The international context of correspondence and exchange undoubtedly framed the emergence of both scientific practice and periodical publication. To address some of these issues, we present four detailed studies of the formation and diverse forms of nineteenth-century science periodicals, and their relations to their audiences and commercial contexts, and to other forms of scientific communication.From scholarship over the last three decades, we have acquired a better understanding of the importance of science periodicals, their diversity and contingent and evolving nature.The history of science periodicals provides a window on to the formation of professional science and many of the scientific practices that have become dominant over the last 200 years. Focusing on the science periodical allows us to pose and explore questions about the construction of science itself. How did the various forms of science periodicals—journals, transactions, proceedings or magazines, to pick just a few of the most obvious examples from a rich and varied culture—help to create and maintain scientific communities and the production of scientific knowledge? Who was involved, and, in the era before the consolidation of professional science, how did elite and non-elite practitioners interact? What was the relationship between, for example, natural history or mechanics' magazines publishing the findings of their readers and the publications of learned societies? And what were the literary forms and devices used to communicate scientific findings to such diverse audiences?In posing such questions and exploring them through the historical record, we destabilize notions of the scientific periodical as an unproblematic category. Instead we find that the emergence of distinctions between literary and scientific journals, for example, were contingent responses . What is more, the category of ‘scientific’ journal also seems to collapse under the slightest pressure. The shifting forms and functions of the scientific journal were part of a web of interactions between different printed forms—the transactions of learned societies, commercial publications, popular and technical or specialist titles, or indeed encyclopaedias—and the spoken word and performance of science, in popular venues as much as at learned societies.7 Would-be editors in the nineteenth century seized upon and boosted these new technologies with a fervour which shares a great deal with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries' technological developments in publishing. Looking forward, this suggests that there will be no easy or automatic transition from one technology to another, from print to digital or closed to open, but rather a series of choices about what is valuable and worth maintaining.Such questions  are not only of historic interest, but are of crucial significance now, as science has come to utilize new systems of digital and open access publishing, and when questions of expertise and authority are being opened up for scrutiny. If the story of today's science communication is—as is often claimed—one of new technologies facilitating new platforms and new types of communication, this is in fact a very old story. The arrival of the steam-powered press and new paper-making technologies drove the development of Victorian publishing at a furious pace.World Brain in the 1930s and, in the nineteenth century, the Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers (to give just a few examples).8 However, despite the obvious extent to which any medium might shape its message, none of these technologies (or putative technologies) was inevitable in its arrival or its action. Even though technologies may contain ‘scripts’—to borrow a term from gender studies—which are formative of the range of possibilities perceived for their use, creators and users played an equally powerful role. The richly peopled histories that follow substantiate the importance of keeping the historical choices made by editors, authors, publishers and readers firmly in view.We are certainly not the first to note that new forms of technology might allow for new forms of communication. This is a dream that runs through the current talk of machine reading and data publication, and the early days of the Internet and digital communication, or Vannevar Bush's hypothetical memex machine and H. G. Wells' Gardeners' Chronicle as any more self-consciously professional scientific journals.9 Indeed, ‘his’ correspondents were just as likely to see him as ‘their’ correspondent in their own submissions to the Chronicle and a host of titles like it that provided broad authorial access, such as Science Gossip, The Intellectual Observer or Knowledge. Even Nature, a direct contemporary and rival to Knowledge in its earliest years, aimed to capture the general reader as well as the specialist, advertising itself as designed to satisfy the general ‘laudable craving’ for information on the latest scientific discoveries and ‘the bearing of Science upon civilisation and progress’.10 The authorship of Nature was, likewise, far from strictly professional in constitution until well into the twentieth century. At a point in time when we are all being encouraged to make our research more open, accessible and relevant, it is instructive to consider the earlier maelstrom of change in the nineteenth century, when commercial journals arose and fell with alarming rapidity as editors and publishers sought to find the most appropriate and appealing forms in which to package science for both general and professional audiences. Indeed, as the articles will make plain, there was no clear division through most of the nineteenth century between professional and popular scientific journals, or between amateur and professional communities.11 Journals provided a space both for interaction and for self-definition, as established norms of scientific communication were gradually set in place.The development of what has been termed ‘citizen science’, with the potential online participation of hundreds of thousands of individuals in the creation of scientific knowledge, raises new questions about the boundaries of professional science, and appropriate forms of publication and dissemination. Such questions inevitably lead us back to the nineteenth century when professionalization began to occur. Charles Darwin, with his network of 2000 correspondents, was as happy writing within, and gleaning information from, the pages of the To explore these matters of scientific communication and participation, this special issue brings together papers from leading historians of science and a series of short analysis pieces on contemporary change in scientific publishing from a range of professional perspectives. Both forms of paper are drawn from a symposium jointly hosted by the Constructing Scientific Communities project and the Royal Society on 27 November 2015: ‘The End of the Scientific Journal? Transformations in Publishing, 1800–2015’. Combining historical and contemporary analysis created a productive tension which we aim to replicate in the structure of this volume. While the answers might have altered considerably, we found that questions of form and function, audiences, editorial practices and commercial contexts are as pertinent today as they were in the nineteenth century. Today's debates are part of a growing and evolving set of preoccupations; understanding their roots can help to inform current thinking and decision-making. Moreover, seeing just how unstable the terms of debate have been historically is not only salutatory, it might also liberate those involved in contemporary discussions on the role and future of scientific communication to imagine new forms of expression and scientific practice.Annals of Philosophy (1813–1826), Murray and Colburn's Journal of Science and the Arts (1816–1830), Constable's Edinburgh Philosophical Journal (1819–1864) and Blackwood's Edinburgh Journal of Science (1824–1832). Each of these titles, established in the 1810s and 1820s, represented an attempt to mobilize distinctions between the scientific and the literary in order to court popular audiences. The editors and publishers of these titles sought to produce a new type of science journal in what was, ultimately, a failed attempt to capture a new popular audience. These types of alternative, and surprising, configurations in the early history of British science periodical publishing warn strongly against any sort of essentialist reading of the scientific journal's form. They point rather to a rich and diverse history formed as much by the ambitions of publishers and the availability of markets, as by the needs of ‘working men of science’.The special issue begins with Jonathan Topham's analysis of four early nineteenth-century scientific journals: Baldwin's Bollettino del Reale Comitato Geologico d'Italia  in order to draw in foreign periodicals in exchange, before there was very much for them to offer in return. Sometimes quite different forms of publication—encyclopaedias in France, for example—were used in much the same way we might expect journals to be deployed. Once again, we see—this time in the context of an international comparison—that there is no essential form to the scientific journal and that it competed in a packed and varied international market with many other forms of scientific periodical, while itself being suborned in function to the uses of local scientific politics.In the second contribution, from Pietro Corsi, the troublingly unreliable nature of the scientific journal is brought squarely into focus. Drawing on examples from across continental Europe and beyond, Corsi argues that one should never trust a journal. Dates can be deceitful. Sometimes a scientific publication was not a journal in any sense we would recognize, as when Italian geologists published the From the broad range of practices that might be clustered together under the umbrella of scientific publishing, Bernard Lightman focuses on developments in popular science publishing in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. The story is one of transformation as new types of science journal vied for newly literate audiences by promoting a democratizing vision of science. Lightman makes clear that for many journal editors of this period the link between the scientific journal and professional science was not obvious. These were popular science journals that did not merely seek to bring the scientific news of the learned society or the rapidly specializing professional to the general public; instead, they asked their readers to join them in envisioning a radically different ‘Republic of Science’ in which anyone could participate in scientific practice and reap the social, as well as personal, developmental and educational benefits of doing so.Last in the historical section, Aileen Fyfe and Noah Moxham use two examples of papers that were read to the Royal Society to explore changing practices and gradations of ‘making public’ in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in another form of scientific periodical: the transactions of learned societies. In charting a broad functional transition from performance at meetings to publication as a key mode of scientific communication, their work throws into sharp relief the challenges to the supposed function of scholarly scientific communication posed by, among other movements, open access. Given the wide range, and sometimes surprising previous functions, of science periodicals, what role do we expect them to play now?The experimentation with forms of scientific publishing apparent in the nineteenth century finds parallels in our era, with the digital revolution apparently opening up possibilities of new forms and modes of publication. Is there, indeed, any need for the scientific periodical in an age of large-scale repositories? And do the calls for open access, and citizen science movements, put under pressure the distinctions which emerged in the twentieth century between professional and public science? We asked our commentators, who are drawn from a range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds, to think broadly about the future of the periodical and science publication. Their provocative and sometimes polemical reflections highlight the roles played by the periodical not only in disseminating scientific results, but also in the wider structures of academic and civic life, from questions of expertise, authority and career incentives, through to issues of patient participation. Whereas the first part of the issue builds a fine-grained analysis of historical developments, this second part, rather like the correspondence sections of a scientific journal, provides a space to explore bold and thought-provoking ideas about what is important in science communication and what should be valued and maintained as we move to new media, new platforms and new forms of engagement.Vanessa Heggie and Cameron Neylon both address issues of expertise and authority, and the changing role of the scientific journal in relation to the confirmation and demarcation of scientific expertise. Twenty-first century scientific journals, Heggie argues, will continue to sustain scientific authority and expertise, but they will need to have a keener ear for the multiplicity of audiences and modes of reading than the access movement has largely supposed, with its attendant vision of flattened hierarchies. Cameron Neylon, in contrast, looks to expertise and authority as an issue of ‘club goods’ held by disciplines and traded for resources. Journals, he argues, have always played a role in ‘creating groups, defining boundaries and validating membership’; the challenge now is to create new forms of publishing which can maintain these communities while also offering effective engagement with those outside.Scientific journals have come to play a highly significant and indeed dominating role in current career structures, and both Rebekah Higgitt and Mark Patterson look to the problematic patterns of rewards and incentives thus created. Both suggest looking more creatively at publication forms, with ‘slow scholarship’ or even a reversal of journal growth, so that we return once more to an era of fewer titles. It is, both authors argue powerfully, the very malleability of the past forms and functions of the journal that can help to open up possibilities of thinking differently about how we value, and reward, various modes of publication and dissemination.Sunetra Gupta and Sabina Leonelli analyse some of the problems and challenges of twenty-first-century scientific publishing. Leonelli focuses on the challenges posed by the move to incorporate data into the publishing process, asking whether dissemination can now extend beyond the formalized, selective and exclusionary writing which is characteristic of much current scientific communication. Gupta argues that the emergence of neoliberalism in the last half-century has pushed the scientific publishing system towards a seemingly more egalitarian, but also more individualistic, emphasis in its operations. The result has been a devaluing of novelty and creativity in science.Finally, Stella Butler gives the librarian's perspective on recent changes in scientific publishing, while Mary Madden considers the importance of patient and public involvement in research and its dissemination and Raghavendra Gadagkar looks to issues of access to publishing in developing countries. All three examine the implications of open access in these differing contexts. For Stella Butler, the key shift in the library in the last two decades has been a change of function, from the warehousing of print materials to the gatekeeping of electronic resources. One response has been the open access movement, but, Butler warns, that has its limitations. Crucially, the digital environment puts in doubt the continuity and stability of knowledge. Will scholars in the twenty-second century still be able to read the scientific works of the twenty-first century with the same ease with which we can draw upon the printed volumes of the past? Madden's focus is on the unique, but informative, challenges of the British context and of National Health Service research funding. Questions of access, Madden points out, do not stop at the point of publication. For patient and public involvement to be truly democratizing in health care, more conceptual work needs to be done on how information is produced by, and circulates within, patient and public communities. Raghavendra Gadagkar, turning to an international perspective, and especially that of the global south, poses the provocative question: under new pay-to-publish systems, will everyone have the same ability to communicate their research, or will those from less well-endowed institutions be doomed to remain knowledge consumers rather than knowledge producers? Gadagkar believes that access to these systems is uneven, but also inherently unstable; prone to ‘cheating’ by unscrupulous publishers.As the historical papers in this volume show, the rise of the scientific journal in the nineteenth century was marked by instability and ephemerality, multiplicity and even duplicity, and fierce competition within commercial markets. A history of scientific journals cannot ignore the commercial context and pressures from which the form arose. The rise of the scientific journal was also, however, marked by constant invention and creativity on the part of editors, publishers and contributors as they responded to the pressures of creating and maintaining new audiences and the possibilities opened up by new social contexts and new technologies. Any history of the scientific periodical will inevitably destabilize its own terms of reference; in many ways there is little to hold together the many forms of communication packed into this catchall term. The term is nonetheless a useful one, even as it alerts us to its own instability. The constant tensions between these categories—periodical, journal, transaction, bulletin and so on—show, furthermore, that the history of the scientific journal is not an isolated one; it cannot be told without reference to the many practices—running from the production through to the promotion of a periodical—which held such diverse forms together and in relation to one another and their markets and audiences. The perspective of the past, especially a past when none of the current tenets of science communication were fully established or fixed, offers the possibility of re-imagining science publishing in the future, as our contemporary commentators demonstrate. However, it should also warn us that these are questions of value and maintenance. What do we value about the scientific journal, the transactions or the proceedings and the interdependencies of such forms with scientific practice, and what do we wish to maintain as technologies change? It is our hope that a return to the past will serve to sharpen contemporary debates, alerting us to new (or indeed old) meanings of value, form and function in scientific communication. The history of the science journal is one of perpetual reinvention: although it might indeed cease to exist in paper form, we look forward to tracking its future incarnations.


Dear friends and colleagues,As you know, scientific research stands on three pillars: the observations and conclusions we generate in the lab, their validation by peer reviewing, and their publication. If one pillar starts to wobble, the science suffers. The quality of the data we produce is our sole responsibility. Everyone agrees that publishing one’s results can be a painful process, leading to the dissatisfaction of many authors. SfN journals along with other nonprofit journals are trying to improve the publication process to improve the experience for scientists. However, the problems of peer review remain poorly addressed. Everybody complains about the review process, myself included. We often feel mistreated by reviewers or editors, even if the latter are active scientists, as is the case for most nonprofit journals.I believe that the core of the problem lies in the fact that we are rarely trained to review papers. As a consequence, our first exposure to the review process is passive, i.e., when we receive the reviews of the paper we have submitted. This becomes our “training” session, and later, we tend to reproduce it (perhaps subconsciously) when we review a paper for the first time. Knowing how best to review a paper requires training, and such training should happen as soon as possible during one’s career.Neuronline platform. The originality of our approach is to use real world examples. We select a paper that has been published by eNeuro. After registering, trainees can download the first submitted version of the paper and work on it using general guidelines we provide. During the webinar, we disclose the comments of the actual reviewers, along with the dialogue established between the Reviewing Editor and the reviewers, until they reached a consensus. You can then compare your own review with the synthesis of the reviews that was sent to the authors.To aid this effort, SfN now offers regular peer review training sessions via webinar for SfN members on the second webinar in this series focused on how to peer review a modeling paper, while our first webinar provided a more general introduction on how to peer review a manuscript.Two webinars are already available, and more are in preparation. Why do we need several different webinars? Interestingly, the way peer review is conducted appears to be specific to each neuroscience subfield. Modeling papers constitute a prototypical example. For example, the methods are rarely questioned in a modeling paper. After all, these are mathematical equations, and they can be either right or wrong. However, a model is usually made to provide a conceptual framework to understand a phenomenon. This often requires simplifying the system under scrutiny, which implies justifying what was kept and what was left out. In addition, there may be very different ways to model a phenomenon. Many modelers only like their own models. As a result, modelers tend to be the most critical reviewers of authors using a different approach. Therefore, computational neuroscience is a field where training sessions on how to review a modeling paper are very important. Our eneuroeditor@sfn.org.We are now planning other webinars in other areas of neuroscience, since we believe that tailoring is in order. If you wish for a specific topic area to be covered, please do not hesitate to contact me at Cheers,


Jordan is the César Milstein Chair of Molecular Cancer Biology in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford, and is Editor-in-Chief of Biology Open (BiO). Rachel Hackett is Managing Editor at BiO.The first issue of Biology Open (BiO) was published by The Company of Biologists, the long-established not-for-profit publishing organisation, in January 2012. The first article? An Editorial from our Editor-in-Chief outlining how BiO was going to reduce the pain to publish and make “life easier for us all” . In 2017BiO was launched with an easy one-click online transfer system for authors whose papers were rejected by one of The Company of Biologists’ other journals – Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology and Disease Models & Mechanisms. Transfer does not require reformatting and authors also have the opportunity to revise their article in response to any transferred reviews. In addition, BiO has a similar transfer agreement in place with the journal eLife.It is, of course, also possible to submit articles directly to BiO; ∼50% of our authors do so. In April of this year, BiO joined the other Company of Biologists, journals in launching format-free submission to reduce the pain to submit for all our authors. We accept any format of paper (with references in any style) and ask you to do only what is absolutely necessary at submission. In practice, this means that other requirements will move to the revision stages – but we hope you won't mind at this point, given that we accept over 95% of revised manuscripts. As part of this change, and recognising the importance of reporting comprehensive materials and methods to aid transparency and reproducibility, we have removed the Materials and Methods section from our length limit to an article. BiO considers useful reports of negative results, but authors don't tend to submit them; perhaps busy researchers prioritise other papers?It's not just authors who benefit from BiO. Articles transferred with existing reviews usually avoid the need for further rounds of review. This system speeds up editorial decisions and reduces the number of reviewers involved in the reviewing of such papers – reducing so-called ‘reviewer fatigue’ . For artSpeed has always been a focus for BiO, and is frequently reviewed and processes honed. Time to first decision is a key concern of authors. We have found speed of peer review the most difficult to improve, with busy reviewers struggling to meet the seven-day deadline. This leaves the Editor with a dilemma; wait for the existing reviewer or try someone else who may or may not be quicker or more appropriate. We're confident our Editors make the right decisions in most of these cases; BiO is quicker than its sister journals and key competitors, especially for articles transferred with reviews, but we are always striving for further improvement.And what about speed after acceptance? To date, for 2017, the author's accepted version of their article appears online on average seven days after acceptance, with 38 days from acceptance to publication in an issue. And we will get faster too – in 2018, BiO moves to continuous publication, with the final versions of articles being published online as soon as they are ready, without having to wait for publication in a scheduled issue.bioRxiv. And bioRxiv will return the favour – authors depositing a manuscript in bioRxiv can now transfer their paper directly to BiO. BiO publishes usage statistics and article-level metrics (Altmetrics) for all articles, giving authors the chance to see how publishing Open Access articles enhances the visibility of their research. BiO will continue to evolve and adopt new best publishing practices – always evaluating any benefit to authors, reviewers and readers.Since its launch, BiO has strived to keep abreast of developments in the fast-moving field of STM  publishing. As well as launching format-free submission, BiO has introduced free post-publication commenting in the form of eLetters. BiO recognises the value of widespread ORCID adoption and requires ORCID IDs to be provided at submission by corresponding authors. We launched a new enhanced web site in 2015 and underwent a rebranding at the same time  . BiO alshttp://thinkchecksubmit.org/).The advent of Open Access publishing has proved to be good news for opportunists. The Open Access journals published by exploitative so-called ‘predatory publishers’ exist to make money. And presumably it works, otherwise why would we be seeing such growth in questionable journal practices worldwide? Reputable publishers and journals (such as BiO) can be identified by their inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and membership of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association). In addition, there are numerous ways in which it is possible to assess the validity of a journal, clearly outlined by the Think.Check.Submit initiative (Has BiO fulfilled its remit? For the authors of the nearly 1000 articles we have published, we certainly hope so. The feedback we receive from authors seems to indicate this, as does the number of repeat authors. Submissions to BiO have increased year on year, keeping our expert academic editors busy. BiO is committed to building on its sense of community with our authors, reviewers, editors and readers. As part of this, BiO and its sister journals fund a wide range of charitable activities that support the community of scientists in the areas covered by the journals. Why not publish with BiO and become part of our expanding community?


Chemical Science, with one of the biggest changes to the journal being a move to publishing weekly issues.2018 promises to be another exciting year for The main reason is to help us keep up with the increasing number of articles published in the journal. Since 2010, we have been growing steadily and published nearly 1000 articles in 2017. This means the journal has just simply outgrown twelve monthly issues, and in the interests of our authors and readers, we want to provide our articles in more bite-size and accessible chunks.A key benefit for authors of weekly publication will be the more rapid assignment of page numbers to their articles. A shorter table of contents alert, sent weekly, will help researchers discover the latest cutting-edge developments more quickly, and readers will also have shorter contents lists to browse. Authors will also find that their articles appear sooner in Web of Science, Scopus and PubMedCentral.Chemical Science is the home for only the most cutting-edge solutions to today’s global challenges. This increase in the number of issues doesn’t necessarily indicate that we are planning a future increase in the number of articles. We will still be looking to publish only findings of the most exceptional significance from across the chemical sciences. However, if we continue to receive more articles that meet this very high standard, then the journal will be able to develop further in a weekly format, without delaying our authors.Chemical Science became the world’s first high quality gold open access chemistry journal.In January 2015, Chemical Science, as we continue to waive the article-processing charge for our authors. At the Royal Society of Chemistry we aim to connect the world with the chemical sciences, and one of the ways we can do this is through making our flagship journal accessible to all.We are delighted to say it is free to read, and free to publish in We are also committed to increasing the visibility of our articles, and so the journal is now fully indexed in PubMedCentral and also listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).The table below reveals a selection of our most-read articles published in 2017. Have you seen them yet? Congratulations to all the authors for this excellent achievement.We are delighted to welcome Professor Mircea Dincă and Professor Vincent Artero as new Associate Editors for the journal. Please do consider sending them your next paper.Mircea Dincă is Professor in the Department of Chemistry at MIT and his research interests lie in the synthesis of new multifunctional materials for applications in electrical and electronic devices, heterogeneous catalysis, and various uses in clean and renewable energy. In recognition of Mircea’s group’s research, he has been awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award from the NSF in 2016 and the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry in 2018, among several others. Mircea is keen to receive submissions in his area of expertise, particularly MOF-related and multi-functional material research.2 reduction. Vincent Artero received the “Grand Prix Mergier-Bourdeix de l’Académie des Sciences” in 2011. Vincent is keen to receive submissions in his area of expertise, particularly in bioinspired chemistry, artificial photosynthesis and renewable energy sources.Vincent Artero is Research Director in the Laboratory of Chemistry and Biology of Metals  in Grenoble, France. His research interests are in bioinspired chemistry and artificial photosynthesis. His group targets the structural and functional modelisation of hydrogenases, the design of artificial organometallic proteins and the design of novel nanomaterials for hydrogen photo- and electro-production, hydrogen oxidation and COChemical Science’s quality, impact and service, and we can only do this with the support of our Editorial and Advisory Boards, authors and reviewers. You are critical for the journal’s success and I’d like to sincerely thank you for this.We are striving to improve We recognised our outstanding reviewers of 2016 as chosen by the Editorial team, by publishing a list of them in the journal in the spring of 2017.We hope to meet many of you in the year ahead and, as always, we would be pleased to receive your feedback and suggestions.Chemical Science Editorial team, a very happy New Year!On behalf of the May CopseyChemical Science.Executive Editor,


The Journal of Applied Oral Science is pleased to announce that it will operate only under a continuous publication online modality in 2018. This model will result in annual volumes, without issue numbers, and the papers will be published as accepted and designed for publication. However, the number of manuscripts published annually will not be modified.The volumes will be divided into the following sessions: editorials (when necessary), original manuscripts and review manuscripts, the latter being published only upon editor's invitation. Case reports  will no longer be accepted.The continuous publication system delivers content to our readers much more quickly than the old issue-based model, i.e., the paper publication will occur in individualized way. This means that manuscripts will no longer have to wait for the next issue - once they are ready to publish, they immediately go online.The editorial board and technical team of the JAOS analyzed the criteria adopted by other journals as well as the recommendation of SciELO, which pointed out the following operational advantages to assume this publication system:–A faster and more definitive way of communicating research results will be established, favoring authors and researchers;–Indexing and visibility of papers in databases will occur more consistently and in less time;–Journals can considerably shorten the time between acceptance and publication of papers, since they do not accumulate more manuscripts to publish in the traditional issue-by-issue model .In addition to the continuous publication of manuscripts, JAOS is also reviewing some points in the publication standards to meet the criteria already established by SciELO, and also to reduce bureaucracy and speed up the publishing process. The new guidelines will sooner be announced on the journal's website.


Research Integrity and Peer Review, an international, open access journal with fully open peer review  to provide a home for research on research and publication ethics, research reporting, and research on peer review. As the journal enters its third year, we reflect on recent events and highlights for the journal and explore how the journal is faring in terms of gender and diversity in peer review. We also share the particular interests of our Editors-in-Chief regarding models of peer review, reporting quality, common research integrity issues that arise during the publishing process, and how people interact with the published literature. We continue to encourage further research into peer review, research and publication ethics and research reporting, as we believe that all new initiatives should be evidence-based. We also remain open to constructive discussions of the developments in the field that offer new solutions.In May 2016, we launched  Research Integrity and Peer Review. Since launching in May 2016 [These are exciting times for May 2016 , a UK paMay 2016  and the May 2016 . The pasAn analysis of the articles published up to January 2018 , but across the editorial board, the ratio is more even with 18 females (40%) and 27 males (60%). However, perhaps the gender composition of the board may reflect the composition of the research field as a whole? This may be the case given that of 33 articles published so far, 12 articles (36%) have female corresponding authors while 21 articles (63%) have male corresponding authors. In terms of peer reviewers, gender diversity is more balanced with 31 (45%) women and 38 (55%) men.We were also able to investigate the geographic location of editorial board members, authors and peer reviewers who had agreed to review as one measure of ‘diversity’. The diversity among the Editors-in-Chief is biased in favour of Europe. However, the rest of the editorial board  span locations across the following continents: Europe , North America , South America , Africa , Asia  and Oceania , although there is a bias towards Europe and North America.In terms of the location of corresponding authors, of 33 articles published up to January 2018, excluding conference proceedings , 43, we In terms of 69 reviewers who supplied reviews for published articles, the diversity is somewhat broader with reviewers located across Europe , North America , Africa , Asia  and Oceania .We are proud of the gender and diversity balance we are currently achieving across our editorial board and our reviewers, and we will continue to work to ensure appropriate balance in terms of gender and diversity in the future. While it is difficult to directly influence gender and diversity imbalances in submissions to the journal, we welcome submissions from across the world, especially Asia, Africa and South America.Our Editors-in-Chief attended key events in the area of research integrity , 4, peerResearch Integrity and Peer Review although the journal scope spans all research, including the humanities and social sciences. Stephanie Boughton, Maria Kowalczuk and Liz Wager were able to share their own recent research at the conference.The WCRI was followed in September 2017 by the 8th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, held in Chicago. The congress aims to encourage research into all aspects of peer review and scientific publication and establish the evidence-base on which researchers can improve the conduct, reporting and dissemination of research. The specific theme for 2017 was ‘enhancing the quality and credibility of science’ which very much corresponds with the scope of Stephanie presented an insight into the types of queries raised with BMC’s Research Integrity Group, showing that ‘ethics and consent’ and ‘data issues’ were the main themes, and two thirds of queries were raised by editors ahead of publication . Maria cAlso in September 2017, the global evidence-based health care community got together in Cape Town, South Africa, at the first ever Global Evidence Summit (GS), co-hosted by Cochrane, Guidelines International Network, Campbell Collaboration, Joanna Briggs Institute and the International Society for Evidence-Based Health Care (ISEHC). While the scope of the GES was broad focusing on evidence production as well as evidence use, e.g. in guidelines, reporting quality of trials and systematic reviews was discussed in various sessions such as ‘Reporting evidence synthesis’, ‘Improving conduct and reporting of evidence synthesis’, or ‘Tools to communicate and use evidence’. Joerg co-organized a special session on dissemination bias in qualitative research, and how this might impact on qualitative evidence syntheses , an areaResearch Integrity and Peer Review. This year, we look forward to hearing more about discussions and investigations that are being shared by the ASAPbio community into transparency, recognition and innovation in peer review in the life sciences ([Looking back, it is encouraging to see the wealth of research being conducted in areas of research integrity, reporting and peer review, some of which we were able to publish in ciences (, the PEEciences ( and the ciences (.Research Integrity and Peer Review we would love to hear about your research and how it could make a difference. Thank you to our authors and our reviewers, our Editorial Board and our readers for all their continued support. We look forward to working with you in 2018, and beyond.Of course, some initiatives will help, others may fail, and that is fine as long as research in these areas is data-driven. In our role as co-Editors-in-Chief of


This issue represents a new beginning for the JACMP— how fitting that it comes just as spring is in full bloom and all things are new. And it comes as a result of a lot of hard work from a dedicated few, a fortuitous historical event in open source publishing, and the patient and kind cooperation of our new publishing partner, Multimed Inc. Has the transition gone as expected? No, it was about four times more difficult than expected. This is mostly due to the inexperience of your humble servant. However, reflecting my irrational optimism, I believe the next issue will be easier and the one after that easier still.Medical Physics was both attractive and intriguing; however, at the end of the day, the complexity and political difficulties of this potential solution proved quite difficult to solve. I also want to offer special thanks and appreciation to Edwin McCullough, Editor‐in‐Chief for 2003, who produced the final issue of 2003 in a sea of uncertainty and controversy.I would like to thank the many who brought us this far. Many thanks to Chris Marshall, John Boone, and Colin Orton of the AAPM and to Ned Sternick, Jim Smathers, and Edwin McCullough of the ACMP. These men labored hard to find a workable solution to keep the American Institute of Physics as publisher while permitting the AAPM to be the owner of the JACMP. The possibility of publishing the JACMP as a supplement to Thanks as well to Ed Nickoloff and James Astarita. Without them, the financial solution and new cost model for the JACMP would not have become a reality. Thanks to the Public Knowledge Project director, John Willinsky. Not only is the PKP manuscript submission and exchange software free, but it is also powerful and flexible. The August 2003 release of the PKP Open Journal Systems was critical for the JACMP because it enabled the new financial model to work.Multimed has thus far exceeded all expectations as a reliable and diligent publishing partner, and deserves our appreciation and thanks.Thanks to John Horton, ACMP Immediate Past Chairman and JACMP Associate Editor, and to the ACMP Board of Chancellors, who agreed to continue supporting the JACMP in spite of the economic challenges the ACMP has faced over the past four years. Finally, thanks to our long‐suffering Board of Editors, who stayed the course in the face of mounting uncertainty. Their job is truly thankless, not the least because I am constantly reminding them of yet another task to do.A new beginning also looks to the future. We have now adopted a double‐blind model for manuscript review. For future JACMP manuscript submissions the reviewers will not know the identities of the authors. University promotion and tenure review committees may feel that such a model protects the review process and legitimizes the publications of authors who are also associate editors of the Journal. In addition, we are an open source journal and part of the expanding worldwide open source community. This means many things, but most importantly it means this: The copyright of your intellectual property remains with you, the author, beginning with this issue. The JACMP is your archive of record, meaning that future publications should reference this site. However, you are free to publish or distribute this work as you see fit because you remain the owner of your manuscript and its copyright.I will have much to say about the meaning and mission of the JACMP in future editorials. For now, it is an honor to be at this place and time and to be performing this service for the worldwide medical physics community.Michael D. MillsEditor‐in‐ChiefJACMP


Toxins editorial team, we are happy to report that the impact factor for Toxins for 2015 is 3.571, 5-year impact factor: 3.942, which places the journal at a ranking of 16th out of 89 journals covering the field of toxicology. Both the number of submissions and the number of articles published . In 2017, a historical perspective and guidelines for Botulinum Neurotoxin subtype nomenclature by Michael W. Peck et al. (http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6651/9/1/38), as well as an interview with Jay Fox and José Maria Gutiérrez on snake venom metalloproteinases (http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6651/9/1/33) have been published. We would welcome additional submissions on clarification of toxin nomenclature. In 2016, we implemented double blind peer-review for all papers submitted to the journal. In this procedure, authors’ names are not known to the reviewers and reviewers’ names are not known to the authors until publication of the paper. We feel this procedure reduces bias in the review process without significantly adding time from receipt of a manuscript to posting the accepted paper on the Toxins as a forum for civil discourse on issues impacting toxinology. The two most accessed papers from 2016 are two original research articles: The Snake with the Scorpion’s Sting: Novel Three-Finger Toxin Sodium Channel Activators from the Venom of the Long-Glanded Blue Coral Snake  by Bryan G. Fry, et al., and Cyanobacterial Neurotoxin BMAA and Mercury in Sharks by Deborah C. Mash, et al.In 2016, we published five comments on previously published papers and welcome further comments, recommending Toxins webpage, and printed versions can be ordered at http://www.mdpi.com/books/library or Applebook and Amazon. We are always open to discuss your proposals for new book topics in 2017. We sponsored six conferences in 2016 and we published reports on presentations from two conferences: the 5th International Symposium on Mycotoxins and Toxigenic Moulds: Challenges and Perspectives (MYTOX) and the Hinxton Retreat on Mechanisms to Reverse the Public Health Neglect of Snakebite Victims. We look forward to continuing to support scientific presentations in 2017 and please keep the journal in mind as a resource for communicating meeting presentations to a broader audience. In 2017, we provided travel award support for three post-doctoral fellows/senior graduate students to present their work at international toxinology conferences, and further details of the winners are announced at http://www.mdpi.com/journal/toxins/awards. We congratulate Dr. Marco Pirazzini, Dr. Natalie Saez and Ms. Rachel A. Miller on winning the 2017 Toxins Travel Awards.In 2016, we also published two books: Enterotoxins: Microbial Proteins and Host Cell Dysregulation, edited by Dr. Teresa Krakauer, and Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) and Public Health: Progress and Current Challenges, edited by Drs. Lesley V. D’Anglada, Elizabeth D. Hilborn, and Lorraine C. Backer. The e-book versions may be downloaded free of charge from the Toxins. We are also grateful to Dr. Sarah De Saeger and Dr. Vitor Vasconcelos who will replace Dr. Manderville and Dr. Berry as Section Editors-in-Chief for Mycotoxins, and Marine and Freshwater Toxins, respectively (Toxins are indeed fortunate that such prestigious scientists volunteer their time and effort to serve investigators in the toxinology field.We gratefully acknowledge the outstanding service of two out-going Section Editors, Dr. Richard A. Manderville, Section Editor-in-Chief for Mycotoxins, and Dr. John P. Berry, Section Editor-in-Chief for Marine and Freshwater Toxins. The numbers of excellent papers on mycotoxins and marine and freshwater toxins published during the tenure of Dr. Manderville and Dr. Berry attest to their hard work as Section Editors in maintaining high standards for the readers of ectively . Dr. De Toxins webpage design. The site has been redesigned to provide more information on the homepage, including fast access to the latest articles, access to recent articles of high interest, information on upcoming conferences, and quick links to Special Issues, topical collections, conference reports and books. Go to “Journal Browser” and click on Volume 8, where you will see we have begun designing volume covers for each monthly issue. You may find your favorite venomous critter or toxigenic microorganism on the cover! In 2017, we will also start posting research job adverts on the journal homepage. You are welcome to contact us for posting your vacancies.Finally, take a look at the new Toxins. Your support of the journal has been fantastic. It is through your efforts that the journal continues to be a useful resource for investigators, students and the lay public. We are greatly appreciative of your hard work. By all means, do not hesitate to contact us with ideas, criticisms, words of wisdom, etc., on how to better serve the toxinology research community.In closing, it has been a great year at


Instead we buy licences which allow only university students and staff to read these digital texts. This has undoubtedly created legal barriers to access for many outside the academy who previously could access print journals by visiting a library and, where appropriate, using the photocopier. This new situation seems counter-intuitive to what might have been expected from a move to the openness of the web-based digital environment that we all now inhabit.Over the past two decades, libraries have moved from being warehouses of print journals to gateways to the electronic scholarly record. ‘GateScholars in science and medicine were the first to react to these barriers by establishing ‘open access’ journals. Some of these journals advocated ‘open evaluation’ using the potential of the web for ‘crowd-sourcing’ reviews and opinions of articles, taking the periodical way beyond what is possible in the print realm, reinforcing the notion of community but also extending it beyond the academy. This changed operating model found resonance with major research funders who wanted research to be widely and quickly disseminated. They began to apply the principle that the outputs of publicly funded research should be available to all. Traditional publishers reacted by offering pay-to-publish opportunities in subscription journals, giving birth to the so-called hybrid journals and conversations between publishers and libraries about ‘double-dipping’. Publishers have also allowed articles in subscription journals to be made open access by deposit in either subject or institutional repositories. This has become known as the ‘green’ route to open access.The administration of these complex payment arrangements (which sometimes involve page charges for tables or colour or both) and issues around funder-compliance have brought enormous challenges to the administration of the scholarly record for both researcher and library.Domesday Book produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1986 was almost lost by the year 2000 and required enormous investment to unlock the information contained on the laser discs. Both publishers and the library community are undoubtedly getting better at digital preservation. But whereas I can say for sure that given good storage conditions you will be able to continue to read our printed books for centuries to come, I am not sure that we yet have the same control over these changing entities that are coming to form our scholarly output. And if in the future we do lose access to journals how can we continue to benefit from twenty-first-century scholarship?The fluidity of the digital environment also raises issues of preservation and stability. Journals are now bytes in the cloud—bytes belonging to publishing organizations which, as history tells us, rise and fall over time. So what can publishers guarantee in terms of perpetual access? The seventeenth-century publications of the Royal Society are still as ‘bright’ and clean as when they first came off the press. In contrast, the digital modern


Open Biology has come, where we are going, and whether we are on the right track. As scientific publishing goes through perhaps its most profound revolution because it was established over 350 years ago, these are questions that we need to keep very much in mind.It is hard to believe that it is already time again to greet another New Year but once again, it is a good opportunity to take stock of how far Open Biology was started to provide a route for the rapid publication of original research and review articles of the highest quality in the broad field of cellular and molecular biology. We wanted articles to be reviewed rapidly, fairly and constructively and published in Open Access format so that they should be freely available for everyone to see. Another of our aims was to see more cell and molecular biology published by the Royal Society as part of a deeply felt conviction that academic societies, charities and university publishing houses can most fairly represent scientists. This was in some ways a response to a feeling that commercial publishing houses had a stranglehold over the ‘top-end' publishing in this area and a growing frustration at the slow and often arbitrary decision-making processes that seemed to hold sway in many leading journals. Getting a toe-hold in this highly competitive publishing niche has brought its challenges but now, we are climbing slowly up the cliff face.Biorxiv, by using a wide-range of metrics to assess the impact of our papers, and by publishing referees' reports and authors' responses. Open Biology also has a sister journal, Open Science, into which articles can be cascaded, not just from Open Biology but from any of the Society's journals, if they are thought not to fit exactly with the objectives of the originally targeted journal. However, our underlying principle is one long-established—that fair and rapid publication of original work can be achieved by an academic society using the traditional refereeing system to provide constructive evaluations of papers by editors who are practising scientists.I like to think that the Royal Society has kept abreast of the changing times in publishing and that we have responded to the needs of the community by embracing the open access model, by encouraging authors to use preprint servers such as The steady gain in our impact has only been possible by getting active scientists to join our editorial board—and our editorial board really do have to work as editors! Last year, I was able to announce the addition of an invaluable cohort of new editorial board members from North America and China. This year, we have further expanded our board membership, being particularly careful to try and represent all our community and avoid unconscious bias. I would like to say thank you to all these scientists for their invaluable contributions to the journal. Thank you also to our growing network of referees and most importantly, thank you to all our authors for submitting their original research papers and lively review articles. Our steady flow of review articles enliven the pages of the journal and bring a wide range of perspectives on diverse, rapidly developing fields.Finally, we are sad to say good-bye to one of our founding editors, Stewart Cole. Stewart has worked tirelessly for the journal and through his efforts we have attracted some excellent papers covering a wide range of microbiology. Thank you, Stewart, for helping us in this difficult part of our climb. We hope that in 2018 and beyond, we can continue to live up to the high standards that you have helped to set.


PAINReports. The new online journal joins PAIN in offering IASP members and the pain research community 2 publishing venues for the best basic and applied pain research. Although PAIN will continue to publish the foremost research articles in the field, PAIN Reports will offer readers worldwide free access to scientific articles and will expand the publishing terrain for developing countries.We are excited to announce the launch of an open access journal from IASP called Why has IASP entered the field of open access publishing? In an era of easy and common internet access and ubiquitous communications technology, the scientific landscape continues to change before our eyes. Compared with just a few years ago, all of us communicate far more often, more rapidly, and more intensively with our peers around the globe. Communication, of course, is at the heart of our scientific enterprise; scientists and publishers, therefore, cannot refrain from adjusting to this new wave.Today, online scientific journals are proliferating in various fields, even as freedom of access to data remains somewhat elusive. Yet momentum clearly is on the side of open access publishing. The rationale is simple: taxpayer money is being used, justifiably, to finance research, but the results of this research generally are unavailable to the public. In most cases, only members of the scientific community have easy access to journal articles.The open access vision, accordingly, is that all data will be freely accessible to all stakeholders—the public, health policy experts, and the broader scientific community. Money allocated for research increasingly will include funds for open access publication as part of the expense of research.2Several steps in this direction already are evident. PubMed Central, acting under the US Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008, publishes full-text versions of government-funded research, making these articles publicly accessible. Similar steps have been taken in the United Kingdom, with UK PubMed Central, as well as in Europe and Canada. The Dutch government, currently pursuing a pan-European open science policy platform, aims to shift scientific publications toward open access venues.PAIN has this option for authors; as an open access journal, PAIN Reports charges authors publishing fees). For example, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) publishes a major line of open access journals. The most popular of these, PLoS One is one of the largest scientific journals, with approximately 30,000 articles published annually. Overall, there is evidence that the percentage of immediate open access articles has increased from 4.6% of all scientific articles in 2006 to 11% in 2011. If articles that are opened after a 1-year embargo and those published in hybrid journals are added, the numbers increase to 8.1% and 16.9%, respectively.3Many medical societies now have at least 1 open access journal, and nearly all scientific publishers support hybrid options, in which authors pay fees to publishers in return for their articles to be open access. (PAIN Reports hopes to publish a high volume of articles rapidly and substantially complement PAIN in generating a multifaceted platform for clinical and research communications in pain research and management.As an online-only journal, PAIN Reports asserts our commitment:The mission statement of PAIN Reports is an official IASP publication. An open access multidisciplinary journal, PAIN Reports promotes a global, rapid, and readily accessible forum that advances clinical, applied, and basic research on pain. The online journal publishes full-length articles as well as brief reports, reviews, meta-analyses, meeting proceedings, and selected case reports. PAIN Reports gives special attention to submissions reporting the results of enterprising and high-risk research and pilot studies as well as locally developed clinical guidelines from scientists and clinicians in developing countries.PAIN Reports.It is with great excitement that we call for submissions from pain professionals in the clinical and research communities to support The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.


In late 2016, our publisher Co-Action and its portfolio of journals were bought out by Taylor & Francis. This was basically a publishing decision, with notification to the editorial team after the fact. To their mutual credit, both publishers were committed to a smooth transfer of responsibilities, and all staff recognised the need for continuity and support, particularly for those authors who had manuscripts under review, being revised, copy set or otherwise in process. That the multi-month transfer began at the outset of the winter holiday season and crossed over two calendar years added to the challenges. We greatly appreciate the professionalism of all involved, and the patience of our authors, reviewers, readers and editors as we all learned new systems and processes, and engaged with new staff for previously routine activity. Manuscript transfer from one publisher to the other was occasionally problematic and review and copyediting processes were occasionally delayed. Navigating new websites sometimes still under development created some additional stress for authors and reviewers, and no doubt created some confusion for our readers. By summer, things seemed to have settled down, and as this new year begins, we seem to have evolved into a positive “new normal”. Thanks to all who have travelled in good humour with us on this somewhat bumpy journey.The other good news? We remain Open Access, and continue to attract high-quality submissions from around the Arctic, and remain a key dissemination avenue for unique and vital circumpolar health content. In late 2016, we published three Special Issues: one including all the abstracts from the 16th International Congress of Circumpolar Health held in Oulu, Finland (NOV), one highlighting key findings from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme’s latest Five Year Report (DEC) and one focused on addressing the complex issues surrounding sexual and reproductive health in the Arctic (DEC). We are grateful to the guest editors who proposed and shepherded these Special Issues and are happy to report we already have at least one Special Issue planned for 2018. If you have ideas for a Special Issue, please feel free to contact me.In the meantime, as 2017 came to a close, we can look back upon a successful and productive year. By year’s end, we published just over 50 articles, or about an average of one article per week. Our authors come from across the North, with all Arctic Council member states represented, and many diverse and significant topics covered. This year Canada and Norway led the pack with the most articles published, with Greenland close behind. The vast majority of articles published were Original Research, but we also published Case Reports, Theory and Methods, and noted two new Circumpolar Dissertations. We look forward to continuing our primary focus on research articles, while expanding the variety of articles published, and already have a few Book Reviews in the works for the new year. We encourage all to review our Instructions for Authors, and to consider sharing your own good work. If you have ideas about a perhaps atypical submission, please feel free to contact me to discuss.y if the entity has y publications that have all been cited at least y times. Our Journal h-5 index for the past five years is 20; the h-5 median is 27 and our current h-index is now 34. This means that we have at least 34 articles that have been cited at least 34 times.Building on the strong foundation of previous editors, we continue to extend the impact and reach of our Journal. Our Thompson impact factor (IF) is continuing its upward trajectory (moving from .707 in 2015 to 1.141 in 2016/2017). Other ways to note this growing influence is through SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): in 2012, it was .049, and is currently .559. Similar to the h-Index for researchers, the Journal h-index is another measure of the quality of a journal and can be calculated using data from Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar. As with the impact factor, Journal h-index does not take into account differing citation practices of fields (unlike the weighted SJR) and so is best used to compare journals within a field. Journal h-factor is described simply: a journal has a h-index value of This excellent trend would not be possible without the dedicated efforts of many. I would particularly like to acknowledge our Editorial Team, and the mentorship and support of our past Editors-in-Chief noted below and all the dedicated reviewers listed who helped us out this past year (see list).Deputy EditorsTracey GallowayUniversity of Toronto, CanadaAnders KochStatens Serum Institut, DenmarkAssociate EditorsMarit JorgensenSteno Diabetes Centre Copenhagen, DenmarkJuhani LeppäluotoUniversity of Oulu, FinlandJon Øyvind OdlandUniversity of Tromsø, NorwayPamela OrrUniversity of Manitoba, CanadaPast Editors-in-ChiefKue Young (2012–2015)Tiina Ikäheimo (2009–2011)Juhani Hassi (2001–2008)We literally could not have done it without you. We look forward to another stimulating and productive year together and welcome suggestions about how we can make our shared Journal even better.


Peer review is important to the scientific process. However, the present system has been criticised and accused of bias, lack of transparency, failure to detect significant breakthrough and error. At the British Journal of Surgery (BJS), after surveying authors’ and reviewers’ opinions on peer review, we piloted an open online forum with the aim of improving the peer review process.In December 2014, a web-based survey assessing attitudes towards open online review was sent to reviewers with a BJS account in Scholar One. From April to June 2015, authors were invited to allow their manuscripts to undergo online peer review in addition to the standard peer review process. The quality of each review was evaluated by editors and editorial assistants using a validated instrument based on a Likert scale.The survey was sent to 6635 reviewers. In all, 1454 (21.9%) responded. Support for online peer review was strong, with only 10% stating that they would not subject their manuscripts to online peer review. The most prevalent concern was about intellectual property, being highlighted in 118 of 284 comments (41.5%). Out of 265 eligible manuscripts, 110 were included in the online peer review trial. Around 7000 potential reviewers were invited to review each manuscript. In all, 44 of 110 manuscripts (40%) received 100 reviews from 59 reviewers, alongside 115 conventional reviews. The quality of the open forum reviews was lower than for conventional reviews (2.13 (± 0.75) versus 2.84 (± 0.71), P<0.001).Open online peer review is feasible in this setting, but it attracts few reviews, of lower quality than conventional peer reviews. Formal peer review has been used by many scientific journals since the 18th century. It is regarded as a trusted form of scientific evaluation, which ideally guarantees and improves scientific reporting, thus serving as a quality-control system. To corroborate this there is empirical evidence that conventional peer review improves the quality of papers  and predA change in the traditional peer review process seems inevitable and has already been advocated by others . Peer reThus, the aim of this study was to investigate attitudes towards modernisation, the advantages and disadvantages of an innovative online peer review system in comparison with traditional peer review and to obtain the views of those involved in this new process.The British Journal of Surgery (BJS) is a monthly, peer-reviewed surgical journal, with a current five-year impact factor of 5.596 (2015). BJS publishes original work in a range of surgical specialties. The journal receives approximately 1800–2000 manuscripts annually. The acceptance rate in 2015 was 12%.TM platform (Thomson Reuters). The mean time from submission to decision in 2014 was 25 days.In the BJS standard peer review process, the co-Editor-in-Chief assesses the manuscript for suitability and a small percentage of manuscripts are rejected based on article type. All manuscripts are then allocated to a handling editor, who either selects two to three relevant referees for peer review or consults with at least one other editor before rejecting the manuscript without peer review . The proThe intention was to develop an innovative peer review system that took full advantage of modern technology to improve the peer review process and draw reviewers and readers into meaningful online scientific debate. The key elements would be: instant electronic real-time communication; an electronic forum; and social media integration, promoting awareness, escalating engagement and propagating participation. The aims of such a system are to: improve the quality of peer review and subsequent post-review manuscripts; draw on a wider range of potential peer reviewers; promote transparency; provide an inside view on critical appraisal, research and peer review to junior surgeons and researchers; and increase readership and impact of the journal and its research.The present study was divided into three parts: a pre-trial questionnaire, a prospective study on an innovative online forum for peer reviewing and a post-trial questionnaire.The pre-trial questionnaire aimed to investigate the opinion of authors and reviewers towards an online forum for peer review, and to introduce authors and reviewers to the idea of using an online forum for peer review. The questionnaire was conducted in December 2014, using SurveyMonkey . InformaThe questionnaire  was circst April and 31st May 2015 were considered for possible inclusion. Upon submission the author was informed about the study and their consent for participation was sought. It was made clear to authors that participation was voluntary and would not affect the outcome of their submission. Manuscripts from consenting authors simultaneously went through standard peer review and innovative peer review using an online forum. Manuscripts were posted online, and an invitation to review these online manuscripts was sent every 14 days by email to approximately 7000 referees with an accredited account in BJS ScholarOne. The manuscript was kept online for 3 weeks and was only accessible through the link supplied in the email.All manuscripts involving original work  submitted to BJS between 1Referees reviewing on the online forum were asked to report using the same standard referee sheets as in the standard peer review process . CompletAccording to the pre-specified study protocol, the handling editor decided on the manuscript based on the standard peer review only, without viewing the reports generated in the online forum. After the editorial decision, the online peer reviews were sent to the handling editor, who scored them according to the standard BJS policy rating system, based on a 5-point Likert scale, from cursory (1 point) to outstanding (5 points), as defined above.et al.  assessed all reviews, both from the conventional peer review process and from the innovative online forum, using a previously validated instrument by van Rooyen et al.  23]. Th. Thet alIn order to secure the authors’ copyright during the study, the line “Copyright 2015 The Authors. All rights reserved.” was added at the top of each manuscript. If a manuscript was accepted, standard BJS policy was applied, and the corresponding author received an email prompting him to log in to Author Services, where, via the Wiley Author Licensing Service (WALS), the license agreement had to be completed on behalf of all authors on the paper.The primary outcome of the present study was the quality of referee reports based on the validated review quality instrument . For thend September 2015. Specific survey questions are shown in The aim of the post-trial questionnaire was to assess the overall satisfaction of authors with the online review process. A web-based questionnaire  was sentResponses to the pre-trial questionnaire were summarised using descriptive statistics. Factors influencing the likelihood of a respondent’s participation in online peer review were analysed using single and multiple logistic regression, testing associations between characteristics of respondents and responding yes to “would you consider participating in open online peer review”, yielding odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). In the multiple models, all items in the questionnaire were included  as categA thematic analysis was performed for the only free-text answer and was narratively summarised.P value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant.Review quality scores from editors  and from assistant editors  were summarised and compared between standard and online review using means and Student t-tests. Agreement between assistant editors’ scoring was measured using kappa statistics. A Ethical approval was not sought, as patients were not directly involved. It was assumed that consent was given when participants actively chose to participate in the survey. Authors submitting their work received information about the study at submission, and it was made clear to them that participation was voluntary and would not affect the outcome of their manuscript. Authors consented to participating by ticking a box at the submission site.The pre-trial questionnaire was sent to 6635 listed reviewers. There were 1454 individual responses, corresponding to a response rate of 21.9%. Not every item in the questionnaire was answered by all respondents, but missing responses were few: no more than 2.5% for any item.Some 87% of respondents were male, 94% of the respondents already acted as a reviewer and 78% had published and/or submitted more than 20 papers . The majFree-text answers regarding thoughts and concerns about the online peer review process are summarised in In multiple regression analysis, male gender, English as first language and previous submission to BJS were all associated with willingness to participate in online peer review .st April and 31st May 2015 a total of 295 manuscripts, including Leading Articles, Snapshots in Surgery, and Original Articles were submitted to the BJS; of these, 265 were eligible for the study  number of reviews posted per reviewer was 1 (1–15). The number of reviews via the online system declined over time . Thirty-The mean (SD) review quality scores are shown in The post-trial questionnaire  was sentIn this study, feasibility, advantages and disadvantages of an experimental online forum peer review system in the setting of a high-quality general surgical journal were assessed. The pre-trial survey suggested that a majority of authors and reviewers were willing to participate in a study exploring this new method of peer review. The actual participation rate of authors in the study was 58%, with a median of one online review per manuscript. The quality of the online reviews varied considerably, but was significantly lower than conventional review. Given the large number of potential reviewers who were invited, the participation rate was very low.In the pre-trial survey, previous submissions/publications, male gender and English as a first language were factors associated with willingness to participate. It is possible that those surveyed, who were all BJS reviewers, differed from authors in these aspects and that worries about the benefits of the online review process and satisfaction with the current system led authors to decline participation. It is also possible that some degree of suspicion around a new system precluded authors from taking part, and if this system became more common and/or accepted, participation rate would increase. Still, over half of the authors submitting during the trial period participated. In this regard, it must be noted that questions 9 and 10 of the survey were somewhat leading , possiblDespite mailing an invitation to submit a review to more than 7000 referee account holders in the BJS ScholarOne system, we only received reviews from 59 individual reviewers. This has to be considered a disappointingly low rate. This could be due to the invitation itself: reviewers might be more attracted, and feel more responsible, if they receive a personal email from one of the editors than from an impersonal mass mail. Another reason could be a general difficulty in getting reviews. The intention was also to draw reviewers and readers into meaningful online debate about the work under review. The finding that the number of online reviewers declined with time also points towards a loss of interest of the potential reviewers and lack of resources used to win potential participants.The lack of time and incentives for the reviewer have been pointed out previously and othePlacing emphasis on reviewing experience when assigning academic posts within universities and medical schools might also increase the incentive to review. An interesting idea is to create a reviewer index , 27 whicThe low participation rate might also relate to a lack of competence in a specific field, real or perceived, on the part of the potential reviewer. Surgery and surgical science are, as all branches of medicine, growing more specialised every year. Most manuscripts submitted to BJS deal with a very specific area, in which only a fraction of the invited reviewers might be expected to have competence.An open online system is attractive because of its transparency and potential to increase communication between reviewers and authors, but, in the present study, some potential reviewers might have refrained from reviewing because their names would have been made public. Thus, non-anonymity might be one reason for the low rate of open peer review. Even if anonymous, online peer review increases transparency, and there is no evidence that unmasking either authors’ or reviewers’ identities increases peer review quality .Medicine has been slow to take on pre-print publication, which can be considered a special case of open peer review. In areas such as physics, statistics, engineering and mathematics, there are several online pre-print servers, on which authors display their work in progress and receive commentaries from the scientific community. For instance, arXiv.org, which started as early as the 1990s, currently houses over 1,000,000 openly available pre-prints. Many pre-print servers have moderators that function as editors, reviewing submissions, turning down those that are off-topic or simply not scientific papers. Some pre-print servers also make use of endorsers, who are authors in the field, who have the authority to allow unauthorised (non-endorsed) authors to submit papers, thus functioning as peer reviewers.Recently, there have been some highly publicised, serious cases of fraudulent research. The content of individual papers, journals and publishing houses and review systems have been the subject of fraud and cheating. Getting papers published is, for many academics, directly related to career, status and income, and there is a risk that an online system could be misused. In this light, the authors’ perceived fear of having ideas stolen and plagiarised should be taken seriously. The post-trial survey was only answered by ten authors, which precludes any firm conclusions.The quality of online review reports as judged using both a validated review quality tool and the conventional BJS scoring system was significantly lower than the quality of the conventional reviews; hence, one may conclude that online reviews cannot replace conventional, invited reviews.Some limitations of the present study need to be mentioned. One is the lack of randomisation and a control group. The present results might not be applicable to all types of journals; for instance, if a similar study was performed on a strictly open access journal, it might yield different results. Further, the inter-rater variability between the raters using the validated review quality tool was higher than previously reported. Apart from the pre-trial survey, a more extensive engagement strategy could have been employed to increase author and reviewer participation. Such a strategy could include presentation at meetings and advertising in printed, online and social media. Once such a system is up and running and engagement is ensured, papers could come to the editor in a more mature and refined product which has been evaluated from multiple perspectives. Online peer review may not be focussed so much on the scientific credibility of a paper but may provide a better insight in the timeliness, attractive value, desirability and possible impact of a manuscript for the scientific community.S1 Fig(PDF)Click here for additional data file.S2 Fig(PDF)Click here for additional data file.S3 Fig(PDF)Click here for additional data file.S1 Textdocx.(DOCX)Click here for additional data file.S1 Datadta.(DTA)Click here for additional data file.S2 Datadta.(DTA)Click here for additional data file.S3 Dataxlsx.(XLSX)Click here for additional data file.S4 Datadta.(DTA)Click here for additional data file.


One of my colleagues from Wiley had asked me if I would be prepared to speak and to be videoed for 5 min on the topic of reviewing. Specifically, she asked me if I would address the questions: ‘why do I review?’; and ‘how has being a reviewer helped my research career?’I rarely turn down an opportunity to be videoed. I think that reviewing is important and, in this issue, Dr Parveen Ali from the University of Sheffield and I consider the peer review system and the variations that exist (Ali & Watson, 2My main motivation in reviewing manuscripts is curiosity, which means there is something in it for me. While I review most things that are sent to me, I ‘draw the line’ at predatory journals and I ensure that the area under research or the methodology in the manuscript really match my area of expertise. My first reaction on receiving a manuscript to review is to wonder what the person has done, what new information the manuscript contains and how well do they understand the methods they have applied. On that final point, I sometimes find that they understand the methods a great deal better than I; in these cases, I learn something. So, reviewing is helpful and it has helped me to develop what I do as well as advise others on what they do.I do think we have a duty to review manuscripts; after all, others do it for us and if we did not undertake reviews then the process of peer review would stop and the publication of new information would slow down. I also value the review process. It is far from perfect but, compared with the alternatives – and there are some (Ali & Watson, 3Being a reviewer has helped me to write and publish better manuscripts. As much as I have pointed out methodical errors to other authors, I have had them pointed out in my own work. This has saved me from embarrassment and helped me to develop and, in one notable example, has led to collaboration with the reviewers who were kind enough to contact me outside of the reviewing process. Otherwise, my early involvement in reviewing and publishing led to my first invitation to serve on an editorial board and this was the start of my editing career. Between, starting this editorial and its completion, I was asked to review another manuscript. I hope I can approach this with the same enthusiasm and curiosity that I did my first review over 20 years ago.


GigaScience is now 5 years old, having been launched at the 2012 Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference. Anyone who has attended what is the largest computational biology conference since then has had the opportunity to join us for each birthday celebration—and receive 1 of our fun T-shirts as a party prize. Since launching, we have pushed our agenda of openness, transparency, reproducibility, and reusability. Here, we look back at our first 5 years and what we have done to forward our open science goals in scientific publishing. Our mainstay has been to create a process that allows the availability and publication of as many “research objects” as possible to create a more complete way of communicating how the research process is done. GigaScience was created [Scientific studies are more than just the narrative of the findings; they’re also the data behind the work. With this in mind, in 2010 the leaders of BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) conceived the idea for a new model for life-science publishing. As 1 of the world's largest genomics organizations, they realized that with BGI’s huge computational capacity they could provide the means to link standard published articles directly with the data supporting the research. By doing this as part of a publication system, it would be possible for research articles to be more comprehensive and for data producers to finally be able to get credit—via citations—for generating broadly useful datasets. Thus, GigaDB  [GigaDB.From the beginning, our goal was to change the way scientific publishing was done; with reproducibility, reusability, accessibility, transparency, and openness being our core principles. To do this, our first step was to find ways to directly link and make citable all “research objects”  that were used or created during research. With the computational and storage resources at BGI, we were easily able to develop a database to host any type or size of data: _004002) , we haveGigaDB, we went on to develop a Galaxy platform, GigaGalaxy, so that computational tools present in manuscripts could be tested and run in this platform [GigaDB to ensure that the version-of-record is always available with the paper. With these tools in place and curation staff to help authors, we have been able to have all of these components of the manuscript available during peer review.After the launch of platform . We alsoA major step toward improving current scientific publishing mechanisms to communicate research is to take advantage of all currently available technical advances to make all research objects accessible to the community. We envision that the future of publishing—communicating research—is to take advantage of these mechanisms and create a new kind of research “Article,” one that integrates different types of research objects  into the traditional static paper Fig. .GigaDB entries . For mo example  and repr example .GigaScience, we emphasized that we do not see preprints as a “prior publication” that would preclude submission to us, and we have strongly encouraged preprint server use. In fact, from launch we have been regularly inviting authors of appropriate-looking preprints to submit to the journal. Authors can now submit their bioRxiv preprints directly to us via the biorXiv B2J platform at the push of a button. This technical integration is another hallmark of biology preprints becoming a standard, accepted, and faster way of communicating research results.Building our own data hosting infrastructure has helped fill many gaps in the reproducibility cycle, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel—forming partnerships and integrating with protocols and computational workflow repositories and platforms has enabled us to quickly adapt and respond to the dynamic challenges and developments that publishing at the front line of data-driven research entails. Using the unifying factors of open source, open licensing, and APIs, we have managed to build a pipeline connecting platforms, such as bioRxiv, protocols.io, Code Ocean, and Publons—allowing transparent publication of all research objects. Further, we feel that partnerships that enhance the speed of data release are key. Thus, from the first days of launching must make all their data, source code, software, and any other relevant information or material openly and freely available. Openness from the beginning has been crucial: it is essential for transparency in the publishing industry, but also allows researchers and citizen scientists alike to assess the content of the work, reuse all of the information, understand what goes into assessing a manuscript, and more. We are quite obviously an open access journal, but since research is far more than a PDF, we mandate that the authors GigaDB, and we have biocurators to help authors migrate and organize their data. Moreover, since there are other databases that are mandatory for use when publishing—in particular, raw sequencing data must go into one of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Consortium repositories —our publication process includes a check at the beginning to make sure the authors have already deposited their data there; if there is a problem, our experienced curators can help authors. Doing such checks at the start is especially good as it can be much harder to get these data released after publication, as many journals have found.It's easy to mandate, but we also recognize the burden this places on authors, who already have enough to do. Given our very strict sharing rules, we try to take the burden off the authors by having procedures and tools to help. Orphan data from the manuscript can be hosted in For further transparency, we also mandate open peer review, so reviewers are named. Thus, the guessing games of “the reviewer is out to get me” and the lack of context for understanding review content are simply gone. We have found that the review process is more constructive than antagonistic, and we’ve also had a “meta”  peer review that included blog and twitter discussions of a paper while it was under review. (See more in “Peering into peer review” .) AdditiGigaScience will continue to push our agenda of identifying needs and adopting tools and mechanisms that will continue to better link and speed the pace of scientific communication for our next 5 years and beyond.While scientific publishing in many areas has been slow to keep up with the pace of research, change was our goal from the beginning. Over the last 5 years, we have worked hard to be as responsive as possible, embraced ongoing and current technologies, and immediately adopted emerging technical tools that clearly helped move research communication in an open, transparent, and rapid direction. We have focused on data and reproducibility, rather than subjective and outdated metrics such as Impact Factor , and we’API: application programming interface; DOI: Digital Object Identifier; FAIR principles of data: findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable.GigaScience.The authors are all employed by The journal has been supported by Article Processing Charges and funding from BGI and China National Genebank, as well as by the UK Natural Environmental Research Council  and BBSRC China Partnering Awards (BB/J020265/1 and BB/M027635/1).L.G. and S.C.E. wrote the original draft, and the other authors were involved in review and editing.GIGA-D-17-00174_Original-Submission.pdfClick here for additional data file.