Academic journals have been publishing the results of biomedical research for more than 350 years. Reviewing their history reveals that the ways in which journals vet submissions have changed over time, culminating in the relatively recent appearance of the current peer-review process. Journal brand and Impact Factor have meanwhile become quality proxies that are widely used to filter articles and evaluate scientists in a hypercompetitive prestige economy. The Web created the potential for a more decoupled publishing system in which articles are initially disseminated by preprint servers and then undergo evaluation elsewhere. To build this future, we must first understand the roles journals currently play and consider what types of content screening and review are necessary and for which papers. A new, open ecosystem involving preprint servers, journals, independent content-vetting initiatives, and curation services could provide more multidimensional signals for papers and avoid the current conflation of trust, quality, and impact. Academia should strive to avoid the alternative scenario, however, in which stratified publisher silos lock in submissions and simply perpetuate this conflation. PLOS Biology 20th Anniversary CollectionThis article is part of the Communicating the results and conclusions drawn from research is essential for scientific progress. Scientists have a duty to share reports of their work so that the community can critique and build on it, extend human knowledge, and ultimately translate the findings into tools that benefit society. Journals have played a key role in selection and distribution of research reports in the biomedical sciences for more than 350 years . ScienceHere, I review the history of science journals, discussing how peer review first emerged and later became widespread in the late 20th century, the rise of the journal brand, and how publishers capitalized and adapted journals to the online world. I then describe how journals currently operate and their roles in verifying, peer reviewing, and filtering submissions, before discussing how publishing could be improved in the era of the Web. My focus is primarily on when and how articles are shared and evaluated. I touch on some of the technical and financial aspects, but a comprehensive treatment of publishing infrastructure and business models is not my aim here. For the most part, I draw examples from biomedical science but many of the concepts discussed apply more broadly across academic publishing.Briefly, I argue that we are at a point where we can take full advantage of the potential of the Web for science communication. It is time to rethink the extent to which a single entity should be responsible for disseminating and evaluating research. Instead we should build a more decoupled system in which articles are first disseminated as preprints and then undergo review, filtering, and evaluation once they are already publicly available. Addiction to journal brand and Impact Factor has led us to conflate quality, impact, and trust in research. We now have the opportunity to adopt a new approach with better trust signals, in which judgments of an article’s merits are not made at a single point in time. However, we are at a fork in the road where we can choose a more open and equitable path or one that locks articles into publisher silos.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society [Journal Des Sçavans was launched earlier the same year but was broader in scope). Numerous, often short-lived, publications appeared over the next 2 centuries, but it was in the 19th century that journals familiar to readers today began to appear, including Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Many of the early periodicals were operated by scientific societies. Despite Oldenburg’s initial aspirations, they were generally not lucrative ventures and were often subsidized by the societies that ran them [A timeline of some key milestones in biomedical publishing is shown in  Society —was launran them .The mid-20th century saw a rapid increase in the number of journals, reflecting the massive expansion in scientific research around World War II (WW2) and, increasingly, commercial motives. Subscription revenue and, later, author fees proved a highly profitable business model. Publishers like Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press (later bought by Elsevier) capitalized by cultivating academics in different subfields as editors and launching numerous new titles across the life sciences . In 1850Early journals naturally needed editors like Oldenburg to solicit and select manuscripts. The use of peer reviewers is sometimes wrongly assumed also to be a centuries-old standard that existed from the outset. In fact, the practice of consulting external referees was only introduced in the 18th century and it was not universally adopted until much later. Moreover, where external referees were used, the aim was generally to protect the reputation of the scientific society that published the journal rather than to assess the merits of articles .Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) did not routinely do so until after the 1950s and Nature and The Lancet waited until the 1970s [Peer review did not become standard until the latter part of the 20th century. Many editors continued to handle the vetting process alone until after WW2. For example, whereas a number of learned societies began to send submissions to external referees in the late 19th century, As peer review evolved, it began to serve a role beyond simply helping editors filter out inappropriate articles: Referees were also asked to assess the quality of the research. This came to encompass evaluation of both its soundness and its significance, a combination that remains controversial. Judgments about the significance of the research became increasingly important commercially as journals competed for authors and subscribers, while funders, readers, and employers sought quality filters in the face of a growing deluge of literature. The perceived prestige of a journal became a key variable to which referees began to calibrate their reviews.Competition among journals led to the emergence of formal and folk rankings of titles. This helped librarians with limited budgets make subscription choices; more problematically, it provided a quick and easy proxy for the quality of individual articles in those journals. Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information  developed the most widely used metric—the Impact Factor—in the 1970s . A ratioPerception of a journal’s quality has of course never been solely about metrics. Many titles developed reputations for the fairness and diligence of their evaluations, together with authority conveyed by the academics on their editorial boards. Thus as academics began to view journals as a hierarchy , this geNature first attempted this in 1971 with the short-lived Nature New Biology, edited by Ben Lewin, and Nature Physical Sciences. Ironically, these were soon shuttered amid financial concerns and worries about dilution of the brand. There would be no such concerns 20 years later after Nature Genetics was launched. Lewin meanwhile launched Cell in 1974, cultivating a reputation for publishing groundbreaking science—and only science Lewin believed was groundbreaking. A publication in Cell became something to crow about and soon where one published seemed to matter as much as what one published. This was a key step in the rise of journal brands, to which the scientific community became as addicted as they were to Impact Factors. As Nature later budded off Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, and Nature Structure, Cell too spawned siblings like Neuron and Immunity then Molecular Cell, Developmental Cell, Cancer Cell, etc. Other publishers would create similarly branded portfolios, including The Lancet, JAMA (by rebranding existing titles), and BMJ. Sibling journals reinforced the parent brand, provided an outlet for rejected papers and diverted submissions away from the journals that previously occupied the second tier in the journal hierarchy  rather than the journal in which they were published. A new generation of born-OA commercial publishers, including Hindawi, MDPI, and Frontiers, also capitalized on the approach, generating remarkable growth in recent years but also concerns about the integrity of their review processes [Another consequence was the birth of Open Access (OA). Calls to take advantage of the Web to make articles freely available to everyone led to a debate about whether this should be accomplished by simply archiving free copies of manuscripts published in subscription journals  or by switching to a model in which article-processing charges (APCs) levied on authors or funders covered the cost of publication in a new breed of “Gold” OA journals that had no paywalls. Gold OA, increasingly seen as the desired solution by some funders and commercial publishers ,13, had rocesses . Many trChanges in the ways researchers discovered papers online provided an additional potential push to article-based evaluation. Web-based tools like PubMed and Google Scholar replaced paper- and CD-ROM-based indexes and also reduced the kind of general browsing readers had performed with paper copies. Online search results centered individual articles rather than journals by increasingly making articles, not tables of contents or journal home pages, the literature-entry point. However, the fact that submissions to mega journals soon appeared to track their Impact Factors indicated the Impact Factor addiction persisted . MeanwhiPerhaps the greatest threat to publisher hegemony in the online world was increased use of preprints, manuscripts that have not (yet) been peer reviewed by a journal so lack any brand imprimatur. Drafts of manuscripts had always been shared among small groups of academics, but the Web meant this could occur globally. The physics community was early to take advantage with the arXiv server, set up in 1991 . There wWhile some have raised concerns about dissemination of new scientific results without peer review, it’s important to note servers like arXiv, bioRxiv, chemRxiv, and medRxiv do vet submissions for inappropriate material ,18,20. TBy covering the costs of dissemination and decoupling it from peer review, preprint servers provide a platform for evolution of publishing. This has prompted many stakeholders to rethink the roles of journals, how and when peer review should occur, and perhaps whether it should happen at all. Before discussing the kind of system that could emerge as a consequence, however, it’s important first to understand how journals currently operate and the different roles they perform.Journals play various roles. Their formal functions include editorial evaluation, various forms of content verification, peer review, text and figure editing, typesetting and content tagging, proofing, digital object identifier (DOI) assignment, print and online publication, long-term preservation, and content deposition . Once anNot all journals perform all of these roles, not all do them well, and not all of these roles are necessary or even desirable. Nevertheless, it’s important to acknowledge they exist, understand why and be cognizant of the costs involved  if we waBox 1. The cost of evaluation. Defining the costs of publication depends on what one means by “publication.” Converting submissions into HTML and XML and typesetting for PDF/print are relatively inexpensive (though not as cheap as often imagined), as is online hosting. Costs mount, however, when people are involved. Quality control in production, administration, and editing involve salaried staff, and a journal that performs rigorous editorial assessment, verifies ethics, and administers peer review will have per-paper costs 2 orders of magnitude higher ($103/paper) than those of a preprint server ($101/paper). We must also be careful to distinguish costs from charges, as APCs may be subsidized by other sources of revenue .EMBO Journal and PNAS estimate their costs at approximately $6,000 per published research article [eLife has in the past produced similar numbers [Nature (>$10 K/article), the true per article cost is much greater (approximately $30 K/article), largely because of the staff time involved [EMBO Journal estimate that >16 hours of staff time are required per published paper for editorial assessment, content checks and administration alone, and that number would be higher were production tasks included [Several high-quality nonprofit journals have made their costs per paper public. The  article ,68. eLif numbers . Note thinvolved . The EMBincluded . Note theLife provides an interesting example of one such strategy: by no longer distinguishing articles as accepted or rejected post-peer review—essentially redefining the journal as a peer review service [One can argue whether all these costs are necessary and/or whether some could be reduced by AI, etc., but we should not pretend they do not exist. Any future vision for science publishing must either accommodate them somehow or justify why they are not necessary.  service —total coNature will typically be viewed very differently from one sent by an unknown journal, and there is clearly a distinction between a personalized invitation from an editor familiar with the work and a form letter generated using email addresses scraped from the Web.Authors submit manuscripts to journals either unprompted or after being solicited by an editor. Prior to the Web, solicitations tended to be a feature of selective journals, whose editors actively scouted for interesting research at conferences and lab visits. Solicitations became more widespread with the arrival of email and business models that rewarded high volume—to the extent that academics are now bombarded with spam invitations from a range of journals. Again brand is key: A solicitation from eLife’s decision to abandon post-review accept/reject distinctions [Once a paper is submitted, the first step is an editorial decision as to whether a paper should be peer reviewed or rejected without external review (desk rejection). The editor(s) will reject submissions that are out of scope or report findings felt to be of insufficient interest or obviously flawed. This is possibly the most controversial step of the process. Selective journals can desk reject >50% of submissions and the percentage is even greater for “high-impact” journals. The fact that decisions at the latter are generally made by professional editors not academics has been a talking point for years. I shan’t reprise the endless arguments but just note the degree of ire correlates with Impact Factor, so this seems more about the stakes than about who is making the decision . It’s noinctions  focused inctions . RegardlFor papers that are selected for peer review, in the ideal scenario a journal works hard to find 2 to 3 well-qualified reviewers whose specific areas of expertise, biases, and potential conflicts of interest are known. These reviewers each devote several hours to providing a detailed critique of the paper that gives suggestions for potential improvement, identifies any flaws, and assesses the importance of the advance for the field—there is an ongoing debate as to whether the reviewers should opine on the appropriateness of the work for the journal or leave this to the editors. An editor familiar with the field then thoroughly examines the reports obtained in the context of their own reading of the paper, bringing in additional reviewers if necessary and carefully analyzing any points of disagreement before coming to a decision on whether the paper should be rejected, accepted, or returned for revision. Minor revisions typically involve some rewriting of the text, with acceptance being the expected outcome. Major revisions are more extensive, may require additional experiments, and acceptance is not assured. In these cases, revised submissions will often be sent back to the reviewers for an opinion. Consultative review processes in which the reviewers see each other’s reports before reaching a consensus have given authors further confidence in the process , though A big question is how often that ideal scenario applies. It is increasingly difficult for many journals to obtain reviewers; months can go by as dozens of individuals are invited and decline or just fail to reply. Desperate editors may simply use individuals suggested by the author or automated/algorithmic selections and ultimately settle for anyone who seems vaguely qualified. Meanwhile, the inevitable tendency of editors to rely on people they know skews the reviewer pool to senior academics in Europe and the United States . ConflicThe problem manifests in part because the review process is largely opaque and uncredited, with little to indicate to a reader how thoroughly a paper has been evaluated. An early attempt to establish some form of certification for journal processes called pre-SCORE was unsuccessful , perhapsAn important but less widely appreciated area where increased transparency about journal processes would be welcome is in the other evaluations they perform. These include various forms of content verification, such as plagiarism checks, screens for image manipulation, ethics checks, verification of data deposits and author contributions, figure correction, copy editing, and nomenclature standardization. The order of events varies: some take place before editorial/peer review, others only once a manuscript is provisionally accepted. It’s important to stress that these processes are far from fully automated . They rEthical responsibilities extend beyond prepublication checks. Journals have an ongoing duty to update manuscripts with any necessary errata (corrections of publisher errors) and corrigenda (corrections of author errors). They must also conduct investigations and liaise with institutional authorities in circumstances where concerns are raised that might lead to complete retraction of an article. These investigations can take a huge amount of staff time and require significant expertise, underscoring the need for humans in the process and associated costs. We should also consider the fact that as business models shift from reader service (subscriptions) to author service (APCs), there is a financial disincentive to increasingly stringent vetting of content. This has manifested most obviously in the appearance of predatory journals but may also affect choices responsible journals make about costly processes such as manual image screening that do not benefit the customer directly.Another area where there has been pressure to reduce costs is production. Biomedical scientists typically submit papers as Microsoft Word files (a minority use LaTeX). Once accepted, article files are converted to a format that allows typesetting of a final print/PDF version and generation of XML and HTML. Meanwhile, figures are converted, sized, and linked and positioned appropriately for HTML and PDF display. The details of the process vary, and there are conflicting views on the ideal workflow. For our purposes, however, it’s sufficient simply to emphasize that while these processes are increasingly automated, they cannot be entirely automated so long as academics use current authoring tools. Human intervention and quality control is necessary, at least for a subset of papers, which are not always predictable in advance. Costs rise further if articles are copy edited or figures are redrawn, both of which involve several person hours per article. Oversight and vetting of proof corrections require further staff time, though some high-volume journals have eliminated these steps. It is also worth emphasizing that movies, executable code, and other novel online features inevitably take up further editorial and production time.Once an article is published, the publisher typically sends metadata to indexing services such as PubMed and, having generated a unique DOI, deposits this with a registration agency. Complete articles may also be sent to long-term archiving services such as Portico and repositories such as PubMed Central. In addition, the journal will update its own website and use a variety of feeds, emails, and social media tools to alert potential readers to the existence of the article.trust signals to readers.Journals play another, broader role within the scientific community: They often serve as forums that help define and nurture particular fields. Active editorial boards engage with the wider community of researchers and journals often collaborate with groups of researchers to agree on standards such as the TOP guidelines (see above) for ethics, methods and data reporting in the areas they cover. Together with the editorial checks described above and confidence in the peer review process operated by editors familiar to the community, this potentially allows journals to function as quality proxies. Many institutions have used journal Impact Factors to evaluate and reward faculty, and despite initiatives like the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), many scientists suspect institutions continue to rely on Impact Factors when assessing their staff, just not overtly. Journal brand meanwhile is used as a quality proxy in all sorts of informal evaluations when a rapid and rough assessment of an individual is required—from shortlisting job candidates to selecting reviewers, seminar speakers, or award recipients. They are also used by readers as filters to decide what content to browse and which papers to read. Scientists increasingly limit the number of journals they browse and encounter content elsewhere only via targeted searches or other recommendations . But even then, journal title often factors into whether they read a paper and what they think of it.More commonly, however, journal titles are used as The result has been an unfortunate conflation of quality, trust, and importance in a single parameter: the journal brand. This is made worse by being based on selection performed at a single point in time by a small number of people, who might not be a representative sample of experts in the field. The challenge is to envision a future for scholarly communication that addresses these problems and ultimately provides a path to better trust signals.As I have described above, science publishing is currently based on a late-20th century, pre-Web workflow in which journals are responsible for peer and editorial review, content verification, distribution, and correction, and in addition serve as signals for curation and evaluation. The question we should ask ourselves now is how this might all be best performed in the era of the Web. What should the publishing process look like, who should perform each step, and how can we build an ecosystem that is more equitable and avoids a conflation of trust, quality, and impact that may be distorting science? We are now at a point where the idea of decoupling the different publishing functions currently performed by journals has become feasible –42, and eLife currently does for articles that previously appeared as preprints on bioRxiv and medRxiv. Publishers that operate their own servers and channel authors to final publication venues they operate have a similar financial incentive to create XML files only once.Decoupling of dissemination from evaluation by sharing articles as preprints is now widely—if not universally—accepted, and the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the benefits of immediate availability of scientific findings to be inarguable. There is a growing number of nonprofit preprint servers modeled on arXiv  to enable this, and the major corporate publishers all operate services that similarly allow posting of submitted manuscripts before completing journal peer review: Springer Nature acquired ResearchSquare; Elsevier acquired the Social Science and Research Network (SSRN); Taylor and Francis acquired F1000R; and John Wiley acquired Authorea. Meanwhile, the majority of journals now allow posting of preprints prior to formal publication, with hundreds actively partnering with preprint servers to receive submissions—see, for example, the B2J process operated by bioRxiv . So-callBox 2. A blueprint for overlay journals. Overlay journals take advantage of the fact that articles have already been permanently archived on a preprint server. The overlay journals need not go to the expense of developing and maintaining a hosting service for the articles itself and instead simply comprises lists of articles that have been selected for the journal with links back to the preprint server where the articles reside. The overlay can therefore comprise a lightweight website, perhaps something as simple as a Wordpress site. The journal Discrete Analysis operated by the math community on arXiv is perhaps the archetypal example.For overlay journals to be successful, however, the final version on the preprint server that has been approved by an overlay journal should be differentiated in some way both to human and machine readers . This coBest practices are just beginning to be established for preprints , and theBiomedical scientists will need to adjust to this new norm, as will journalists and the wider community. There is an opportunity to educate lay readers about the nature of scientific enquiry, peer review, and how scientific consensus emerges as a consequence of multiple studies and self-correction. Preprints provide a timely focus on this against the background of a growing deluge of un-peer-reviewed, peer-reviewed, and allegedly peer-reviewed material. Again, the COVID-19 pandemic has been illustrative. It led to unprecedented public attention on preprints, with good journalists frequently noting the findings were “not yet peer reviewed.” Misinformation is obviously a concern but narratives that place preprints at the heart of it are frequently spurious , and artThe phrase “publish-review-curate” (PRC) is sometimes used to describe how science publishing should operate in a post-preprint world, and decoupled models for peer review are beginning to emerge (see below). However, it is important to remember there are forms of content verification one cannot expect peer reviewers or readers to perform. We must be careful not to overlook the need for these, particularly given the prevalence of image manipulation , the eashttps://orcid.org/) is an example. Although currently an author-disambiguation system, it is an important trust signal when confirmed by an author and/or attached to multiple articles in different venues, and one can envisage it evolving to become a system for identity verification. Both the Center for Open Science (COS) and the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) have developed badges for content that represent another step in this direction [This is an area where improvement is needed, since many journals do little in the way of content verification and of those that do few are transparent about the checks they perform. A more granular and transparent approach would be significantly better than leaving readers to make assumptions based on journal brand. Assignment of “badges” to articles after passing specific content checks would provide more multidimensional signals for human readers, and embedding such badges in article metadata would be valuable for machine reading and indexing. The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) scheme  and SciScore (https://www.sciscore.com/) are already exploring this territory. Either way, in the PRC parlance one can imagine a blend of VPRC and PVRC (where V denotes verification) in which content checks are performed at various points and badges are sequentially added to articles to give readers increased confidence  so that this information is available earlier. Alternatively, third parties may perform these services. Initiatives like DataSeer  and so https://www.sciencecolab.org/biophysics-colab), a collaboration of research scientists who review and curate preprints in biophysics. Creating tools for such groups to arrange peer review could help address some of the inequity and skewing among those who get to participate in the process [https://connect.biorxiv.org/news/2021/05/14/dashboard), Sciety (https://sciety.org/), and Early Evidence Base (https://eeb.embo.org) already aggregate reviews and commentary from a variety of sources, but ultimately it will be important that search engines and indexing services such as Crossref, Web of Science, and ideally PubMed incorporate these as well. Effective indexing of accumulating peer reviews would pave the way for a more open ecosystem in which a variety of different approaches to evaluation coexist . Perhaps, it should be done differently depending on the type of research. For example, should experimental and computational biology be reviewed differently, and might studies reporting new tools and techniques benefit from review processes more like road testing than traditional review? Similarly, preregistration, and therefore linking to peer reviews conducted before the work is performed, could be employed more broadly. While unlikely to be appropriate for a lot of exploratory research, this would help to avoid bias in reporting of studies for which a clear prior hypothesis can be registered.Where different forms of review of the same paper are required, these could be separated. Statistical review at some journals currently involves dedicated reviewers, and this could take place on a different timescale with the outputs available earlier and appended as badges to preprints. We could do the same for other aspects of papers requiring specialist review. More generally, we should consider distinguishing “technical” review of methodology from “contextual” review of the findings. This would provide an opportunity to involve more ECRs in the process, particularly given that they tend to have more direct experience of new techniques than older principal investigators (PIs). ECRs in particular would also benefit from peer review being more broadly recognized as an academic contribution in its own right . Tools lPerhaps the greatest inefficiency in the current publishing process is the successive, redundant reviewing of papers by different journals, in which the peer reviews for rejected papers remain hidden and represent millions of hours of lost scholarship. Trickle-down or bubble-up approaches that keep manuscripts within a publisher silo are one approach to combating this . Cross-pNormalizing such a process will be a cultural challenge. The PubPeer service provides the most obvious example of this and offers some useful lessons . UndoubtFiltering of content has the potential to be much improved in a decoupled system that no longer relies so heavily on journal brand. Algorithmic recommendations based on text and citation analysis are already used widely. It’s a concern that a broader variety of tools are not routinely employed. Despite the appearance of numerous recommendation engines in recent years , many have been shuttered or failed to gain traction, and most biologists continue to rely on PubMed and Google Scholar. With the arrival of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) blurring the lines between dialog and search, it will be interesting to see what role they play . More chHuman curation will of course still play a role, be it via informal, trusted sources like colleagues and social networks or more organized tertiary material. Will this mean the return of the brand or the revenge of the community? Journal front sections  already play an important role highlighting work of potential interest. As journals cease to be venues where research itself first appears, providing context and analysis should become more important . Faculty Opinions (formerly Faculty of 1000) provides this service independently of journals , and theOpinions differ on the desirability of quantitative indicators for articles, which can be used for both curation and evaluation. Goodhart’s Law applies, but there is a strong push to rank content. Academia is a prestige economy, and hypercompetition only fuels inflation within it. Citations are a widely used metric easily incorporated into search tools and evaluations. Other article-level metrics, such as downloads and social media-based measures of attention , now often appear alongside articles but there is little sign they are widely used. In both cases, numbers are hard to compare across disciplines, despite attempts to normalize for this , and attOne final aspect of curation to consider is whether there is a conflationary counterforce. An implicit assumption of the PRC model is that (peer) review and curation can be distinguished and occur in series. But if peer review is ongoing, the line between peer review and News & Views may blur as people experiment with evaluation. This could be important when opinions of the merits or validity of work differ among experts and/or later developments cast the work in a new light. In such cases, PRCR may be a more accurate depiction of events than PRC. We must be careful to avoid the wisdom of hindsight in judging individuals though, understanding that their logic, methods, and conclusions may have been perfectly reasonable given the state of knowledge at the time.Any vision for the future of science publishing should be centered on making new findings available as soon as possible to spur further research and speed up its translation to actionable tools and knowledge that benefits society. Peer review in its broadest sense should be a critical aspect of this process. In recent years, however, it has too often served as a mechanism for assigning quality proxies to articles, as academia has effectively outsourced evaluation of scientists to journals. We should instead focus efforts on ways to verify the content of articles and their authors and provide trust signals for readers. Decoupling peer review from dissemination will allow it to take on different forms, operated by different actors, among a variety of multidimensional indicators rather than sustaining a single quantitative or qualitative journal-based parameter. The oft-referenced “article of the future” we should strive for should thus be a constellation of linked web objects that include narrative (the article), data deposited in appropriate repositories, appropriately archived code and coding environments, verification badges, and any necessary protocols or preregistered research plans, amid a cloud of review and evaluation elements that accumulate over time.To achieve this vision, we should strive for an evolving, open ecosystem  rather t


Sleep Advances, the new journal of the Sleep Research Society (SRS). It is my privilege and honor to serve as the inaugural editor-in-chief of this online-only, gold open access journal that will help propel the field forward by publishing excellent papers in sleep and circadian research. Our vision is to disseminate timely developments and advances that reflect the diversity of sleep and circadian science and to offer our authors quick, objective, and straightforward peer review.Welcome to SLEEP’s high standard for acceptance to cascade to the SLEEP Advances review process so that this science can find a publication home in an SRS journal.Our mission is to build toward this goal with a strong and effective editorial board and peer reviewers. We plan for reviews that are fundamentally fair and reasonably fast. We will offer our authors a process for pre-submission inquiry with rapid turnaround. We will also provide a mechanism for excellent submissions that do not meet We will focus our content across the lifespan and across species, methodologies, and ideas. We welcome science that explores novel concepts and approaches, including basic biology, neuroscience, and behavior. Papers that introduce the field to new measures or methods of analysis will also be welcome. We are eager to publish excellent translational research, though hope that the field’s other clinically oriented journals will continue to publish papers that describe and report practice parameters and clinical guidelines.Accomplishing our goals will depend on the active engagement of members of the sleep and circadian field from around the world that include scientists in North America, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East. We seek both established and emerging leadership for our editorial team … first, second, and third generations of our scientists … who are ready to help launch and sustain the journal.We envision supporting our authors by providing swift feedback on submissions along with special opportunities to present and highlight their science, including rapid publication and release free to the public, promotion of noteworthy articles to the media, and highlighting individual papers with “cover” art. We will support our authors to manifest transparency and reproducibility of their findings by encouraging them to provide full data sets and analytic code. Because of our stature as on-line, digital journal, we hope our authors will also take advantage of the format to submit videos, three-dimensional graphics, and other content that can enhance the visibility and accessibility of their work.SLEEP Advances, I am eager to work with the SRS leadership to guide the journal, and I am ready to welcome manuscripts from the best our field has to offer.Again, I am thrilled to undertake leadership of SLEEP, and many individuals at Oxford University Press, including Christina Snyder, for their effort and encouragement in making the SRS vision of this journal a  reality.I thank John Noel, SRS Executive Director, Ron Szymusiak, EIC of


Medical care for cancer is increasingly directed by genomic laboratory testing for alterations in the tumor genome that are significant for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. Uniquely in medicine, providers must search the biomedical literature for each patient to determine the clinical significance of these alterations. Access to published scientific literature is frequently subject to high fees, with access limited to institutional subscriptions. We sought to investigate the degree to which the scientific literature is accessible to clinical cancer genomics providers, and the potential role of university and hospital system libraries in information access for cancer care.We identified 265 journals that were accessed during the interpretation and reporting of clinical test results from 1,842 cancer patients at the University Health Network . We determined the degree of open access for this set of clinically important literature, and for any journals not available through open access we surveyed subscription access at seven academic hospital systems and at their affiliated universities.This study found that nearly half (116/265) of journals have open access mandates that make articles freely available within one year of release. For the remaining subscription access journals, universities provided a uniformly high level of access, but access available through hospital system collections varied widely.This study highlights the importance of different modes of access to the use of the scientific literature in clinical practice and points to challenges that must be overcome as genomic medicine grows in scale and complexity. Routine care for many cancers now includes testing to identify alterations in the tumor genome that drive the patient's disease . In thisGenomic tumor sequencing results are conveyed to physicians and patients mainly through written reports. Certified clinical laboratories performing genomic testing issue reports identify the genomic alterations present in a tumor sample, and also provide an interpretation that comments not only on the technical parameters of the testing but also on the clinical implications of the results. Because of the complexity of the genome, reporting standards have evolved to require that laboratories give an interpretation of the significance of each variant reported  See App. ClinicaAs a result, clinical genomics reports often contain, by necessity, personally focused, patient-specific reviews of the scientific literature. Each alteration is researched by the reporting laboratory, and an interpretation is issued based on information found in the scientific and medical literature. Literature searches are accomplished using a combination of manual search using conventional literature search tools , and by using proprietary and publicly available cancer knowledgebases, databases that contain information on the impacts of particular genomic alterations on protein function and therapy which can be searched either manually or automatically via an application-programming interface –13. BecaGenomic interpretation is generated and consumed by medical personnel of varying levels of training. Once issued, clinical reports are read and used by many care providers, including specialist physicians, generalist physicians, nurses, and genetic counselors, and ultimately are available to patients, who are increasingly willing and able to research their genomic test results ,15.As personalized medicine has developed and expanded, the need for access to scientific literature has increasingly become an important issue. Genomic testing has, until recently, been carried out largely as part of research studies at medical centers affiliated with universities, a setting where those generating and consuming genomic interpretations have enjoyed extensive access to the scientific literature through university library subscriptions. However, as genomic testing has moved increasingly into standard care, it has involved more and more providers in non-academic roles that do not have extensive access to the scientific literature needed for genomic interpretation. Within some academic centers, personnel who do not have university affiliations rely heavily on library collections kept by hospitals for literature access. At the same time that cancer genomic testing has expanded, obtaining access to the scientific literature required for interpretation of these results has become more complex and expensive for public institutions –18.To assess how well current systems meet the needs of precision medicine, we investigated the accessibility of literature used by a clinical laboratory in the interpretation of genomics results. We compiled the journal article references accessed during the interpretation of genomic testing results for nearly 1000 lung cancer patients and 1000 patients with hematopoietic malignancies, incorporating results generated using both manual search and by IBM Watson for Genomics, an automated system. Further, we surveyed medical centers and university libraries in Canada to assess how well the subscription-only sources were covered by these institutional collections.The research in this study was approved by the Research Ethics Board of the University Health Network (Study ID 18-5808).The test dataset consisted of PubMed IDs (PMIDs) of journal articles that were accessed and recorded for clinical interpretation of sequence variants in two settings: first, in routine biomarker testing for a series of non-small cell lung cancer cases tested at the UHN Genome Diagnostics Lab (lung cancer series), second, a series of cases tested as part of the AGILE study of genomic profiling of hematological malignancies (leukemia series). For the lung cancer series, testing was performed between 2015 and 2019, and the leukemia case series testing was performed between 2014 and 2017. Lung cancer testing was performed on 15 genes that are clinically important for lung cancer. Leukemia testing analyzed 54 genes used for diagnosis, risk evaluation, and therapy selection in hematological disorders. For both patient series, PMIDs were extracted from curation notes recorded in the Alissa genomics analysis platform (Agilent) using custom Python scripts. In parallel, cases from both series were analyzed using the Watson for Genomics platform (IBM). Per system requirements, sequencing results in the form of a Variant Call Format file (.vcf) were input, along with an appropriate disease code from the NCI Thesaurus. Interpretation text was outputted in JSON files, which were parsed for PMIDs cited in the interpretive text using custom Python scripts .PMIDs were matched to journals using a custom Python script to query the PubMed Application Programming Interface. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) Catalog was used to assign journals to publishers and to link print and electronic International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSNs) for each journal. Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science Core Collection was used to assign one or more subject categories for each journal. Clarivate Analytics' 2019 Journal Citation Reports was used to find and assign the 2019 Impact Factor score for each journal.Journals' open access policies were determined using information from the Directory of Open Access Journals, PubMed Central, and from the publisher's website for individual journals. Journals were categorized as Gold Open Access (GOA), Delayed Open Access (DOA), Hybrid Open Access (HOA) or Subscription Only (SO) where information was available. GOA journals have all the articles published in their final peer-reviewed form freely available through the journal or publisher's website on the day of release. Journals were only classified as GOA if it was specifically stated in one of the sources listed above. To maintain congruency with the Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health , it was The survey of literature access targeted libraries of hospitals, health authorities, and universities that conducts research in medicine. Between May and August 2020, 21 hospital system libraries, 12 university libraries, 10 regional and provincial health authorities, and 4 health library associations were contacted to gauge interest in participation. Seven hospitals and their associated universities agreed to collaborate in this study. The academic hospital systems that collaborated in the study were: University Health Network (UHN), Toronto, ON; Trillium Health Partners (THP), Mississauga, ON; McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), Montreal, QC; The Ottawa Hospital (TOH), Ottawa, ON; IWK Health Centre (IWK), Halifax, NS; London Health Science Centre including The London Regional Cancer Program (LHSC), London, ON, and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA), Winnipeg, MB. For comparison, the collections of the universities with which these hospitals are associated were also analyzed: The University of Toronto (U of Toronto), Toronto, ON - associated with UHN and THP; McGill University, Montreal, QC - associated with MUHC; The University of Ottawa (U of Ottawa), Ottawa, ON – associated with TOH; The University of Manitoba (U of Manitoba), Winnipeg, MB - associated with WRHA; Dalhousie University , Halifax, NS - associated with IWK Health Centre; Western University (Western U), London, ON - associated with LHSC.Because information on institutional holdings is complex, methods for collecting holdings lists were unique to each institution. No single survey method was used for all institutions – holdings data were gathered from internal records which were not available publicly. For health science libraries without web-based catalogs of journal holdings , journal lists from subscription packages relevant to life sciences and medicine were compiled and duplicates merged based on ISSN number. For larger institutions , holdings were available via public web-accessible catalogs. For these institutions the list of subscription-only journals used in clinical reporting and analysis was searched directly against the public holdings record. Searches were made by ISSN number. All journal holdings lists for libraries were received or created between May 2020 and August 2020.Statistics on Universities were taken from public informational websites, accessed October 29, 2021  of journal articles used in the interpretation of the genomics results were recorded as part of the routine clinical analysis work, and these PMIDs were compiled to create a dataset of references used in this standard manual curation process. Subsequent to this manual curation, genomics test results were analyzed using IBM Watson for Genomics (Watson), an automated system for generating interpretation of the biological and clinical significance of genomics results –30. The In total, the clinical interpretation of the results from these case series yielded 9565 article uses, referencing 2264 separate PMIDs . For botJournal of Thoracic Oncology) and the two most cited in the leukemia dataset  are prominent publications focused on those diseases , publications that have a focus more specifically on cancer genetics were also frequently cited   . JournalJournals that were most commonly identified as sources for interpretation and reporting of clinical results for (A) lung cancer or (B) hematological malignancies. Journals cited 25 or more times are shown. For a complete list of journals, see Supplementary Information). (C) Web of Science subject categories for journals in the combined clinical interpretation dataset. (D) Proportion of journals used for clinical interpretation published by large publishers. (E) Proportion of journals used for clinical interpretation by open access policy. (F) Proportion of Gold or Delayed open access journals for publishers well represented in the clinical interpretation dataset. Proportion is given for publishers with 5 or more journals identified as interpretation sources. Other gives the proportion of open access journals in all others not published by the named publishers.We found that more than half of the journals used in clinical interpretation were published by large publishers – specifically, the five publishers that control the largest share of the Natural and Medical Sciences publishing structure space . The pubBecause open access policies are becoming increasingly necessary to access the literature for all scientific fields, we surveyed the extent to which journals needed for clinical genomics interpretation were available through open access policies. We researched the open access policies of the journals in the clinical interpretation dataset and categorized them as GOA, DOA, HOA, or SO. We found that fully accessible journals were the minority in the clinical dataset. 50 out of 265 journals (19%) were classified as Gold Open Access and 25% (66/265) had Delayed Open Access policies . A furthJournals restricted to subscription-only access more commonly belonged to large publishers. Among publishers with more than 5 journals in the dataset, we found that the proportion of Gold or Delayed Open Access journals was markedly lower for large for-profit publishers than for the remainder of the dataset as a whole . Two notFor the sizeable number of articles that are not available via open access policies, providers must rely on subscription access. To fully understand the level of access that healthcare providers have to the literature needed to interpret clinical genomics results, we conducted a survey of subscription access at 7 major hospital systems in Canada and 6 of their affiliated universities. All of these hospital systems are engaged in both treatment of patients using genomic biomarker testing and in laboratory testing reporting interpretation of genomics results. As in the United States, physicians and many non-physician staff at these academic hospitals have faculty appointments or other affiliations with universities and are able to access university library collections in their day-to-day work.All of the six universities surveyed have medical schools. Robust collections in the health sciences are tied to a university needing to support a medical school and the affiliated status of the hospitals around that school are related to the learning requirements of those medical students. These universities predominantly ranged in size between 20,000 and 40,000 students , comparaAll of the hospital systems we surveyed have institutional health sciences library collections which are accessible to all staff involved in clinical genomics. The hospital systems surveyed all employ between 10,000 and 16,000 staff . These iWe investigated whether these university collections and hospital system collections were sufficient to provide access to the full set of references used in our clinical interpretation dataset by checking subscription access for all journals which did not have complete public open access (Gold or Delayed Open Access). The collections of all six universities provided almost complete access, with all collections providing access to near or greater than 90% of journals in the dataset . CoveragIn keeping with their smaller collection sizes, we found that coverage rates were significantly less for health science center library collections. The larger collections kept by UHN, THP, TOH and IWK achieved 40-50% coverage , Fig. 2aBecause precision medicine often involves interpretation of genomic alterations that are rare or unique, it relies heavily on more focused case reports and small studies likely to be found in very specialized publications. Because hospital library collections may potentially supplement areas of coverage where university collections are weaker, we asked whether these collections were complementary to university collections for clinical genomics or overlapping. To assess the gaps in university holdings, we analyzed WOS categories for the journals in the clinical interpretation dataset that were missing from university collections . We founWe have compiled a large dataset of publications accessed for clinical interpretation of genomic biomarker testing and used it to assess the accessibility of this literature for the health care providers that produce and consume these test results. We find that while 44% of the literature needed is available through open access policies, as much as 56% is not, and providers must rely on institutional library subscriptions to gain complete access. We also find that while university collections were largely sufficient to gain access to all of the literature required, the collections of individual hospital systems covered far less, exposing a gap in literature access that may affect the practice of personalized oncology.Digital subscription access to journal articles is essential for clinical laboratories because of the need for fast turnaround and high throughput. Clinical labs require a degree of scale to operate economically, and even smaller academic labs issue thousands of reports per year. The time spent per case on interpretation in the clinical setting rarely exceeds an hour, and by necessity must be on the order of minutes for most cases. Interlibrary loan (ILL) has been a key part of hospital libraries' ability to offer access to journals beyond their immediate collections, and digital services like the National Library of Medicine's DOCLINE have enabled fast turnaround for interlibrary requests for medical articles . HoweverHowever, ILL may be a useful tool for clinical labs in interpretation of hereditary testing, a related but distinct area of genomic medicine. While personalized cancer biomarker testing requires reporting on all variants of possible clinical significance (which for larger panel tests can number in the dozens), testing for hereditary disease seeks to identify one or a few genomic variants that are causative and diagnostic for a genetic condition. As a result, hereditary reporting is more detailed, and full reporting of all available literature is crucial. Hereditary testing is also generally done on a longer turnaround , a timeframe for analysis and reporting that is more compatible with the time needed to fill ILL requests. Additionally, the fees associated with ILL are likely to be lower per case with hereditary testing, with fewer requests required overall.The collections of academic hospital systems, while smaller than university collections, are an important mechanism in providing access to literature for personnel that do not have access to university resources. While physician staff at the academic hospitals we surveyed generally have a university affiliation, there are many unaffiliated health care providers that interact with precision oncology reports who rely on internal hospital access. Most notably, the work of literature searching on the significance of genomic variants by clinical labs is often done by analysts or technicians who do not have university affiliations and may lack access to paywalled literature. With different cost and resource sharing models between academic medical centers and affiliated universities, the need for hospital collections to provide access to non-physician personnel may differ greatly by institution.As personalized medicine expands in scope and more decisions are made based on these individualized lab findings, the need for access will certainly extend beyond university-affiliated institutions. Increasingly, generalist and specialist physicians at community hospitals without academic affiliations are using personalized genomics results in cancer care, especially where care is less centralized, such as in rural areas. The need for information access will also be felt acutely in middle-income countries, where precision cancer care is becoming available, but where information infrastructure may be less extensive.Acquisitions by hospital libraries can be targeted to areas of specific need not covered by general university collections. Such an endeavour would suggest a need for clear communication of needs between libraries and the groups they are serving to understand what sorts of information is used and how it is used by their library's patrons. We assessed whether this could be applied to precision genomics, where coverage of highly specialized publications may be of great value. However, we found that targeted acquisition is not likely to be effective for genomics interpretation. The journals used for genomics interpretation were as likely to be of broad interest as to be focused and did not discernably represent any one subject category. While non-English language journals were frequently not covered by university collections these do not represent a clinically significant group, as they are rarely cited or considered in clinical reporting. Our study does not point to any category of publication that could be selectively acquired to enhance the practice of precision medicine.While targeted acquisition and partnerships with university libraries can help close the gaps, ultimately staff and resources for hospital libraries remain essential. In May 2021, the Canadian Health Library Association released a statement on the importance of hospital libraries. In it they cited that hospital library resource and workers aid in making better informed clinical decision making, preventing adverse events, and reducing unnecessary treatments, referrals and lengths of stay. However, the trends of library closures, budget reduction, and termination or redeployment of employees has threatened the existence of hospital libraries.  Any chanWe found that open access policies are an important component of access for the practice of clinical genomics, with nearly half of the publications needed for interpretation available under Gold or Delayed Open Access policies. While hybrid open access journals made up a significant proportion of our dataset, the uptake of open access in this model is generally quite low –37, and Our study focused on Canadian institutions. However, academic medical centers in the US and other countries also routinely use university affiliation to grant access to information resources, and the issues that we explore in this study apply generally in academic medicine. It is important to note that commercial labs have a much larger role in the US than in Canada. Genomic testing for cancer care that is funded by the Canadian public system has largely been carried out in Canadian academic centers, with few patients getting testing from private labs. In contrast, in the US a large proportion of genomic testing is carried out by commercial labs, and a large proportion of patients receive care in non-academic settings. Commercial laboratories must negotiate their own literature access and use a variety of models, but ultimately open access policies benefit these providers and their patients as well.Another limitation of this study is that while we were able to completely assess current subscription access at universities and health science libraries, we were not able to fully assess whether the full back catalog was available under subscription access in some cases. Our analysis assumes that all back issues are available, but access to older publications may represent an another important constraint on information for genomic reporting.While this study has focused on the needs of health care providers, the greatest coming challenges around information access in cancer care will likely center on patients. While it has long been agreed that patients have a right to access their medical records, the trend toward patient-centered clinical reporting has accelerated greatly. With the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act in April 2021, patients in the US gained definitive access to the complete narrative text of electronic laboratory and pathology reports, making patients a legally defined part of the audience for laboratory interpretation of genomics results. Along w


Dermatology as a whole suffers from minority underrepresentation. We conducted a search of the top 60 dermatology journals for mention of their approach to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within their publication through editorial board members or peer-review processes. Of those 60, only 5 had DEI statements or editorial board members dedicated to increasing DEI. There are publications with checklists and frameworks for increasing DEI within the literature. We propose that more journals implement these resources within their peer-review process to increase diversity within their publication. JAMA Dermatology and the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology (JAAD), finding that their racial demographics mirror that of dermatology, although unrepresentative of the United States population [JMIR Dermatology’s efforts to improve DEI in our peer-review process.Research journals with diverse editorial board members are more likely to publish research from diverse perspectives . As the pulation . To the We identified the 60 highest-impact dermatology journals on Scimago by their h-index score. Each journal’s website was examined for statements on DEI, editorial board members dedicated to DEI, or other information regarding DEI in their peer-review process. Two independent reviewers performed website searches and documented the results separately to improve accuracy. If the journal was a subsidiary of an academic society, we did not include diversity statements made by the society unless it was explicitly stated on the journal’s website.JAMA Dermatology has an associate editor for diversity, a mission statement, and mentorship initiatives aimed at advancing DEI within publications. Further, JAAD and the British Journal of Dermatology have editorial groups dedicated to DEI. Pediatric Dermatology has a DEI statement. Finally, Actas Dermo-Sifiliograficas has listed the gender diversity of editors. No other journals met our inclusion criteria. The JAMA Network and American Society of Nephrology created editorial policies and a DEI checklist, respectively, to provide a framework and criteria to ensure DEI is an integral part of the editorial and peer-review processes [Of the 60 dermatology journals reviewed, only 5 (8%) referenced DEI either as a policy on its impact on publication processes or identified individuals or groups dedicated to increasing the diversity of published research. For example, rocesses -6. The rJMIR Dermatology is dedicated to improving the DEI within our publications and our peer-review process. We plan to appoint a DEI editor to our editorial board who will lead a diverse editorial review committee. The DEI committee will provide manuscript feedback, recommendations, and guidance to encourage diverse author representation and ensure the use of inclusive language. We urge dermatology journals to join in this step toward improving racial and ethnic DEI in journal review boards.


Crohn’s and Colitis 360 (CC360) have launched 2 new initiatives, the Fellow’s Corner and the CC360 Editorial Fellowship, to support trainees in gaining knowledge and skills regarding peer review and publication as well as offering guidance on training in IBD and an opportunity for publication in this peer-reviewed, open access, quarterly online journal. These opportunities are described in this manuscript.The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation has grown to appreciate the needs of gastroenterology trainees with numerous initiatives designed to provide education, academic opportunities, and mentoring in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in recent years. The editors and staff at  For some gastroenterologists (GIs), this may be the majority of their work: Devising research questions, designing projects to answer those questions, and analyzing and disseminating results. For clinically focused GIs, conducting research may not be the primary focus, but the ability to identify relevant research studies, interpret data, determine its validity, and apply it to clinical care is essential. Fellowship training is an ideal time to begin to develop skills in planning, conducting, and assessing research quality. Both pediatric and adult GI trainees completing a fellowship program accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education are required to conduct scholarly activities during training which may include classic biomedical research, quality improvement, population health, and/or medical education, prior to their graduation.We have created and launched a new section within the Journal called The Fellow’s Corner, which you are now reading! Each issue of the journal will contain 2 articles, 1 Training Pearl and 1 original article first authored by a fellow. The Training Pearl will be authored by an experienced IBD clinician, and the majority of Training Pearls will be invited by the editorial board. Topics may include clinical skill development, medical education, and mentoring tips focused on scholarly productivity and career development in GI with a specific focus on those interested in IBD. The second publication in the Fellow’s Corner will be an opportunity to highlight original articles written by fellows. While a wide range of article types will be accepted for peer review, including commentaries or editorials on the topics of training, health policy, and advocacy, there is a preference for original research articles which, in some cases, may be considered for a waiver of publication fee. When submitting an original work to CC360, a box will be available to check in the submission portal that indicates whether the article should be considered for publication in the Fellow’s Corner. Manuscripts published in the Fellow’s Corner will also be cataloged and highlighted on the CC360 Fellow Initiatives webpage.The Editorial Fellowship is a 1-year, mentored experience designed for second- and third-year GI or IBD fellows. In this program, the Editorial Fellow collaborates with Associate Editors of CC360 to learn about the processes of peer review, editing, and publishing. Through reviewing manuscripts submitted to the journal and receiving feedback on these reviews from our Associate Editors, fellows hone their ability to identify strong research and provide constructive comments to authors. The program also provides the opportunity for networking within the IBD space, and for publication of peer-reviewed work in CC360. Applications will open for the 2024–2025 Editorial Fellow in the fall of 2023 and 1 fellow is selected per year to serve a term from February through the following January.https://academic.oup.com/crohnscolitis360/pages/360-fellows. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at hilary.michel@nationwidechildrens.org and lisa.malter@nyulangone.org.To be a well-rounded, effective GI, one must be both clinically savvy and knowledgeable about how to conduct, interpret, and review scholarly research. With these novel programs at CC360, we aim to support the development of trainees and contribute to the growing pipeline of academically excellent pediatric and adult GIs and IBD specialists. More information about these initiatives can be found here:


The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations are used by medical journals worldwide to guide editors and authors regarding “best practices” related to the intersection between research and publishing. In this opinion paper, we bring two discussion points to the attention of readers and users of the ICMJE recommendations. The first pertains to journals’ use of the old conflicts of interest form, replaced in 2021 with a new disclosure form. The second relates to inconsistent or outdated policies in journals’ instructions for authors mismatching the current ICMJE recommendations. The ICMJE does not monitor how journals use or apply the ICMJE recommendations. Thus, the editors must be mindful of updates and changes relevant to the authors. Furthermore, authors should carefully examine journals before submission to ensure that journals use updated forms and policies and should be mindful of submitting to non-ICMJE-recommendations-conforming journals despite claiming to follow them. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals,” or the ICMJE recommendations in short, are used by medical journals worldwide to guide their editors and authors regarding “best practices” related to research and publishing. Like most guidelines existing for journals, editors, and academics, their content is rightfully evolving, and these guidelines are updated to either reflect new challenges in the world of publishing ethics or new policies adapting new philosophies emerging from the research environment.Japan Medical Association Journal (JMAJ) claims to use the ICMJE recommendations and requests that authors abide by them. However, some of the requirements can be challenging to meet and might reflect cultural limitations. For example, a recent opinion paper in JMAJ highlights challenges that residency specialists face, namely when publishing papers, one of the criticisms being that complex  permissions are required to make the secondary publication of papers originally published in Japanese compliant with the ICMJE recommendations (1).The (2). For example, in that paper, it was questioned whether those journals that claimed to follow the ICMJE recommendations were evidently doing so. Thus, a journal merely claiming to follow these guidelines does not necessarily imply that such is being followed. Advice had been offered by the ICMJE for authors to avoid citing articles in predatory or pseudojournals, yet the ICMJE offered no such list. How can authors confidently know whether a paper belongs to a valid (scholarly) or a predatory journal? Moreover, should the ICMJE dictate what research academics can or cannot cite, and why would such a policy be nondiscriminatory and not a violation of authors’ rights and freedoms to cite whatever literature they feel is important? Consequently, while some recommendations by the ICMJE may look “good” and valid on paper, as their wording is adjusted to a fine scale with each “update,” some are unrealistic in practice. This suggests that despite the long history of the ICMJE recommendations, they are still lacking and are thus imperfect. Finally, that paper highlighted the “unfair” privilege that the ICMJE has in publishing multiple copies of its recommendations across as many journals as it deems fit or as wide as its influential network spreads. This is a luxury that average academics do not have.The ICMJE recommendations are refined every year or two, possibly in response to academics’ concerns made about them (3).As another very prominent example of the fluid nature of changes to the ICMJE recommendations, many medical journals rely on them to define authorship, requesting authors to make statements validating their authorship and contribution to the stated research. However, making a statement on paper is one thing, but verifying the validity of authorship is a completely different issue. Thus, as argued above, some of the ICMJE recommendations sound good in principle, but in practice, they are extremely difficult to implement, especially authorship verification. In journals claiming to follow the ICMJE recommendations, authors must satisfy four clauses to meet the ICMJE’s definition of authorship. However, historically, this was rarely the case. The ICMJE authorship clauses were yesteryear (about a decade or more ago) and ambiguous, and authors only had to comply with three clauses . The issue of authorship verification is currently critical following the use of large language models and artificial intelligence-driven chatbots, like ChatGPT, which do not meet ICMJE clauses of authorship (4). However, category #13  is vague and leaves the accuracy of the form open to personal interpretation and bias, potentially invalidating the entire form. This risk is true for nonfinancial and/or personal COIs, which are often difficult to distinguish (5). Journals requiring authors to submit an ICMJE-based COI declaration must employ the new version because it is an ethics-related statement and a legal document. In addition, journals must be coherent. Therefore, if they claim to adhere to the ICMJE recommendations, they must enforce such policies. The ease with which authors can complete the current ICMJE disclosure form should not distract them from the caveats associated with unclear clause #13. In such a situation, it is best to consult with the journal and editor-in-chief before submission. Meanwhile, journals must ensure that ICMJE disclosure form is up-to-date  form template to a “disclosure form” in February 2021, formalizing it in June 2021, and the PDF version of the old form was replaced with a new form, in Word format, freely available from the ICMJE website . Two rea(1) offered some excellent ideas to residency specialists, who would also benefit from knowing the information in this opinion. Crucially, they must check the ICMJE recommendations for updates, just in case some policies concerning them have been updated. They must also check journals’ websites carefully to ensure ICMJE compliance. If they find a non-ICMJE-compliant journal, they should be cautious about submitting work to that journal.In their opinion paper, Matsubara and Takahashi Finally, we wish to raise a rarely debated issue, namely the retrospective application of current ICMJE recommendations to older papers. For example, for any reason, if there is an ethical investigation by a journal into a paper’s research, should the 2022 version of the ICMJE recommendations be applied to older papers, say from 2017 or 2007? Evidently not, and authors of such investigations must ensure that journals present the version of the ICMJE recommendations that existed at that time. Despite this logic, we have no evidence that current rules and guidelines are being retrospectively applied.Therefore, practicing the claims made within academic publishing is vital for the integrity of science. Editors claiming to follow ICMJE recommendations have an ethical obligation to follow and implement updates made to them. Authors should consider the truthfulness of claims made by editors as a criterion for deciding on where to publish their research. More generally, academics must intricately reflect on the dynamic nature of publication ethics because of its inextricable and growing impact on research careers.NoneThe authors contributed equally to this paper’s intellectual discussion, literature exploration, writing, reviewing, and editing.Not applicable.Not applicable.Not applicable.


Ecology & Evolution has published its first Registered Report and offers the perspective of the editor, author, and student on the publication process. Instead, the goal is to serve the ecology and evolution communities and provide an outlet for sound research and communication without acting as arbitrary gatekeepers. We strive to be experimental. This year, we have published the first manuscripts of a new type of article for Ecology & Evolution—Registered Reports.https://osf.io/) or Authorea (https://www.authorea.com/). Then, the actual research, as described in the “in principle” accepted Stage 1 report, is conducted. Stage 2 is the “complete” article , which is ideally reviewed by the same referees to ensure that the research approved in stage 1 has been appropriately conducted and reported. Further details on what is required can be found here (https://www.cos.io/initiatives/registered‐reports).The approach to publishing this article type sits particularly well with our sound science philosophy. Registered Reports are well‐described in the literature , so at this point, they are certainly not novel, but the journey to widespread usage among ecologists and evolutionary biologists is still in the early stages, with the first journal in the eco‐evo space only adopting them in 2017 , publication of confirmatory/negative results , a guard against HARKing and p‐hacking  the publication process of Gya et al.  and (b) 2Ecology & Evolution , our department granted us access to the lab during lockdown, saving the experiment. Once the data were in, “only” results and discussion remained, with no need for “creative” storytelling or adjustments because of lab failures or unexpected results.A couple of weeks into the labor‐intensive lab experiment, COVID‐19 hit. As this was an experiment that was crucial for a PhD thesis, but also because we already had the Stage 1 acceptance from In Gya et al. , we expeThere are, however, disadvantages to this way of publishing, with an obvious case being unexpected, yet interesting, results that were not anticipated in the original Stage 1. Fortunately, there are contingencies for this. The Registered Report format allows you to include “additional analyses” in a separate section of your results, but these results cannot be the main findings from your study. If unexpected findings really are a breakthrough and deserve to be the main story, you can retract the Stage 1 report and submit the new analysis and storyline as a traditional paper, to either the same or an alternate journal.Besides “additional analyses” accounting for unplanned inspiration, one concern we had was that the rigid structure of a Registered Report may hinder our ability to adapt the analyses to unexpected data, e.g., if the distribution of data did not meet our prior expectation or if a proposed model turned out to be ill‐suited to the data. However, we found this format nimble enough to account for such unforeseen issues, while keeping the analyses honest by requiring an explanation of such alterations.Another potential disadvantage is that writing a compelling Introduction can be difficult while you are still “blind” to the results. However, our experience is that this can be used to an advantage, helping focus the Introduction on the key question(s), without having to juggle back and forth between Introduction and Discussion, as is often the case in more standard article‐writing formats.Finally, delays may occur between submission/approval of Stage 1 and the actual experimental work ; therefore, Registered Reports require a relatively rapid peer‐review process, at least on the Stage 1 submission. It also requires clarifying to Stage 2 reviewers that the Introduction and Methods are already assessed and cannot be changed.Ultimately, we had a positive experience with our reviewers on this paper, and it did not feel like we were limited by our fixed Introduction or Methods from the accepted Stage 1 Registered Report.3Gya et al.  was one The lab work in Gya et al.  involvedhttps://betweenthefjords.w.uib.no/home/), and this time around, the lead authors were MSc students  reviewers’ comments and a potential rejection or request for major revisions by a scientific journal. This introduces high stakes into the student's thesis experience, which may be especially problematic for minority or underprivileged background students ; writing – original draft (lead); writing – review and editing (lead). Kristine Birkeli: Writing – original draft (supporting); writing – review and editing (supporting). Ingrid J. Dahle: Writing – original draft (supporting); writing – review and editing (supporting). Christopher Foote: Writing – original draft (supporting); writing – review and editing (supporting). Sonya R. Geange: Writing – original draft (supporting); writing – review and editing (supporting). Joshua S. Lynn: Writing – original draft (supporting); writing – review and editing (supporting). Joachim P. Töpper: Writing – original draft (supporting); writing – review and editing (supporting). Vigdis Vandvik: Writing – original draft (supporting); writing – review and editing (supporting). Camilla Zernichow: Writing – original draft (supporting); writing – review and editing (supporting). Gareth B. Jenkins: Conceptualization (lead); writing – original draft (supporting); writing – review and editing (supporting).We thank Allen Moore for constructive comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.


Biology Letters is a Royal Society journal focused on the rapid publication of short high-quality research articles, reviews and opinion pieces across the biological sciences. We are also a Plan S compliant  Transformative Journal. We continue to grow and innovate to provide the best service to our authors and readers in the face of a challenging publishing landscape.Biology Letters is committed to offering an excellent publishing experience for authors from maintaining a painless submission process to highly competitive publishing median times, with an average of 26 days from receipt to first decision and 15 weeks from first submission to publication. These turnaround times are testament to the hard work of our 90 strong international Editorial Board, comprised of expert Board Members, and Handling, Reviews and Preprint Editors. All these experts are efficiently organized by our excellent staff, Surayya Johar and Raminder Shergill, based in the Editorial Office at the Royal Society, London. But we are not complacent, and continually renew our Editorial Board to ensure it includes the best scientists to advise us on decision-making across our diversity of subject areas and to ensure it reflects gender and geographical diversity. If you are interested in joining our Editorial Board please contact the Editorial Office.The team at https://www.biorxiv.org/), paleorXiv and EcoEvoRxiv (https://ecoevorxiv.org/). Over the past year, our Preprint Editor, Catherine Talbot, has been recruiting more people to join her team and expand the subject area coverage. Again, please do contact the Editorial Office if you are interested in learning more about joining our preprint team.We are committed to increasing the accessibility of research and ensuring that it is communicated as rapidly as possible. To accelerate this process, we encourage researchers to deposit pre-publication versions of articles in appropriate preprint repositories such as bioRxiv . It means authors can transfer their manuscript information and metadata without having to re-upload files. We encourage authors to cite the preprint version in the accepted article. Authors are also permitted to cite other preprints, provided they are clearly identified as such.Staying with the preprint landscape, I would like to take this opportunity to highlight that Biology Letters, authors must declare where they have used AI in their manuscript. Declaring the use of these technologies supports transparency and trust. Please do familiarize yourselves with our current AI policy when you are submitting to the journal.As we embrace future developments to widen participation in scientific publishing, there is a need to be mindful of the advent of new artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technology, such as ChatGPT. Indeed, there are now examples of published articles written using ChatGPT, and most recently, of scientists taking it a step further by producing a research paper in less than an hour with ChatGPT as the ‘co-pilot’. These endeavours are exploring the frontiers of what AI technology may offer scientists in the future. Perhaps most importantly, they raise awareness of the need for discussions about its benefits and risks. Currently, in Biology Letters publishing model is our ability to assemble and publish topical collections of articles as Special Features. These collections follow from authors' suggestions approved by the Editorial Board. In recent years, Special Features collections have included Ocean Acidification (2017), Effect of Sea Ice on the Arctic Biota (2018), Blue Carbon (2019) and Ecological Resilience (2021). Last year's Special Feature on the causes and consequences of worldwide Insect Decline could not be more topical. These articles aimed to increase knowledge of potential causes and consequences of this decline. Rather than merely focusing on additional evidence for insect population declines, the authors provided a better mechanistic understanding of the causes for, and consequences of, insect decline. We welcome and look forward to suggestions for future topics.An important element of the Biology Letters. Earlier this year, Warren Booth and colleagues reported the first case of a crocodile who made herself pregnant, as identified at a zoo in Costa Rica. The discovery made headlines around the world. The phenomenon, known as parthenogenesis, occurs in birds, insects, fish and other reptiles but had not previously been reported in crocodiles. From Booth's comment to the BBC about the work, it is easy to see why it attracted press interest: ‘The fact that the mechanism of parthenogenesis is the same in so many different species suggests that it is a very ancient trait that has been inherited throughout the ages. So this supports the idea that dinosaurs could also reproduce this way.’As leading scientists, our authors often make the headlines with their research discoveries reported in As always, I would like to thank our talented and dedicated authors, readers and reviewers for all their hard work over the past year. The success of the journal reflects their efforts, together with those of our Editorial Board and publishing team.https://royalsociety.org/blog/2023/06/biology-letters-has-your-research-covered/) on the Royal Society's site written by our own Surayya Johar who caught up with some of our authors whose images made it onto the front cover of Biology Letters to find out what happened next.In closing, I would like to recommend an excellent publishing blog (


Few resources exist to support finding journals that accept case reports by specialty. In 2016, Katherine Akers compiled a list of 160 journals that accepted case reports, which many librarians continue to use 7 years later. Because journals' editorial policies and submission guidelines evolve, finding publication venues for case reports poses a dynamic problem, consisting of reviewing a journal's author guidelines to determine if the journal accepts case report manuscripts. This project aimed to create a more up to date and extensive list of journals that currently accept case reports.1,874 journal titles were downloaded from PubMed. The team reviewed each journal and identified journal titles that accept case reports. Additional inclusion factors included being indexed in MEDLINE, accessible on the internet, and accepting and publishing English language submissions.The new journal list includes 1,028 journals covering 129 specialties and is available on the Open Science Framework public page. Case reports are a type of article that provide a detailed account of a novel clinical finding, describing the findings, clinical progress, and future outlook of an individual patient . Though The design of contemporary undergraduate medical education has reinforced the importance of case report authorship as a publishing opportunity for early career physicians. Fourth-year medical students have expressed that writing a case report improves their scientific writing and presentation skills, improves their curriculum vitae, and helps them secure residency positions . The preDespite the availability of articles providing guidance on how to write case reports and select journals, authors are still faced with the challenge of finding a journal in their specialty that accepts case reports -13. ConsOur team conducted a search in PubMed for journals that included the publication type “case reports.” Next, the filters for “MEDLINE” and “English” were applied. Lastly, the team used the custom date ranges from November 1, 2021, to April 30, 2022, to narrow down to journals that were currently publishing. The records were downloaded to Excel and journal titles were deduplicated.The team chose to limit to MEDLINE journals. Indexing requirements for MEDLINE include transparent editorial policies, explicit peer review information, ethical and conflict of interest policies, and editorial board information . AdditioThe team collected the following information for each journal: journal title, URL to instructions to authors, and whether the journal accepts case reports. For any journal currently accepting case reports, the team collected further information about the publishing model  and selected the appropriate specialties. To facilitate data collection, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) catalog was searched for each journal, and from the journal record the electronic links were used to navigate to the journal websites. If a link was broken the team searched the internet for the journal title.The team created a controlled vocabulary list for the specialties. For cross-disciplinary journals, the team selected all applicable specialties. For journals with unclear specialties, the team included all the assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms listed in the NLM catalog record. Team members selected “other,” when a specialty did not appear on the list, then reviewed and updated the list as needed. Post-screening, the team finalized the specialty list.Finally, the team used the free version of AirTable , which includes an online data collection form. After compiling the data, the team uploaded the file into the Open Science Framework.Of the 1,874 journals reviewed, the team excluded 846 titles for the following reasons:Not fully indexed by MEDLINE (n=3)The journal website or instructions to authors used non-English text and the team could not translate the instructions into English (n=30)Unable to access the author instructions or broken journal websites (n=5)The journal was no longer being published (n=2)Non-journal publications (conference proceedings and books) (n=3)Did not explicitly state in the author guidelines that accept case reports (n=803)https://osf.io/b9wnx. Users can download the list or view it online. The spreadsheet is searchable, and users can sort the list by clicking on the column header(s).The final list includes 1,028 journals and is available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) at Authors often consult librarians about where to publish articles. During a consultation or reference interview, the librarian may guide authors through finding and evaluating journals. They may help authors create their own list of criteria for a journal including manuscript types accepted, indexing, aim and scope, open access, cost to publish, or journal ranking . Once anCase reports are not usually funded research projects and some authors may have to consider the cost of publishing their manuscript. Costs could vary by geographic location or the journal's agreement with an author's organization , 18, thoThe team intends for the list of journals available on Open Science Framework (OSF) to be customized for local use. The list can be downloaded and further curated to meet a specific user group's needs, for example by adding journals that are not indexed in MEDLINE, or by showcasing open access journals with transformative agreements with the organization. The curated list can then be uploaded and shared with a user group on the library's website.Journals frequently change publishing models, fee structures, and submission categories. As a result, any listing of journals that publish case reports represents at best a partial snapshot of the landscape at a given time. While this list can serve as a starting point when consulting with learners about where to publish a case study, it should not be viewed as exhaustive and may become out of date.