Each year he GSA publications team sponsors a symposium to assist authors who wish to publish in GSA’s high impact and influential journals. The first part of the session will include five brief presentations from the editors of The Gerontologist, Innovation and Aging, and the Journals of Gerontology Series A and B plus GSA’s managing editors. We will integrate practical tips with principles of publication ethics and scholarly integrity. The topics will be as follows: (1) Preparing your manuscript: strong and ethical scholarly writing for multidisciplinary audiences, (2) common problems that affect peer review, (3) addressing translational significance and fit to journal expectations, (4) transparency, documentation, and Open Science; and (5) working with Scholar One. Following these presentations, we will hold round table discussions with editors from the GSA journals portfolio. At these round tables, editors will answer questions related to the podium presentations and other questions specific to each journal. Intended audiences include emerging and international scholars, and authors interested in learning more about best practices and tips for getting their scholarly work published.


The year 2020 brought unprecedented challenges, and opportunities to reassess and reaffirm our values. As our anniversary year draws to a close, we reflect on achievements and areas for improvement. Nature Communications, we started 2020 on a positive note in anticipation of our upcoming 10th anniversary in April of that year—then the coronavirus pandemic struck. All of our offices worldwide closed, forcing our editors into lockdown, often repeatedly throughout the year. Working from home they juggled work, care of dependents, lack of suitable workspaces, and mental and physical wellbeing issues.At “We paused to consider how far we had come as a journal in the last 10 years, and where we are heading next, through an Editorial, blog posts and videos.”responsibilities. We urge funders, universities and other stakeholders to take measures to address the conditions under which caregivers (who tend to be disproportionately women) have continued to work in the past year. On our side, we hope that our commitment to disregard from our editorial evaluation any competing works published while a submission to our journal is under review or under revision—and to remain open-minded when submissions overlap with other recently published works—will help relieve some of the pressure our authors feel.We are thankful that we could continue to work from home, unlike many others. We know how difficult the year has been for our authors and reviewers, who faced many challenges while research institutes closed and demands on their time soared. Our thoughts have been particularly with those who have to share their time between research and other, equally important, We are most grateful to all of our editors and other team members who worked extra hard to keep the journal running to the best of their abilities in the last year, as well as to our authors and reviewers for their hard-work, patience and adaptability during these unprecedented times.anniversary helped us reflect on our journey as a team. We paused to consider how far we had come as a journal in the last 10 years, and where we are heading next, through an Editorial, blog posts and videos. Our first authors gave us their thoughts on the journey the journal has taken in a Q&A conversation. We asked our authors for their perspectives on how their fields have changed in the past decade and where it was heading in the next ten years in a series of Comments collected here.As our interactions with colleagues, authors and reviewers moved completely online, the initiatives we had planned for our The past year has acutely brought to the forefront issues of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Like many other organisations, we embarked on a process of self-reflection and learning to assess how we could reaffirm and strengthen our own support and contributions to DEI in science.commitment to diversity and those laid out by Springer Nature. But we recognise that we have more work to do to educate ourselves and to reach out to under-represented groups of researchers. We have turned inward to examine our editorial practices to enable the thorough and respectful handling of sensitive topics alongside engagement with groups and communities potentially impacted by the research we as a journal publish. We have set up an internal DEI working group currently focusing on activities of outreach as a first concrete step. We are working with diverse communities of researchers to learn about the challenges they face and actions they recommend stakeholders to adopt, and we hope to soon share a series of Comments and Perspectives with our readers.We adhere to the common guiding principles of Nature Portfolio’s programme, we also wished to give those investigators a stronger voice in our journal. We ran a competition for early-career authors asking them to share their research projects and the ups and downs of publishing one of their first papers with us. The four winning entries can be found on our anniversary site here. We started a Q&A series focusing on the challenges ECRs face in their academic lives. In our first conversation, ECRs shared their experiences in navigating virtual conferences and tips for organisers to keep ECRs in mind while planning them. More recently, a Q&A article with three ECRs delved into the issues they are encountering during the pandemic and was accompanied by a conversation with senior investigators and funding representatives sharing their thoughts on how funders and university leadership can better support early career researchers and young faculty.In a year when we started to focus more on supporting early career researchers (ECRs) through our peer review mentoring Our anniversary year has now come to a close, and we look ahead to the next few years: we will continue to support the research community through the publication of important works, and we will keep building on the DEI and ECR initiatives mentioned above in order to do so in the most effective and sensitive way.


A Message from the Editor-in-ChiefThis issue of Acta medica Lituanica is the result of further evolution: from now on, our journal is being published by the Vilnius University Press. Probably you noted changed design, but most changes are within the system of submission and publishing. All they serve the main goal – wider and more effective dissemination of knowledge.Vilnius University Press is the academic community owned publishing platform – it means that academics play a key role in dissemination of results of their research. This enables also more effective implementation of academic freedom, more innovations, more transparency. Finally, it also means more Open Science. Publications in our journal are and will be freely accessible and free of article processing charges.This is already the second issue that was formed at the time of extreme challenges for biomedical community due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Many of us found ourselves at the frontline dealing with this critical situation and fulfilling our duty to society. This issue starts with a review paper dedicated to the problem No.1; some more are under review. Another paper is dealing with professional burnout – not a minor problem for health professionals nowadays. Other research papers and case studies remind us about life before and (let’s hope) after the pandemic.Finally, I want to thank our reviewers who sacrificed their time evaluating manuscripts:Sigita AidietienėVidmantas AleknaKarolis AžukaitisValdas BanysAušra BeržanskytėŽana BumbulienėJolanta DadonienėGytė DamulevičienėEdvardas DanilaAudrius DulskasMilda EndzinienėEglė EreminienėŽymantas JagelavičiusLigita JančorienėRičardas JanilionisAugustina JankauskienėDalius JatužisTomas KačergiusVytautas KasiulevičiusJacek KubicaVaidutis KučinskasZita KučinskienėLimas KupčinskasSigita LesinskienėMieczyslaw LitwinRūta MameniškienėRūta NadišauskienėAlvydas NavickasJanina PetkevičienėNarūnas PorvaneckasTomas PoškusDainius PūrasRūta SargautytėJūratė ŠipylaitėPovilas SladkevičiusEugenijus StratilatovasArūnas StrumilaRasa Strupaitė-ŠileikienėVirgilijus TarutisVytautas TutkusAlbertas UlysVincas UrbonasAlgirdas UtkusBirutė VaišnytėRespectfully,Prof. Dr Rimantas Jankauskas,Editor-in-ChiefActa medica Lituanica


European Journal of Hybrid Imaging (EJHI) opened to contributions in February 2017 and was launched in October of the same year, as a platform to publish papers focused on the use of hybrid and multimodality imaging in clinical practice, clinical trials, and pre-clinical research. EJHI was born as the last member of the EJNMMI family of journals and is now well integrated into the scientific workflow of the family.The EJHI can ensure the rapid and widespread distribution of published articles. The open access model offers a fast and reliable way to disseminate knowledge, and publication can be supported with several funding schemes when authors have no resources available to them. In this respect, the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) has supported the publication of relevant papers with a sponsorship program. The EANM program helped authors who would otherwise lack Open Access funding publish in EJHI, and the resulting research has contributed greatly to both to the field and the success of the journal. This program will be continued next year, in order to facilitate the successful positioning of the journal in the scientific community.As an Open Access journal, EJHI has received contributions not only from the nuclear medicine community but also from authors in other disciplines that involve hybrid imaging.In less than 2 years of life, the EJHI received 49 manuscripts, of which 37 were accepted and 3 are currently under revision. In 2017 only, the articles published in EJHI were downloaded 587 times, with a usage factor of 122.As of September 2018, the A fast and effective peer review process is practiced at the journal, in line with the characteristics of the EJNMMI family of journals, and this ensures the rapid appraisal of manuscripts.European Journal of Hybrid Imaging has a brief, but very successful, history.When taken together, we have all the arguments to say that the European Journal of Hybrid Imaging, as of January 1, 2019. At the same time, Arturo Chiti will become the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, continuing his efforts in the EANM family of journals.To continue this trend, Springer Nature and EANM, in agreement with Arturo Chiti, have asked Francesco Giammarile to become the Editor-in-Chief of the EJHI, driving the journal towards an established position within the scientific journals in its field.Prof. Giammarile will ensure a smooth transition and the continued growth of the Arturo Chiti, Humanitas University and Humanitas Clinical and Research Center, Milan, Italy.Francesco Giammarile, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, Austria.


BMJ Open Science. BMJ Open Science is a new online peer-reviewed open access journal where we provide a platform to promote and engender trust in the research we publish and transparency in the processes we use to achieve this. Our scope is broad and covers the whole spectrum of preclinical and translational biomedical research that is close to human medicine. It is my distinct honour to address you as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Open Science we support preprints and replication studies, advocate for transparency of methods used, differentiate between exploratory and confirmatory studies, and will publish all sound experiments irrespective of their findings. Understanding what doesn’t work as well as what does work, will provide clear insights that will underscore the utility of preclinical evidence. We are also proponents of open science and information sharing, and have engaged with community led initiatives, such as the Open Science Framework, to eliminate access barriers to methods, data and information from the research that we publish.We have launched this journal to address some of the limitations in biomedical research widely described as impeding the efficiency with which preclinical data translates to improvements in human health. These include how we design our experiments, how we conduct them, the data and experiments we choose to include in our research reports, the overall quality and clarity of our research reports, the peer review process, and timely access to our research reports and their underlying data. What makes this journal different is that we have taken an innovative approach in order to challenge our collective bias against null and negative results; the desire to follow the status quo, which for many has culminated in very successful careers and the consequences of the desire to maintain a competitive edge in an outrageously competitive discipline. At BMJ Open Science  welcomes original research articles (including registered reports), study protocols, methods papers, data descriptor articles, reporting and conduct guidelines, review articles, and position papers. The research questions addressed must be sound, not necessarily novel, important and pertinent to human health in a preclinical setting.BMJ Open Science plans to be synonymous with rigour, transparency and reproducibility in research, reporting and peer review. It is a great honour to lead and work with a group of outstanding scientists from Europe, China, North and South America and from a broad range of biomedical disciplines who will serve as members of the Editorial Board, and are committed to the mission and scope of the journal.I hope that you will read our published articles, submit your research, and contribute to peer review and discussion. We commit to being an excellent source of scientific information and look forward to working with the preclinical and translational biomedical community to achieve our mission.


Scholarly publishing lives on traditioned terminology that gives meaning to subjects such as authors, inhouse editors and external guest editors, artifacts such as articles, journals, special issues, and collected editions, or practices of acquisition, selection, and review. These subjects, artifacts, and practices ground the constitution of scholarly discourse. And yet, the meaning ascribed to each of these terms shifts, blurs, or is disguised as publishing culture shifts, which becomes manifest in new digital publishing technology, new forms of publishing management, and new forms of scholarly knowledge production. As a result, we may come to over- or underestimate changes in scholarly communication based on traditioned but shifting terminology. In this article, we discuss instances of scholarly publishing whose meaning shifted. We showcase the cultural shift that becomes manifest in the new, prolific guest editor. Though the term suggests an established subject, this editorial role crystallizes a new cultural setting of loosened discourse communities and temporal structures, a blurring of publishing genres and, ultimately, the foundations of academic knowledge production. MDPI-journals” assessed during an analysis  issue. This typically has a relatively narrow thematic focus. From the journal's perspective, calling on guest editors rather than professional editorial staff for fulfilling crucial editorial duties represents a form of outsourcing. While more managerial or organizational tasks such as rights management or production remain with the journal's or publisher's staff, the pivotal scholarly tasks of curation and community building are fulfilled by the guest editor.With regard to the curation of scholarly content, the reliance on guest editors goes hand in hand with an opening of the thematic profile of the traditional journal. Here, a journal's profile unfolds as a temporal sequence of thematic foci or topics that are relatively narrow but not necessarily strongly related to one another. This comes with distinct effects on scholarly discourse. Rather than being characterized by steady, (more or less) consistent thematical and disciplinary developments, scholarly discourse becomes structured by event-driven, single-occurrence clusters that appear and dissolve across disciplinary boundaries. Novelty, timeliness, or relation to current events become essential criteria for the success (or failure) of such discourse clusters. This also comes with an increased reliance on the guest editor's ability to recognize or create timely successful topics, as they can no longer draw on an established discourse to steadily generate content, or attract authors and readers. Topics might also look decidedly different if they are specifically created around current events that cut across disciplinary boundaries, instead of being generated by ongoing disciplinary debates.This transformation is mirrored on the level of the respective scholarly communities, which experience a process of dissolution as well. Journals are no longer connected to a relatively stable group of authors, reviewers, and readers that form a particular community. Instead, those groups become event-driven and somewhat nomadic, much like the topics they concern themselves with. They temporarily gather around a particular question that a particular guest editor addresses in a particular issue, and subsequently dissolve, or move on to other journals and publishing venues for other special issues. This dissolution obviously is not solely the result of a rising importance of special issues, but triggered by a number of factors. An early factor is the shift from (primarily) print to (primarily) online journals which allow for article-level access instead of issue-level access, and which also led to a push for article-level metrics Fenner, . As a coScience and Nature. Their reputation is mostly independent of specific topics and spans a wide range of different communities. In this case, guest editors profit more from being associated with a journal than vice versa. For most journals, however, establishing themselves as brands becomes more difficult, which may lead to journals moving more and more into the background and taking on a role closer to a sole publishing platform, rather than a brand defined by curation and community.With the rise of the guest editor, the generation, accumulation, and distribution of academic reputation also becomes much more precarious for journals. Not being able to draw on a stable editorship as a reputation guarantor, journals either must rely heavily on the prestige and reputation generation abilities of a host of changing guest editors, or themselves become the brandNature have become a whole system of interconnected journals, both broad and thematically specific, while on the low-ranking side, platforms provide publishing solutions with low rejection rates and servicing multiple disciplines at once. These modes of platforms meet where they both offer under-differentiated, so called mega-journals. While not really “in the middle,” these platform contexts open up a space where guest editorship is performed in new ways.Historically, we would expect the guest editor to operate in this “middle ground,” where the theme of a special issue fits well with the thematic profile of a journal and where the reputation of the guest editor ties the thematic community to that journal. Outside of that middle ground, the role of guest editors seems to make less sense. High ranking journals and guest editors seem to be an odd couple, at least in the long run, as the thematic clustering of articles will be detrimental to the goal of only publishing the best work within a research field and, consequently, reject most submissions. Curating a special issue in such a context will be difficult, as thematic considerations regularly conflict with aspirations for quality and gatekeeping. Conversely, guest editorship in very low-impact journals may appear equally odd. In a context of high acceptance rates, the work of curating a special issue may have little reputational benefit for the thematic community. It does so only for scientists or scholars who strive to gain from being made visible at any price, irrespective of a journal's or publisher's low reputation, and who cannot serve at more visible or esteemed venues. The reputational gain of such an editorship may be questionable beyond the mere formality of authorship since the low-impact journal is by definition rather not visible, and so are its authors and editors. According to such a view that aligns well with a traditional publishing system where there is a clear reputational hierarchy of scientific journals, we would expect guest editorship to be frequent “in the middle.” However, end-points of this spectrum—high and low ranking journals—have seen a considerable shift toward platform models of publishing. On the high-ranking side, brands like The shift in journal publishing practices is characterized by a new mode of activity, or activisation. This development of activisation is marked by earlier practices of editorial work being side-lined by practices of acquisition. Consider how journals were best described by a sort of passive activity in the past . Special issues and guest editors enable journals to be active as direct players. They engage in agenda setting as they propose topics and actively acquire authors for these as well as for regular paths of submission of their journals.The twist, however, is constituted by the fact that this direct activity—the acquisition as well as the agenda setting—often stems from guests, and is therefore constituted without the inhouse editorial team, or only so mediated by them. It is in this respect important to note that the rise of the guest editor and associated developments of outsourcing have a strong impact on the mode journals operate in, in the sense described here.MDPI or Frontiers) can easily expand their portfolio of journals and, thus, publishing brands by seeking potential new sub-fields, combinations of existing fields, or new geographic  areas of a field. By so doing, they provide a new publishing site for this—pre-emptively moderated or constituted—community. As this sub-field may not yet exist, there is, furthermore, not yet a corresponding discourse community that negotiates relevant epistemes of that sub-field.This development even transcends the agenda setting within the subject area of a journal and affects scholarly fields in that journals themselves are launched. Publishers that provide a publishing platform  is the brand, in terms of both its graphics as well as name, and its function for a discourse community. It is, in sober terms, more or less a keyword with a brand identity among many others on the platform. Users can choose a keyword to reach areas of content—i.e. choose a journal. The brand identity may appear to be more complex as it involves graphics, descriptions, editorial responsibilities, etc. But these are merely internal complexities for a journal. In terms of the publishing platform, these complexities are dissolved as the journal brand and all its residual constitutive features come down to being a differentiator on a platform.Sammelband), the genres journal and book seem to converge. A journal's special issue is characterized by its speciality in several respects. It may step out of the periodicity of the journal and suspends, or side-lines, the usual submission guidelines and content focus in that a particular subject focus is being picked which internally unites all articles to be published. An edited collection approaches these very characteristics from a somewhat oppositional perspective: the book usually is non-periodical by nature and, except for specific series, books in a programme are not connected by a mutual focus as do articles in a special issue. They are standalone publications, even though series may bind them because of a topical nearness. Journal articles are never standalone publications.Secondly, this also contributes to the issue that publishing genres blur or their distinctions dissolve. Especially along the lines of special issue and edited collection . They are to be downloaded by article or by compressed PDF, both commissioned by scholars from within the field, the publisher merely providing technological means and brands in response to processing fees. This becomes ever more visible in the form of article collections, also termed overlay issues, with which publishers actively collate articles post publication. This can even be seen as a grounded special issue as publishers—whether editors, guest-editors, or author collectives—may take on a curating role as the articles published may suggest. It is in this respect to ask: what is the specificity of these publishing genres other than their historical constitution?The role of the guest within editorial praxis is tangible throughout the aspects accounted for here. These aspects are not all bound to a causal connection in that the guest editor is posited to be the reason for the developments described. But more often than not, the guest editor is at least a crucial cog in the scholarly publishing machine—seemingly minor but with tremendous impact on the development. Without the guest editor, publishing platforms would not be able to thrive the way they do since their cost-cutting measures have cut out the essential links and expertise the guest editor contributes today.topoi to explore and to, potentially, serve and exploit. It is the guest editor—the scholar-seeking-network-and-reputational-esteem—who provides both these means. And yet, whether the enlargement of social and symbolic capital are fulfilled by such a role is a different question, one that can be answered only with an eye on the failure or success of the publishing platform itself, indicating again the circular enforcement of publishing.Publishers would not be able to stay connected to scholarly fields and their developments, both in ways to connect to intellectual resources such that journals become, or stay, relevant as essential communicative sites, to lure in submissions and guide them to relevant audiences; and in ways to stay alert to relevant meta-developments, the new sub-fields and On the surface, editors and guest editors may appear to remain established subjects, bounded, as they were, by well-known scholarly communication practices. At closer inspection, however, we can decipher a shift of practices which results in a shift of meaning. It is this shift of meaning that we have accounted for in this article. While, to be sure, there never were unequivocal definitions of what it means to be an editor, the shift of meaning that we describe goes beyond variations of the past. The rise of the new, prolific guest editor showcases a crystallization of new cultural and structural settings that scholars, scientists, and staff concerned with scholarly publishing in a wider sense need to be aware of.This awareness is required as the new cultural settings fundamentally affect how academic knowledge is being produced. It touches on questions that have to concern all involved in contributing to knowledge production, such as: What are reasons to publish? What function does a scholarly publication have? It is a shift that exemplifies altered foundations of academic knowledge production. And it connects to several cross-cutting themes that may guide further research. We see at least four strands where empirical analysis would allow for a better understanding of these transformations.Firstly, the development from thorough curation to lose clustering needs to be studied empirically in order to determine to which extent this change entails an uncoupling of production and reception of scholarly discourse with regard to the contextualization and interrelation of contributions to a special issue or edited book. In this vein, the guest editor might even be somewhat of a transitory figure, with journals and publishers only retroactively clustering articles into “collections” after publication, thus cutting out the guest editor's responsibility for pro-actively generating content with a specific thematic profile.Secondly, the consequences and repercussions of these transformations in the relation of publishers, publishing platforms, and (guest-)editors for reputation and the accumulation of social and symbolic capitals urgently call for further examination , grant no. 01PW18015.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


The reference set comprised 343 preprints, 121 of which appeared as a publication in a peer-reviewed journal. While the preprint servers identified 39.7% of the preprint–publication links, our linker identified 90.9% of the expected links with no clues taken from the preprint servers. The accuracy of the proposed linker is 91.5% on this reference set, with 90.9% sensitivity and 91.9% specificity. This is a 16.26% increase in accuracy compared to that of preprint servers. We release this software as supplementary material to foster its integration into preprint servers’ workflows and enhance a daily preprint–publication chase that is useful to all readers, including systematic reviewers. This preprint–publication linker currently provides day-to-day updates to the biomedical experts of the COVID-NMA initiative.Preprints promote the open and fast communication of non-peer reviewed work. Once a preprint is published in a peer-reviewed venue, the preprint server updates its web page: a prominent hyperlink leading to the newly published work is added. Linking preprints to publications is of utmost importance as it provides readers with the latest version of a now certified work. Yet leading preprint servers fail to identify all existing preprint–publication links. This limitation calls for a more thorough approach to this critical information retrieval task: overlooking published evidence translates into partial and even inaccurate systematic reviews on health-related issues, for instance. We designed an algorithm leveraging the Crossref public and free source of bibliographic metadata to comb the literature for preprint–publication links. We tested it on a reference preprint set identified and curated for a living systematic review on interventions for preventing and treating COVID-19 performed by international collaboration: the COVID-NMA initiative ( Authors posting—and then updating—preprints fuelled the fast communication of ongoing experiments and preliminary results that could help guide policy and clinical decision-making.The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease 2019 a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ on January 30, 2020. COVID-19 was soon qualified as a pandemic in March.medRxiv  researchers publishing bibliometric studies. We stress the shortcomings of these attempts regarding a day-to-day preprint–publication linking task, which motivates our approach.Several stakeholders have been striving to link preprints to subsequent publications. We discuss the attempts of 1) Crossref as the leading DOI registration agency for scholarly documents, 2) the organisation running Crossref is one of the ten DOI registration agencies.medRxiv maintainers) who are requested to diligently show the publication DOIs along with their preprints: ‘all preprints need to link to a resulting journal article when they are alerted by Crossref that one exists’ . This means that readers are unaware of the latest peer-reviewed results for more than half of the preprints related to COVID-19.Working at the COVID-NMA living systematic review  and Scopus, the two leading subscription-based bibliographic sources. Larivière et al.  sought tr et al.  used a sr et al.  matched bioRxiv. On the other hand, one may mine bibliographic sources  with preprint features as query, including titles and authors. This approach has the three following drawbacks, though. First, the providers of these sources update them regularly but a delay remains between the publication (in early view or in print) and the inclusion into bibliographic indices. This is problematic for any day-to-day screening of the literature. Second, each update of a bibliographic source must be accounted for to perform preprint–publication linking on fresh data. This requires the downloading of huge bibliographic datasets and their subsequent indexing, a computationally intensive and time-consuming task. Third, the WoS and Scopus are known to index a selected fraction of the published literature only medRxiv preprints. Figure medRxiv hosted 10,560 preprint versions corresponding to 8214 unique preprints. Filtering these records on the published field, we found 741 preprints with one linked publication.The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory operating both bioRxiv preprints  and the title of its associated publication are likely to be very similar. Running through the 740 paired titles, we noticed that minor variations often occur. Some typographic markers differ between preprint and publication versions: hyphens get typeset as em- or en-dashes, for instance. In addition, acronyms in preprint titles are sometimes expanded in the publication counterparts. For instance, the strings We used a 3-step method to measure the similarity between a preprint’s title and its associated publication’s title. First, both titles were pre-processed to expand acronyms and uniformise typographic markers. Second, the resulting titles were tokenised using whitespace as delimiter. Third, the Jaccard distance between the two resulting token lists was computed .The preprint 10.1101/2020.05.02.20086231 in its latest version was titled: Distinguishing between direct and indirect consequences of covid-19.The subsequent publication 10.1136/bmj.m2377 was titled: These tests suggest that most preprint–publication pairs show high to perfect similarity. Setting a 10% lower bound for inter-title similarities should filter irrelevant pairs out.Perfect similarity occurred for 81% (We hypothesised that the first author of a preprint (in its latest version) remains as first author in the published paper. There is only one counterexample among the 740 pairs: the first author of preprint 10.1101/2020.03.03.20030593 becomes third author in the associated publication 10.1001/jama.2020.6130 promoting the preprint authors ranked 10 and 2.Typographic variations w.r.t. accentuated letters and dashes: author ‘Ana Fernandez-Cruz’ of preprint 10.1101/2020.05.22.20110544 appears as ‘Ana Fernández Cruz’ in publication 10.1128/aac.01168-20.Corrected last name: author ‘Goldstein, E.’ of preprint 10.1101/19012856 appears as ‘Goldsteyn, E.’ in publication 10.17513/mjpfi.12945.Corrected first name: author ‘Achakzai, Mohammad’ of preprint 10.1101/19001222 was changed to ‘Achakzai, Muhammad I.’ in publication 10.3390/jcm8122080. Note that besides the changed letter, a middle initial was added.Collective name: first author ‘Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 National Emergency Response Center’ of preprint 10.1101/2020.03.15.20036350 is reworded as ‘COVID-19 National Emergency Response Center, Epidemiology and Case Management Team, Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’ in publication 10.24171/j.phrp.2020.11.2.04.We designed an author–matcher algorithm that compares two authors’ ORCIDs or, when not available, their identity. Hyphens and accents were removed to uniformise the strings. Then, the family names and up to the top three letters of the first names were compared, as a way to overcome changes in middle initials. Tested on the 740 pairs, this approach showed a 97% , and identical first authors (based on either ORCIDs or identity comparisons).medRxiv gold collection. The matching is almost perfect with 99% validated pairs (10.1101/2020.03.03.20030593 and 10.1001/jama.2020.6130 have little title similarity (31%) and the preprint first author is third author in the subsequent publication.10.1101/2020.05.02.20086231 and 10.1136/bmj.m2377 have poor title similarity (5%) and the middle initial of the first author is only present on the publication, which impaired identity matching.The next section discusses the implementation of the tested search features as input parameters to the Crossref API and post-processing filters.We applied equ. As a reminder, we tackle the following information retrieval task: for a given preprint, find all subsequently published articles. We need to comb the most comprehensive and up-to-date scholarly literature, looking for publications matching the features of the preprint under consideration. This section describes the preprint–publication linker we designed. It combs the scholarly literature for publications matching preprints using the daily-updated Crossref bibliographic source that comprised 117 million records as of October 2020.8We designed a two-step ‘query and prune’ process to retrieve any publication likely to be a follow-up of a given preprint.medRxiv gold collection of ‘published’ preprints. Exclusion filters delineate the search space based on two criteria. First, the publication’s date must be posterior or equal to the preprint’s first version. Second, the publication’s type must include materials published in journals, proceedings, and books. Crossref’s search engine uses a ‘best match’ approach to retrieve up to 20 records based on title and byline similarity. Each returned record comes with a score reflecting the similarity between the query  and the matching publication.First, the program queries the Crossref REST API with the parameters in Table Social Science Research Network (SSRN) preprint server whose DOIs starting with 10.2139/ssrn were incorrectly deposited with the journal-article type despite being preprints  in the field “with all of the words” and selecting the option “in the title of the article”,dated from 2020. TO screened the search results by comparing titles and, if needed, abstracts with the preprint, to identify associated articles. TO checked all results, including articles in which the first author of the preprint had a different authorship position.TO repeated this search in the L.OVE database for all preprints for which no article had been identified in the previous step. TO restricted the dataset by using the following filters: COVID-19 studies, Prevention or Treatment studies, Primary studies reporting data. TO downloaded this dataset in Excel format. For each preprint, TO used the filter function to search for the name of the first author in the authors column (in any position). Within this subset, TO then searched for the name of the intervention assessed in the study in the title column. When a potential match was identified, TO compared the titles and, if needed, abstracts to verify the preprint–article pair.Most of the 343 preprints were posted to medRxiv (94.2%) and some appeared on other preprint servers: SSRN, Research Square, and Preprints . It is interesting to note, however, that the top-ranked publication was also of interest: it is an erratum of the expected publication.123 publications in journals that do not assign DOIs.https://doi.org.2 publications with a defunct DOI that failed to resolve via 2 publications whose first author differs from the preprint’s first author. We had identified and discussed some of these cases in the “New England Journal of Medicine whereas the list of authors was given in the preprints.2 publications published under a Consortium name (The RECOVERY Collaborative Group) in the 1 publication whose title differs much from the associated preprint.1 publication with an erratum, this latter being retrieved by the linker instead of the initial publication.The 91.5% accuracy of the preprint–publication linker suggests an improvable linking process. For a recall-oriented complementary screening, after an initial screening step, users may tune parameters of the preprint–publication linker  for each preprint DOI. When considering the top-ranked result only, the algorithm had a 89.62% precision. Considering the top 3 results leads to a 91.20% precision while considering the entire results leads to a 91.26% precision. The preprint–publication linker performed similarly on the COVID-NMA collection (previous section) and on a larger and more diverse test collection stemming from various preprint servers supporting several scientific communities.bioRxiv preprints yielded 7.6% of missing publication links  and available at


About 30 years ago I had a discussion with my then head of department at Bangor University, the late Professor John Bryn Owen, about what an ideal journal would look like in our field, animal science, in the future. We decided that it should publish all relevant science that was statistically and ethically robust, free of the vested interests that pervaded many publications at that time. As I got more involved in animal welfare science, it was clear that such interests were prominent in this sector of the discipline. Closely associated with our ideal of opening up publication to all scientists, was that of opening up readership to all, not just a small group of subscribing society members and libraries. As the new century spawned a mass of internet content, it became clear that transitioning journals to being web-based could achieve both of these if a different funding model was used for journals — payments by authors not users. As well, using electronic communication for reviewing and editing, initial responses by the journal could be kept to about a couple of weeks , unheard of in the days of printed articles. In 2010 I was contacted by the newly formed publishing arm of the institute, MDPI, to start an open access journal in the animal science sector, the first of its kind and one of 25 journals initiated by the company that year. In the first article . Recognition of the value of the journal by scientists came quickly and submissions grew exponentially. In 2019 the one thousandth paper was published, but it is a mark of the exceptional growth of this journal recently that annual publication is now more than 3500 papers and that nearly 8000 papers have now been published in total . With submissions rising and scientists paying regularly to publish their articles, the publishing company has been keen to support ventures to promote the science. In 2017, Travel Awards were introduced; in 2018, Young Investigator Awards; 2020, Outstanding Reviewer Award; and 2021, Best Cover Award. Reviewers are now rewarded for their work with vouchers that can be used against publication costs, as are editors. Reviewers are rated by editors for the quality of their reviews, so that the best reviewers can be used in assessment of manuscripts. In both 2020 and 2021 very successful International Electronic Conferences on Sustainability in Animals were held, with leading international keynote speakers. These gave young scientists an opportunity to present their work to a broad audience, and prizes were awarded to the best entries.The early years were one of discovery and setting of standards. Endorsing the ARRIVE guidelines in 2014, establishing sections, enrolling editors, culminating in a structure set in 2018 with 18 sections, each headed by an experienced scientist, four deputy editors in chief, and 764 editorial board members. More recently we have reviewed our standards for use of animal and humans in research, culminating in a public statement of our policy , has been a huge effort by many scientists, editors, publishing staff and others. This will have a lasting legacy for all the animal sciences, but particularly those, such as animal welfare and ethics, where the community has a strong interest. The future of animals on our planet lies in our hands, and we all need to have access to the debate.mdpi.com, last accessed 31 December 2021)), with those positing new ways of thinking about our relationships with animals being particularly commonly viewed. For example, the paper referred to above as being cited 227 times, which was on new ways of describing animal welfare, has been viewed over 27,000 times. This is a big impact, but we could do more. Allowing open comment on papers would enhance people’s engagement with the work and generate new ideas. As well, viewing and even commenting is one thing, actually doing something in response to new findings is much more impressive. I would like to see updates added to papers by the authors to demonstrate what outcome the article has had on public policy, animal conservation, animal welfare standards etc.What of the next ten years, what can we expect to see change? I would like to see more involvement of the community in the animal science reported in Animals. Viewing figures for Animals articles make for interesting reading (Animals|Top Cited (Publications in Animals are now increasingly used as the basis for online news media, including opinion piece outlets. It is vitally important that these rely on sound science, such as that reported in Animals. It was partly for this reason that I initiated the ‘Simple Summary’, for public understanding of the science. I would like to see all our papers with top quality Simple Summaries. Scientists can get help from the media staff in their institutions if necessary. One of the most common failings of authors of our articles is an apparent inability to provide a short summary suitable for public digestion.I would like to continue to work towards more common standards in many aspects of publishing animal science, ethical standards, the quality of reviews, and scientific writing standards. Both authors and readers have a right to expect fair treatment, of the animals and humans involved in research, and of the research process generally. As well, we must weed out any false reporting, deliberate or otherwise, or weak science, so that our journal can be relied upon as the most accurate source of animal science articles.Finally, on behalf of the animals on our planet, I must thank all those that have made Animals the success that it now is, with much hard work over the last ten years, and I look forward to seeing its development over the next ten years.


Research Policy and Strategic Management, a new section of Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, begins publication with great optimism for the use of the open access format to enhance readership, rigor, and dialogue for the community of scholars and policymakers.Research Policy and Strategic Management takes advantage of the Frontiers platform to accomplish three goals: (1) to facilitate faster publication of policy-oriented publications in an open-access (OA) format; (2) to contribute open evidence, data, and expertise supporting publications in order to aid reproducibility and support policymaking; and (3) to boost trust between policymakers and academia by widening the channels of communication between these communities. Each of these points is expanded below. We have plans to address two clear challenges in OA—the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) and the journal indexing—as is discussed below.RPSM, with a focus being on ensuring that evidence-based policy—a bedrock principle of public administration—is served. The print-journal model, effective for over 300 years, is now overtaken by digital modes and venues, moving scholarship into the hands of users at rapid pace. As we know, the print-journal model often requires months to years of review, editing, and publication processing. RPSM will speed up this process, and the editors will work to draw the attention of policymakers to the work. Rigor in intellectual contribution will remain a primary goal.Any scholarly venue must publish excellent scholarship; this will therefore be a primary purpose of Frontiers in platform, this section of Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics will publish high-quality research in a timely way, moving scholarship briskly into a public forum and creating a venue for evidence-based policy discussion—all at a pace far accelerated over the current communications processes. We will create and act as a supportive community.Greater speed and openness are provided through an innovative open-access platform, fully compliant with Plan SFrontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics is an open platform that will aim to close that gap.Second, the new venue will provide a discussion function to accompany scholarly work. This responds more to a threat than an opportunity, also tied to new media. In an era when, paradoxically, freer, ubiquitous communication has empowered those who wish to spread their ideas to decision makers, some are manipulating and distorting facts using new media. One way to address this problem is to create tighter links between those producing scholarship and those who need research. Some forces in society seek to use media to obscure or blur information in order to undermine authority and introduce distrust—to move beyond “truth” or “falsehood” into a deep uncertainty where nobody knows what is real. At that point, no expert or policymaker can be trusted or believed. In such an uncertain space, it is impossible to evaluate and debate facts. Thus, in scholarship, we see a call to “tear down the journal system”—as if it is a bastion of some “ancient regime” that embodies an entrenched and illicit meritocracy rather than a system that offers an expert filter to judge the believability of claims. This dynamic cries out for forums that allow questioning but provide verification. The publication will be open access, with open-source links to data, authentication of authorship and contributorship, validation of sourcing, and open peer review. Authentication in scholarly communication is increasingly needed in an era of “deepfakes”—predatory publishers, increasing plagiarism, hoaxes, and spoofing, use of unverified data, and an intensifying competition for recognition. Moreover, the publication will be committed to pushing back on the many factors that underprop gender and racial inequality by consciously putting inclusion as a primary goal.The process of verification of academic research within the policy framework is slow and varied. Academics often choose Research Topics in isolation, not always knowing actual social or policy needs. Their role of “speaking truth to power” is muffled and garbled by the processes of publication and the additional pressures of indicators of “impact” and “quality.” The process of speaking truth—presenting researched evidence—has the goal of confirming or falsifying the statements of or actions of the government, but the “expert” is often called upon simply to prove their own credibility rather than to defend their observation. The process, however, could also be opened up to engage with new kinds of material—material that is open and informed by research—and employ different communication processes that present and socialize the production of evidence, integrate science with valued sensibilities, and work across and bring together different viewpoints. This is one of the goals of the new outlet, and it is enabled by this new, highly functional platform.Open access itself is not the golden door to an equitable landscape for academic researchers—it only offers a solution to the problem of limited accessibility of published scholarship. In turn, OA introduces several troublesome features—in particular, article rocessing charges (APCs) and the lack of a sanctioned “impact factor”—whose absences actually stack the deck against younger researchers who do not have funds to pay for publication and who need source-based impact factor indicators and citations to gain promotion. For those researchers who do not have funds to pay for publication, Frontiers has a waiver mechanism to ensure participation regardless of ability to pay.Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics will be indexed in Google Scholar, DOAJ, CrossRef, and CLOCKSS. It will soon be listed in PMCID and Dimensions (based upon DOI). For scholars who may need this help, we will produce a statement qualifying the contribution and impact of their work. This follows a number of recent calls to move beyond metrics and toward what some call “profiles, not metrics”—returning the responsibility to those offering to “measure” scholarly quality (see the Leiden Manifesto)Finally, the editorial board is committed to addressing inequities in the current system that impact gender and geographic representation. We are committed to openness in all ways. The openness of the format allows us to address these problems from the ground up as we organize. The board of editors and reviewers will be gender balanced and broadly inclusive. We will keep this as a goal in choosing other peer reviewers. In contrast to existing publication schemes, we seek to create a supportive community that enhances its members and creates new knowledge that serves society.The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.


Nursing Reports and set out a mission for the journal. On the 13 July 2020, MDPI took over from PAGEPress as the publisher of Nursing Reports. I, Prof. Dr. Richard Gray, became the new Editor-in-Chief on 20 July 2020, taking over from Dr. Colleen E. Marzilli Tyler. I would like to thank Dr. Tyler for her valuable and important contribution to the journal.The purpose of this editorial is to introduce a new publisher and a new editor-in-chief of https://rb.gy/5jennp).By way of introduction, I originally trained as a Mental Health Nurses at King’s College in London, in the early 1990s. I then did my Master’s degree in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2000) and my PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London (2001). I was a Medical Research Council Post-Doctoral Research Fellow 2001 through 2005 and got my first Chair in 2008 at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. I moved to La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, in 2017. Over the course of my career, I have published some 220 papers, most of which—to be honest—are rather dull and often contradictory. If, for some peculiar reason, you are interested in reading some of my papers, they are dutifully listed on my Google Scholar page  first nursing-specific journal. You may not know much about MDPI as a publisher, and I suspect that you will probably be interested in some background information. Founded in 1996, MDPI is Open Access academic publisher globally and publishes 267 titles, including 73 Science Citation Index Expanded and 1 Social Science Citation Index—Web of Science —covered journals [https://doaj.org/).Nursing Reports emerge over the next few years as a leading nursing journal that publishes high quality research and scholarship. My main task—and that of my editorial and MDPI colleagues—is to ensure that papers are handled in a timely way, consistent with best practice for journal editors. If you are interested, you can read more about the code of conduct editors are required to follow by using this link to the COPE website: https://rb.gy/lfcr36. I take the COPE code of conduct extremely seriously and if you, as an author, reader or reviewer, feel that my conduct has fallen below these standards, please write and let me know. There are two recommendations from COPE code that I think are particularly important and would like to underscore: reporting negative results and appealing editorial decisions. There is good evidence that studies reporting negative results (this includes empty systematic reviews) are not reported, potentially distorting the evidence base [One of the defining features of MDPI journals is the speed with which manuscripts are handled. The average time from submission to publication across all MDPI journals is 39 days and the acceptance rate is 40% . These aNursing Reports: pre-registration of research and reporting guidelines. Pre-registration of research is intended to prevent publication bias and reduce data fishing (searching a data set to find significant results) [https://osf.io/) or clinical trial registries . Another way to pre-register you work is to publish your protocol, there a few nursing journals that publish this type of manuscript. Nursing Reports actively encourages authors to submit protocols of their research—systematic reviews, clinical trials, observational and qualitative research. By describing and justifying research methods prior to starting fieldwork or data extraction, we hope to improve the quality of nursing research and scholarship. Of course, I also hope you will submit the results of your research to Nursing Reports.As editor-in-chief, there are two further issues that I want to champion in results) . In nursresults) . All stuNursing Reports that authors report their research against the appropriate reporting guidelines. I hope you agree this is a positive and progressive position to take that will make research findings more broadly accessible.Turning to reporting guidelines: The Equator Network was established some 15 years ago with the aim of promoting transparent and accurate reporting by encouraging researchers to report their research findings against a set of guidelines. Reporting guidelines are structured tools that researchers can use when planning their research and preparing their results for publication. In my editorial experience, few nurse authors make use of reporting guidelines and, as a consequence, papers can be tough to read and process. It will be a requirement of papers submitted to Lancet, 43% of the documents they published in 2019 were letters. In leading nursing journals over the same period, less than 1% were letters. In medicine, the tradition of letter writing is strong. We have all witnessed the power of letter writing in exposing and eventually leading to the retraction of some bad science about the drug hydroxychloroquine during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seemingly, nurses write, and nursing journals publish, few letters. This lack of post publication scrutiny worries me, and I want to actively encourage readers who identify issues with the papers we publish to write and let us know. We need to encourage more dialogue and debate if our research is to be considered credible. For clarity, letters published in Nursing Reports do not incur an article processing fee.The publication of a paper in an academic journal is not the end of the scientific process. Post-publication review is essential in confirming observations. In leading medical journals, such as the Nursing Reports is in the process of expanding its editorial board. In my opinion, an engaged and active editorial board is vital to a vibrant and successful journal. I am keen to work with an editorial board that is diverse and inclusive; I would therefore like to extend an invitation to active researchers to apply to join the journal editorial board of Nursing Reports. The decision to appoint will be based on enthusiasm and motivation, stage of career, and publication trajectory.Nursing Reports is doing against these (and other) quality metrics.How will you know if I and my editorial colleagues are doing a good job? Typically, the performance of a journal is determined by counting citations (impact factor); whilst this metric is clearly important, I want to argue that there are other important quality metrics that should inform potential contributors’ opinion of a journal. These might include: how long it takes from a the submission of a paper to a first decision being made, the proportion of manuscripts that are rejected, how many appeals and complaints an editor receives (and how many were successful), the proportion of papers where study data are available, and the rates of preregistration. In my opinion, grading journals on how well they share information will promote greater transparency and openness in academic publishing. It is my intention to publish an end of year “report card” setting out how Nursing Reports is a nursing journal that I hope will be a little bit different because of our focus on openness and transparency. I look forward to working with you as authors, reviewers, and readers of the Journal.


We review the scope, content, and focus of the peer-reviewed journal, Research on Aging (SAGE), publishing its 422nd volume this year. We will discuss how scholarship produced from researchers around the globe has changed over the years. Data on submissions, acceptance rates, and the important role of an international editorial board will be presented. The review process will be described, along with suggestions on how to increase chances of success when submitting original research. Although Research on Aging is sometimes considered to focus primarily on social gerontology, the scope in recent years has widened considerably, with manuscripts in aging studies published from such fields as economics, psychology, demography, public health, and public policy, as well as from sociology, and social work, among others. One of several special issues forthcoming in the journal will be described to demonstrate the possibilities for international impact.


One of the major concerns of any scientific journal is that the research it publishes should be reproducible. There have been many alarming estimates for the lack of reproducibility of work published in the biomedical sciences, which has led to widespread trends to require authors to provide more detailed descriptions of methods and reagent sourcing and sharing, a frequent call for deposition of original data in open access databanks, and possibly a greater willingness to publish negative or conflicting results. These efforts are based on the reasonable expectation that the research in question has been performed in good faith.Very occasionally, one encounters a paper in which some of the data is falsified. This can range from, for example, the relatively benign exclusion of outliers in a dataset for spurious reasons or use of an inappropriate control. Reviewers and editors do their best to identify such occurrences and to remedy them. It has been very rare, however, to encounter entirely falsified manuscripts – until recently.The pressure to publish for early career scientists and clinicians is intense, and career advancement and income are commonly dependent on this. One should not be surprised, therefore, that the phenomenon of the paper mill has emerged in recent years . This isThis journal has seen tens of such manuscripts submitted this year from authors most probably attracted by our increasing Journal Impact Factor™, the broad spectrum of research covered by the journal and our very inexpensive article publication charges. We believe that we have identified and rejected all of these submissions so far, but this remains a continuing challenge to our editors.Endocrine Connections requires corresponding authors to attest that the submission is original, the authors’ own work and has not been submitted elsewhere. The journals published by Bioscientifica have agreed as a matter of policy that we will henceforth require submitting authors to use an institutional email address unless there is a good reason not to do so. The work reported in the vast majority of biomedical science papers is the product of a research or health provider institution that provides the facilities and/or the patients, and which employs the researchers. Undoubtedly, these organizations would be very unhappy to know that falsified research was being published in their name, and it is entirely reasonable that correspondence about the research should take place through their own email servers and not some personal provider.Is there anything we can do to prevent these submissions? In common with most journals, It is also useful when screening a new submission to be able to check the author’s previous publication record. While this can usually be accomplished by a quick PubMed search, it is often the case that some surnames are very common and literally hundreds of published authors share the same name and initials. In this case, a unique researcher identifier such as the ORCID iD is extremely valuable, and for this reason we will be asking submitting authors to provide this information on submission of articles.Endocrine Connections should know that the editors may request their original data and that they must supply this for peer-review to continue. Furthermore, we strongly encourage authors to make publically available the full data underpinning their articles, by depositing these in an appropriate public data repository. In conjunction with this, Endocrine Connections will soon require authors to include a Data Availability Statement in their article, indicating if and where the data underpinning it is publically available.To enable full scrutiny of submissions, authors submitting to As a journal we can only do our best to identify fraud and fake science will occasionally be published. Ultimately, these deliberately falsified products taint the areas of science, the organizations to which this work is attributed and the nations that harbour these paper mills. We believe that to avoid long-term reputational harm these organizations and their national overseers need to act, for example, by establishing readily contactable offices of scientific integrity and by prosecuting those that make financial gain by falsifying science.The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest that could be perceived as prejudicing the impartiality of this editorial.This work did not receive any specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sector.


Hematology Reports published its first volume in 2009, which included 10 publications: 8 original articles and 2 reviews [Hematology Reports became the official journal of the Society of Hematologic Oncology Italy . The journal publishes their scientific material from conferences and other events. The presidents of SOHO Italy are Dr. Claudio Cerchione, Prof. Dr. Giovanni Martinelli, and Prof. Hagop Kantarjian  [In September 2019, Hematology Reports will be published by MDPI and will continue to serve the scientific community by publishing high-quality, open-access, peer-reviewed articles on all aspects of the prevention, diagnosis, and management of disorders of the blood. As of 2022, Hematology Reports will continue to publish high-quality and interesting research in the field of hematology.We would like to offer a warm welcome to all Editorial Board Members, SOHO society members, and authors. We hope


Cultural heritage, especially the fine arts, plays an invaluable role in the cultural, historical, and economic growth of our societies. Works of fine arts are primarily developed for aesthetic purposes and are mainly expressed through painting, sculpture, and architecture. In recent years, owing to technological improvements and drastic cost reductions, a large-scale digitization effort has been made, which has led to the increasing availability of large, digitized fine art collections. Coupled with recent advances in pattern recognition and computer vision, this availability has provided, especially researchers in these fields, with new opportunities to assist the art community by using automatic tools to further analyze and understand works of fine arts. Among other benefits, a deeper understanding of the fine arts has the potential to make works more accessible to a wider population, both in terms of fruition and creation, thus supporting the spread of culture.The call for papers for the Special Issue “Fine Art Pattern Extraction and Recognition” was opened to anyone wishing to present advancements in the state of the art, innovative research, ongoing projects, and academic and industrial reports on the application of visual pattern extraction and recognition, for a better understanding and fruition of works of fine arts. The Special Issue solicited contributions from researchers in diverse areas such as pattern recognition, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and image processing. Furthermore, we also solicited the submission of papers as an extension of the works presented at the homonymous workshop we organized at the 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition .The Special Issue received several submissions, which underwent a rigorous peer review process. After the review process, 11 articles were selected based on the ratings and comments. The published articles cover various applications of cultural heritage and digital humanities research; focus on different branches fine arts such as painting, architecture, and photography; and develop and apply a range of techniques, from image processing to computer vision, based on handcrafted features and deep learning.Artworks are subject to alterations over time due to various factors such as natural aging, external agents, inadequate conservation treatments, etc. Hence, techniques for monitoring, preserving, and restoring cultural heritage artifacts have become crucial. To this end, Daffara and Marini  present In their contribution, Banfi and Mandelli  exploiteOther contributions have addressed the problem of high-level semantic analysis and the interpretation of artworks. With the advent of digitized art collections, such an analysis has acquired increasing importance as a means of providing new information within digital art image repositories, supporting both enthusiasts and experts in finding and comparing artworks. To this end, computer vision techniques are good candidates to aid in the automatic categorization and retrieval of artworks. Following this line of research, Pinciroli Vago et al.  experimeTo support art historical research, Sindel et al.  did not Journal of Imaging for their endless support in making this Special Issue possible. We hope it will benefit the scientific community and increase interest in this exciting area of research.We express our sincere gratitude to the authors for their contributions, to the reviewers for their efforts in reviewing the manuscripts, and to the editorial staff of the MDPI


The peer-reviewing process has long been regarded as an indispensable tool in ensuring the quality of a scientific publication. While previous studies have tried to understand the process as a whole, not much effort has been devoted to investigating the determinants and impacts of the content of the peer review itself. This study leverages open data from nearly 5,000 PeerJ publications that were eventually accepted. Using sentiment analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, mixed linear regression models, and logit regression models, we examine how the peer-reviewing process influences the acceptance timeline and contribution potential of manuscripts, and what modifications were typically made to manuscripts prior to publication. In an open review paradigm, our findings indicate that peer reviewers’ choice to reveal their names in lieu of remaining anonymous may be associated with more positive sentiment in their review, implying possible social pressure from name association. We also conduct a taxonomy of the manuscript modifications during a revision, studying the words added in response to peer reviewer feedback. This study provides insights into the content of peer reviews and the subsequent modifications authors make to their manuscripts. Although the peer-reviewing process often feels like a heavy burden to many scientists , the proDefinition 1The contribution potential of a given paper measures how much recognition and engagement an article has currently received. We use the (1) number of citations, (2) Altmetrics and (3) number of readers as proxies for a paper’s future potential to contribute to its field. We refer to (2) and (3) collectively as a paper’s citation metrics.e.g., by examining manuscript modifications made in each review iteration.We focus on the concept of “science of science”—the study of how science and research is conducted—due to significant implications of potential reduced efficiency with the limited resources of the scientific community . If the In this study, we aim to use objective measurements for assessing peer review and understanding how the peer-review process may improve the submitted manuscripts by asking the following research questions:RQ1: What factors from the revision process predict the acceptance timeline and contribution potential of a submitted manuscript?RQ2: To what extent is peer review sentiment associated with author or reviewer characteristics?RQ3: During the revision process, what kinds of modifications do authors make to their submitted papers?We note here that peer review data for papers that were eventually rejected are not publicly accessible and are hence not in our current dataset. This limits the scope of our study to focus on the peer review process and contribution potentials of accepted and published papers—we hope to expand our dataset to include rejected paper submissions in future expansions of this work.https://easychair.org/). It also accelerates the exchange of reviewer feedback and author rebuttals. The transition from paper-backed peer reviews to electronic peer reviews produces an interactive publication and open peer commentary  on linguistic characteristics of the peer review. They tested for and established that “review robustness” exists in the 583,365 peer review reports from 61 journal published by Elsevier, constituting perhaps the largest-scale study on peer review to date. However, one limitation of In a recent attempt to assess peer review biases and robustness, https://peerj.com/) as our primary data source and supplement this with publication performance and contribution data from Altmetrics , Crossref (https://www.crossref.org/) and Dimensions (https://www.dimensions.ai/) (We leverage PeerJ (ons.ai/) . We detahttps://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/), a well known research citation database, which checks to ensure that the journal satisfies certain criteria such that Web of Science acknowledges the journal as a scientific journal and not as a predatory publisher  of the journal, and final decisions on whether to reject, request a minor or major revision, or accept the paper are made by the editor(s). PeerJ is also included in the Web of Science database , we are unable to differentiate solicitation modality through the retrieved data.We were able to crawl PeerJ’s website for the articles that opted to make their review histories public, which resulted in a 62% yield of articles in the Each article consists of at least one revision and subsequent article version. The versions of the articles begin at 0.1—indicating the original submission and the first-round of peer review—and increments the version number by 0.1 with each following review round. For each revision version, we determined if a peer reviewer has “signed” his or her review. In addition to peer reviewers’ comments on the manuscript, we also extracted the editor’s comments and decisions as well as the article’s DOI . See Basic ReportingExperimental DesignValidity of the FindingsComments for the AuthorEach peer reviewer is asked to comment on the assigned article in the following aspects:All feedback for the authors are contained to these questions, with many of the miscellaneous and specific comments from peer reviewers being enumerated in the “Comments for the Author” section. Because the review audit trails follow the same structure in both PeerJ journals, we are able to scale and parse all available peer reviews, and scrape the peer review data directly from the PeerJ article HTML.PeerJ—Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences and 100 rebuttals in PeerJ Computer Science.We downloaded the authors’ rebuttals or response letters addressing peer reviewers’ comments, which were mostly in docx format, from an article’s HTML page, and extracted the raw text using Python’s docx library. We excluded all rebuttals that were not provided in docx format for the sake of scalable processing. Because the first version of the article is the initial submission, version 0.1 will not have a rebuttal. In total, we found 6,149 rebuttals associated with the articles included in this study, with 6,049 rebuttals in https://github.com/mstamy2/PyPDF2) for text extraction. Reading the raw text from the PDFs was not as clean as we had hoped, due to variance in encoding and metadata that is included with different PDFs. In future work, we hope to first convert these PDFs into Word documents for cleaner text extraction.We also wanted to track how the papers evolved through revision iterations between the authors and the peer reviews. PeerJ’s open review history provides the updated article that the authors submit for the next round of peer reviews, and this enabled us to download each iteration of the paper, including the original submission and the final submission to be published. These submission versions are uploaded as PDFs, so we used the Python library PyPDF2 . In order to find these differences, we counted the individual occurrences of words for each article version. This approach then allowed us to find the words that are added or removed from version to version. We do note here that we lost the ordering of the words, but as we leveraged Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, which turns a document into a bag of words, the ordering did not impact our results i.e. present in the word count dictionary of the current revision but not the previous revision), and the second group being the words “removed” (i.e. not present in the word count dictionary of the current revision but present in the prevision version). In this paper, we focus only on the words in the first revision that were “added”to the original manuscript.Once we obtained all submission versions for a particular article, we found the differences in text between contiguous submission versions only , to calculate metrics for the contribution potential of papers in our dataset.We collected article metrics using Dimensions, which is a service that provides organized scholarly information . Dimensipeer review contentnumber of review iterationspeer review editor decisionmanuscript modifications made in each review iterationWe study the impact the peer reviewing process has on a published article’s contribution potential, as defined in Definition 1, by examining four attributes from the publishing process:We also summarize the variables used in our analysis in We focus on the sentiment of review content. We leverage PeerJ’s single blind review process and the optional post-publication ability for reviewers to “sign” their reviews to compare the sentiment of peer review feedback from reviewers who opt to “sign” their reviews and from those who choose to remain anonymous.Each submitted manuscript goes through at least one round of revision with all of the peer reviewers, if not more, prior to publication. As the revision process between the paper’s authors and the peer reviewers is intended to help check and improve the reporting quality and completeness of the final publication, we investigate whether the number of review rounds affects the paper’s eventual contribution potential.After all peer reviewers have submitted their feedback for a particular revision iteration, the PeerJ editor makes a final decision on whether to reject, request minor or major revisions, or accept the paper for publication. This decision is made by the editor after taking the peer reviewer’s feedback into consideration, and assessing the collective opinion on the paper’s quality. We note that all of the papers in our dataset have been eventually “accepted”, as the “rejected” papers are not published.However, external factors may play a role in the editor’s final decision. Since PeerJ uses a single blind review process, the authors’ genders (inferred by name), academic prestige or prior experience may potentially influence the verdict. For example, manuscripts written by prestigious authors may be accepted with fewer revisions, while manuscripts written by emerging authors may elicit more requests for revisions.If the editor has requested a minor or major revision, authors are given the opportunity to incorporate the peer reviewers’ feedback into their work and submit a new iteration of their manuscript. Some of these changes may be to simply rectify grammar while others change the implications of the paper. Identifying the specific changes made to the revised submissions enables us to understand how the paper content evolves with peer reviewer input.https://genderize.io/) to predict the author gender based on the author’s first name. Genderize.io has been used in prior research and commercial settings to estimate gender (1The authors of this paper recognize that the gender is not binary. Our representation of the gender information does not reflect our attitude towards any gender.We study if author gender or reputation impacts the editor’s decision to request a revision (minor or major) or accept the paper. We use Genderize.io . TextBlob returns a polarity score within the range , where negative values mean negative sentiment and positive values correspond to positive sentiment.We also infer reviewers’ perception and attitude towards the assigned manuscript through the polarity of their review. The authors’ response to the peer reviewers’ feedback might also affect the reviewers’ view of the paper. Therefore, we use the polarity of the authors’ rebuttal as a control variable. To estimate the polarity of a given text, we use TextBlob  and β is the parameter of interest. zi are the vectors for the polarity control variable discussed above. For a robustness check, we estimate β with different xi vectors, changing variables for gender information or h-index values.The editor requests that the authors submit a revised version of their publication in order to ensure that the discrepancies found by the peer reviewers and the editor are addressed appropriately. The peer reviewers and the editor have a responsibility to verify that all published papers satisfy the journal’s publication criteria, and reject those that do not meet this expectation. The revision process enables the authors and the peer reviewers to have a dialogue on how to improve the submitted paper so that it meets these requirements.We use a linear mixed model to determine if the number of revisions is correlated with the number of citations. We show that the number of revisions is not correlated with the paper’s contribution potential, but we note here that as we were unable to obtain a dataset that includes the revision history of rejected papers, our conclusions only hold true for accepted and published manuscripts. The relationship between independent variables and citation number can vary significantly based on an article’s research area, and we use a mixed linear effect model to account for this potential heterogeneity. Although random effects may differ by field, the fixed effect is common for all research areas.We control for confounding variables that might affect the citation number. We specifically control for the research area, length of time since publication, number of authors and authors’ h-index. The citation count of a particular publication may depend on the publication’s field, and we control for this heterogeneity as the random intercept for each research area. We expect the number of citations a publication receives to increase over time and control for this by finding the number of months that have elapsed since publication. To control for this, we use the variable Year-month, which is a linear trend variable to control for differences in citation counts depending on when the paper was published. We control for the number of authors on a paper, as more contributing authors can increase the exposure and, consequently, citation count of a paper. We also use the h-index of the authors to control for the impact that an author’s visibility in the field might have on citation count.Sentiment analysis of peer reviewers’ feedback allows us to study (1) if author h-index affects the sentiment of the reviews, and (2) if there is a difference in sentiment between reviewers who choose to “sign” their reviews and those who choose to remain anonymous. We again use TextBlob to calculate the polarity and subjectivity of the reviews for each reviewer. While the polarity is mapped onto  to reflect polarity sentiment, the returned subjectivity value ranges from , with a higher value corresponding to higher subjectivity. We also use the authors’ inferred genders and h-indexes in our model. We leverage the cross term of the female author ratio and if the reviewer chose to remain anonymous to study whether the relationship between the authors’ gender and the reviewer’s sentiment differs depending on whether or not the reviewer “signs” the review.To test our hypothesis, we use a mixed linear regression model, which enables us to estimate the fixed effects across all reviews. Sentiment towards the submitted manuscript can depend on the article content and on the peer reviewer. By using the mixed linear effects model, we can take this into account and decompose the coefficient of the independent variables into fixed and random effects. In this analysis, the fixed effect can be interpreted as the general tendency across reviews for all reviews.During the review process, authors are able to revise their manuscripts and incorporate the peer reviewers’ feedback and suggestions into the next iteration of their paper. Some authors even self-identify areas in their papers to improve upon and make corresponding changes for the next revision submission. This modification process is integral to the review process as it enables constructive discussion and improvement upon papers prior to publication.corpus of documents . To mitigate the impact of specific research topics or terminology in our topic modeling work, we also removed the words that appear in less than fifty documents .We aim to understand what kinds of changes are made when authors revise their manuscripts. In order to do so, we conduct topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on the words that were added in a new revision of the manuscript. LDA is a statistical tool that identifies latent topics in a given ocuments . In thisIn this section, we present the results of our analyses to answer the research questions proposed in the Introduction. We first discuss the results of our regression model to predict the acceptance timeline of a paper based on attributes of the first revision (including reviewer response) and the submitted manuscript’s contribution potential. We then study the reviewers’ comments. More specifically, we aim to understand which author or reviewer characteristics are associated with peer review sentiment. Finally, we focus on the modifications authors make to their manuscripts during the peer review process, classifying the words added to the manuscript during the first-round of revisions.In this analysis, we focus on the revision decision during the first review iteration. We use five different models reflecting different variable permutations, the results of which are represented by the five columns in In all models, we observed that the h-index of the authors decreases the probability of receiving a request for additional revision(s). This finding indicates that authors with higher h-indexes may be able to produce papers that are closer to publication quality, possibly due to more experience in publication. We also observed that gender does not affect the revision decision process. These results do not quantitatively change across all of the models in e.g., papers in our dataset that were published from October 28, 2018 through October 28, 2019) in We also conducted analysis to test the possible biases in the inclusion of an author’s h-index. As discussed in the Methods section, we use the authors’ “current” h-index. Therefore, our h-index data is a snapshot at the time of data collection  and not the h-index at the time of each paper’s submission. We acknowledge this limitation of our study, as the h-index history for each individual author is not attainable from any open data source that we are aware of. To estimate the possible effects of any temporal gap, we ran the logit-regression model with the data that was published within one year after the h-index was retrieved  generated the same findings as TextBlob (see results in “Prediction of a Paper’s Acceptance Timeline”), further validating the implications of our findings.Table A63Decided by the perplexity and coherence scores described in  and train the model on the documents from PeerJ—Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences4These documents are the added words as described in “Manuscript Modifications”. . e.g. study, analysis, view). We color the words related to a paper’s evidence with green . For example, when data is added to the updated manuscripts, the authors might add additional evidence or description to their analysis. The orange words represent words that indicate a change in perspective . Because we only train our model on the words that have been added in the first revision, we interpret the words in orange as words authors use to change the implications in their papers. For example, the word “may” can change the insinuations of arguments in the authors’ original submission. We leave research topic related words in black.In our LDA model, we set the number of topics to 13Namely, the results of our study suggest that the peer review process does indeed ensure that manuscripts that are eventually accepted meet a certain publication quality threshold, as there was no correlation between contribution potential and the number of review rounds a manuscript goes through. While we do find that some external factors, such as the authors’ h-indexes, are associated with the editor’s final decision of whether to request an additional revision or accept the paper, author gender and author h-index do not impact the reviewer’s feedback sentiments. Finally, we find that the social pressures from a reviewer revealing their identity influences the sentiment polarity of that reviewer’s feedback.5As our dataset does not include rejected papers, we are unable to observe the review history for a manuscript that is rejected. Thus editors, in our dataset, are part of the review process that eventually leads to the manuscript being accepted and published.. We evaluated factors related to the manuscript itself and external social factors that may impact the editor’s verdict. As This study first investigated how the revision process influences a manuscript’s acceptance timeline and contribution potential. In our dataset, the editor is tasked with considering the peer reviewers’ opinions and his or her own beliefs when deciding whether or not to ask the authors for an additional revision of the manuscript or to accept it to be publishedOur paper contributes to the current literature by deconstructing and scrutinizing the peer-review process itself. We studied the role of external factors such as gender in the context of the peer-review process . While tPeer review is an integral part of the publication process that allows peers to review and discuss improvements to a paper in order to prepare it for publication in a journal. We focus on the peer reviewers’ feedback and the subsequent discussion between the authors and peer reviewers through the rebuttals, manuscript revisions and follow up feedback.We approach the analysis of the peer reviewing process with an emphasis on the content of the individual reviews and implications of the manuscript modifications. Given that our dataset does not contain the review histories of any rejected papers, the main function of the reviewers in our dataset is to correspond with the authors to improve the authors’ paper to the point where the manuscript can be accepted for publication. Although revision decisions and sentiment of the peer reviewers’ feedback may vary, our study implies that the process of peer-reviewing plays a role in ensuring a accepted and published paper meets a certain baseline of quality and contribution potential.There are still many questions that we were unable to address within this study. Our analysis is limited by the lack of review audit history from papers that were either rejected or eventually rejected by the editor. This missing dataset is critical to the robustness of our analysis, and we hope that, in future extensions of this paper, we are able to obtain this additional data. Another limitation of our study is the breadth of research areas that the manuscripts in our dataset covers, as our publications are currently only from natural science and computer science journals and are all published in PeerJ journals. In addition, our taxonomy study of manuscript modification only describes the categories that certain words are generally associated with. However, in our current study, we were unable to measure how exactly added words changed a specific paper’s implications during the revision process. For example, we found that words such as “however” and “may” were added during a revision. While we categorized these as words that are generally associated with a change in implication or perspective, it is not explicitly clear whether such words weakened or changed the statements that an author argued in a specific manuscript.In the future, we hope to incorporate review audit histories from other research areas (such as the humanities) and from other publishers. Finally, our study focuses only on the additions authors make to their manuscripts during the first round of revision, and we plan to expand this to encapsulate both the content removed in a revised manuscript and subsequent revisions made in the entire review history.We utilize the perplexity and coherence scores to determine an appropriate number of topics for LDA to use as a hyperparameter. While the perplexity is one of the most popular metrics for selecting the number of topics 10.7717/peerj.11999/supp-1Supplemental Information 1Click here for additional data file.