Academical and not-for-profit research funders are increasingly requiring that the research they fund must be published open access, with some insisting on publishing with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to allow the broadest possible use. We aimed to clarify the open access variants provided by leading medical journals and record the availability of the CC BY licence for commercially funded research.We identified medical journals with a 2015 impact factor of ≥15.0 on 24 May 2017, then excluded from the analysis journals that only publish review articles. Between 29 June 2017 and 26 July 2017, we collected information about each journal’s open access policies from their websites and/or by email contact. We contacted the journals by email again between 6 December 2017 and 2 January 2018 to confirm our findings.Thirty-five medical journals publishing original research from 13 publishers were included in the analysis. All 35 journals offered some form of open access allowing articles to be free-to-read, either immediately on publication or after a delay of up to 12 months. Of these journals, 21 (60%) provided immediate open access with a CC BY licence under certain circumstances . Of these 21, 20 only offered a CC BY licence to authors funded by non-commercial organisations and one offered this option to any funder who required it.Most leading medical journals do not offer to authors reporting commercially funded research an open access licence that allows unrestricted sharing and adaptation of the published material. The journals’ policies are therefore not aligned with open access declarations and guidelines. Commercial research funders lag behind academical funders in the development of mandatory open access policies, and it is time for them to work with publishers to advance the dissemination of the research they fund. This manuscript includes a cross-sectional analysis of open access policies of medical journals with a high impact factor, including society-owned journals, from multiple publishers.The open access policies of all journals analysed were clarified, and confirmation of our findings was received by email from 97% of the contacted journals.Open access policies of the journals and publishers analysed are subject to change, so the information presented here may change in the future.By selecting journals with a high impact factor, our analysis does not include prestigious journals from specialised therapy areas and regional or non-English language journals, which may have lower impact factors.Science, Nature) could be considered as interdisciplinary journals rather than exclusively medical journals.Some of the journals included in our analysis  to ‘free-to-read and reuse’ . The Budapest Open Access Initiative,10.1136/bmjopen-2018-028655.supp1Supplementary file 1When a journal offers open access, it has wide scope in the choice of policy or policies it will apply, using one of the Creative Commons licences that allow reuse under specific terms, or offering free-to-read access without a licence.At prominent journals, open access with a Creative Commons licence is typically facilitated by an article processing charge. Following payment by the research author, institution or funder, articles are usually made available on the journal’s website at the time of publication in the publisher’s typeset format (Version of Record). Open access articles that do not include a Creative Commons licence at the time of publication typically involve an embargo period before the published articles are freely accessible and may allow access only to the accepted manuscript , which is made available on the author’s institutional website, PubMed Central or Europe PubMed Central without a requirement for payment. It is noteworthy that the accepted version of a manuscript as well as the Version of Record are sometimes required to bear a Creative Commons licence, often including the -NC and/or -ND clause.There has been an increasing trend towards open access publishing over the last 20 years, and almost 50% of articles were published open access in 2015.We set out to clarify the open access variants provided by leading medical journals for research in general, and commercially funded research in particular, and establish the availability of the CC BY licence for commercially funded research.Using Journal Selector , we identified medical journals with a 2015 impact factor of at least 15.0 (accurate on 24 May 2017). To focus on journals publishing original medical research, we excluded journals that only publish review articles. We collected information on the open access variants provided by the included journals from their websites and by email contact when information was missing or unclear, making up to three attempts between 29 June 2017 and 26 July 2017.For immediate open access, whether a CC BY licence or other Creative Commons licence was provided.For delayed open access, the length of embargo period for open access.For both immediate and delayed open access, which version of the article would be available (published Version of Record or accepted).For each journal, we recorded the following information:The requirements for obtaining a CC BY licence .Article processing charges.For journals that provided a CC BY licence, we additionally collected information on:Between 6 December 2017 and 2 January 2018, we emailed the journals’ editorial offices requesting confirmation of our findings. Once open access variants were recorded, we categorised the most open variant provided by each included journal using our own classification, as shown in https://doaj.org/search) on 21 February 2019.To gather general information on open access licences and charges available from a larger selection of medical journals, we carried out a search on the DOAJ website  of the 15 journals with an impact factor between 15.0 and 19.9, and 3 (30%) of the 10 journals with an impact factor over 30.0 .All 14 journals, from six publishers, that did not provide open access with a Creative Commons licence provided access to different versions of the article either immediately, after a 6 month embargo period or after a 12 month embargo period under different circumstances .Science and Science Translational Medicine, were not available from their websites because the details were only provided when the article was accepted.Of the 21 journals that offered a CC BY licence, 19 (90%) disclosed article processing charges on their websites. Across these journals, charges ranged from US$3000 to US$5000; the most common article processing charge was US$5000 (in 13 (62%) of journals; The BMJ offered it to any organisation who required it, regardless of the nature of the funding source.Of 713 medical journals indexed in the DOAJ database on 21 February 2019: 689 (96.6%) supported publishing with a Creative Commons licence and 24 (3.4%) supported publishing with the publisher’s own licence; 227 (31.8%) journals charged article processing charges for open access and 257 (36.0%) journals listed CC BY as their most restrictive licence regardless of whether there was an associated article processing charge. Of the 257 journals that allowed open access publishing with a CC BY licence, 108 (42.0%) charged an article processing charge for the opportunity and two (0.8%) did not have available information on publication charges.The BMJ) allowed authors to obtain a CC BY licence when the work was supported by funders who required its use. Therefore, if commercial organisations, such as pharmaceutical companies had a policy that required open access with a CC BY licence, The BMJ would currently be the only compliant medical journal with an impact factor greater than 15.0. At the time of our analysis, no commercial research funder required open access with a CC BY licence. However, the company at which the analysis was performed, Oxford PharmaGenesis, has since updated its publication policy to require open access with a CC BY licence for the research it funds.Here, we present a cross-sectional analysis of open access policies of medical journals with a high impact factor, including society-owned journals, from multiple publishers. We met our objective to clarify the open access policies of all journals analysed and received confirmation of our findings by email from 97% of the contacted journals. We found that all leading medical journals in this study provided some form of open access, but there was little consistency across their policies. Over half of the included journals provided a CC BY licence; however, with the exception of one journal, this option was available only to authors funded by non-commercial organisations. One journal  can be considered interdisciplinary journals rather than exclusively medical journals. Although our study covers only a small number of journals, extending such a manual analysis to a greater number of journals without loss of detail and verification of all results would take more time and increase the scope of the study. If more extensive mining of journal metadata becomes feasible, this study could be more easily repeated for a bigger cohort of journals. To gather general information on open access licences and charges available from a larger selection of medical journals, we carried out a search on the DOAJ website on 21 February 2019. Unlike our manual analysis of medical journals with a high impact factor, the search of medical journals indexed in the DOAJ included only those that met the DOAJ criteria to be considered an open access journal. Therefore, it is not surprising that the proportion of journals that provided open access with a Creative Commons licence in our manual analysis (60.0%) was lower than that found in the DOAJ search (96.6%). To our surprise, the proportion of journals that provided open access with a CC BY licence was higher for the journals in our manual analysis (60.0%) than for the journals identified in the DOAJ search (36.0%). However, the DOAJ currently only lists one licence for each journal and asks publishers to choose the most restrictive licence, so there is a possibility that the CC BY licence is available from a greater proportion of medical journals indexed in the DOAJ. In our manual analysis, all included medical journals that provided open access with a CC BY licence required payment of an article processing charge, but less than half of the medical journals in the DOAJ charge for a CC BY licence. This finding suggests that medical journals with a high impact factor charge more for publishing open access with a CC BY licence than the average medical open access journal. Information on whether the availability of the CC BY licence is dependent on the funding source could not be easily found using the DOAJ search.Limitations of this study are that we investigated journals listed in the Journal Selector database with an impact factor of at least 15.0, and that, because impact factors and the open access policies of journals and publishers are subject to change, the information may change in the future. The validity of the impact factor metric is contentious, and its use in this analysis may have led to exclusion of prestigious journals from specialised therapy areas and regional or non-English language journals that have impact factors under 15.0. Furthermore, some of the journals included in our analysis  guidelines state that authors should take responsibility for the way research findings are published.Our research shows that one-third of the journals with a high impact factor do not offer immediate access to the published version of a manuscript on publication, even though the open access policies of many funders with respect to embargo periods echo the recommendations set out by open access declarations worldwide.American Family Physician was US$4400.Policies vary between publishers but also across journals at the same publisher, and this is also the case for journals not included in this analysis, as shown, for example, by Taylor & Francis in their table of the policies of all their journals.et alThe BMJ and The Lancet, owned by Elsevier, disclosed the information requested. The editors of the US journals Archives of Internal Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine did not provide the data. For The BMJ, reprint revenues constituted 3% of its overall income; The Lancet obtained 41% of its revenue from reprints.The Lancet, commercially funded publications constituted a large proportion of highly reprinted articles (63/88) compared with a sample of control articles from the same journal (23/88).Research by Lundh Science and Science Translational Medicine, both published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, do not disclose article processing charges on their websitesTwo of the journals included in our analysis, We found that the open access policies of some journals precluded commercially funded research from being published open access, even after an embargo period and without a Creative Commons licence. Further analyses could therefore be undertaken to clarify the proportion of journals with this policy and the rationale behind this position. Future research could also focus on a larger cohort of journals than the current study, or on journals from a specific therapy area, to clarify further the use of open access variants in the medical publications landscape. Future work could also involve collecting information on whether medical journals with a high impact factor allow commercial funders to use preprints or registered reports, which speed up research dissemination and remove publication bias, respectively. For example, it would be interesting to see whether journals that do not provide immediate open access options to commercial funders allow research manuscripts to be posted as preprints, and therefore support immediate dissemination of the results, although in a manuscript that has not yet been peer reviewed.The CC BY licence is recommended by open access declarations and funders of research as the optimal open access licence. Our analysis shows that although medical journals with a high impact factor provide some form of open access, they restrict commercially funded research from being published with the CC BY licence, meaning that the research output cannot be reused or built on if it is published in journals with a high impact factor without payment of additional fees. These restrictions hamper the further development and implementation of the approximately half of all medical research that is funded by commercial research funders.Open access publishing facilitates faster and more thorough disclosure of research, removes barriers for groups conducting systematic reviews, increases both the citation counts and altmetric scores of publications and benefits patient health by improving informed decision-making by doctors and patients.


We’ve Come a Long Way, BabyTitle song of the 1979 album of the same name by American country-music composer and singer Loretta LynnMolecules’ 20,000th paper. For this we invite the submission of high quality reviews and articles on any of the subjects covered in Molecules’ eighteen topical sections.On behalf of my Section Editor-in-Chief co-author colleagues I am pleased to announce a Special Issue to commemorate the recent publication of Molecules Editorial, the words nevertheless seem most appropriate to define the journal’s trajectory since volume 1 was published in 1996, to the occasion we now aim to celebrate with the Special Issue being announced herein. Between Chattopadhyay et al.’s Synthesis of the Demospongic Compounds, -Octa-decadienoic Acid and -Eicosadienoic Acid [Molecules and its publisher MDPI AG have indeed come a very long way in a very short time [While a country-western song title may seem out of place in a oic Acid , Moleculort time  and muchMolecules is now one of the preeminent Open Access journals in the field of chemistry, with a 2018 Journal Citation Report® Impact Factor of 3.060 and a 5-Year Impact Factor of 3.380 (2018) [Molecules now has 213 sibling journals. 0 (2018) . It rankMolecules. As for the mechanics of this Special Issue, we anticipate a 90-day submission period, following the normal submission process, during which the Section Editors and I will be selecting the manuscripts that move on to standard anonymous peer review. To encourage publication of high quality papers, and submissions on underrepresented topics or from underserved regions, each Section Editor will have access to a certain number of page charge waivers, to be used at their discretion. In summary, we would like to invite all chemists and scientists working in related areas to submit their best work to this Special Issue, as well as to


We published our 1000th paper. This success belongs to our community of neuroscientists. Since launching eNeuro is a society journal with society values: quality of science, consideration for authors first, run by active research scientists, transparency, fairness, and no financial interest. But holding such values does not guarantee that the journal will be chosen by fellow scientists. eNeuro was.It is always difficult to launch a new journal as its success depends upon the trust scientists have in the journal. Of course, eNeuro has a large impact in the community. Feedback from authors and reviewers tells us they are very happy with the way we are handling manuscripts and how we reach a consensus decision in review to present to authors.The number of submissions is still on the rise. The number of accesses to published articles is increasing exponentially, demonstrating that the science published in eNeuro among the forefront of journals seeking to change how science is published. In the coming months, more innovations will be announced. My goal remains the same as it was at launch, that is to make eNeuro the flagship of online-only, open access neuroscience journals. We are getting there. So, to all, thank you. A thousand times.Over the years, we have introduced many innovations, placing


Open Biology moves forward to meet new challenges in the ever-changing world of scientific publishing. Hopefully, we manage to keep the best of the old while keeping abreast of the new.A new year is with us again and Open Biology articles received their highest usage to date with over 1.1 million downloads.We are still managing to turn papers around with some speed. In 2018, the average time from submission to first decision was 30 days, and then it took an average of 25 days to get from the final decision to online publication. Why use a preprint server? Although we are equally happy if you do and are happy to sign articles from the popular servers, we hope that all of this makes our authors happy. Our readers are! In 2018, In the past few years, we have encouraged the submission of review articles from leaders in their fields. The response has been tremendous, and our review articles have become one of the hallmarks of the journal. We particularly encourage review articles that generate innovative and testable ideas and constructive discussions and/or critiques of their fields. In 2018, 62 invited reviews were submitted and 48 have already been published—almost double the 25 from 2017. The rest will follow shortly and be enhanced by the articles that are in the pipeline. We see this as an important role for the journal in providing a forum that stimulates the circulation and discussion of up-to-date results in developing fields in the widest possible way.Open Biology article features an ‘Altmetric donut’ in the Details tab. Some of the highest Altmetric scores include a perspective article on predicting virus emergence [The journal is partnered with Altmetric which tracks the number of times articles are mentioned in the news, on blogs and in social media. Each mergence , a reseamergence , a reviemergence  and devemergence .It is not only our review articles that are catching attention. Notably, two articles also on rapamycin in fission yeast from the groups of Mitsuhiro Yanagida  and JannThere are some new developments in the journal in the past year that I must report. One of these is to compile papers into special interest group collections. One dear to my own heart is a Special Collection on Centrosome Biology. We have an open call for papers for this special collection of articles focused on the biology of the centrosome. By pulling our papers together, not only in monthly issues but also in topic groups, we aim to highlight exciting work in particular fields and in this example, improve knowledge on centrosome function, evolution and abnormalities. We aim to publish the centrosome full collection later in the Summer 2019.In a similar vein, in February 2019, we will publish a mini collection of reviews in collaboration with neuroscientists based at the National Academy of Taiwan, Academia Sinica. The Academy celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2018, and this is also the 10th anniversary of their Neuroscience Program. We are delighted to put together this collection of articles to commemorate these anniversaries.Open Biology has partnered with BioStudies, a database of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) that collects all the data about a study in one place. Since the pilot in September 2017, 20% of authors have made their data accessible through a data package. It is in the year 2018 we introduced a reproducibility checklist for authors to complete during the submission process which will help to encourage transparency and reproducibility of data and experiments. The form is available alongside the manuscript.We are actively exploring numerous ways to distribute data and methods. We also have a new author feedback tool from Publons. This is a new feature which allows out authors to rate the quality of the feedback that they receive from reviews and also give them the opportunity to recognize those peer reviewers who have made an exceptional effort to improve the quality of their work. We recommend researchers to sign up to Publons keep a validated track-record of contributions across all journals they contribute to.Royal Society Publishing is now on WeChat and we encourage any academics based in China to follow us and engage with our content using our QR code. Our marketing team will regularly post videos, articles and news from the whole of our portfolio of journals in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. If you use WeChat, please do let us know what you think about our account.your support to Open Biology and the other journals of the society to reach this objective. I am grateful for so much support; from my fellow editors Christine Holt, Marek Mlodzik and Peter Parham; from our hard-working international editorial board; and for all the referees who have helped us in the past year. Above all my thanks go to Buchi Okereafor at Royal Society Publishing for her constant attention to the journal and to me and to my review article secretary, Kseniya Tyshkevych, for her endless patience and her tireless contributions.The Royal Society regards publishing as one of its important objectives in order to make our findings as scientists as widely available as possible. We ask for Open Biology in 2019 and wish you and all our readers a prosperous new year with lots of exciting new discoveries.We hope to see your article submitted to


This article presents the frequency of distribution of editorial members of Dove Medical press, across the world based on their official stated affiliations. Uneven distributions across the six continents were observed and this was confirmed by the Chi-square test of goodness of fit. Further research can focus on data on the gender composition, distribution of the affiliations of the first or corresponding authors of the respective journals, citation and editorial board composition based on the abstraction and indexation of the journals. Specifications tableValue of the data•The dataset can be helpful in bibliometric and research evaluation analysis.•The data analysis can be extended to obtain the editorial board composition based on the journal indexing such as Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science and so on.•The dataset can provide insight to the theoretical and observed expectation of the editorial board composition using the Chi-square test of goodness of fit.•The data can be helpful in efficient smart campus and journal management.•The data analysis can be extended to include the gender composition and distribution of the affiliations of the corresponding or first authors of the journals.•Other known statistical tools may be applied to the dataset for more exploration.1The dataset contained in this article are the official stated affiliations of the members of the editorial boards of 109 journals published by the Dove medical press. The editorial board membership of each journal comprises of the editor in chief, associate editors, statistical editor (if applicable) and the other members of the editorial board. The affiliations are grouped according to the six continents. The continents are denoted as follows: North America (NAM), Europe (EURO), Asia (ASIA), South America (SAM), Australia (AUST) and Africa (AFR). The raw dataset can be assessed as 1.1RemarksAs of this writing, Dove Medical press has a total of 2120 editorial board members for 109 journals. The dataset is moderately positively skewed with a coefficient of skewness of 1.317 . On the average, any randomly selected journals would have approximately The description statistics was obtained for the total editorial board composition of the 109 journals. This is shown in 1.2a, b, c, d, e and f.RemarksThe percentage of the total sum across the continents is as follows: North America (54%), Europe (26.5%), Asia (13%), South America (1.65%), Australia (2.78%) and Africa (1.56%).Descriptive statistics of the respective six continents are done to explore the patterns of distribution that is only summarized in Fig. 12The data were manually extracted from the publisher׳s websites and analyzed using SPSS 20.0 and Microsoft Excel. The data were current as at the time of writing this article and a complete enumeration of the board members of Dove press. It was also observed that some researchers are board members in more than one journal and that necessitated that the reason why each journal was treated individually from the web page related to it. The board members are classified according to six continents. Journals that are no longer accepting papers for publications were not considered. The design adopted for data collection is because of the importance of the editorial board members in journal management, which includes; paper submission, appointment or recruitment of reviewers, decisions on submissions made by authors, quality assurance, indexation and abstraction, disciplinary roles in cases of scholarly misconduct and so on.Similar works can be considered, see RemarksThe distribution of the editorial board across the continents is highly uneven as evidenced by the p-values. The implications of this as regards to gender equality, acceptance and rejection rates of manuscripts and rate of publications are subject to further investigations.The data is characterized by an uneven editorial board distribution across the continents. This can be investigated by the use of Chi-square test of goodness of fit test. The assumption of no underlying probability was the reason of the use of Chi-square test of goodness of fit. This is summarized in


This difference suggests the existence of gender bias in neuroscience. Of course, there is a time lag between being a trainee and becoming a faculty member, but parity has existed for decades at the trainee level (50% of PhDs in Neuroscience have been earned by women in the US since 1990). Yet, this does not translate at the faculty level. I believe that this issue needs to be solved at the faculty recruitment stage. As a society journal, there is not much that we can really do, except continue to alert the community to this issue.Many studies, commentaries, blogs, etc. point at a gender bias in favor of males for award and acceptance of both grants and publications, respectively e.g., . AccordiHowever, scientific journals may take actions to help mitigate gender bias at the publication. If we consider the present 39% female/male ratio for faculty positions, unbiased representation means that there should be 39% females as corresponding/senior authors.Biaswatchneuro released their latest numbers for January to March 2018 for the Journal of Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and eNeuro. All journals are below the anticipated 39%, although the two non-profit society journals, Journal of Neuroscience and eNeuro, are doing better than the other two. Recent studies demonstrate a persistent underrepresentation of female authors in scientific journals , and it is not supposed to be perfect. It removes unconscious bias whenever possible (a win-win situation). Hence, in most instances, the reviewers do not know who the authors are, so their decision cannot be unconsciously biased by gender. Reviewers are forced to assess the science itself, without relying upon author gender, reputation, institution, or country of origin, etc. The only scientist who knows the gender of the authors is the reviewing editor. The board of reviewing editors at eNeuro is composed of roughly equal numbers of female and male scientists, reflecting the composition of the neuroscience workforce at the trainee level and representing an aspiration for a scientific workforce able to draw upon the creativity and intellectual effort of all scientists, regardless of gender. It is important to remember that the final decision of the reviewing editor is based on consensus reached during a consultation session with the reviewers who remained blind to the authors’ identity throughout the whole process.I can attempt to interpret why we have a balance between submission and acceptance that avoids gender bias. At My personal interpretation is that the double-blind review process minimizes gender bias during the evaluation of the paper. It avoids adding an additional layer of bias to the dissemination of research findings. Consequently, most, if not all, journals should adopt it.eNeuro is keen to address.It is possible that the double-blind review system solves, at the evaluation level, another important bias, that of early career versus established investigators, another area of potential disparity that


Perspectives on Medical Education preprint policy: PME encourages authors to deposit a preprint of their manuscript prior to submission for peer review on non-commercial servers such as bioRxiv, Open Science Framework Preprints, and SocARxiv. When submitting, authors must disclose in their cover letter that a version of the manuscript has been deposited as a preprint and include any associated DOIs or accession numbers. Upon publication in PME, authors are requested to update any preprint versions with a link to the final published article.A preprint is a complete version of a scientific manuscript that is uploaded to a preprint server by its authors prior to peer-review . Preprinearly discovery, access, and opportunities for feedback.Preprint proponents have highlighted their value in relation to In the biomedical sciences it takes on average 100 days from submission of a manuscript to acceptance . In compPerspectives on Medical Education, make this information available, not all journals openly share these dissemination data.Unlike most of the scholarly literature , preprinMost preprint servers are designed to enable the scientific community to comment and provide feedback on preprints. This capability provides authors with the chance to receive feedback early, when there is still opportunity for revision. In fields such as physics, providing feedback on preprints is a well-established procedure, which has been the field’s standard practice for over 20 years . AdditioDespite the above benefits, critics have raised concerns about preprints. For example, there is concern that readers, including scientists, journalists, and the lay public, will not recognize that a preprint has not been peer reviewed and possibly act on unexamined and potentially invalid evidence. For scientists this could lead to citing unvetted research thus compromising the integrity of the literature base. However, Lariviere and colleagues found that only between 0.2 to 6.6% of preprints deposited in arXiv, depending on specialty, were cited and that those numbers are declining . AnotherWhile increasingly common in the bio and clinical sciences—over 5000 manuscripts were deposited in the life science repository bioRxiv (pronounced ‘bio-archive’) last year alone —depositiIn January 2018, we completed a manuscript reporting survey results on questionable research practices in HPE. In our analysis, we discovered areas of concern for the HPE research community and thus wanted to communicate those concerns to the community quickly. As a research team, we explored the possibility of depositing our manuscript as a preprint.To begin, we emailed the editor-in-chief of the journal to which we planned to submit. In the email, we described our rationale and provided links to information about preprints and examples from bioRxiv. The editor discussed our request with his editorial team and shortly thereafter granted us permission to deposit our preprint. We then submitted the article to the journal and, in our submission cover letter, also noted our intention to deposit our article as a preprint.prior to submitting to their journal of choice. Our experience varies slightly due to the newness of preprints in HPE and our interactions with the journal’s editorial team). Following a basic screening process to check for plagiarism and dangerous or offensive content, our preprint was posted and assigned a unique digital object identifier (DOI) after approximately 48 h [Following the editor’s approval and our submission to the journal, we submitted our preprint to bioRxiv in the ‘scientific communication and education’ category. . Next, we were able to reference our preprint on a grant proposal to continue expanding our related program of research on the responsible conduct of research. Moreover, we got a ‘time stamp’ on our new findings, since bioRxiv provides a posting date and DOI, thus giving us the opportunity to ‘plant our flag in the ground’ on this important research topic. Finally, our preprint stimulated collaboration. Since posting to bioRxiv, we have heard from several HPE scientists interested in collaborating, and we have started a follow-on project exploring authorship practices.Recently, our article on questionable research practices in HPE was accepted by the peer-reviewed journal mentioned above, after a round of major revisions. Once the journal makes the published ahead of print version available online, a link will be included on our preprint’s web page, alerting readers and directing them to the updated, peer-reviewed version of the article.From our perspective, posting a preprint and submitting to a traditional journal gave us the best of both worlds: we gained valuable feedback from the reviewers and editors, and made important revisions through the peer-review process, and yet by posting a preprint we were able to take advantage of early discovery, access, and opportunities for feedback (from outside the community).Perspectives on Medical Education invites authors to deposit a preprint of their manuscript in a non-commercial preprint server prior to submission to the journal. (See below for PME’s preprint policy). As an initial foray into preprints, the journal has published its first article that was recently deposited as a preprint prior to submission to the journal [To facilitate early discovery, access, and feedback to research and scholarship,  journal . In the Written work prepared by employees of the Federal Government as part of their official duties is, under the US Copyright Act, a ‘work of the United States Government’ for which copyright protection under Title 17 of the United States Code is not available. As such, copyright does not extend to the contributions of employees of the Federal Government.The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.


Conducting a peer review for a journal may help emerging nursing scholars grow in their understanding of the publication process. Peer review, or the use of peers or experts to assist in judging the value of submitted work, is used—in common with other fields—in nursing to help decide which manuscripts are published in nursing journals and how they should be changed before publication  as this will ensure—for journals that are also registered with Publons—that your reviewing activity is recorded and does not go unrecognized . The problem of predatory journal has been addressed by one of us (RW) on several occasions  and that you make sure you are familiar enough with the content or methods to produce a quality review  . I was able to quickly identify the problem statement and I can understand how this problem is related to nursing. I had trouble understanding the variables involved in this study. Perhaps a better definition of (insert the variables) could be included in the opening paragraph. This could aid in understanding these concepts prior to reading the rest of the paper.The following is an example of how you might summarize your feedback to authors:3.2Was the literature review up‐to‐date and based mainly on primary sources?Did the authors provide state‐of‐the‐art synthesis of the literature? Alternatively, did the authors describe a few previous studies and forgo synthesis?Did the authors provide a strong rationale for the study?Did the authors highlight gaps in current understanding or conflicts in current knowledge?Did the authors define key concepts adequately?Was a conceptual/theoretical framework articulated? If not, is the absence justified?The authors of a manuscript should use the background or literature review to synthesize relevant literature and to describe why the study is needed. As a reviewer, it is your job to determine if the authors’ use of previous research is related to the study. Most of the time, the background should end with a research question . Consider summarizing the detail a little more concisely and connecting it to (insert topic). The gaps in current knowledge need to be more clear and the author needs to define key variables.The following is an example of how you might summarize your feedback to authors:3.3Did the authors use appropriate procedures used to safeguard the rights of study participants?Was the study externally reviewed and approved by an IRB/ethics review board?If the study involved an intervention with human participants, was it appropriately prospectively registered in accord with AllTrials principles or WHO requirements Noyes, ?Were the data collection points appropriate?Did the design minimize biases and threats to the validity of the study?Was the population described in adequate detail?Did the authors try to minimize sampling biases?Was the sample size based on a power analysis?Was there congruency between the operational and conceptual definitions?Did the authors use appropriate methods to measure key variables?Did the authors adequately described specific instruments, and were they good choices, given the study population and the variables being studied?Did the authors provide evidence that the data collection methods yielded data that were reliable and valid?Did the authors provide evidence that the staff who collected the data were adequately trained?The authors of a manuscript should use the design section to provide a clear statement of the design. Then, they should use the method section to describe the methods used to carry out the design, the psychometric properties of any questionnaires and, if the study is quantitative, a power analysis should be stated. The authors should also describe randomizing, blinding and control, or approaches to rigor in qualitative studies. As a reviewer, it is your job to determine if the authors’ analysis of the data includes enough detail for qualitative or quantitative analysis for the process to be clear to readers . Begin the review by summarize what the paper is about including the chief finding. Place the finding of the paper in the context of the existing literature. Indicate the significance of the work and if it is novel or mainly confirmatory. Indicate the work's strengths, its quality and completeness. Then state any significant flaws or weaknesses and note any special considerations. For instance, if previously held theories are being overlooked, give constructive feedback describing the way that they could improve the research. Keep the focus on the research, not the author. Remember to provide constructive criticism in order to help the authors improve, even if recommending rejection. This helps developing researchers improve their work . I was unable to find a much research on your topic, so I think this paper is worth pursuing. It is obvious to me that you have done lots of work on this paper. It is quite an undertaking to pull together all the necessary information for a research study. Below I have offered comments. I hope you find my comments helpful.For instance, you may start your peer review to the authors by saying:It is then very helpful if you can list your suggestions for change possible numbered or bullet‐pointed and as discretely as possible. This helps the editor and the author to see precisely what needs to be done, and it also helps the author to respond in an organized way as recommended by Williams .6vice versa, writing a glowing report on a manuscript and recommending rejection. Likewise, avoid writing a glowing report about an article to the author and then raising extreme doubts about the article with the editor and recommending rejection. Never be insulting to authors; try to maintain a scholarly tone in your reviews and convey any criticism, however serious, in polite terms. It is also bad reviewing practice to ask for copious amendments to a manuscript and then to decline to review the revisions. This makes life very hard for the editor and the authors. Finally, editors do not like to be asked, rudely, why they have sent someone a manuscript when it is clearly poor and having their judgement questioned. If you do not want to review a manuscript, then simply and politely decline to review it.Try to be consistent across all aspects of your review. Especially, ensure that your comments are congruent with your recommendation. For example, do not get into the habit of writing copious comments condemning a manuscript and then recommending revision or, 7After you submit your review to a journal, some journals may send you the comments made by other peer reviewers about the same manuscript you have reviewed. By comparing your comments with those of others, you could, indirectly, assess your own performance. Participating in the peer‐review process may help you learn to evaluate scientific evidence critically and enhance your professional development by improving research skills to improve the contribution to overall knowledge development.


We are pleased to report the continued increase of the Impact Factors of MDPI journals in 2009 see . Entropy, and in 2012, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health will be included for the first time. Nevertheless, we are already able to compute a preliminary impact factor of approximately 1.4 for Entropy [As noted in a similar Editorial published in June 2009, the Impact Factors of MDPI journals have been steadily recovering since the inception of the full Open Access publishing policy in early 2007 . We are


The productivity and performance of men is generally rated more highly than that of women in controlled experiments, suggesting conscious or unconscious gender biases in assessment. The degree to which editors and reviewers of scholarly journals exhibit gender biases that influence outcomes of the peer‐review process remains uncertain due to substantial variation among studies. We test whether gender predicts the outcomes of editorial and peer review for >23,000 research manuscripts submitted to six journals in ecology and evolution from 2010 to 2015. Papers with female and male first authors were equally likely to be sent for peer review. However, papers with female first authors obtained, on average, slightly worse peer‐review scores and were more likely to be rejected after peer review, though the difference varied among journals. These gender differences appear to be partly due to differences in authorial roles. Papers for the which the first author deferred corresponding authorship to a coauthor (which women do more often than men) obtained significantly worse peer‐review scores and were less likely to get positive editorial decisions. Gender differences in corresponding authorship explained some of the gender differences in peer‐review scores and positive editorial decisions. In contrast to these observations on submitted manuscripts, gender differences in peer‐review outcomes were observed in a survey of >12,000 published manuscripts; women reported similar rates of rejection  before eventual publication. After publication, papers with female authors were cited less often than those with male authors, though the differences are very small (~2%). Our data do not allow us to test hypotheses about mechanisms underlying the gender discrepancies we observed, but strongly support the conclusion that papers authored by women have lower acceptance rates and are less well cited than are papers authored by men in ecology. Peer reA wide diversity of research demonstrates that the productivity and performance of men is generally rated higher than that of women, even in controlled experiments  are thus highly variable in results and conclusions. There are a variety of possible explanations for this variation. Studies vary in their research subjects; for example, peer reviewers for academic journals and granting agencies are generally professional scientists, whereas the manipulative studies that detect gender effects on assessment scores often use students as the evaluators, possibly contributing to the differences observed between correlative and manipulative studies. Also, gender differences may be obscured in correlational studies by other biases (such as prestige bias) and by the wide variation in quality and significance of the documents being assessed. It is notable that, although few correlational studies detect statistically significant effects of gender on peer review, effect sizes are usually in the hypothesized direction (bias against women). Regardless of the reason why there is so little consistency of conclusions among studies, it leaves unresolved questions about the frequency and magnitude of gender differences in the outcomes of scholarly peer review.per paper differed between men and women in ecology, consistent with two earlier studies of the ecology literature that failed to find gender differences in citations  the outcomes of editorial and peer review or (b) the number of citations that papers obtain postpublication in journals of ecology. To test for relationships between author gender and outcomes of peer review, we examine two datasets. First, we test for relationships between author gender and editorial and peer‐review outcomes in a dataset that contains detailed information on authors and the peer‐review process experienced by >23,000 research manuscripts submitted to six journals in ecology and evolution between 2010 and 2015. Our dataset is large enough to have the statistical power necessary to detect small but meaningful gender differences in outcomes. Second, we survey authors of published manuscripts to obtain the submission histories of those manuscripts , including whether their papers had been rejected from at least one prior journal before being accepted at the journal that eventually published the paper. To test for relationships between author gender and citations, we analyze author and citation data extracted from Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) for all journal articles published between 2009 and 2015 in journals categorized in the domain of ecology.22.12.1.1ScholarOne Manuscripts. We included manuscripts submitted between 1 January 2010 and 30 June 2015 for Functional Ecology, J Animal Ecology, J Applied Ecology, J Ecology, and Methods in Ecology and Evolution , and between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2015 for Evolution. The dataset includes only standard research papers . We consider only the first submission of a manuscript; revisions and resubmissions were excluded (so that we do not double count papers). Data in ScholarOne are author‐entered and so author lists in the database are sometimes incomplete and often incorrectly ordered. We thus determined authorship order and corresponding authorship on papers from the cover page of the submitted manuscript. The dataset includes 23,713 manuscripts, 22,592 of which have more than one author, and 1,121 of which have a single author. A more detailed evaluation of the gender distribution of authorships in this dataset is presented in Fox, Ritchey, and Paine .Author gender was determined using the online database Throughout our analysis, we distinguish two stages of the editorial and peer‐review process. First, papers are screened by senior and/or Associate/Handling Editor editors before being sent for review; a large proportion of papers are declined at this stage  in the research domain of Ecology. Review and methods journals such as the  and Fox .Using the Qualtrics platform, we sent questionnaires to each corresponding author to request information about the publication history of their paper. The complete questionnaire is presented in Paine and Fox . ImportaIn total, 52,543 unique corresponding authors were surveyed. A total of 12,655 authors, 24.1% of those contacted, responded to our questionnaire. After removal of incomplete or unintelligible responses and invited papers, and journals to which fewer than 100 manuscripts were available, we have histories for 8,597 manuscripts from 81 journals.Author names were genderized using the same process as detailed above. We genderized 93.7% of first authors and 95.1% of last authors.2.1.3Trends in Ecology and Evolution and the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, as most papers in those journals are invited. We also excluded journals with fewer than 100 papers, and excluded review papers, commentaries, perspectives, editorials, brief communications, and other types of papers not considered typical full‐length research studies. This dataset includes 108,295 studies published in 142 journals.To test for the relationships between author gender and the number of citations obtained by manuscripts, we extracted metadata from Clarivate Analytics Web of Science for all manuscripts published from 2009 to 2015 in the ecology domain. We excluded review journals such as ClarivateAnalytics Journal Citation Reports. Because manuscripts are typically submitted to a journal one or two years before their eventual publication, we used journal impact factors for annual period that was two years prior to the publication year of the focal manuscript as our measure of journal rank at the time of manuscript submission. These impact factors are typically made public half‐way through the following year and thus would be the most recently available impact factors an author could consider when submitting their manuscript. Impact factors were log‐transformed to reduce heteroscedasticity.We used journal impact factors obtained from Author names were genderized using the same process detailed above. We genderized 93.7% of authors (93.7% of first authors and 95.2% of last authors).2.2For papers with more than one author, our analyses of author gender focus on the first, last, and corresponding author, rather than overall author gender ratio. This is because middle authors generally have less prominent roles in manuscript preparation and submission and, in our dataset, the corresponding author was either the first author or the last author for 95.1% of papers for which a corresponding author was identified. In the appendix, we present analyses for overall author gender ratio (the proportion women), analogous to those presented in the main text for first, last, and corresponding author gender; the main outcomes of those analyses are the same as those for first and last author, with minor differences only in the details. Few papers had a single author, comprising only 4.7% of the submitted papers dataset (6.4% of the questionnaire dataset and 5.8% of the WoS dataset); these papers are analyzed separately from multiauthored papers.Throughout our presentation, we identify the last author as the “senior author.” This is because ecologists tend to assume that the last author is the senior researcher  under whose guidance the research was executed Duffy, .2.2.1PositiveOutcome[yes/no] = Journal + Year + AuthorGender[female/male] + 2‐way interactions, with all independent variables as fixed effects . Review scores are not binomial, and vary substantially among journals and years, dependent on the journal rating scales and rating guidelines . We thus first standardized review scores (average score across reviews within each paper) to a mean of 0 and variance of 1.0 within each journal‐year combination. ReviewScore therefore has units of standard deviations and measures the deviation from the overall average review score of 0, with higher scores being better. We then tested for gender effects of peer‐review scores using analysis of variance (SAS Proc GLM), modeling ReviewScore = Journal + AuthorGender + Journal‐x‐AuthorGender interaction .Each manuscript represents a single data point that includes one first author, one senior author, one corresponding author, and one author gender ratio. Thus, all analyses are performed considering individual manuscripts as independent data points. To test for gender differences in editorial outcomes , we used logistic regression (SAS Proc Logistic) to model For presentation in figures, we calculated a female:male success ratio, which is the probability of a positive outcome when the author is female divided by the probability of a positive outcome when the author is male, for which a ratio of 1.0 indicates that there is no gender difference in manuscript outcomes. Means of this success ratio were calculated for each journal‐year combination, then averaged across years within journals. All standard errors for manuscript outcomes and the success ratio are calculated from the among‐year variance within journals  or from the among‐journal variance .Least‐squares means, where presented, are calculated using the LSMeans statement in either SAS Proc Logistic , or SAS Proc GLM.2.2.2AuthorGender. We allowed AuthorGender to interact with the logarithm of the journal impact factor (JIF), to assess whether gender bias varied with journal prominence. Journal was included as a random intercept, to account for variation in rejection rates among journals independent of JIF. Thus, the generalized mixed‐effect model had the form PositiveOutcome[yes/no] = AuthorGender * log(JIF) +  and was fit using the lme4 library in R 3.5.1. The effect of the gender of the first and last author on PositiveOutcome did not vary significantly with JIF (p ≥ 0.74). Therefore, we dropped these interactions from the models.To assess the effect of author gender on the probability of manuscript rejection across the 81 journals in the questionnaire dataset, we predicted the probability of a positive outcome as a binomial response given 2.2.3AuthorGender using a Poisson error distribution. We allowed AuthorGender to interact with the logarithm of the impact factor of the journal (JIF), to assess whether gender bias varied with journal prominence. The year of publication was included as a random intercept, to account for the nonlinear accumulation of citations through time. Thus, the generalized mixed‐effect model had the form NumberofCitations = AuthorGender * log(JIF) + (1|Year) and was fit using the lme4 library in R 3.5.1. For single‐authored papers, the effect of gender on NumberofCitations did not vary significantly with JIF (p = 0.099). Therefore, we dropped this interaction from the model.To assess the effect of author gender on the number of citations obtained by articles published in the 142 journals in the Web of Science dataset, we predicted the number of citations given 2.3The datasets analyzed here include personal identifiers. Thus, it was essential to maintain the confidentiality of all participants. The datasets provided online (Dryad) were thus anonymized to maintain the privacy of authors. CW Fox was the only person to have access to nonanonymized versions of the submitted papers dataset , and CET Paine was the only person with access to nonanonymized survey data. Human subject ethical approval for the questionnaire aspects of this study was obtained from the University of Stirling.33.13.1.1χ12 = 0.56, p = 0.45), obtained lower review scores when reviewed , or were less likely to be invited for revision  or revision +resubmission  if reviewed. Thus, cumulative throughout the entire process, we found no evidence that single‐authored papers submitted by women were less likely to have positive outcomes, whether we consider a positive outcomes as just being invited to submit a revision  or being invited for revision or resubmission .We found no evidence that single‐author papers submitted by women were less likely to be sent for peer review ; 56.7 ± 5.2% of papers authored by women were sent for peer review, and 55.6 ± 5.1% of papers authored by men were sent for peer review , a ratio of female:male success of 1.02.We found no evidence that gender of the corresponding author influenced the likelihood that a paper would be sent for peer review  or reject; they rarely offer the option to resubmit a rejected manuscript. The other journals commonly invite resubmission of manuscripts that are rejected (reject with resubmission invited). We thus perform two analogous sets of analyses. In the first, we treat a revision invitation as the only positive outcomes and treat all rejections (whether resubmission is invited or not) as a negative outcome. In the other, we consider rejections for which resubmission was invited to also be a positive outcome. These two sets of analyses are labeled as “Invited to revise” versus “Invited to revise or resubmit,” respectively, in Figures FE, J Anim and J Ecol, but can differ more substantially for the other three journals. Figure Once editors have reviews in hand, they must decide whether to invite revision or decline the manuscript. The six journals differ in the types of decisions they make. First authors—Of papers that were sent to review, papers with female first authors were slightly less likely to be invited for revision .Cumulative across the whole process (including both prereview and postreview rejections), papers with female first authors were slightly but significantly less likely to be invited for revision Figure a; papersSenior authors—In contrast to the significant differences in the success rate of papers with female versus male first authors, there was no overall significant gender difference in success rate of papers that were sent for review for papers with female versus male senior authors, regardless of whether we consider a positive outcome to include just a revision invitation . Cumulative through the entire process (considering both prereview and postreview rejects), there was no significant gender difference in success of senior authors when considering only revisions as a positive outcome  or being invited to either revise or resubmit following rejection  as positive outcomes. This gender difference in the probability that a manuscript has a positive outcome is at least partly explainable by peer‐review scores; after accounting for the gender difference in peer‐review scores , the gender difference in the probability of a positive outcome disappeared when positive outcomes included the invitation to revise or resubmit , but remained significant when positive outcomes included only the invitation to revise .χ12 = 10.5, p = 0.001), but 97% as likely to be invited revise or resubmit , relative to papers with male corresponding authors.Cumulative through the entire peer‐review process , submissions with female corresponding authors were only 90% as likely to be invited for revision  peer‐review scores. We thus ask whether this difference in peer‐review scores, which are known to be the major variable affecting editorial decisions after review  or both an invitation to revise or resubmit  as positive outcomes. Notably, the differences in success rates for papers female versus male first authors became nonsignificant when you consider resubmissions to be a positive outcome , but remained significant when only an invitation to revise was considered a positive outcome . The effect of senior author gender on manuscript outcomes remained nonsignificant after including peer review scores in the model whether we considered resubmission invitations to be a positive outcome  or not .When including peer‐review scores  in our statistical models testing for effects of gender on peer‐review outcomes. We find that papers with female first authors were just as likely to be sent for peer review  and obtained similar peer‐review scores if sent for review , but not if invitation to resubmit is considered also a positive outcome . Cumulative through the entire editorial process , papers with female first authors did not differ statistically in their probability of a positive outcome, regardless of whether we consider only an invitation to revise to be a positive outcome  or consider both an invitation to revise and an invitation to resubmit to be positive outcomes . The gender of the first and senior authors had no detectable effect on the probability of acceptance averaged across all journals . Of papers with just a single author, those with a female author were no more to be accepted than were papers with a male author, regardless of the impact factor of the journal .For papers with multiple authors, we tested whether the gender of the first or last author and journal prominence  predicted the probability of manuscript acceptance using generalized mixed‐effect models with binomial errors. The probability of a manuscript being accepted for publication from a journal is strongly negatively associated with the impact factor of the journal to which it was submitted . The pattern for senior author gender differed, in that papers with male last authors were better cited than papers with female last authors, but only at high JIF journals . For example, at a journal of JIF 10, papers with male senior authors gained 4.7% more citations than those with female senior authors, whereas at a journal with JIF of 0.1, papers with female senior authors obtained 7.4% more citations than those with male senior authors. Because the number of citations obtained by papers published by journals of JIF 0.1 versus JIF 10 varies by two orders of magnitude, this difference compounds to give male senior authors a dramatic advantage in the accumulation of citations. For papers with just a single author, those with a single female author received, on average, 84% as many citations as did papers with a single male , gender differences in the number of citations gained by papers with female and male first or single authors remained largely consistent; papers with male authors consistently obtained more citations than did papers with female authors Figure a,c. For 4Controlled experiments commonly find that the performance of women is scored more negatively than that of men when no actual difference exists. However, the extent to which such gender biases influence editors and peer reviewers remains uncertain. Despite a few high‐profile examples, most studies find no gender difference in the outcomes of peer review at academic journals, though there are some notable exceptions. In our study, we find that papers with female first authors are equally likely to be sent for peer review as are papers with male first authors, but they obtain slightly lower peer‐review scores and are less likely to have a positive outcome after peer review, though the magnitude of this gender difference varied among journals. The gender differences in both peer‐review scores and editorial decisions appear to be partly due to gender differences in authorial roles. Papers for the which the first author deferred corresponding authorship to a coauthor obtained (on average) substantially lower peer‐review scores and were less likely to have positive outcomes. Gender differences in corresponding authorship explained some of the gender differences in peer‐review scores and the frequency of positive editorial decisions. After publication, we also find that published papers with female first, last, or single authors are cited less often than those with male authors.4.1Our analyses uncover differences in editorial and peer‐review outcomes between papers authored by men and those authored by women. Though many of our individual analyses found no significant gender differences, the effects are consistently in the same direction: Papers with female authors obtain lower peer‐review scores and have lower probabilities of positive editorial decisions, than do papers with male authors. Effect sizes varied throughout stages of the process and across journals but, cumulative from submission through to the editorial decision, papers with female authors were, on average, 4 to 9% less likely . Though most studies conclude that men and women have equal success rates at journals, many of these studies observe trends toward papers with male authors being more likely to be accepted for publication  gender differences in peer‐review outcomes. This is because of the tremendous amount of background variation due to heterogeneity in manuscript quality and in editor and reviewer populations. The large sample size of the current study, >23,000 papers submitted to six journals, provides the statistical power necessary to detect gender differences in the range of 5%–10%. It is notable that the previous studies that have provided the most compelling evidence of gender differences in peer review are of similarly large scale. For example, of >23,000 papers submitted to Functional Ecology . Unfortunately, our data do not allow us to directly test for unconscious or conscious biases because we have no independent metrics of manuscript quality and significance. Explanations other than gender discrimination could contribute to the gender disparities observed here. For example, women defer submission of their manuscripts to collaborators more often than do men and might use different criteria for evaluating the journals to which they send their papers  These papers are being written, at least in part, by someone less familiar with (or less committed to) the research being described in the manuscript, such as a research mentor or a colleague more fluent in English; or (b) first authors are more willing to defer corresponding authorship when a paper is of lower significance and/or reports less robust research. Regardless of the explanation, this difference may be important for understanding gender differences in publishing success because women defer corresponding authorship more often than do men  of the publishing journal. Papers with female last authors are also less well cited in higher impact factor journals, though the reverse is true in low impact factor journals , with the cumulative effect being that papers with female authors receive fewer citations than papers with male authors. This observation contrasts with a number of previous studies of the ecology literature, which found that citation rates did not differ between men and women  less likely to be invited for revision or resubmission (Table The authors have no conflict of interest.Evolution and the five journals of British Ecological Society. CETP collected and analyzed the data for the author survey and manuscript citations. Both CWF and CETP wrote the manuscript.CWF collected and analyzed the data for the sections of the manuscript examining papers submitted to


From July 2021 eLife will only review manuscripts already published as preprints, and will focus its editorial process on producing public reviews to be posted alongside the preprints. The growing popularity of preprints has enabled researchers to make their papers freely and immediately available to anyone with an internet connection. Many eLife authors were early adopters of preprinting, and support within our community continues to expand: a recent internal analysis showed that nearly 70% of papers under review at eLife were already available on bioRxiv, medRxiv or arXiv.This is a major milestone. It means that for all practical purposes eLife is no longer a publisher: rather, eLife is now an organization that reviews and certifies papers that have already been published. We welcome this moment, and the long-awaited opportunity it provides to replace the traditional "review, then publish" model developed in the age of the printing press with a "publish, then review" model optimized for the age of the internet. Henceforth, eLife will focus its editorial and technology development efforts on bringing this new model to life in a way that benefits authors, readers, potential readers, the broader research community and the public.Here we detail changes to eLife policy and practice that are the first major steps in this process. First, we are shifting to exclusively reviewing manuscripts that have been posted as preprints. Second, we are refocusing our editorial processes away from deciding what papers should be published, and towards transforming preprints into "refereed preprints" that include a public assessment of the work prepared by our reviewers and editors.While we are moving quickly to seize this opportunity, not all changes will be immediate. We want to make sure we get our processes and policies right, we want to make sure authors who work with us in developing and refining a new system are not penalized for doing so and, most of all, we want to bring our entire community along with us into this new publishing world.We are, in particular, ever mindful that the authors who entrust us to review their papers still have to operate in a world where journal citations are the currency of careers. Thus, while our long-term goal is to move science away from the use of journal titles as the primary measure of the quality of research, until an alternative takes hold, we will still be selecting papers to be "published" in eLife.With the embrace of bioRxiv and medRxiv by eLife authors, we feel our community is ready for us to become the first major journal to move to only reviewing preprints, and to work with us to reoptimize peer review for this new era of science publishing.Our first step towards our goal of exclusively reviewing preprints is to make the posting of preprints the default. If any paper we are planning to send out to peer review is not already on a preprint server, we will post it to bioRxiv or medRxiv (as appropriate) on behalf of the authors. We expect that many of our authors who previously did not post preprints did so out of inertia rather than opposition, and will now do so.However, we are aware that some potential authors have real concerns about posting preprints, and others are restricted from doing so for various reasons. We would like to take some time to understand and, where possible, mitigate these concerns, especially in areas where adoption of preprints has lagged behind. Therefore, for the next six months, we will give authors of papers under review the option to opt out of posting a preprint, and will instead ask them to explain their reasons.Once we feel we understand and have addressed concerns about preprinting that are in our power to address, we will move to only review papers that are already available as preprints. It will still be possible for authors to request a waiver of this policy in exceptional circumstances, but we expect these to be rare.https://twitter.com/PreprintReview), our current opt-in system for reviewing preprints, that informing reviewers that their reviews would be posted on bioRxiv only rarely led them to write their reviews in a different way. We also learned that it is very difficult to inspire new editorial and reviewer practices when they are only employed for a small percentage of articles. We have therefore concluded that we have to go all in for this system to succeed. Hence, starting immediately, we are instructing our editors and reviewers to prepare public reviews for all manuscripts under consideration.One of the biggest challenges we face in implementing this new system is that peer reviews are typically not written for a public audience. We learned from Preprint Review .However, if our editors decide a paper is not appropriate for eLife, we will, for now, allow authors to postpone the posting of the public review until the paper is published elsewhere. Allowing such delays will address a potential major obstacle to adoption – author fears that negative public reviews will prejudice their ability to publish their work in a journal – while ensuring that authors cannot permanently avoid dealing with issues that may have arisen during our review.Proceeding in this manner will allow us to work constructively with authors while we develop and refine our review processes, and introduce the system to the wider scientific community. However, as we get better at producing constructive public reviews, and as authors get more comfortable with both the idea and our implementation of it, we expect to move towards the rapid posting of all reviews, irrespective of the associated publishing decision.As mentioned above, our long-term goal is to move away from the use of journal titles as the primary measure of the quality of research in science and medicine. However, we know that journal titles remain important for many researchers as they pursue their careers. Thus, while we are developing alternatives, for the foreseeable future, we will continue to select a subset of the papers we review for "publication" in eLife.author guide for details). After the reviews on the paper have been submitted, the editors and reviewers will consult with each other to decide: (i) what they wish to convey in the public review; (ii) if the paper is appropriate for publication in eLife. The authors will then be sent a copy of the public review as well as a letter outlining the reasons for the decision regarding publication in eLife: if a revision is invited, this decision letter will list the issues that need to be addressed before the manuscript can be accepted.The process will be similar to what it is today .While pragmatism dictates that we maintain this legacy of print era publishing, our long term goal is to render it irrelevant as well as obsolete. We have already begun working on ways to downweight journal title as the main indicator of manuscript quality. We plan, for example, to introduce richer evaluation metrics that can be published alongside articles – both those that we publish in the journal, and those that we review as preprints – ending the absurd process of bouncing from journal to journal until a paper is accepted. We are also developing a new platform for interacting with preprints and public reviews (All of these changes, if widely adopted, will create a version of the current publishing system that is more efficient, effective and transparent. But the real opportunities – and challenges – will come from the more radical and dramatic changes to science publishing that will be possible once we finally break free of the "one paper, one journal, one publication model" that still dominates the field.There is no reason for papers to be reviewed only once, or by only one entity. The review process should involve multiple voices and go on for as long as the work is relevant. It should be possible for reviews to be written by anyone with something useful to say about a work – not just the people who have been selected by a journal or other entity. And one can imagine all manner of more useful ways to organize and curate the literature than just putting papers into a single "journal".But we also have to recognize the potential perils of such a system. We do not want the evaluation of science to become any more of a popularity contest than it already is, and we want to make sure that the process is as fair and free of bias as humanly possible. We cannot count on the wisdom of the crowd to solve these problems for us. So as we move towards this new system, we also reiterate our commitment to observe how it is impacting everyone involved in science and medicine, and to always be willing to fight for changes that make research communication better for all.


ESC Heart Failure (ESC‐HF) is an open access journal focused on advancing the understanding of heart failure since 2014. It is one of two journals of the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology . ESC‐HF is published by Wiley as its publishing house. The journal's main topics include basic and translational research questions regarding the pathophysiology, electrophysiology, and biology of heart failure; clinical questions regarding the prevention, diagnosis, understanding, and therapy of heart failure; and epidemiological questions regarding the incidence, prevalence, prevention, distribution, and risk factors for heart failure in different populations. The workload regarding submitted journals is distributed between Prof. Stefan D. Anker , the editor‐in‐chief, and the three deputy editors Prof. Stephan von Haehling  for the clinical section, Prof. Zoltán Papp  for the basic science section, and Dr Gábor Földes  for translational research. However, the journal would not be feasible without the help of the many authors and reviewers, editorial board members, associate editors, and especially the editorial office with Monika Diek, Anja Janssen, and Corinna Denecke. This journal relies on all these people to work together, towards the same goal of better understanding heart failure and its treatment.While in 2014, new journal issues were published every 6 months, today every 2 months a new issue is published. Thereby, the number of articles steadily increased over the years—2014, 16; 2015 and 2016, both 41; 2017, 95; 2018, 131; and 2019, 149. This is a ninefold increase of published articles from 2014 until 2019. At the time of this writing in September 2020, the number of submissions in 2020 has reached 926. The journal attracts publications from many different nations. The list of countries where most of the articles originate includes Germany, the United States, Japan, England, Italy, Netherland, Spain, Sweden, France, and Australia.TableTablesIn Web of Science,In 2019, ESC‐HF articles were altogether cited 1276 times.None declared.


The backbone of the initiative is Plan S, with one main goal: “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo” , in order to fulfil the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration.” Plan S defines OA platforms as publishing outlets for original research publications , and not those that are serving to aggregate or re-publish content already being published elsewhere. It recognizes the importance of the green route to OA and strongly encourages the deposition of all publications in a repository, irrespective of the chosen route. Plan S recommends not support hybrid journals in their current form. Instead, it encourages various transformative agreements with publishers of subscription journals for their transition to fully OA journals by gradual increment of their OA content and by offsetting subscription income from payments for publishing services to avoid double payments  crisis has shown that OA is the one and only solution allowing immediate access to relevant information on new research developments. The pandemic had “COVID-19 . Will thCOVID-19 .A European publisher reasoned that a plan driven by direct payments from grants is incompatible with the disciplines and sub-fields where there is no direct grant funding, eg, humanities and social sciences (HSS). Many of these disciplines have a more national focus and receive scarcer grant funding . An analAt the same time, an analysis by the Institute of Scientific Information showed that in 2017 the research supported by Plan S initial funding bodies yielded only 6.4% of papers indexed in the Web of Science databases . These pSince researchers from different countries have radically different access to funds to pay APCs, some rely heavily on subscription journals, where they do not have to pay any charges to publish their work.The main challenges set before publishers under Plan S are as follows:• Establishing fair and reasonable prices for publishing services, including waiver policies as well as implementation of caps if unreasonable price levels are observed ;https://blog.f1000.com/2020/08/19/price-transparency-on-f1000research/)• Improving APC transparency  is supported entirely by public funds and revenues -15. One The prospective of losing financial support from governments/institutions may soon drive diamond OA journals, especially those in the STEM area, to embrace the APC model to survive. Many local STEM journals whose mission is not primarily to publish new research even face extinction. Humanities and partly social sciences journals are in a somewhat better position, as they are more likely to receive national support and keep the diamond OA model because of their national/local outreach.The subscription-based non-OA publishing model is not an option for these small journals/publishers, as their subscriber base is too small to ensure self-sustainability. This is one of the reasons why a number of small not-for-profit publishers have already accepted offers from large publishers to become part of their journal portfolio .To sum up, even the basic Plan S requirements for OA journals, publishing platforms, and OA repositories may be out of reach for many small publishers and/or institutions that maintain their digital repositories. Publishers from countries with centrally financed and developed national OA platforms, such as Croatia , are in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/guidelines/#techqual). As the number of publications grew during the COVID-19 pandemic at an unprecedented rate, and the immediate free access to relevant scientific information became of utmost importance, preprint servers and free access to research data also became increasingly important , the “brand-name” core journals will always be preferred. So, the question is whether these peripheral STEM journals will become an outlet for papers rejected by the core journals and whether they will attract authors with scarce grant money.Many European research funders have been endorsing cOAlition S from the very beginning and supporting Plan S as one of the paths to science without publication paywalls. Its aims, principles, and scope are a step forward to open science. Despite this boost, it remains to be seen whether Plan S will have unexpected long-term effects on journals from small or peripheral scientific communities. Many researchers in these communities mainly publish in their domestic journals. Despite limited international reception, these journals can play an important role by increasing access to locally relevant information and helping domestic researchers to improve their publication performance. If the diamond OA publishing model of these journals loses stable national financial support, it would be an additional blow to small scientific communities.


This has been a very strange year, related to the serious coronavirus infection that has affected all of us so heavily. Many changes, as elective surgery has been put on hold and many of us have worked part- or even full-time in the Corona health care. Obviously, the virus is a tough enemy and we are still not “rounding the corner”.ESSKA, as a society, in collaboration with KSSTA, has published several useful guidelines on how to work and how to protect yourself during this predicament. We have during the year published several papers related to the virus crisis, these papers have been very well received. In some of them, we are looking forward: are we prepared to return to normal work when the quandary is over?We have, in a joint effort with EKA, published many papers with relevant recommendations on how to maintain a safe work environment for hip and knee replacement surgeries and how we can safely return to work, when society slowly returns to normal.There has been a major increase in submissions during the year. Usually, we receive approximately 100–140 manuscripts per month. But, during some months, we have received almost 250 submissions. We think that clinical researchers, who usually spend 3–4 days per week in the operation theatre, now have had more time to conduct research and write papers. Many of them are good and clinically valuable. For the first time, there will be over 2000 submissions this year.This high volume inevitably means that the work load for all those involved in the journal on a daily basis has increased markedly. We would, therefore, like to thank all our reviewers who have had many more papers to review than earlier years. We would also like to thank the Associate Editors, the Editorial Board and last, but not least the Editorial Office, managed by Runeeta Rai and Simona Luparia, and the constant support offered by the ESSKA Executive Office, especially Zhanna Kovalchuck. Over 250 new submission per month, means that we have to read almost 8–10 new manuscripts every day, almost double of what we are used to. Thank you all again for your understanding and patience. We have been able to maintain our Impact Factor, which has exceeded 3.0 this year, in a manner similar to the last five years.We have been successful on several projects, such as CME Credits for all reviews, a new feature and well liked by reviewers. We have considerably increased our teamwork with JEO, and now witness an increasing number of manuscripts that make their way to JEO for publication. We worked on the project “Women in ESSKA”, and we are proud that many of the young and bright women scientists in Europe are a part of our Editorial Board. We have also added several new Editorial Board Members and reviewers. We welcome and thank you all for the good work during 2020.Finally, we would like to introduce our new Deputy Editor-in-Chief: Professor Olufemi Ayeni. He is the Division Head of Orthopaedic Surgery at McMaster University in Canada. He is also the Medical Director of the Hamilton Tiger Cats  and Forge FC (Canadian Premier League). He has published over 300 academic publications (peer-reviewed and book chapters) focused on sports medicine with a predominant focus on Femoroacetabular Impingement (FAI). His research focused on FAI has been funded by major institutions including the Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation, American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, Arthroscopy Association of North America and Canadian Institute for Health Research. Prof. Ayeni has presented widely across the globe on FAI, research methodology  and is the recipient of several prestigious awards. Recently, he was awarded the J. Edouard Samson Award (2020) for the best career Orthopaedic Research in Canada over a 5-year period. He has executive roles in several international organisations including ISAKOS and ISHA. Locally, his other administrative roles include Head of Orthopaedic Service at McMaster University Medical Centre, Fellowship Director for Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy and associate faculty member of the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact (McMaster University). Over the years, Prof. Ayeni has served as a reviewer, Editorial Board member and Associate Editor for KSSTA, and we welcome him in his new role.Thank you all for 2020. We look forward to 2021, when hopefully our lives will be back on track!


Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE) will be freely accessible online without a subscription. This exciting change will make all the MBE content available to all readers immediately upon publication.From the first day of 2021, all manuscripts published in the journal  MBE’s Open Access (OA) policy, developed in partnership with the Oxford University Press (OUP), will be comprehensive. MBE allows authors to post the original, unrefereed version (the preprint) of their manuscript before formal editorial acceptance on any repository or website. All articles are automatically deposited in PubMed Central upon issue publication. Article text, associated metadata, and supporting information are made electronically accessible by OUP, a nonprofit publisher with a long history of supporting academic publishing. MBE authors already hold the copyright to their published materials with no restrictions. Authors may choose a publication license that is most compatible with their institutions’ policies and funding bodies. MBE’s OA policy makes it possible for authors to comply with varied OA initiatives, emerging demands of funding bodies, and national directives.The transition to OA ends the 37-year tradition of MBE as a print journal that started in December 1983 . MBE adoSociety for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), which owns MBE, has a long history supporting OA publishing. In 2010, SMBE introduced Genome Biology and Evolution (GBE), an online-only journal published under an OA model. Yet the OA movement has not gained unanimous support, primarily because authors, institutions, and funding bodies must directly bear the cost of making their research widely accessible.In many ways, MBE’s adoption of the OA model in 2021 is a natural next step in our journal’s evolution. The arguments in favor of OA publishing are compelling, as evidenced by the broad support for this publishing model in the scientific community. Indeed, scientific advances should be shared and discussed widely without financial barriers. The https://academic.oup.com/mbe/pages/Open_Access).SMBE feels that the transition to OA for the journal will increase, not decrease, the access, participation, and impact of science shared through MBE with the global scientific community. At the same time, SMBE firmly believes that the publication of rigorous and high-impact research should not be dependent on researchers’ ability to pay APCs. Consequently, MBE enacted a policy of waiving page charges for the first ten printed pages of an article in 2016 to reduce the cost of traditional publication for authors in need. With MBE’s transition to full OA, relief from publication costs will now be made available through a generous policy of need-based APC waivers and discounts. The new system of waivers and discounts is entirely independent of the editorial process. It ensures that the ability to pay APC does not impact evaluating a manuscript’s suitability for publication in MBE. An independent committee will receive, evaluate, and approve requests for a waived or reduced fee for scientists working in developing countries and other scientists on a case-by-case basis (see Importantly, MBE APCs are among the least expensive compared with its peer journals. SMBE members receive a discount when publishing in MBE. MBE APCs defray the cost of publishing and providing need-based fee waivers. Any income beyond direct publication costs supports scientific knowledge and discourse supported by SMBE through society-sponsored activities. These activities include facilitating communication and interaction among its members, supporting outreach to the broader community, nurturing young scientists’ careers, enhancing diversity among our ranks of researchers, and celebrating research achievements. Specifically, SMBE spends proceeds from its journals to support annual meetings and smaller satellite meetings and workshops. SMBE supports conference registrations and travel for hundreds of students, young scientists, and established investigators every year. SMBE also confers honors on students and researchers studying principles, patterns, and applications of evolutionary biology.It is the outstanding commitment of volunteer scientific editors and SMBE council members that enables SMBE to have resources to return to the community. These researchers donate their time, effort, and expertise, which is converted into support for SMBE’s community missions. In many OA journals, higher fees are charged without much broader benefit. SMBE and MBE are proud to provide a high impact, relatively inexpensive product that supports authors and the community at the same time. MBE is committed to working with our authors and readers to ensure publication of high-quality content in a financially sustainable manner for our Society. We aim to publish in the most inclusive way possible and welcome feedback from our community.


We have recently received correspondence regarding a paper published this year, questioning both the content and the editorial procedures used to evaluate the article prior to publication. We can assure our readers and authors that we take comments relating to scientific content, the processing of articles and editorial transparency seriously.All articles published by the journal are peer-reviewed by at least two independent experts in the field (or at least one in the case of rapid communications). The article in question was also peer-reviewed by two experts on whose recommendation the decision to publish was made. Eurosurveillance is seeking further expert advice and discussing the current correspondence in detail. We will, according to our existing procedures, evaluate the claims and make a decision as soon as we have investigated in full. In the meantime, it would be unfair to all concerned to comment or discuss further until we have looked at all the issues. here.Details on the editorial policies and processes are available