accuracyand validity certified, regardless of the evaluation of its content.” Thisrecommendation may sound to reviewers as a signal to approve articles only based onanalysis of methods and statistics sections, without considering the reasons why it wasconducted and its broader context.In an article published in Nature, a Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) collaborator, “Peerevaluation has been going through a transition period and many believe it is necessaryto redefine its principles and practices in order not to delay or impede the scientificprogress. In this regard, alternatives to the traditional arbitration model haverecently emerged, which is usually closed, maintaining the identity of the reviewers(single-blind system) and also the authors (double-blind system) confidential. It isinteresting to point out that since 1833 closed and anonymous opinions prevailed, sinceit was not considered appropriate or cordial to publicly review a colleague’s work,moreover, opinions were not considered a personal expression, but represented theauthor’s hierarchy.According to Lilian Nassi-CalòThere are several models to reward the reviewers, but the most cogitated one in recenttimes proposes the public recognition of the evaluators to give prestige to thisimportant stage of the publishing process of scientific publication and, consequentlyhelp improve the quality of revisions.The BJCVS, with the intention of honoring its reviewers, joined the [Publons], a websitethat was created to record the input of peer reviewers and influence researchers tooffer their experiences as reviewers., co-founder of [Publons]. All reviewersshould sign up at [Publons] to register their revisions both before and after the onlinepublication. The manuscript, prior and after to the reviews, is not disclosed, unlessallowed by the journal. However, we request the authors the review certificate or wecheck with the editors to make sure the review was performed by the one selected forsuch task. To increase our performance, we are working to automate the system, speedingup the update of all reviewers. Even when a journal opts for anonymous reviews, ourplatform may give credit to reviewers. It’s easily understood that when you are selectedas reviewer of an article, the publisher is demonstrating that you are considered aspecialist in that subject. [Publons] is a great way to highlight this experience. Ourusers are beginning to use their certificates as reviewers on their curriculums, andalso to be recommended for the journals’ boards, or selected as associate or fulleditors.According to an online interview, see below the opinion of Andrew PrestonPredicting that the reviewer’s activity would be one day recognized, the BJCVS has beenissuing certificates for each review carried out by its collaborators since 2002.These data are also filed in our databases, and can be obtained by their request.https://Publons.com/home/.In order to make the reviewer’s activity more recognized, we have long been claiming that“CAPES - Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel in Brazil”should consider this procedure of high relevance, essential to guide authors incorrecting flaws, either in form or content, increasing the quality of journal’sarticles, fundamental measure for the research’s be cited, resulting in the increase ofthe Impact Factor, placing our country in the spotlight of the Concert of Nations. Oneday, we hope to be able to obtain this benefit by valuing the revisions as if they were“scientific articles”. The [Publons] may represent a new argument with the CAPESleaders, so that our idea can be accepted. For this reason and for the benefit itrepresents in curriculum content, we recommend that all associated editors and reviewersof the BJCVS, as well as the authors, who will at some point be invited to be reviewers,sign up for [Publons] by accessing the link: I hope that reading this first issue of 2017 will be interesting for all who can find inour journal a source of knowledge and incentive to promote it nationally andinternationally.Warmest regards!Domingo M. Braile1Editor-in-Chief - BJCVS


The research has been diverse with respect to intent, simulation modality and context. It has been descriptive, experimental, evaluative, explanatory and exploratory, meaning the methodologies and methods have drawn from quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research approaches. Researchers and their audiences are also diverse and include simulation practitioners, health and social care professionals and educators, psychologists, sociologists, biomedical scientists, engineers, information technologists, economists, programme evaluators, policy makers and others. Within this context Advances in Simulation takes its place as an open access scholarly publication at BioMed Central. Advances in Simulation will provide a forum for all to share scholarly research, ideas, policies and practices that advance the uses and theories of simulation in the health and social care community.Although simulators have been used in healthcare education for hundreds of years, it is really only in the last thirty years that research Advances in Simulation. Our Editorial Board [Our journal fulfils an aspiration of the Executive of the Society in Europe for Simulation Applied to Medicine (SESAM), under the leadership of immediate Past President, Dr Ralf Krage and current President, Prof Antoine Tesniere. As Editor in Chief, I am granted editorial independence and together with the Senior Editors, Dr Peter Dieckmann (Denmark), Prof Tanja Manser (Germany) and Prof Ryan Brydges (Canada), we are charged with the responsibility of shaping the forum offered by al Board  compriseAdvances in Simulation with an experience that values them as members of the health and social care simulation community. We will offer thoughtful and fair peer review – only individuals with highly relevant expertise will be invited to review. We will also strive for timeliness in the review process and will rely on our many reviewers to achieve this. We will operate a continuous publication model for articles that are successful in the peer-review process, with articles published quickly following acceptance.We consider quality to be measured by more than the published article. We will aim to provide authors who submit manuscripts to We will consider manuscripts that apply to all health and social care professions and draw on all sciences, from explorations of cognitive mechanisms to societal impacts. We will publish basic and applied research, reviews, commentaries, innovations, debates, methodology articles and editorials . While oAdvances in Simulation is much wider than education, his words resonate with our intent to value research seeking understanding with and about simulation. Moreover, as our community asks more complex questions, and studies more complex uses of simulation technologies, researchers have a responsibility to thoughtfully align research paradigms with hypotheses and research questions. Our intent is to provide a forum for all discourses, with a particular emphasis on researchers who demonstrate a clear fit of paradigm to scholarly purpose.In 2010, Regehr suggested the need to re-orient two of the dominant discourses in health professions’ education research: (i) from the imperative of proof to one of understanding, and (ii) from the imperative of simplicity to one of representing complexity well . And whiOver the next two years we have commissioned several articles addressing issues the Editorial Board and members of SESAM have identified as important and relevant for their practices such as conducting economic evaluations, the potential of serious games, the role of simulation in career transitions and more.open access publishing model of Advances in Simulation enables articles to be freely available and universally accessible. This has obvious benefits. In open access publishing, authors retain copyright of their work. Articles will also be archived in PubMed Central and other freely available full-text repositories. This archiving complies with policies of major funding bodies. Authors pay the article processing charge, which covers the cost of the publication process enabling readers to have free access.The Advances in Simulation through submissions, reading and sharing published articles, serving as a reviewer, and proposing future topics for this forum.Our community is experiencing an exciting era in health and social care simulation research and practice. We hope that you will contribute to Advances in Simulation.Debra Nestel, Editor in Chief,


At the end of the last year, we, editorial team, decided to redesign our website to better serve our readers, reviewers and authors. After much hard work, we are excited to officially announce the new and improved Balkan Medical Journal website. You can now reach us at http://balkanmedicaljournal.org/We thought that it was important to renew the website to reach a wider audience. So, we wanted to have good, clear, easy-to-follow navigation throughout our website. The new website will remain both open access and free of article processing charges. We hope that the website will respond better to our readers’ needs and interests.Key features of the new website include:• Drop down menus to make easier to navigate and improve content layout and design,• Pre-submission inquiry to allow author to have quick feedback from Balkan Medical Journal’s Editors regarding the suitability of a manuscript for the journal,• Image corner which is created from clinical images published in the latest issues for teaching and training purposes,• News section to stay up-to-date on the latest with health news and health science,• Articles section which is composed of selected publications from current issue,• Email alert feature to keep you up-to-date with content of the journal,• We provide you with necessary information about citing in How to Cite,• Advanced Search gives you opportunity to find what you seek more easily,• Select articles you want and make the site to show them with View Selected Articles,• You can share your favorite articles with your colleagues on social media with Share feature.We would like to thank our publisher, Galenos Publishing House, for their tremendous support and effort.For any questions, suggestions, feedback or comments, please contact us via E-mail.


Food & Nutrition Research (FNR) journal is owned by the Swedish Nutrition Foundation (SNF), a non-profit organisation. SNF was founded in 1961 with the aim of promoting nutrition-related research and its practical application. To this end, the FNR leadership made the bold decision in 2008 to begin publishing electronically as an open access journal and to cease with the printed version. This has accelerated worldwide online distribution and access to the FNR for both authors and readers.The Although the Open Access movement has exponentially increased the number of high-quality journals, there are simultaneous increases in low-quality journals. However, the strong rise in popularity of citation frequency, impact factors and valued credibility component provided by reputable journals prevent the surge of this sort of open-access journals.FNR is now well established as a peer-reviewed, open access journal that strives to briskly review, publish and disseminate high-quality research in nutritional sciences. FNR has recently decided to change the overall focus of the journal to different aspects of human nutrition. The new aims and scope include nutrition ranges from whole-body metabolism, clinical health, fitness and population health and deep mechanistic studies at molecular/biochemical and cellular levels relevant to human nutrition. This scope directly supports SNF’s mission to extend the knowledge of nutrition through basic, multidisciplinary and clinical research to improve public health and clinical practice. Areas of new and added emphasis include the following: eating behaviour and qualitative assessments; nutrition education; implementation; nutrition and exercise physiology; nutritional impacts on cognitive function; intervention programme methods and outcomes; evaluation and validation studies of dietary and nutrition methods; food and nutrition policy; and food processing, packaging and storage affecting nutritional aspects.The major changes for the journal are simplified below:A revised scope encompassing the breadth of human nutrition researchA simplified submission process with the new publishing partner Open AcademiaThe changes in scope demand an expansion of editorial structure to provide the breadth of expertise necessary to chaperone high-quality and rapid peer review. Accordingly, the FNR is now restructured with additional editors with broader expertise in human nutrition and a statistical advisor.I am really excited with the new expanded editorial team and the new publishing partner, Open Academia.I look forward to working with the nutrition community to ensure continued success of this journal.Professor Asim K. DuttaroyEditor-in-Chief


As a peer reviewer for a journal, you have an important role to play. You help the editor sift through the myriad of submissions, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of manuscripts and thereby helping make decisions about which works are important and rigorous enough to be shared with our community of library researchers and practitioners. As in most fields of study, however, librarians usually do not receive formal training in how to review a manuscript. Instead, we may learn how to be a peer reviewer by receiving reviews of our own manuscripts that we have submitted to journals or by picking up general tips and tricks gleaned from our intimate understanding of the scholarly publishing process. Not surprisingly, therefore, peer-reviewing skills are unevenly distributed across librarians, and even experienced peer reviewers may persist in wondering whether they are successfully accomplishing this task.If you are relatively new to scholarly publishing and peer reviewing, you may feel a twinge of doubt the first couple of times you are asked to review a manuscript. You may fear that you will not be able to come up with at least one solid criticism of the manuscript that now lies in your hands. Rest assured, however, that this is quite unlikely.Think of yourself as an external consultant . RealizeIf you are new to the library profession, realize that your inexperience is not necessarily a detriment to your peer-reviewing ability. In fact, for medical journals, studies consistently show that younger reviewers or reviewers with less professional experience write higher quality reviews than those who are older or have more experience –5. AlthoSome common advice given to peer reviewers is to read the manuscript at least twice , 7. The Take notes while you read the manuscript, and then construct those notes into a carefully written review. Discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript. When you find a weakness, suggest a concrete way to overcome the shortcoming, if possible: “It’s the easiest thing in the world to poke holes into something. It is usually much harder to suggest how to fix them” . It is uTo get started reviewing a manuscript, consider the following questions.Do the authors provide a compelling rationale for why they conducted the study?Do the authors clearly describe the purpose of the study and/or state their hypothesis?Are the methods fully and clearly described?Is the methodology sound? Are there potential sources of bias?Do the authors utilize objective measures  when possible?Are the results reported in the text consistent with the data shown in the figures or tables?Are the statistical analyses performed and reported appropriately?Do the authors draw clear conclusions based on the results (as opposed to simply restating the results)?Are the conclusions justified by the data (or do they overreach the data)?Do the authors explain how their findings advance the knowledgebase and practice of the field?Do the figures and tables clearly convey the information?Are all of the figures and table necessary ?Would the manuscript interest the journal’s readership?Is the writing straightforward and to-the-point?Are there areas of the text that the authors should clarify, elaborate upon, or omit?Are the authors missing any pertinent references or body of literature?There is no set recommendation for how long reviewing a manuscript should take. Although some reviewers may spend 8 or more hours reading the manuscript and writing a review , a studyAlthough writing a review need not take a great amount of time, it is generally true that longer reviews are better than very brief reviews. More specifically, a good, comprehensive review should typically be between one-half to two pages in length , dependiFinally, if you find a “fatal flaw” in the manuscript, such as an error in logic or the use of an inappropriate research design or approach that cannot be remedied by collecting additional data or rewriting the manuscript, it is unnecessary to prepare a long list of minor comments; rather, simply communicate your major concerns .Conducting peer review is a service to our academic and professional community. Because authors and readers are usually unaware of the identity of reviewers, peer reviewing is mostly a thankless job. However, some recent initiatives aim to provide scholarly credit for peer review . In parJournal of the Medical Library Association, we sincerely thank our peer reviewers, who take great care in moderating and strengthening the discourse on the research and practice of health sciences librarianship.Despite radical changes in scholarly communication, peer review is still considered a necessary process that increases the quality of published research . Speakin


Future Science OA. We are excited to begin our fourth year of publishing research and discussion from across the biomedical-related disciplines, all the way from the bench to the bedside. Although we have some interesting things planned for 2018, in this Foreword, we will take a look back over some highlights from volume 3.I am delighted to introduce the first issue of volume 4 from Future Science OA. Our main highlight was the launch of our new-look website, which has allowed us to showcase our articles in an innovative, easy-to-read format, to provide metrics such as downloads and social media mentions for each article and to allow the use of graphical and video abstracts to maximize each article's impact and clarity.2017 was an excellent year for Future Science OA editorial team believes it is essential that negative and inconclusive research is published in order to ensure transparency and avoid other repeating experiments that have already failed in the past, and we hope to see increasing submissions to this section.The new website has also allowed us to create topic-specific sections of the journal, allowing our content to be visible to both broad and specific readerships. In addition to common topic areas, such as bioengineering and oncology, we have included a dedicated area for negative research . The FutFuture Science OA Young Ambassadors [We have also launched the Early Career Research Zone . The Futassadors  have helWe were particularly proud to launch the Future Science Early Career Research Award in 2017, a scheme to reward an outstanding, biomedical-based, early career researcher. The award saw four finalists chosen from over 30 excellent nominees. The winner was then chosen by our judging panel, which comprised members of our Editorial Board and Young Ambassador Panel, and a vote from over 1200 people. The 2017 winner, Joe Abisambra  has now joined our Young Ambassador Panel, and we look forward to him helping us develop more offerings for early career researchers. He also received £1000 in prize winnings and presented a webinar on his Alzheimer's disease research, which you can view at . The Ear2017 also saw us accepted for coverage on PubMed Central, which means all of our content is now discoverable via PubMed. This achievement, combined with the excellent quality of our articles and our continued commitment to sharing articles after publication, especially via social media, means that through 2017 we have seen over 11,000 readers per month on average. This is a rise of over 300% from 2016, and has been excellent to see.Future Science OA reviews to their Publons profiles.In other news, 2017 saw us partner with Publons, a free service for academics that rewards reviewers for their work . We feelThe most-read content through 2017 covered a broad range of topics. The top article, read by over 3500 readers, saw Claus Manniche  and Alan Jordan  discuss how our understanding of Modic changes in back pain has evolved over the past decade .Our 2016 review defining and discussing sarcopenic obesity also features in our most-read list . BoastinMany articles from our 2017 volume also featured in our most-read list. Of particular note, early career researcher Kevin Deighton  and colleagues produced an excellent forward-looking perspective on the investigation of meaningful effects in physiology research, which was particularly well-read and now has an Altmetric score of 41 .Myc and Lin28 also made an impact, and has an Altmetric score of 49 [A research article presenting a new method of induced pluripotent stem cell formation avoiding the use of the oncogenes Joining these articles in our most-read list are those published in our special issue focusing on organ-on-chip . The issIt is always interesting to look back at how our demographics are changing. In 2016, our readers and authors were predominantly from Europe and North America. This trend continues in 2017, with Europe taking the largest portion of the pie, likely owing to the appetite for open access in that geographic region . It is eIn terms of readership, we have seen a huge increase in our readership this year. Our content continues to attract readers from across the globe, which is superb .We continue to be hugely grateful to our Editorial Board for their continued support of the journal. This year we have been delighted to introduce a number of new members. Catherine Martel  was promoted to the board following her excellent work on the Young Ambassador Panel. She has also been joined this year by Matt Gibson , John Greenman , Simon Lo  and Michael Gold .The postpublication dissemination of our articles continues, and we continue to share our publications through our online platforms such as Twitter  and FaceOverall, 2017 has been an excellent year, and we thank our readers, reviewers, authors and Editorial Board members for their continued support. We look forward to working with everyone in 2018.


Contemporary biomedical research is performed by increasingly large teams. Consequently, an increasingly large number of individuals are being listed as authors in the bylines, which complicates the proper attribution of credit and responsibility to individual authors. Typically, more importance is given to the first and last authors, while it is assumed that the others (the middle authors) have made smaller contributions. However, this may not properly reflect the actual division of labor because some authors other than the first and last may have made major contributions. In practice, research teams may differentiate the main contributors from the rest by using partial alphabetical authorship . In this paper, we use partial alphabetical authorship to divide the authors of all biomedical articles in the Web of Science published over the 1980–2015 period in three groups: primary authors, middle authors, and supervisory authors. We operationalize the concept of middle author as those who are listed in alphabetical order in the middle of an authors’ list. Primary and supervisory authors are those listed before and after the alphabetical sequence, respectively. We show that alphabetical ordering of middle authors is frequent in biomedical research, and that the prevalence of this practice is positively correlated with the number of authors in the bylines. We also find that, for articles with 7 or more authors, the average proportion of primary, middle and supervisory authors is independent of the team size, more than half of the authors being middle authors. This suggests that growth in authors lists are not due to an increase in secondary contributions (or middle authors) but, rather, in equivalent increases of all types of roles and contributions (including many primary authors and many supervisory authors). Nevertheless, we show that the relative contribution of alphabetically ordered middle authors to the overall production of knowledge in the biomedical field has greatly increased over the last 35 years. With the increasing costs, complexity and interdisciplinarity of modern science , researcLarger teams translate into a larger number of authors listed in the byline of scholarly articles. The term ‘team size’ is thus used hereafter to refer to the number of authors on an article. In certain cases, there may be hundreds of authors on a paper; a phenomenon coined as ‘hyperauthorship’ . Larger While it may be difficult for an external observer to assess the respective contributions of individual authors of a collaborative work, their position on the byline may be used as a proxy for the extent and nature of their contributions, since names are typically ordered following implicit disciplinary norms . For exaPrimary authors: main contributors to the experimental work;Supervisory authors: senior researchers who supervised the research; andMiddle authors: individuals with relatively small contributions to the research who are listed between the primary and supervisory authors.This raises a difficult question: how can we distinguish primary, middle and supervisory authors? In other words, where does the middle begin and where does it end? Previous bibliometric analyses of biomedical research –26 have In this paper, we use partial alphabetical authorship as a tool to identify the primary, middle, and supervisory authors in a given team. As Harriet Zuckerman  pointed The purpose of this study is to empirically explore the relative contribution of primary authors, middle authors and supervisory authors to research articles in the biomedical field. More specifically we provide answers to the following research questions:How prevalent are alphabetically ordered middle authors in biomedical research?What are the proportions of primary, middle and supervisory authors in the articles’ bylines?How has the overall contribution of middle authors to the biomedical literature evolved over the last 35 years?Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (http://www.ost.uqam.ca). The discipline of the articles was determined by the NSF classification of the journal in which they are published. Because trends observed were almost identical in the two biomedical disciplines studied , they are combined in the results presented below. We identified middle authors using the following three steps: 1) identifying alphabetical sequences, 2) correcting broken sequences, and 3) distinguishing intentional and incidental alphabetical sequences. While we used proprietary WoS data for this study, other investigations could be performed using non-proprietary data such as PubMed, which also provides an extensive coverage of biomedical literature.This study is based on all biomedical research and clinical medicine articles published between 1980 and 2015, which were authored by 4 to 100 individuals, and indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WoS). Access to the WoS data in a relational database format was provided by the rd position and ending at the 5th position.We used an approach similar to that of Waltman  to detecth author (Starr Koslow Mautner) because her last name (Koslow) has been indexed as a second initial. There may also be cases of human errors, for example when two names are inverted in a long list of otherwise alphabetically ordered authors. Finally, alphabetical ordering conventions differ by language and country, so different individuals may alphabetically order the same list of names in a different way. These conventions also contain rules regarding alphabetical ordering of special characters, which can create further errors since these characters are no longer present in the indexed names.Depending solely on names and initials to identify alphabetical sequences has some limitations. Errors can occur because of special character conversion, compound names and names with prefixes, indexation errors, and human errors in the alphabetical ordering. In our dataset, spaces and hyphens are removed from last names (e.g. van Gogh becomes vanGogh), and special characters are converted into the basic Latin alphabet (e.g. Lübeck becomes Luebeck). Also, the prefixes of Dutch names  are not taken into account in the alphabetical ordering. It may also happen that the first of two last names of an author is treated as a second first name during the indexation process. ororTo reduce as much as possible the occurrence of the errors mentioned above, we concatenated consecutive alphabetically ordered sequences which met one of the following conditions:R is the combined length (r) of the alphabetical sequences preceding and following the break.X is the first letter of the author name before the one causing the break.Y1 is the first letter of the author name causing the break.Y2 is the first letter of the author name causing the break after removing potential prefixes.Y3 is the last initial of the author name causing the break.Z is the first letter of the author name after the one causing the break.R is important because the longer the consecutive sequences, the higher the probability that they actually constitute a single sequence that has been broken into two distinct parts. Therefore, to maximize the precision of the alphabetical sequence break detection, we manually verified a random sample of 100 broken alphabetical sequences for different values of R, and we selected the minimum value of R for which the proportion of false positive was 5% or lower. A total of 192,716 broken alphabetical sequences were fixed: 28,779, 77,332 and 86,605 sequences for which the (R = 8 and X ≤ Y1 ≤ Z), (R = 6 and X ≤ Y2 ≤ Z), and (R = 6 and X ≤ Y3 ≤ Z) conditions were met, respectively. The resulting dataset comprises more than 6.7 million articles authored by a total of more than 44 million authors, among which 13 million alphabetical sequences where found.The value of Pi, which is the probability that the authors are intentionally listed in alphabetical order, and the opposite of the probability Pc that authors are listed alphabetically by chance. Pi is determined by two variables: the number of authors in the sequence (r) and the team size (N). For example, there are 3,628,800 possible combinations of N = 10 authors out of which 156,002 contain an alphabetical sequence of r = 5 authors. Thus, a sequence of r = 5 has a 156,002/3,628,800 = 4.3% probability of occurring by chance (Pc), and therefore a 95.7% chance of being intentional (Pi). N and Pi for different values of r. We see that for short alphabetical sequences of 3 or 4 authors Pi increases rapidly as the byline gets longer, while the Pi of sequences of 6 and 7 remains very high, even for articles with up to 100 authors. More details on the calculation of Pi and Pc can be found in the supporting information . In order to maintain this level of certainty, the test was performed on the subset of 2,527,997 articles authored by 7 to 100 individuals . The model was statistically significant χ2(2) = 6.61x10e4, p <.001 but explained only 8.6% of the variance in the presence of an alphabetical sequence of authors in the bylines, correctly classifying only 3.4% of cases. As shown in The average size of teams producing biomedical articles varies over time, which may have an effect on the trends observed in Pi ≥ 0.95. SD = .117) primary authors, 60.1% (SD = .141) middle authors, and 19.0% (SD = .119) supervisory authors.Having established the high prevalence of bylines containing alphabetically ordered middle authors, we proceeded to analyze the team composition of articles where such sequences are found. This limited our analysis to the 74,555 articles containing a single alphabetical sequence for which The right panel of r for which Pi ≥ 0.95 by the sum of team size N for all biomedical articles in the WoS for that year . In this last part of our analysis, we look at the evolution over time of the overall contribution of middle authors to the biomedical literature. More specifically, we aim to determine whether the relative number of middle authors has been increasing at a lower, similar or higher rate than the average team size. For each year, we estimate the middle authors’ contribution to biomedical research by dividing the sum of all One should note that while On the byline of scholarly articles, the list of authors is the product of a combination of several factors. The nature, scope and complexity of a research project determine the amount of work, the various tasks and the array of knowledge and skills required. These may often be determinant factors in establishing the size of the research team and the division of labor among its members. Furthermore, the naming and ordering of authors, which we use to assess the relative contribution of team members, is the product of a more or less normalized social process. While strong (but implicit) disciplinary norms serve to guide authorship, other factors come to bear such as the existing relationships between collaborators and their position in the institutional hierarchy. We here discuss how these factors may explain our results.In the first part of our analysis, we show a clear relation between the size of teams and the prevalence of alphabetically ordered middle authors. This can be explained by two different factors. Firstly, all other things being equal, a larger team will lead to a greater division of the work simply because the same amount of work can be divided among more team members. Uneven distribution of tasks will in turn determine author order, and allow for a distinction between primary, middle and supervisory authors. It is thus logical that the number of middle authors will increase as teams increase in size. Secondly, since it is more difficult to order very large number of authors based on their contributions, especially when contributions are small and diverse, it makes sense for the use of partial alphabetical order to increase with team size. Results also show that, for papers with 7 authors or more for which middle authors are listed in alphabetical order, these authors constitute the largest proportion of research teams See . This suHowever, a striking feature of the share of authors that fall in each of these three categories is their invariance as a function of team size. In other words, the increase in the number of authors per paper is not solely due to an increase in the number of middle authors but also to an equivalent proportional increase of primary and supervisory authors. This supports the hypothesis that larger teams might require a more diverse set of skills and roles including many primary authors and many supervisory authors.Aside from considerations relating to the amount, complexity and division of the work, the large number of middle authors, especially in lengthy author lists, raises questions relating to authorship practices and criteria. It is possible, for instance, that the increasingly long bylines are not only reflecting an increase in collaboration, but also that small contributions are increasingly rewarded with authorship. Ordering middle authors alphabetically may reduce the incentive to keep the author list as short as possible because when authors are ordered according to their contribution or in full alphabetical order, adding a name on the byline reduces each one’s share of credit. Clearly distinguishing primary, middle and supervisory authors by using alphabetical order reduces this ‘loss of credit’ for primary and supervisory authors because they remain differentiated from the middle authors. Thus, listing middle authors in alphabetical order might increase the propensity to include more middle authors. Interestingly, this suggests that while the order of authors is determined by the type and amount of work, the method used for ordering names may also determine the type and amount of work required for an individual to be listed as an author. Another incentive for rewarding small contributions with authorship is the responsibility that is associated with authorship . In a seThe idea that partial alphabetical order would allow research teams to reward smaller  contributions with authorship might seem somewhat at odds with the current authorship guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which state that authorship is to be based on the following criteria:‘Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; ANDDrafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; ANDFinal approval of the version to be published; ANDAgreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.’ .Previous studies have shown that honorary authors  are present in about one fifth of biomedical papers ,32. It sMore investigations will be necessary in order to better grasp how the empirical observations provided in this paper result from other factors such as the increased complexity of research, the increased division of labor, and a reduced threshold for inclusion in the authors list. Furthermore, as journals increasingly require that authors provide details about their contributions, including this information in further studies could also help better understand the relation between team size, individual contribution, and the use of partial alphabetical order.Further research could also incorporate data on the authors’ affiliations to see how the number of departments or institutions involved in a project may relate to the division of labor, the use of partial alphabetical order, and the share of primary, middle and supervisory authors. We could hypothesize that research involving multiple institutions is more likely to bring together researchers with different expertise that will each play a major role (e.g. primary or supervisory). This could partly explain that increase in supervisory and primary authors observed in the present study.In this research, we demonstrated that the listing of middle authors alphabetically is a practice used frequently in biomedical research, especially in articles with a large number of authors. We also showed that when middle authors are identified alphabetically, they represent on average more than half of the research team. This indicates that the author inflation might be due in part to increased division of labor which may be associated to the increased size and complexity of research. This is reflected in the fact that the share of total authorships attributed to alphabetically ordered middle authors has increased more than average team size over the last 35 years. As discussed above, these results provide insights not only on collaboration and division of labor in biomedical research, but also on authorship practices.The increase in teams’ size has raised issues that have been widely discussed, including the lack of transparency of authors’ contributions and the difficulties of assigning responsibility for the work as a whole or for its different parts. In addressing some of these issues, Baerlocher and colleagues  proposedHowever, effective implementation of this model would require its acceptance by the scientific community and its adoption in research evaluation processes. Most of the currently used bibliometric indicators (e.g. the H-index) do not take into account one’s position on the byline. Consequently, being middle author may be paradoxically more rewarding, from a cost-benefit perspective, than being a primary or supervisory author. Inversely, indicators and evaluation processes that only put emphasis on the first position might create disputes and hinder collaboration and division of labor.S1 File(PDF)Click here for additional data file.


Journal of Hip Preservation Surgery (JHPS) and having read the piece afresh I cannot adequately explain why. Our reviewers had missed a trick, as had I, we had lost a worthy publication and had upset a colleague in the process. Mea culpa.We shot ourselves in the journal foot the other day and, even now, I cannot establish how. The issue was simple. A good colleague, well known to us all, submitted a paper and two reviewers turned it down. It happens. Determined as ever, our colleague submitted the research to another journal who instantly accepted it. We then compounded the injury by citing the now-published work in our subsequent literature review section, What the Papers Say. For some reason, the research appeared better after publication in another journal than when first submitted to JHPS is not alone. Indeed, our journal has in my view some of the best peer reviewers in the business. Unrewarded and unsung they have an ability, unsurpassed by many, to take a submission, assess it, frequently improve it, and help the editorial team reach a fair conclusion. At least we feel it is fair, until we do something daft as I have outlined.Or, is it mea culpa? You see, the scenario I cite here is not unusual. JHPS. Some of our most highly cited papers received the weakest reviews on submission, whereas some of the least cited received glowing commendations from the start.Peer review is now under the spotlight and it is not just us. Many would agree that if the peer review process were itself to be peer reviewed the only valid editorial decision would be to revise and resubmit. Birkbeck College in London has recently landed a hefty research grant simply to do just that, to review peer review . It appeJHPS is positioned, you need to set others thinking as well as reporting results.As a highly specialist publication we are continually at the edge. We are frequently the first port of call for an author who has something to report but wishes to excite research and comment rather than deliver long-term results. So, because a paper does not have 1-year, 2-year, 3-year results or longer; because an RCT does not have perfect equipoise or, because a control arm simply does not exist, does that render a paper worthless? I would argue not. When you are at the cutting edge, and that is where JHPS the success it is today, of that I have no question.The development of hip preservation has been a team approach from the beginning. Yes, there were a few lonely voices at the start, subsequently becoming a veritable army on the advance, but each of us adds what little we can to the work of the majority. That is what has made hip preservation the success it is today. There is no one paper, no one author, no one society, no one editor for that matter, who can claim to rule the roost. Go to any hip preservation meeting and, unless I have misjudged it, you will see practitioners, researchers and colleagues for certain, but overwhelmingly you will see friends united in their aim to move our subspecialty forwards. It is that which has made So, I for one am looking forward to the developing debate on peer review, a process that became established in the mid-17th century as a means not so much of identifying good research but of rationing submissions. It was an era when costly hard copy was all that was available. A journal simply could not afford to publish everything it received. Times are now different, thanks to a burgeoning internet and a something-for-nothing culture. Studies have shown that peer review is open to abuse, at times unreliable, and frequently fails to identify fraud . There aJHPS, do not have a band of reviewers that is worth more than its weight in gold. If you review for JHPS, in my view you are the top of the top of the top and words fail me when I try to offer thanks. We are fortunate, many others are not, and yet even we cannot claim to be perfect as my mea-culpa incident shows.It is certainly time for the process to be reappraised, especially for those journals that, unlike JHPS, issue 4.2, was truly impressive. The paper by Lund et al. [The last issue of d et al.  describiet al. [et al. [et al., for your tip.And as for this issue of our journal, issue 4.3, I am again spoilt for choice. However, apart from reading the issue from digital cover to cover as you would expect me to recommend, do have a close look at the paper by Degan et al.  on the r [et al. . I admitJHPS. It is published for you, the hip preservation practitioner, and is filled from cover to cover with pearls. I commend this issue to you in its entirety.So, as ever, please enjoy this issue of My very best wishes to you all.


Journal of Nutritional Science (JNS) was established in the early part of this decade as an initiative between the Nutrition Society and Cambridge University Press, with the first volume appearing in 2012. The founding Editor-in-Chief, Professor Philip Calder, was at the time also Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Nutrition (BJN). This reflected the original concept that the JNS would be closely allied to the BJN, with the same Editor-in-Chief and a common Editorial Board. The new journal was in part intended to provide a vehicle for articles that while scientifically sound were not able to be published by the BJN, because of the pressures on space in the Society's flagship journal. A close association between the JNS and the BJN continued when Professor Graham Burdge took over as Editor-in-Chief of both journals in 2013.The JNS has been receiving direct submissions and these now form most of the material published rather than articles originally submitted to the BJN . This evolution underlies the growing sense that the ‘new’ journal should forge its own identity and be clearly distinct from its esteemed parent. As part of this transition, it has been agreed that the JNS should have its own Editor-in-Chief, separate from that of the BJN, and I am delighted to say that I assumed this role in October 2017. I am most grateful to my predecessor, Professor Burdge, for all his work on the journal, and I am very pleased that he has agreed to continue to serve the JNS as Deputy Editor. Over the next year, the JNS will also be establishing its own Editorial Board, though I anticipate that there will be some overlap with the BJN. I would like to thank those who have agreed to continue on the JNS Board in the interim.Increasingly, the JNS is, of course, that it is a fully Open Access (OA) journal. OA publishing has expanded dramatically since the concept began to gain traction some 15 years ago, and there are now both fully OA and hybrid models. OA as a route for the dissemination of scientific information transfers the cost of publication from the consumer to the producer, with subscription charges being replaced by fees paid by authors; the key advantage is that there is no paywall barrier to the availability of what is published with the result that the reach of scientific papers is maximised – and potentially the number of citations. There is now a range of highly successful OA journals, amongst the best known of which are PLOS ONE and the Frontiers series. Fully OA journals are proliferating at a rapid rate, and many will be familiar with the daily influx of email requests to submit an article to a new OA journal, often from an obscure publisher. Some of these journals have been termed ‘predatory’, and until recently Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado-Denver maintained an extensive blacklist of such journals. Among the dangers of ‘predatory journals’ is that they risk undermining the concept of OA publishing. A number of new OA journals, of course, have impeccable credentials, being published under the auspices of the Royal Society in the case of Open Biology, for example.The defining characteristic of the JNS has the strengths and combined authority of the Nutrition Society and Cambridge University Press behind it, the Press being the world's oldest publishing house, having had ‘letters patent’ granted by King Henry VIII of England in 1534. OA journals established, owned and run by learned societies are in practice a return to the origins of scientific publishing. The majority of long-established, discipline-based journals were set up by learned societies, these including, for example, the BJN, the Journal of Physiology and the Biochemical Journal in the UK, and the American Journal of Physiology and the Journal of Nutrition in the USA – as well as the world's earliest and longest-running scientific journal, the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions.The . Indeed, in 1957, David Martin, the then Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society, stated that ‘Scientific Societies should be the guardians of the quality of scientific publication of original work in learned journals’. Given the development of OA and of predatory journals, this is especially apposite – and with the JNS, taking guardianship is exactly what the Nutrition Society is doing.Academic journals owned and run by commercial publishers are a relatively recent development, and it has now been argued that learned societies should exercise their moral authority and reclaim the guardianship of publishingJNS, which is now in its seventh year, will continue to evolve. I am concerned, as are Editors of every journal, to ensure that the review process is as speedy as possible, consistent with the maintenance of high standards. The remit covers the full spectrum of the nutritional sciences – from genetic, molecular and cellular studies to metabolism and whole-body physiology, through to dietary surveys, epidemiology and public health issues. Indeed, the journal takes a catholic view of what constitutes nutrition, and this includes studies using cell culture systems and plant extracts when these have nutritional relevance. A wide range of article types are welcomed: Primary Research Papers, Brief Reports, Reviews, Perspectives articles, Systematic Reviews, Workshop Reports, Letters to the Editor and Obituaries. We are pleased that the JNS is listed in key indexing and abstracting services, including PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, Essential Sources Citation Index and the Web of Science.The JNS is to become a leading nutrition journal and to be the vehicle of choice for those wanting full OA publication. We look forward to a successful future and to receiving your high-quality manuscripts.The goal for the


Dear friends and colleagues,eNeuro is very successful. Since our launch in November 2014, we have received over 500 submissions and published over 300 papers. In our second full year, we published 210 manuscripts, which more than doubled our 86 publications in 2015. And our website visits have also doubled from 2015 and continue to grow each month. Despite the lack of impact factor , more researchers are relying on us to publish their results. This vote of confidence not only shows that eNeuro succeeds in publishing great science, but also that our publishing model satisfies all actors: authors, reviewers, and reviewing editors.It is a great pleasure to tell you that Science Educator Award commentary and the Sci Rigor series along with homepage videos that provide insights on publishing in eNeuro.In 2016, we increased the number of reviewing editors to cover more neuroscience disciplines. Our goal is to cover the growing and evolving breadth of the field. I would welcome any suggestion regarding missing topics. You may have noticed that we started actively using our social media platforms to promote some research articles, along with other outreach activities, which help to promote the journal and increase the reach of its publications. There have also been some great commentaries published this year: the But let us look at the future. We are working hard to bring even more innovations in 2017.Acknowledging the best reviewers on the home page. The reviewing process is an integral part of scientific research. It must be properly acknowledged. Note that since 2016 reviewers can update their ORCID account with the number of reviews they perform for both SfN Journals.∙ Educating investigators at an early stage of their career to perform a review is an important mission. The first webinar we organized was very successful. SfN members can access it here. We are going to organize many others, focusing on specific topics or themes in Neuroscience. Stay tuned for the next one, which will be on computational neuroscience. As before, attendants will be given access to the first submitted version of the paper before the webinar to work on it as reviewers. During the webinar, we will see how the review process was performed during the consultation process, with the do and not-do when reviewing a paper.∙ Working on implementing video abstracts. Authors will be able to upload, if they wish, a video version of the published story for a better outreach to the community.∙ Sharing author and editor experiences. More videos are coming to provide the benefits of consultations with reviewers and the experiences of authors submitting to eNeuro.∙ eNeuro is still on the rise, both in terms of publishing great science and in terms of changing the landscape of the publishing world.Thanks to you, 2017 will be even better!Cheers,Christophe Bernard


Authenticity is the foundation of science. Without ourindividual involvement, participation, interaction, sincerity andwork ethic, our collective medicine would cease to exist. So alsois the case of the advancement of medicine. One of the mainmeans to progress, in this field is the conduct of research, whichwould eventually have an impact on the world we live in.The conduct of research requires one too many qualities in boththe individual and the team, from the inception, the planning,and the execution until the final publication. It is a hard foughtjourney with many daunting challenges. And because of thehumongous power that rests on the author's shoulders, a greatamount of responsibility tags along with it given that at eachand every step a potential for human or other error does existand a dedicated and sincere effort on the part of the individualand the team must be taken to prevent this from happening. Thisresponsibility is nothing but conducting honest research bearingin mind the implications of falsehood. And this is where theconcept of retraction notices comes into the picture.Back in the 1970s when publications were not as abundant, retraction notices were an inexact undertaking and posed quite a challenge. There were no strict guidelines and each journal had its own format to retract an article, none being better than the other. The threat of legal proceedings against the editors or journal publishers loomed large   , 2 . DA retraction notice is issued in the journal where the said article is published by a particular author or team of authors, if there is evidence of misconduct such as plagiarism, data falsification or fabrication that could seriously undermine the reliability of the article itself. From the standpoint of the author, an honest error might have unknowingly resulted in the apparent misconduct. Therefore, distinguishing human error from actual misconduct is of utmost importance for the editors of the journal   . The edNow, there are a few more things that are important here. Firstly, when an article is under review at any journal, multiple checks are employed to scout for plagiarism and these methods are more stringent with increasing impact factor of the journal   . Howeve The classic example that is mentioned about such retraction articles is one of Eric T. Poehlman. He was an internationally recognized scientist, but his colleagues were convinced that he had falsified data and thus a full scale investigation was launched into his works following which he pleaded guilty. However, for years prior articles published by him were referred to and he was considered an authority in the field of obesity and ageing   .  Imagine using the wrong treatment protocols, an unnecessary investigation modality or the wrong drug to treat patients based on unethical research. Therefore, it is imperative for us as a scientific body to realize the importance of not only being aware and reporting such articles but also ensuring that it never occurs in the first place.It has been said that practice makes progress and progress leads to perfection, and we have made immense progress by the formation and revision of retraction policies and this has understandably led to the publication of more authentic literature in recent times. However, multiple hurdles still do exist and by virtue of authentic studies we hope to overcome them with the eventual goal of a world of publication free of misconduct.


Hereditas in the last months may have noticed that the journal terminated its activity by the end of 2014. I am extremely happy to announce that Hereditas is alive again and as a result of this resurrection, I write this Editorial. I must admit that around 8 months ago, I wrote a similar Editorial for the last issue of Hereditas under the wings of the previous publisher, Wiley. At that time, the letter was written in a rather melancholic mood, as the tradition of one of the oldest journals in the world dealing with genetics seemed to come to an end. We should keep in mind that Hereditas was founded in 1920 and was thus pretty close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. For this reason, we, the Editors, as well as the owner of Hereditas, the Mendelian Society in Lund, are more than delighted to have found BioMed Central as the new partner for continuing our activities and we are looking forward again to serving the scientific community under the new wings of BioMed Central.For those who followed the fate of Hereditas means almost 100 years of publishing in the field of genetics. During almost one century, Hereditas developed its distinct reputation through publishing seminal papers. For example, did you know that the first demonstration of the correct number of human chromosomes (46) was demonstrated through a publication that appeared in Hereditas [ereditas . It was ereditas . This 19we now offer a wider selection of articles than previously: Research articles (available before), Brief reports (available before), Reviews (available before), Commentaries (new), Letters to the Editor (new), Software (new) and Opinions (new). Hence, authors have a wider selection to choose from, and the likeliness that their manuscript fits into one of these categories is higher. There are also plans to have special issues on topical issues: here, the readership is invited to come up with appropriate suggestions, if they wish.Hereditas has appointed a second Editor-in-Chief, Professor Yongyong Shi from Shanghai, China, with whom I share the responsibility for the direction and the activities of the Journal. I would like to use the opportunity to warmly welcome Yongyong Shi onboard of Hereditas, and I wish him ample satisfaction for this post. Yongyong Shi has vast experience in the genetics of complex traits including mental disorders, tumors or metabolic diseases. Apart from his expertise, he will become a major driving force for our expanding activities in Asia and Australia.we now offer a large Editorial Board with eminent scientists (meanwhile more than 40 colleagues).the layout of the homepage has been changed: it is now more transparent than previously and all relevant information for authors and readers is readily available therein.the homepage is now embedded into the BioMed Central platform.When you compare the “old” Hereditas with the “new” one, then you will notice a number of apparent changes:Hereditas within BMC also means a plethora of benefits for authors: the most important one to name is “Open access”. Open access means that your article will be available and read by other scientists around the world at no cost and independent of the budget of the librarian. Open access also implies that once your manuscript is accepted, it will be published online immediately. Hence, your data are out, become readily visible and will immediately be listed in PubMed.Publishing with Open access also means that you always have online access to your own article, and signifies that authors keep the Copyrights of their work and thus grant anyone the right to reproduce and disseminate their article, provided that it is cited accordingly. Finally, Open access journals have to potential to reach a larger number of readers than subscription-based journals. It is clear that you as the authors will benefit from those facts mentioned above.Hereditas now has an expanded Editorial Board with many excellent scientists at hand. It is our policy that the editorial staff strive for a fast time from submission to final decision on every manuscript submitted to the journal. To this end, we use the well-proven manuscript-submission platform, Editorial Manager. The platform allows authors to upload their manuscript in a intuitive fashion. Later during the reviewing process, the platform allows full transparency for authors to assess the stage of their manuscript. Your manuscript will always be seen by at least 2 reviewers, in some cases we seek the opinion of a third one. We strive for constructive criticism by the reviewers such that authors will receive clear guidance on how to improve the manuscript to ultimately get it accepted. Furthermore, upon receipt of the reviews, authors are given sufficient time to revise their manuscript.As mentioned above, Hereditas now accepts a wider range of manuscripts than the “old” one. We accept manuscripts across the full scope of genetics and genomics, including those of plants, crops, microorganisms, animals, human diseases and model systems, and, more recently, also manuscripts dealing with novel viral sequences and bioinformatics. It is our goal to provide a wide and interesting selection of articles to readers in future.As far as the research topics are concerned, the “new” Hereditas. For this reason, we invite you to publish with Hereditas, a journal with almost 100 years of tradition and sharing a distinct reputation.It is our intention to celebrate the centenary of Stefan Baumgartner, Editor in Chief.


Despite the surge of research and development in assistive products for older adults and/or people living with disabilities, policies on access and procurement have lagged in responding to the growing demand from users. Developing policies to address these concerns require an understanding of the ethical challenges underlying approaches for providing assistive products. The purpose of this scoping review is to identify and map the literature pertaining to ethical challenges related to assistive product access and procurement to inform policy development.We will use established approaches to conducting scoping reviews which include five stages: (1) conducting broad searches to identify potentially relevant literature, (2) refining selection criteria, (3) reviewing search results, (4) mapping literature according to conceptual areas of interest, and (5) summarizing results. We will analyze data by thematically grouping the descriptions of assistive products identified in the included articles and conducting a content analysis to iteratively develop a targeted synthesis of literature focused on ethical challenges in relation to assistive product access and procurement by older adults and/or adults living with disabilities.Our scoping review findings will focus on and provide insight about the models, frameworks, and principles that have been used to understand ethical challenges related to technology access and procurement. We will use the findings to help inform a series of citizen panels in Canada to identify Canadians’ values and preferences for enhancing equitable access to assistive products.The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13643-017-0419-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. The world’s demographic structure is changing dramatically due to population aging. The number of people who are 60 years old or older is projected to double to over 2 billion people between 2013 and 2050 . The UniAssistive technology encompasses a broad range of supports with varying terms and definitions used in the research literature, legislation, policy, and practice. A commonly cited definition of assistive technology (used in the Assistive Technology Act of 2004 in the USA) indicates that it is technology that can be used in both assistive technology devices and services . In thisIn spite of the high need for and use of assistive technology, unmet needs exist for access and procurement . Access Identify the challenges related to assistive product access and to examine the models, frameworks, and principles that have been used to understand the ethical dimensions related to these challenges, with a focus on their use for older adults and/or adults living with a disability, andDevelop a conceptualization of ethical challenges related to assistive product access and procurement.Our objective is to conduct a scoping review to examine the ethical challenges related to assistive product access and procurement. Our specific objectives are to:We chose a scoping review as our approach because (to our knowledge) the ethical challenges related to assistive product access and procurement and the implications of these have not been comprehensively reviewed, and an important first step towards such a comprehensive assessment is to systematically map the key concepts, main sources, and types of evidence available to identify gaps in the research area. We will use established systematic and transparent approaches to conducting scoping reviews , which iOur search strategy will involve identifying published journal articles and gray literature to ensure that we cover the breadth and comprehensiveness of the available literature addressing the ethical implications of assistive product access. We will search the following 22 databases to identify relevant literature: The Cochrane Library (including Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and reviews indexed in the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects), MEDLINE, Health Star, PsycINFO, EMBASE, AMED (Allied and Complementary Medicine), International Political Science Abstracts, Social Work Abstracts, Joanna Briggs Institute EBP database, CINAHL, AgeLine and Social Science Abstracts (EBSCO), Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (ASSIA), ProQuest Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, Philosopher’s Index, EconLit, Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, PubMed for non-MEDLINE records, McMaster Optimal Aging Portal .To identify gray literature, we will search OpenGrey and Grey Literature Report and conduct targeted website searches of government departments and stakeholder organizations, such as the Medical Devices Publications, Canadian Disability Policy Alliance, Canadian Agencies for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH), UN ENABLE (Convention on Rights of Persons with Disability), International Federation on Aging, and World Health Organization (WHO). We will supplement our website searches by contacting key informants from organizations within national and international settings, including AGE-WELL NCE  in Canada and the Bridging Aging and Disability International Network. We will also scan the reference lists of articles that we included in the final scoping review as a final check for any articles we may have missed.We will limit our searches to English only, but the date range of our searches will not be limited to ensure that we cover the breadth and comprehensiveness of the available literature. We will search the databases listed above using the following combination of terms:  AND (“assistive technology” OR “assistive technologies” OR “assistive device” OR “assistive devices” OR “adaptive device” OR “adaptive devices” OR “adaptive technology” OR “adaptive technologies” OR “rehabilitation device” OR “rehabilitation devices” OR “rehabilitation technology” OR “rehabilitation technologies” OR “assistive product” OR “assistive products”). The search strategy and the number of results from each of the databases are outlined in Additional file We will include empirical and non-empirical documents that focus on the ethical challenges related to access to assistive products for adult populations (18 years of age and older) with disabilities or health conditions. For this review, we will use an existing definition for assistive product as defined by ISO9999:2016 which describes it as “any product , especially produced or generally available, used by or for persons with disability” . ExampleAll search results will be reviewed independently by two reviewers using the selection criteria, and records will be classified as “potentially relevant” or “exclude.” In the event of a discrepancy between the two reviewers, the piece of literature will be classified as “potentially relevant” at this stage. The full text of “potentially relevant” articles will be retrieved and two reviewers will again independently review the texts to make a final assessment for inclusion in the scoping review. When consensus on whether a document should be included cannot be reached during the full-text review, a final decision will be made by a third reviewer. Reference manager software, Mendeley, and reviewing manager software, Covidence, will be used to facilitate the management of references and the reviewing process.We will conceptually map the papers that fit our selection criteria using an iterative process. The purpose of conceptual mapping in scoping reviews is to categorize relevant papers into domains and topics of interest to identify areas that are conceptually rich and areas where there appear to be conceptual gaps . We willOur initial framework includes six domains: (1) type of document (research and non-research); (2) population characteristics ; (3) context ; (4) type of assistive product; (5) assistive product access and procurement; and (6) ethical concepts . Other relevant ethical concerns include equitable access, fairness, disparities, distributive justice, social justice, advocacy, resource allocation, and ageism. In addition to the categories included in the conceptual mapping, the reviewers will assess each paper by identifying those that are likely to offer important insights into the ethical challenges that can help to inform discussions about equitable access to assistive products.The presentation of the scoping review results will include an outline of how many articles are identified and selected, which will include a narrative description of the search decision process accompanied by the search decision flowchart using the PRISMA  reporting guideline . A copy We will summarize the conceptual mapping results in tabular format. Specifically, we will summarize the number of papers in each of the conceptual mapping domains both overall and according to the two populations of interest (older adults and adults living with a disability). We will use these findings to identify areas of conceptual richness and where there are gaps. In particular, we will derive potential areas for future in-depth synthesis .Underlying our scoping review approach is an emphasis on systematically and transparently mapping the literature to better understand the ethical challenges related to assistive product access and procurement. We will disseminate our scoping review findings by summarizing the key implications and lessons learned about the ethical considerations for addressing barriers to assistive product access and procurement. Our scoping review will help inform future work towards developing ethical decision-making frameworks and models that are useful for policymakers, stakeholders, and researchers in addressing equitable access and procurement of assistive products.One component of our knowledge translation plan is to disseminate the findings through at least one conference presentation and to submit at least one manuscript to an open-access, peer-reviewed journal. Another component of our knowledge translation activities is to utilize our scoping review findings to prepare a plain language brief  that will serve as key input for citizen panels that we plan to convene in Canada . The pan


Established in 2011, BrowZine is a “Journal Enhancement Platform” owned by Third Iron. Usable from a desktop, laptop, or mobile device, the journal browsing service allows users to create a custom electronic journal library of their favorite journals. BrowZine does not change the journal reading experience but helps users discover and organize their favorite journals in a library’s existing electronic journal collection.With a variety of available subjects and subcategories , BrowZine is not limited to health sciences libraries. Brow-Zine’s predictive search can be used multiple ways: searching by subject, title, or ISSN. In subject browsing mode, the user can either view all available journals in a specific subject area or further limit to a specific discipline within that subject area.As an example, through the reviewer’s institutional access, “Biomedical and Heath Sciences” can be limited to dentistry, health care services, nutrition, veterinary science, or any of the additional seventeen subcategories . From thBrowZine uses a custom 3-tier taxonomy  of more Appropriate for students, physicians, faculty, and librarians, BrowZine is useful for anyone who wants to browse journals on an intuitive platform. BrowZine markets itself to academic libraries, medical libraries, and corporate information centers, so the user possibilities are seemingly endless. According to the Third Iron website, BrowZine is used at nearly 500 libraries and information centers in 16 countries [Finding a champion in the institution is important, because BrowZine can be relatively challenging to market. It is difficult to adequately describe the product to potential users on a library’s website, which makes product demonstration crucial. But because many of BrowZine’s intended users are busy clinicians, reaching members of this group to provide one-on-one demonstrations might be an impossible task. In addition to the strategy of recruiting several clinicians or faculty members to help promote the service to their students and colleagues, libraries can use marketing tools provided by Third Iron to promote the product: a LibGuide, widgets, images, and several printable posters.BrowZine’s features can be tailored to suit users’ preference. In addition to simply browsing favorite journals, users can create reading lists; save articles; share articles through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or email; and export citations to Zotero, Mendeley, BibTex, or EndNote. Articles can also be saved in BrowZine under My Articles. Clicking on the article’s title will automatically connect users to an article’s full text using the library’s existing linking tool.Perhaps BrowZine’s most notable feature is My Bookshelf. My Bookshelf consists of four colored rooms, or “bookcases,” that hold sixteen titles each (four on each “shelf”), for a total of sixty-four individual journals. The user can change titles of bookcases and shelves to aid in organization. Any journal can easily be added to My Bookshelf from the journal’s table of contents page by clicking “Add to My Bookshelf.” When the desktop application is open, BrowZine pushes out badge alerts for each journal title to indicate the number of unread articles.Another useful feature of BrowZine is the ability to integrate the product into LibGuides. Examples include widgets directing users to predetermined subject collections, an A–Z search box, and tables of top journals with access to each title’s current issue. Third Iron has created its own LibGuide with resources and instructions for successfully adding BrowZine to a library’s existing LibGuide. New for 2017 is BrowZine’s application programming interface (API) functionality: the Journal Availability API and the Search Results API are currently available, and late 2017 will see release of the Article in Context API.BrowZine’s mobile application  can be downloaded for Apple, Android, and Kindle Fire using each device’s respective store. Once a BrowZine username and password have been created, the app syncs easily with the desktop version. Similar to the functionality of the desktop version, the app can be set up to push alerts when new content is added to favorite journals.BrowZine works with EZProxy, WAM proxy, OpenAthens, and virtual private network (VPN) authentication systems. A “Pairing Service” is also available for libraries without remote authentication. BrowZine can sync with most existing A–Z systems, including Serial Solutions 360, OCLC WorldCat, TDNet, Alma, and ProQuest Intota.Generally, new users should not require a great deal of training to use BrowZine. The service is easy to learn, and users should be able to create a BrowZine username and password and easily build collections on their own.Although the product is intuitive, BrowZine offers several options for technical support, if the need arises. Support is available through email, or one may visit the Knowledge Base, an extensive bank of questions and answers covering general questions for users, information for publishers, video tutorials, and frequently asked questions about library configuration and working with library holdings. Additionally, BrowZine periodically hosts webinars to offer training and to highlight new product features, and a robust user community is always available to help further BrowZine’s evolution and improvement.User experience will vary, because the service depends on a user’s institutional holdings, and access to open access journals can be limited. However, BrowZine is a reasonably priced product with good overall value for libraries serving health sciences communities. A free trial of BrowZine with access to content from open access publishers is available through Third Iron’s website.