This Editorial discusses the missions and scope of the new Gold Open Access journal “Brain, Behavior and Immunity (BBI) – Health” and how it complements the activity of the established BBI journal. This Viewpoint is published concomitantly in both Brain Behavior, & Immunity and the new journal, Brain, Behavior & Immunity-Health, to reach the widest possible audience.Where do scientific papers go when they are rejected from Brain, Behavior & Immunity (BBI)?If you are reading this editorial, you probably are familiar with the missions and scope of BBI . DedicatBBI-Health.With a healthy impact factor stably hovering around 6 over the last few years, BBI receives approximately 1000 submission per year – and it rejects around 750 of them. Many of these are good papers, but are incompatible with the missions and scope of BBI. We have decided to capture at least some of the rejected papers in a sister journal, named There are many reasons why a paper is unsuitable from BBI, and many of the rejected papers are valuable studies that end up being published in other good journals. An internal study conducted by Elsevier has tracked down papers rejected from BBI in 2013–2017, which then went on to be published in other scientific journals. Elsevier used the title and the authors’ names to track each rejected paper, to see if they got published and, if so, where and when, and how each paper performed in terms of citations. Inevitably, some papers would have been untraceable because the title was changed, the data split or merged within other publications, or the authors had simply moved on and not published it. But, of those that were subsequently published and traceable, most were eventually published in quality journals. Ironically, incorporation of comments provided by the associate editors and reviewers of BBI may have made these submissions more competitive for other journals, much to their benefit.So, why were these papers rejected by BBI? Within BBI, there is an emphasis on studies that have a mechanistic component  and that have both biological and behavioural data (including some measure of immunity in its broader sense). So, papers that are scientifically sound that tend to be more descriptive without focussing on mechanisms; or test hypotheses that have been extensively investigated before for additional insights; or lack a behavioural outcome measure; or present conclusions that are considered too preliminary - are all considered unsuitable for BBI. For example, some papers are clinical studies using case-control comparisons of small samples or attempting to draw novel insights by measuring descriptive biomarkers that have been investigated before – often in the same types of clinical groups. And some are pre-clinical studies, like animal investigations testing or repurposing a me-too drug that affects a well-known mechanism for novel uses, with or without behavioural, clinical or functional endpoints. In summary, several of these rejections result from incompatibilities with the higher threshold for acceptance to BBI, which no doubt has led to its success. Yet, these papers could be helpful in moving research on psychoneuroimmunology forward, and often have clinical relevance.BBI-Health has been launched in order to broaden the canvas of research on psychoneuroimmunology by capturing at least some of these good-quality-yet-rejected papers. By doing so, BBI-Health would also leverage the time and effort invested by the BBI editors and reviewers in reshaping rejected publications into competitive submissions – but no longer for other journals. BBI-Health will allow the transfer of papers from BBI to BBI-Health, either before peer-review  or after peer-review (if the referees highlight concerns akin to what we have described above). The good news is that authors will be able to revise their paper based on the referees’ comments even if the paper is rejected by BBI and transferred to BBI-Health, thus minimising delays in the editorial process. BBI’s referees too, hopefully, will find their review efforts put to good use - even if the paper is rejected from BBI. Of course, the editorial team will ensure that their suggested changes are integrated in the revised version before submission to BBI-Health.broadening the scope and expanding the readership of both our journals, and about drawing more investigators into our field of research. Over time, we are confident that the clinical focus of the journal (when compared with BBI) will become clear to the broader family of readers and scientists, many of whom may or may not be members of the affiliated society, the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society. We are immediately inviting direct submission to BBI-Health for papers that fulfil the broader criteria described above of strong emphasis on translation and clinical, rather than mechanistic, relevance.But BBI-Health is not, and will not be, just about capturing rejected papers – it will be about Moreover, BBI-Health will publish paper formats that are clinically very relevant but yet are simply not accepted in BBI: research protocols of clinical studies and clinical trials; case reports or case series at the interface between psychology, psychosomatics, immunology, psychiatry and neurology; realist reviews, illustrating the method for implementation research; and papers discussing policy, including ethical, health and cultural implications of research in psychoneuroimmunology. BBI-Health will be broader – not narrower – than its older sister, BBI.Finally, there is an ambition that BBI-Health will be an open-access, high-quality journal that will fulfil the criteria of the new ‘open access’ policy detailed in ‘Plan S’ and endorsed by a number of funders in the cOAlition S, including the Wellcome Trust, UK Research and Innovation, the European Research Council and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who may eventually stop funding open-access publications in hybrid journals. If or when this happens, the community of scientists interested in psychoneuroimmunology and immunopsychiatry will be ready with a dedicated journal.We are already thinking at what data we can publish in BBI-Health. Are you?


Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have been researched now for about 30 years. However, even still, much of the work done in the lab environment is seldom applied within the targeted end-users, for example, people with severe motor disabilities.The main goal of the research community should be to finally bring the BCI into a state in which the end-users can profit and gain independence and quality of life. One possibility to push the field into practical applications is driven by initiatives such as CYBATHLON  and othIn the BCI Race, at CYBATHLON . Ideally, both aspects should be considered together, but how to do so optimally is still an open question.All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


COVID-19 pandemic has taken a distinct toll on routine health service provision, taking away precious lives, resources and health staff focus that none of us have ever witnessed before. During these testing times, the Indus Hospital & Health Network quickly adapted itself to ensure our services were available and the demands of COVID-19 treatment, both in the hospital as well as the community, were met. While IHHN rapidly partnered with stakeholders and participated in much needed clinical research including international drug and vaccine trials, the spirit of action and self was exhibited by all our staff, whether frontline, ancillary or support with the same zeal and courage. And thus, it was only befitting that our ICON 2022 theme would be called “Beyond the Call of Duty”, especially dedicated to the spirit of intense courage and personal sacrifice that our health staff displayed throughout the difficult COVID-19 waves.Our journal supplement also carries this theme, as it highlights work that clinicians and researchers from over 22 specialties have produced above and beyond their routine work in this all-consuming pandemic. We have deliberately opted for only an online version of this supplement as a direct tribute to the global medical community’s swift adaptation to virtual conferences and online meetings as well as a reflection of Indus’ paperless hospital concept. Writing an academic article requires collaboration, expertise and time. It is commendable that those who submitted their articles managed to carry out their clinical duties as well as coordinate their academic work during the pandemic’s multiple waves. Our publication committee received 32 submissions that underwent double blind peer review. Fourteen original articles, three case reports, one correspondence and one review article were accepted for publication. The articles were diverse and not necessarily focused towards COVID-19. In fact, only four articles are related to the pandemic even though a lot more COVID-19 related research took place at IHHN.We understand that when international collaborations take place or there is unique research from Pakistan, authors prefer submitting to international indexed journals over local ones. This phenomenon will change when more and more Pakistani journals are indexed and the turnover time for publication is reduced. As such, we are especially thankful to all the authors for their faith in submitting an article to this conference supplement to showcase IHHN’s research capabilities. We are also grateful to our publication committee for their detailed reviews and feedback for improving manuscripts and for collaborating with other reviewers. Our excellent publication coordinator ensured efficient correspondence between reviewers and authors, as well as with the Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences’ publication team, to ensure the production of this special ICON edition.It is our hope that this supplement will continue to encourage and inspire Indus’ clinicians to work towards and contribute to future editions.


Brain Communications. While we are still struggling with the pandemic here in the UK and worldwide, things are looking somewhat brighter with vaccinations allowing more interactions with loved ones and eventually maybe even in person scientific conferences on the horizon. I almost miss the bad coffee and jet lag that comes with the chance to chat with colleagues. But there are a few silver linings for the field from this horrible experience including the wider reach of online meetings. The organizers of the recent Brain Conference kindly sent us a Field Potential article describing their experience of hosting this conference which allowed us to reach people worldwide with the online format.https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/pages/biomarkers-collection) with an accompanying editorial by Associate Editor Dr Alberto Lleó.Welcome to Volume 3, issue 3 of Brain Communications asking for experience in the scientific publishing field. One of our goals is to promote career development of neuroscientists, so in response, we have decided to start a Brain Communications Observers scheme. In this scheme, led by our Scientific Editor, Dr Manuela Marescotti, we will demonstrate some of the day-to-day tasks of an editor and discuss the journal’s wider strategy with observers. With this programme, we aim to help observers understand the process of publishing a paper, give them insight into working as part of the editorial team, and enhance transparency of our editorial processes. At our last Editorial Board meeting, there were also fantastic ideas including a ‘reviewer academy’ to support ECRs in learning to review papers and giving them credit for doing so. Keep an eye on our website for more details.One of the many downsides of the pandemic for our field is that is has brought into even starker relief some of the systemic problems we face as scientists. Early career researchers (ECRs) have been hit particularly hard by the lab shutdowns and the economic downturn and resultant decrease in some of the funding streams. These difficulties for ECRs are not new, however, and one of the things I think we do poorly in academic neuroscience is help people transition out of academia at different career stages. There are not enough positions at the ‘top’ of academic neuroscience for all of our PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, but the skills gained in scientific training are of great value beyond academia in many areas including science policy, biotech, teaching and of course publishing. In the past few months, several ECRs have approached our team at https://sfdora.org/). Luckily for us, our fantastic authors have sent solid and super-interesting work that is already being well cited, so we are predicted to have a respectable impact factor, when it is assigned, despite not striving for this as a goal.For those of you wondering when we will have our first impact factor, the short answer is I don’t know and, to a certain extent, I don’t care. One of our founding principles is that we promote publication of rigorous neuroscience studies without requiring that every study be completely novel. We welcome replication studies, well-substantiated negative results, and repeating key experiments in different model systems. These studies by their nature may not be cited as highly as completely new findings, but we firmly believe it is important that they be published to help move the field forward and enhance credibility in neuroscience. Thus, we are NOT trying to drive a high impact factor by restricting acceptance based on novelty. I appreciate that for career progression, publishing in ‘high impact’ journals is important for most of us despite our institutions and funders signing up to initiatives like the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA The cover image for this issue is from Massey et al.Thank you for your continued contributions to the journal!Tara Spires-Jones, Edinburgh, UK


ESC Heart Failure as the first open access heart failure journal in September 2014, and we would have never guessed that this journal would produce such a great interest in the heart failure community. Indeed, the first ever article to be published in ESC Heart Failure—by this group of authors—already noted that ‘research in acute and chronic heart failure is busier than ever worldwide and demands more publishing space’.European Journal of Heart Failure, that would allow transfer to the new journal for submissions that could not be published, mostly for lack of space. Soon, the journal was indexed in PubMed, and in 2018, the first ever Impact Factor was released for ESC Heart Failure, reaching 3.407. Despite increasing submission numbers expected to grow to 1500 this year alone, we are extremely pleased to say that the impact factor has increased to 4.411 when it was published in June this year.We started ESC Heart Failure published in 2020 by Felicitas Escher et al. was a paper on the detection of SARS‐CoV‐2 genomes, which was published while the pandemic was still raging. These authors used endomyocardial biopsies of 104 patients with suspected myocarditis or unexplained heart failure to detect SARS‐Cov‐2 genomes by real‐time reversed transcriptase polymerase chain reaction and found that five samples contained SARS‐CoV‐2. These findings were suggestive of myocardial injury based in SARS‐CoV‐2 accumulation in the myocardium, ultimately leading to ubiquitous troponin increase.TableLooking into PubMed, a search of ‘ESC Heart Fail [JO]’ yields 1,424 results. Papers cover a very broad range of heart failure research from basic research over to randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, review articles, case reports as well as rationale & design papers, and subanalyses of large‐scale clinical trials. With an increasing submission rate and a decreasing acceptance rate that still is about 50% of all submissions, we always aim to broaden clinical and basic research understanding of heart failure in its largest sense. Not surprisingly, the best cited paper in ESC Heart Failure published in 2018 and 2019 and the citations to these manuscripts also gained in 2018 and 2019. This point also highlights the fact that the 2 year impact factor may be useful for research with rapid turnover such as heart failure but not for other areas. Real ‘impact’ may sometimes be better reflected by the 5 year impact factor that is also published by Clarivate Analytics—the current publisher of the journal impact factor after Thomson Scientific and Healthcare sold this part of their portfolio in 2018.Of course, the impact factor has been a matter of debate since its first release in 1975 after being originally suggested by Eugene Garfield. To understand how the impact factor is devised, it needs to be considered that only articles are taken into consideration that have been published 2 years before publication of the respective impact factor, for example, in June this year, the 2020 impact factor was released taking into account all publications in ESC Heart Failure, we are proud to have an impact factor above 4 giving us a solid foundation among other heart failure journals for future publications (TableAnyhow, as the editors of ons Table2, and


Chemical Science is celebrating Peer Review Week 2021 with the launch of Reviewer Spotlights, a new way to highlight the hard work of our reviewers, and encourage further diversity in our reviewer community. Chemical Science, we recognize the many and varied contributions our reviewer community make to ensure the quality of the research published in the journal is as high as possible.At We also know that a fair and unbiased review system relies on having input from a diverse range of reviewers, whether this is country of origin, gender, ethnicity, career-stage, or affiliated institution, in addition to having the relevant and sufficiently experienced subject expertise.We want our reviewers to reflect the diversity of our community and are actively working to improve this.Chemical Science are based, and how this compares with our authorship. This is a relatively easy first step, as this geograhical data is collected as part of the peer-review process and, in the case of the authorship, openly available. We have also started asking our reviewers and authors to voluntarily provide us with data on gender so we may analyse this in a similar way in the future. The other characteristics mentioned above are harder to capture, however we are currently exploring whether we should be doing this, and how this might be possible.To enable us to improve the diversity of our reviewers, it is important to start by understanding the current situation. As a first step, we have looked at where our current group of reviewers for †Data taken from Scholar One, and is the total number of reviewer recommendations returned for articles submitted in 2020, for initial submissions and resubmissions. Reviewer recommendations on revised manuscripts are not included, as these are likely to be the same reviewer in the majority of cases. This top five is the same as the authorship of the articles that are published in the journal.‡‡Data taken from Clarivate Analytics Web of Science™, for all articles published in 2020 issues. This includes all authors on an article. Data accessed 20th September 2021.It won’t be surprising to many that the top five countries that make up our reviewers are the US (27%), China (15%), Germany (9%), UK (9%) and Japan (6%).†The proportions do however differ, with the biggest discrepancy being that 32% of 2020 papers included an author based in China, whereas the percentage of reports returned from reviewers in China was only 15%. The UK is also under-represented in the reviewing pool, making up 18% of papers published but with just 9% of reviewer reports. The US, however, does a more comparable reviewing load for the journal, making up 27% of reviewer reports received, and an authorship of 31% of our published papers. For all other countries, the percentage of reviewer invitations and authorship are within one or two percent of each other.1 published by Publons and Clarivate Analytics, show the US dominating peer-review  compared to 25.4% of publication output, with China contributing less (8.8%) when it comes to reviews, compared to article output (13.8%). This same report however does point to this trend reversing in what it refers to as the ‘hard sciences’. When the volume of reviewer reports is normalized by country, this shows China and India making significantly larger contributions across chemistry. The relatively low percentage of reviewer reports from China for Chemical Science, and the fact that the proportion of reviewer reports from India is currently 2%, certainly shows that there is work for us to do here.This picture may not be that surprising, and this generally follows a pattern seen across peer-review globally. The Global State of Peer Review in 2018,Chemical Science community is to ensure we are suitably recognising those that do a great job for us, and show that a broad and diverse range of researchers are welcomed.An important way to encourage new reviewers into the 10.1039/D1SC90097H), as selected by the editorial team for their significant contribution in 2020 to Chemical Science. Our list includes reviewers who provided a much higher than average number of excellent quality reports. We also recognize that providing a high number of reports is not the only important measure, so we also selected reviewers who provided extraordinarily detailed reports, reviewers who were particularly noted for constructively helping authors to improve their manuscripts, and also reviewers who provided noteworthy and thoughtful adjudicative reports as well.Earlier this year, we published our Outstanding Reviewers for the journal  and Facebook  each week.Each month we will highlight reviewers who have provided exceptional support to the journal over the past year. They will be featured in a monthly blog post, and we’ll also be talking about an individual reviewer on Twitter (We are hoping that this feature will also provide some interesting insight into the review process itself and to demonstrate what new reviewers could potentially gain from being part of the process. There might also be some great hints and tips that these reviewers can share with you each month.Chemical Science blog.2 We asked our reviewers a few questions about what they enjoy about reviewing, and their thoughts on how to provide a useful review. To see their answers, please visit our journal blog or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.To kick start this in August and September, we are highlighting Sangwoon Yoon, Athina Anastasaki, Jeremiah Gassensmith and Yun Chen on our Chemical Science, or any RSC journal, we are always looking for fresh opinions and voices to be part of the journal community. Please visit our website to see our criteria on becoming a reviewer, and the next steps on how to contact us.3• If you are interested in reviewing for Chemical Science, when suggesting reviewers for your article when submitting, do consider nominating reviewers from a diverse range of backgrounds and career-stages.• As an author for Chemical Science when invited, please do take the opportunity to give us suggestions of people you know who would do a great job.• As an existing reviewer, if you are unable to review an article for 4And finally as a reviewer, you also receive 50% off a new Affiliate membership for the RSC, which brings further discounts and career support, as well as the chance to track and gain recognition for your reviewing activity through our partnership with Publons.As always, we love to hear from you so please do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. We look forward to hearing from you. Chemical Science Editorial teamMay Copsey, Executive Editor, and the chemicalscience-rsc@rsc.org


Journal of Patient-Reported Outcomes (JPRO) is an international, open access, multi-disciplinary journal publishing original research and review articles, brief communications, commentaries, editorials, and reviews of recent books and software advances in the field of patient-reported outcomes. The JPRO is an official journal of the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL). The first JPRO articles were published on September 12, 2017.The We want to acknowledge the immense contributions of Dennis Revicki, JPRO Founding Co-Editor-in-Chief, who died on May 9, 2021. His impact on ISOQOL and the field of patient-reported outcomes was immense. We miss him greatly.University of Sheffield, UK), Joanne Greenhalgh , John Devin Peipert , Caroline Potter , and Jessica Roydhouse .The fifth year (2021) of the JPRO was another successful one due to the contributions made by reviewers and the consistently high quality of the science reflected in the published articles. We are also extremely grateful for the conscientious work of the associate editors: Jill Carlton (We are confident in a very positive trajectory for the JPRO in 2022 and we encourage those conducting patient-reported outcomes research to submit manuscripts and to serve as peer reviewers.Sincerely,Ron D. Hays and Chih-Hung ChangJPRO Co-Editors-in-Chief


Bioscience Reports enters its fifth decade of continuous multidisciplinary life science publishing, here we present a timely overview of the journal. In addition to introducing ourselves and new Associate Editors for 2021, we reflect on the challenges the new Editorial Board has faced and overcome since we took over the editorial leadership in June of 2020, and detail some key strategies on how we plan to encourage more submissions and broader readership for a better and stronger journal in the coming years.As  Bioscience Reports is published on behalf of the Biochemical Society by Portland Press and is committed to the Society ideals by publishing sound science, providing a suitable home for valid data and findings in the life sciences. We welcome reproducible, appropriately replicated and controlled experiments, with conclusions adequately supported by the presented results. We encourage submissions in all areas of the molecular life sciences, both basic and applied.The Biochemical Society is one of the U.K.’s largest single-discipline learned societies, promoting the advancement of the molecular biosciences since 1911. Bioscience Reports is committed to the Biochemical Society aims of disseminating and sharing scientific knowledge, encouraging discourse and debate amongst scientists. To fully democratise our published research, Bioscience Reports has also been committed to full open access since 2012, with all papers published under the most permissive CC BY licence. All journal profits are returned to the Biochemical Society, supporting Society grant-funding and educational charitable endeavours. Since 2020, Portland Press has offered subscribing institutions a combined transformative ‘Read & Publish’ option, facilitating institutions towards full open access publishing [Bioscience Reports covers a broad range of fields, the journal has maintained an impact factor of 2.942 (issued in 2020), with a 5-year impact factor of 3.112. We feel this puts the journal in an excellent position moving forwards, hopefully allowing us to continue to encourage quality submissions, but to also grow and expand into areas that are currently under-represented, or are becoming of increased topicality.Although The start of this decade has seen many changes in the scientific community, not least following the global COVID-19 pandemic impacting on the ability of laboratories to conduct research, travel internationally to disseminate findings, and the direct effects of SARS-CoV-2 on scientists themselves, their friends and families. This has also been reflected in research featured in the journal, with a number of studies on SARS-CoV-2 recently published , includiBioscience Reports itself has undergone significant changes in 2020, not least the retirement of our previous Editor-in-Chief Wanjin Hong. We thank Wanjin for his excellent service to the journal for over 10 years, but we take this opportunity to introduce ourselves as the incoming Editor-in-Chief (Weiping Han) and Deputy Editor-in-Chief (Christopher Cooper), with our expertise being in the molecular basis of metabolic disorders and associated complications, and biochemistry and structural molecular biology of genome stability, respectively. To assist in handling increasing numbers of submissions, 2020 also saw a significant expansion of the number of Associate Editors, with 11 recruited to the Bioscience Reports Editorial Board . This has expanded the subject areas covered by the Editorial Board, including diverse topics such as stem cells, tumour microevironment, cell signalling, ADP-ribosylation, through to chemical biology and drug development. These appointments also diversify the Editorial Board’s geographical distribution . Whilst paper mills and methods to detect them have been excellently reviewed by colleagues elsewhere [A recent significant challenge faced by the journal has been the increased prevalence of falsified or fraudulent paper submissions, particularly involving manipulated images such as stock or invented images , or dupllsewhere ,8,9, thelsewhere . We espelsewhere .PubPeer (and other sources) of published potentially fraudulent and paper mill articles in 2020, we acted rapidly to assess the severity of cases and issued Expressions of Concern to papers where it was felt the issues were both significant and unlikely to have an immediate resolution. This further alerted readers to these papers under investigation, and accordingly published corrections or retracted articles at the earliest timepoint, in accordance with our publishing policies and COPE guidelines. We believe Bioscience Reports has taken great steps towards combating such fraudulent submissions, with our other immediate responses including instigating more stringent submission requirements, including the insistence of raw Western blot data and inclusion of institutional email accounts. We continue to mandate ORCID identifiers for corresponding authors, and encourage all authors to include their ORCID ID.We (as Editor-in-Chief and Deputy Editor-in-Chief), the Editorial Board, Portland Press and the Biochemical Society firmly believe in an accurate scientific record, and ensuring the integrity of the material in the journal is of the highest priority. Hence, following a sudden increase in community-driven notifications from Elisabeth Bik, and we are continually reviewing and updating our editorial processes and policies, with additional checks performed by the Editorial Office upon submission of all articles and again prior to acceptance. Portland Press’ new Data Policy also guides authors in transparent research and data presentation procedures, alongside strengthening our editorial and peer review processes. Whilst Bioscience Reports has seen significant growth in the last 5 years, with an over seven-fold increase in submissions compared with 2016  are: protein biochemistry , basic mBioscience Reports.We feel such broad research topics potentially featuring interdisciplinary studies are of interest to our wider readership, facilitating the exposure of authors’ findings outside of their immediate research field, compared with publishing in specialist journals. This combined with our fully open access publishing model and the values of the journal outlined here, we hope will encourage authors to submit their articles to Bioscience Reports, and we look forward to a successful (and post-COVID-19) future.The journal would be nothing without the publishing team, and we thank all the staff at the Portland Press Editorial Office, particularly Niamh Lynch and Zara Manwaring, the outgoing and incoming Managing Editors, respectively. We also thank the reviewers and readers too for their support in helping to build


Chemical Science. Graphical abstract image adapted from © Shutterstock/M-SUR.Introducing double-anonymised peer review in  Chemical Science. For the majority of journals at the Royal Society of Chemistry, and across the chemical sciences more widely, peer review is carried out using a traditional single-anonymised approach, where reviewers are anonymous but author names and affiliations are known to reviewers. Double-anonymised peer review takes this one step further and conceals the authors’ and reviewers’ identities from each other.We are pleased to announce that authors will now be able to select the option of double-anonymised peer review for their manuscript on submission to Chemical Science readership will likely be familiar with the term ‘double-blind peer review’ and how it operates. In 2020, the STM Association, a global trade association for academic and professional publishers, formed a working group to look at peer review taxonomy to develop and recommend standardised terminology to make peer review practices transparent and inclusive for all.1 It was decided that the use of the word ‘blind’ in this context, as well as being easy to misinterpret, is ableist in origin, i.e. arises from and reinforces stereotypical understandings of disability which impact negatively on blind and low vision people. Therefore, this taxonomy recommends that the term ‘double-blind’ is replaced by ‘double-anonymised’. As we introduce this model on Chemical Science, we will also be extending the terminology more widely across all Royal Society of Chemistry journals that offer it.Members of the 2 and initiated a joint commitment with 38 other publishing organisations to set new standards within scholarly publishing to enable a more inclusive and diverse culture.3 Bringing the option of double-anonymised peer review to Chemical Science is another step towards a fairer and more inclusive process.The Royal Society of Chemistry is committed to tackling the significant gender, racial, socioeconomic and geographical challenges that affect the scholarly publishing process. In recent years we have studied our own publishing operation to identify and quantify gender biasChemical Science, the only peer review model that has been available to our authors is the more traditional single-anonymised approach. While we continue to trust in the effectiveness of that system, we also want to respond to the growing number of requests for alternative models that are coming from the broad and diverse chemical sciences community.Since the launch of ChemComm, trialled the use of double-anonymised peer review and permanently adopted it a year later. Their experience identified that 10% of their authors chose this approach, with an above average number of these authors being resident in India and the Middle East. The quality of the reviews and author satisfaction were comparable for both single- and double-anonymised routes.4 Since then our Environmental Science family of journals has also taken the move to offer the option of double-anonymised peer review to their authors.5 Other science, technical and medical publishers have also trialled and adopted double-anonymised peer review recently, for example the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry journals published by Wiley6 and the Institute of Physics, who have implemented double-anonymised peer review across all of their journals.7,8In July 2017, one of our sister journals, Chemical Science authors more choice and control over how their manuscript is handled. For any author who feels that they may be unfairly subject to a bias in relation to their gender, ethnicity, career stage, affiliation or otherwise, we hope this option will allow them to have greater trust in the peer review of their manuscript. Over time, this will also provide data that will help us as a journal and a publisher to identify sources of bias so that we can take further steps to eliminate them.By offering double-anonymised peer review we hope to give 9 Under this model, the onus to ensure a manuscript is appropriately anonymised will lie with the authors, and we appreciate the difficulties attached to this. As so much scientific research draws on previous work and has iterative components, appropriately referencing a manuscript may leave a clear trail to the authors’ identities. Moreover, as the use of preprint servers such as ChemRxiv increases, a reviewer might easily identify the authors should they choose to preprint their manuscript.While there are clear strengths to this approach for reducing bias, we must also recognise the challenges of double-anonymised peer review.Another challenge is time. Anonymising a manuscript requires a different writing style and this may have an increased time cost for authors, for example if they have previously submitted the work to a different journal that offers only single-anonymised peer review. We feel that these challenges are more than compensated by the additional choice that this system offers for authors.Critics of double-anonymised models that are optional to authors might argue cases of positive bias are still possible where the single-anonymised route is chosen. We recognise that this approach alone will not tackle all sources of bias within the publishing system. Our Associate Editors will continue to have oversight of both author and reviewer identities. Working together we can help to reduce bias, regardless of the peer review model used. We are also working to further increase the diversity of both our Editorial Board and reviewer pool and to increase the breadth of perspectives that we draw upon for editorial decisions. Offering the option of double anonymised peer review has the potential to reduce bias with respect to gender, race and ethnicity, country of origin, or affiliation, and we see it as an important step in our continuing drive towards fairness and inclusivity.Chemical Science’s diamond Open Access credentials, the journal has also been taking steps to adopt wider Open Science practices, such as making author contribution statements mandatory10,11 and more strongly encouraging data availability statements.11,12 While at first glance double-anonymised peer review could be seen to be making the peer review process more opaque, we view it as complementary to more open peer review models. Double-anonymised peer review aims to reduce the bias during the review process. Open and transparent peer review models, conversely, work to increase the visibility of the decision-making process after review, so that readers can understand the steps taken during the peer review process that led to the publication of an article. Both double-anonymised and open or transparent peer review models can operate at the same time to bring fairness and transparency to the publication process. While Chemical Science does not offer open or transparent peer review at this time, should we introduce this to the journal in future, we feel these two options for authors can work well in tandem with each other.Alongside As an author, you will be able to choose whether your manuscript undergoes double-anonymised peer review or traditional, single-anonymised peer review. Both options will be available to all authors and your preference can be selected during the submission process. If you choose the double-anonymised peer review option, you should ensure that your manuscript and all associated files are suitably anonymised before submission; please refer to our checklist when preparing your manuscript files see ESI. It is tChemical Science audience in line with our reviewing procedure. However, we would ask you to please highlight in the confidential comments to the Editor that you were able to identify the authors when submitting your review.As a reviewer, you will receive an invitation where the identity of the authors is kept confidential for papers where the authors have chosen the option of double-anonymised peer review. All further communication will omit author name and affiliation details. If you determine the identity of the authors for manuscripts where double-anonymised peer review was chosen, we would ask you to continue with your review, focusing on the suitability of the manuscript for the Chemical Science with the inclusion of this new review option.We look forward to working with the authors and reviewers of  May CopseyChemical ScienceExecutive Editor,  Jeremy AllenChemical ScienceDeputy Editor,  Andrew I CooperChemical Science, & Department of Chemistry, University of Liverpool, UKEditor-in-Chief, SC-012-D1SC90122B-s001


One year after the outbreak of COVID-19 and the rapid global spread of the SARS-CoV2, the virus is still here, people still get infected, many have to be hospitalized and some unfortunately die. We are still afraid of the disease, but we know much more about our enemy and it makes us less insecure. We have learned how to live with the virus. Epidemiologists have told us how to behave to minimize its spread, molecular biologists have explained how the virus enters the body and our cells and what damage it causes, biotechnologists have created the vaccine to protect us from the infection, engineers have built new hospital facilities and equipment, and psychologists have mobilized to help us overcome mental problems caused by the pandemic. Science responded by focusing research and expanding communication as we needed to acquire more knowledge in as short time as possible and to communicate research results among scientists, as well as with authorities and general public. A demand for fast dissemination makes the quality assurance of disseminated data more important than ever. Nature can be regarded as a large puzzle and the role of scientists is to incorporate pieces of knowledge in the overall understanding of how the world around us functions. Inserting a wrong piece not only blurs the puzzle but also misleads other scientists in their efforts to fill in the existing gaps. Therefore, it is our task not only to explore but also to consolidate efforts of the whole scientific community. The crucial part of these efforts is to ensure high quality peer reviewing of research data. Indeed, this may represent the main role of scientific journals today. The mechanism of anonymous peer reviews has been the essence of quality control in most journals for many decades. In the recent years, however, as the number of research papers has multiplied, demanding ever more time and efforts to ensure credibility of published data, journals are seeking innovations in the publishing practices including the reviewing mechanisms. In view of the culture of ‘openness’ in the total research process, open reviews have attracted attention of the scientific publishing community. Although the term ‘open review’ can mean different reviewing practices, in recent discussions it most often means that the names of the reviewers are revealed to authors. The idea of disclosing names of reviewers is not exactly a new one. Over twenty years ago, Nature Neuroscience published an article summarizing advantages and disadvantages of open peer reviews (From the point of view of the authors, the situation in which their papers are evaluated by unknown reviewers while at the same time their names are known to them may seem unfair. It is not easy for authors to accept rejections of their papers based on reviewers’ opinions without knowing their credentials. It should, however, be mentioned that the decision on the fate of the paper is never brought by the reviewers alone, but it is always the responsibility of the editor, who can give authors the opportunity to revise their manuscript regardless of the reviewer’s criticism, or ask for another opinion if the quality of the review is not as high as it should be. The reviewers’ opinions and editor’s decision based on them should be as objective as possible, regardless of whether the reviewers’ names are disclosed or not. On the other hand, a good review can bring valuable improvements to the text, as well as to the quality of authors’ research, and at the same time, by opening the reviewing process and disclosing reviewers’ names with their comments, reviewers would receive due credit, which could be an incentive for them to accept peer reviewing task. Considering this, it seems that the idea of open peer review attracts more attention of the editors than of the authors and the scientific community in general, although in a number of publications dealing with this mode of quality assurance some less obvious advantages are mentioned, like increasing the general discussion on scientific topics, or education of younger researchers (


The present editorial 2020 continues the series of status reports in Environmental Earth Sciences (EES) in previous years 2017 and 2019 . The year 2020 coming to an end was heavily influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic affecting all areas of life including research work and, therefore, scientific publishing as well “”. One br Over the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant economic and social effects throughout the world, and has caused significant impacts on the way that the research community has been able to live and work during this period. As a result of the pandemic, immense research efforts have been directed towards improving our understanding of the behaviour of the virus and of ways to defeat it. The way in which scientific communication has been changed entirely, as conferences are now mainly held in virtual formats. Video conferencing now allows information to be exchanged more frequently and quickly without travelling. However, the intensity and creativity when meeting and talking in person is missing, and our communication has become rather “two-dimensional” due to our reliance on connecting with each other through a computer screen. For environmental sciences, in particular the field work has become more difficult due to travel restrictions. In general, however, the publication success of EES has not been significantly impacted.In 2019, a new Publishing Editor, Paola Teti, was assigned by Springer and the editorial workflow was changed as well. Paola follows a distinguished group of former Publishing Editors: Drs. Wolfgang Engel, Christian Witschel, and Annett Buettner. Editors during this time were Drs. Peter Flawn and Philip LaMoreaux. Drs. Jim LaMoreaux and Gunter Dorhofer succeeded them and Olaf Kolditz is the most recent addition to the Editors-in-Chief of EES. These distinguished scientists have helped establish EES as a well-respected journal known for its applied approach to science with an emphasis on the coverage of research in developing countriesWith our new Publishing Editor, Paola Teti, the editorial workflow has been changed as well. The Editors-in-Chief (EiCs), Managing Editors and Publishing Editor have initiated editorial meetings to discuss pressing topics and accelerate decision-making processes. The habits and technical progress of video meetings have been utilized to update the format of the Annual Editorial Meetings. The Associate Editors are invited to the annual meetings to share their expertise and experience on a regular basis.During the journal editors meeting in November 2020, the discussion on the scope of the journal was continued. EES’s focus is on geoscientific topics and related environmental impacts—studies of real-world problems and developing solutions for them. The sustainable development goals (SDG) serve as a compass for the societal relevance of research and development in this field. To emphasise this direction, a journal theme for “Case/Field Studies” is currently being considered. The issue of how to further improve the quality and speed of manuscript handling is a permanent issue that is being considered by the Editors. Examples of how this could be done include shortening the duration of invitation request times for reviewers, and by updating the reviewers’ data base.The EES website, which was launched in 2019, is now fully functional and allows readers to easily grasp contents and to attract the interest of readers. The title page contains useful information on basic statistics . The latest articles from the journal are highlighted with a key figure or photo  has 16 highly cited papers belonging to the top 1% cited in July/August 2020 in its research fields. Water-related topics belong to the most frequently cited category . This procedure corresponds to the calculation of a journal’s impact factor for 2020“Wordles” or “word clouds” have been used again to identify the most-used words in papers’ titles and abstracts. Even though not acknowledged as a rigorous scientific approach, it provides an interesting insight into the most frequently covered topics. The size of the words in the picture corresponds to their coverage in the paper titles and abstracts. Figure Zhang et al.  The journal’s progress report summarizes selected indicators and statistics concerning journal development in the impact-factor-related years 2018-2020. The impact factor is a key criterion concerning the scientific impact of the journal in the research field. It characterizes the quality of the journal and acceptance within the scientific community. More recently, however, the DORA Agreement has been signed which expands the ways to measure journal quality. In addition to providing a journal of high-quality scientific content, EES strives to provide a platform and broad forum for scientists all over the world by addressing diverse environmental issues and challenges particularly in developing countries.Figure Authors’ contributions of publications by countries and by institutions from 2017 to 2019 and 2018 to 2020, respectively, are shown. Fig. Figure Continuous article publishing (CAP) became the standard for processing articles in EES in 2016 and has positively affected the entire publication process. Currently it takes an average of 66 days from submission to first decision and 288 days to acceptance Fig. .The final graphics show the relationship between submission and published items Fig. . In 2018We strongly recommend the authors to use ORCID for your manuscript submissions to provide a unique and persistent digital identifier. With your personal ORCID iD authors can link your professional information, affiliations, grants, publications, peer review, and more to your research work and increases your visibility in the scientific community.Topical collections became an important strategic instrument to promote relevant and new research themes in environmental earth sciences. In general, topical collections are open and researchers are encouraged to contribute to these structured publication projects. The following list is a compilation of the open topical collections and includes the corresponding guest editors.9Earth Surface Processes and Environment in a Changing World: Sustainability, Climate Change and Society Coastal and Marine Geographic Information System using IoT Building stones and geomaterials through history and environments - from quarry to heritage. Insights of the conditioning factors Groundwater quality and contamination and the application of GIS NovCare - Novel Methods for Subsurface Characterization and Monitoring: From Theory to Practice (Uta Sauer and Peter Dietrich)Sustainable Utilization of Geosystems Visual Data Exploration Geosphere-Anthroposphere Interlinked Dynamics: Geocomputing and New Technologies Global Change of Groundwater in Western Mediterranean Countries Advances in Environmental Geochemistry Water in Large Basins (Peiyue Li)Water Problems in Eastern Mediterranean Countries Topical Collections play a central role in a thematic combination of research works, they belong also to the most cited EES papers. Here we continue the detailed analysis for the Topical Collection on “Subsurface Energy Storage” (Kabuth et al. We are very grateful to the guest editors for organizing and managing these thematic issues of coordinated research works


Applications in Plant Sciences has taken steps to address this important issue of research inequity, as outlined below. We now call upon the entire botanical community—researchers, editors and reviewers, funding agencies, and publishers—to work together toward a more equitable environment for all researchers around the world.Do all plant biologists worldwide have equal access to novel methods, enabling them to be equally productive, publish, and receive credit for their research? Or does reduced access to cutting‐edge techniques in countries with lower financial resources create an inequity for researchers located there? Such disparities and biases do exist within our discipline and must be addressed if we are to move forward as a more just society.  As people around the world confronted social inequities during this past year with racial unrest, political strife, and an international pandemic, plant biologists should also reflect upon biases and disparities within our own field. Inequity based on gender and race/ethnicity is a long‐standing problem recognized within the sciences  to indicate roles played by each contributor to a scientific paper.What can be done to erase this inequity? One approach is to promote greater collaboration between more financially privileged researchers and those investigators lacking resources necessary to carry out the research, but who have deep knowledge of the plant species themselves. There are situations where this arrangement has certainly worked well, but it comes with a potential danger of a perceived imbalance in the relationship. Specifically, it is critical that researchers in less affluent countries be adequately recognized for their work as full partners and coauthors on papers, rather than being used simply for access to the study species and only mentioned in the acknowledgements—known as “parachute science” De Vos, . Authorsompleted . This caApplications in Plant Sciences in April 2020  recognize the value of international researchers and their contributions, and (2) empower all plant biologists, regardless of their geographic location, country, and/or socioeconomic status, with equal access to methods that result in publishable papers. For example, scientists in the United States and other privileged countries should make every effort to cite articles by international researchers, invite them to give departmental seminars, and recruit their students into graduate programs and as postdoctoral researchers (and provide continuing support if they then choose to return to their country of origin). Furthermore, many universities and research institutions in tropical countries desperately need access to new technology, given the scarcity of scientific funding in their home country. Collaborating, more privileged researchers should include colleagues in these countries on grant proposals to facilitate research at that site. However, this requires that federal funding agencies allow the transfer of a portion of allocated funds to other countries. At the very least, large funding agencies should encourage the inclusion of local researchers and field guides if research is conducted abroad, with funding allowed for that expense. In addition, alternative methodological solutions could also be pursued that are not as costly, such as those outlined in a special issue of ril 2020 .h‐index. Finally, publishers must think critically about how the fees they charge can impair access and prevent international researchers from contributing equally to their journals. Resources such as Research4Life (https://www.research4life.org) are also being developed to provide access to journals and to defray article publication charges for authors from eligible institutions and countries. Taken all together, these are the first steps needed to develop global equity in the plant sciences.There are also steps that can be taken within the publication process. Reviewers should think about their own implicit biases and how that might affect their reviews, especially involving authors who do not have English as a first language ; for exaApplications in Plant Sciences (APPS) began in 2013 as a publication outlet for all authors throughout the plant sciences and has continued in this tradition to publish novel tools and methods. The journal is committed to publishing all types of methods (regardless of cost) provided that the method itself or the application is original. Over the past few years, the editors and staff have been carefully considering how to more effectively engage researchers from all over the world, as demonstrated in the following ways:Encourage submissions from all countries: Over the past year, submissions were received from the United States, China, Australia, and France but also from 19 other countries, including Pakistan, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, and Kenya. We are now reviewing our author guidelines to ensure they are clear for authors for whom English is not their first language.Reaching out to international authors: Through our partnership with Wiley, we are expanding our efforts to reach out to authors through workshops in other countries, such as at the Congreso Latinoamericano de Botánica in Quito, Ecuador, in 2018, and the Congreso Mexicano de Botánica in Aguascalientes, Mexico, in 2019. We also offer waivers and discounts (https://authorservices.wiley.com/open‐research/open‐access/for‐authors/waivers‐and‐discounts.html) on publication charges for authors from low‐ and middle‐income countries.Recruiting international reviewers: Over the past three years, we have depended on the expertise of reviewers from 50 counties. While most reviewers have originated from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and China, researchers from countries such as Ecuador, Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Tunisia have also contributed their expertise as reviewers.Open access papers: All readers with internet access can readily access for free all articles in the journal as soon as they are published, as the journal is open access with articles available in HTML format and downloadable as PDF files.Diversifying our editorial board to represent our global audience: We have purposely expanded our Editorial Board and our Reviewing Editor Board to reflect the countries of origin, race/ethnicity, and gender of our authors and readers. Our editorial boards now represent 12 countries in addition to the United States: Argentina, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Spain, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Venezuela.Personalized review process with a sensitivity to international authors with English as an additional language: All new submissions are quickly screened to ensure first that the scientific content is appropriate for the journal, and then that the English is of sufficient quality to facilitate review. Editors also work constructively with all authors throughout the review process and ultimately the production process to ensure that the scientific content of each paper is easily understandable by all readers.Emphasis on low‐cost methods: A special issue published in April 2020 titled “Conducting Botanical Research with Limited Resources: Low‐Cost Methods in the Plant Sciences” included 12 articles presenting effective methods that can be used by any researcher. Due to the high level of interest in this subject, a follow‐up special issue on the same topic is currently in the early planning stages.all researchers, regardless of where they are located around the globe. This requires that our profession reflect upon whether we are truly the equitable society we strive to be and work to build a more inclusive profession.Many plant biologists strive to become effective and productive researchers, developing solutions to complex problems or questions, contributing to past discoveries, and inspiring generations to come. One common misconception is that anyone can succeed if they have a strong work ethic, patience and determination, technical ability, and intellectual prowess. The reality is far from this, given that accessibility to resources is also a key component as demonstrated here. If we are to progress as a discipline, we will need the contributions of


Peoples Republic of China is the best friend of Pakistan who has always supported us on various international forums. Not only that China has maintained close and cordial relationship with Pakistan in different fields all these years. More recently, it has made huge investment through CPEC project which will play a vital role in economic development of Pakistan. Over the years, China has also made important progress and has emerged as one of the fastest developing economies and a world economic power and it is increasing its sphere of influence all over the world helping many countries in different fields. At present after United States of America, China is the biggest contributor to the world medical literature if we look at the number of papers published from China.We in Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences have been regularly receiving scientific papers from authors from China for the last many years and the number of annual submissions have been increasing almost every year. If in 2011 the number of submissions from China were sixty four, it increased to over five hundred during the years 2014, 2015 and 2016. However, we could accept only a few for publication after peer review which were either of interest to our readers in this part of the world and the authors were willing to revise and resubmit after peer review responding to the reviewer's comments and suggestions.It was in March 2021 that we received a communication from Dr. Shaofei Wu from Wuhan Institute of Technology with a proposal to publish a special issue highlighting the research activity of their institution in the field of medical imaging. They wanted us to showcase their research by publishing a special issue. In the past we have published a special issue highlighting the research being carried at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in March 2013.The institution will select one or two Guest Editors and they will be overall responsible for the contents of this issue.The authors will follow the instructions for authors on our website while preparing the manuscripts and they will be particularly mindful about the length of the manuscript.It will be an Only Online issue and no print copy will be available hence no print copy will be supplied.The Guest Editors will ensure that every manuscript being contributed to this issue will go through proper peer review system. They will submit these peer review reports along with the submission.Every manuscript will be accompanied by Letter of Undertaking signed by all the listed authors confirming the exclusive submission to Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences.The authors will keep in mind the authorship criteria by International Committee of Medical Journals Editors (ICMJE) as we do not wish to promote Gift authorship a menace which is very common all over the words these days, China being no exception.It was also made clear that in most cases we allow just four authors just to discourage gift authorship but in some cases based on the study, one can allow more authors if all those listed as authors deserve authorship.Every manuscript will also be accompanied by approval from the Ethics Committee/Institutional Review Board with Reference Number, Date and stamp of the institution of the Ethics Committee.We will do the copy editing and reserve the right to reject any manuscript if we are not satisfied with the peer review report or think it is beyond the scope of our journal.The authors might have to revise their manuscripts one again after editing if we feel such a need and the authors will be given guidelines in this respect.All papers received will be checked for plagiarism using iThenticate software and if similarity index score is more than 18%, such papers will be rejected.After the papers have been submitted, we will check them for plagiarism, format them after editing and then upload the edited version on our website before further processing.PDF files of all the papers will be sent to the organizers to share with the authors for proofreading before they are finally published.Once the issue has been finalized and published online, we will make arrangements for preparing the XML files for submission to PubMed Central and the issue will be uploaded as soon as possible so that it is visible on Medline, PubMed, PubMed Central as well.We had also made it clear that we will not accommodate more than thirty manuscripts in this special issue and they will be selected by the Guest Editors from the large number of papers available.Once an agreement was reached, we received thirty-two papers for this issue. Initial review of the submissions disclosed that most of the authors had failed to carefully read and follow the instructions for authors as the papers were too lengthy with large number of figures, illustrations and tables in each manuscript. Our observations were conveyed to the Guest Editors and we expressed our inability to proceed further unless the authors revise the manuscript in the light of the instructions on our website. They were also given the option that if they cannot do that and were not feeling comfortable, we can abandon this project but we were not prepared to compromise on the quality. The message came that they were willing to revise the papers once again. At this, they were asked to first revise just two papers and send it to us for perusal. If we felt satisfied, only then they should proceed further and submit the remaining manuscripts. After few days we received the two revised papers which we found in order hence they were asked to proceed with further submissions.Thirty-one papers were found in order while one papers was rejected because it was based on the data already covered in another manuscript and it was almost a duplicate submission. During further editing, a number of paragraphs needed to be rewritten, some of the sentences had to be rephrased to ensure that the message was conveyed effectively. In some cases, even we were at a loss as to what the authors wanted to convey, hence could not rewrite and rephrase them. As such these paragraphs were shared with the Guest Editors asking them to request the authors to rewrite them so that they can be replaced in their manuscripts. All this went on smoothly and the guest editors were kind enough to persuade the respective authors to respond immediately.This special issue now contains thirty-one manuscripts highlighting different aspects of medical imaging, X-ray, Ultrasound, CT Scan, MRI, computer aided diagnosis, latest developments in medical imaging. As pointed out by the Guest Editors, it focuses on human physiology and physiological dysfunction, medical imaging and physical analysis methods, medical functional imaging, medical image processing methods, computational fluid dynamics, medical engineering materials besides medical image signal processing and physiological signal monitoring. All this are extremely helpful in non-invasive diagnosis and treatment methods. They are also helpful in early diagnosis and prevention of diseases.We sincerely hope that our readers will find this issue highly informative and it will help them in their professional capacity building in their respective areas of expertise. At the same time, it will not only help improve patient care but also go a long way in further cementing our brotherly relations with Peoples Republic of China. We will continue to strive for greater cooperation and collaboration between the healthcare professionals of both the countries, the academicians and researchers in particular which will be to our mutual benefit.


Learning & Behavior, 48[2], 191–192) discussed research claiming honeybees can do arithmetic. Some readers of this research might regard such claims as unlikely. The present authors used this example as a basis for a debate on the criterion that ought to be used for publication of results or conclusions that could be viewed as unlikely by a significant number of readers, editors, or reviewers.Roberts ( When I saw a report by Roberts  summarizI agree that it is unwise to suppress data or ideas. However—and this is highly unfortunate—in order to qualify for publication, a paper generally requires a strong claim. When these claims are extraordinary, many of them will prove false; publishing such false claims on a regular basis pollutes the literature and erodes trust. Researchers will find themselves chasing gaggles of wild geese, instead of just one or two. Moreover, once published, a claim is almost impossible to dislodge from the literature. For example, the infamous study on the relation between autism and vaccination  using a novel number of items in the initial pattern; the choice patterns had numbers that the bees had experienced in training. Studies of apparently complex cognition in an invertebrate (with a brain the size of a sesame seed) may suggest that a precursor of this aspect of cognition was present in a distant species hundreds of millions of years ago or that this aspect of cognition is much simpler  than previously supposed. As a further bit of context, bees are renowned for surprisingly complex behavior  conducting controlled experiments to test the effect of interventions in the publication process, and in (ii) quantifying scientific progress , that were subject to a large-scale replication effort ” (p. 45). The left-most green dot reflects a significant effect because it was a psychometric study with 230,047 participants. As mentioned in Wagenmakers et al.  Various statistical remedies for publication bias at this time do not appear to be effective , regardless of whether a study is a replication or a new, unique design, if a researcher decides to publish their results based on some data-dependent criterion (like only large effect sizes or strong evidence), then the data they report can no longer be interpreted as resulting from the study they conducted. This is independent of whether the results are unlikely in some prior sense; the data reported are simply not representative of the outcomes that might be expected from the study. It is not clear to me what the data are good for at that point.This entire conversation strikes me as one about gatekeeping that has been central to conversations about replication and reproducibility. Rich asks, What should be the evidentiary criterion for publishing unusual findings? And Joachim asks, What is the criterion for literature that can be trusted versus that which cannot? It seems to me that we should question the questions here. Can’t there be multiple criteria that would make an article and literature valuable contributions? Does replicability always have to be one of those criteria? Surely there is value in some nonrepeatable science .I am with Rich in that I view science as a process involving the accumulation of many tests and investigations—each with varying degrees of what, by today’s standards, constitute best practice . In my view, well-powered, methodologically and contextually sound studies that produce either unusual/extraordinary results or that produce null results convey important information that could shape future theory and research—and neither of these results should be suppressed. At the same time, it seems that labeling literatures and articles trustworthy or untrustworthy invites unnecessary judgment that may, over time, prove itself inaccurate as tools, methods, theories, and hypotheses develop. For “open science,” it feels quite ironic to put up relatively rigid, narrow criteria by which we judge scientific contributions as worthy, especially since those criteria are likely to shift over time.E.-J. discusses Kahneman’s conclusions about priming effects, and the fact that many of the claims in the literature cannot be replicated. Yet priming generally is one of the best established and strongest effects in the cognitive and psychological sciences, and has both extremely strong empirical evidence and excellent theory to back it up , David Meyer  draws a I do not believe there is much progress to be made by assuming that these “cathouse” effects are small and real instead of completely spurious. And modeling is laudable and potentially insightful, but not when the data are almost 100% noise—it would be like taking a Ferrari and driving it straight into a swamp. More to the point, although I am in firm agreement that “results from replication studies should be interpreted carefully,” it seems to me that results from original studies should be interpreted even more carefully, and particularly so when the claim is extraordinary.There may be occasional value to the publication of an extraordinary claim even in the absence of extraordinary evidence, but perhaps journals ought to create a special section for this kind of work .Nature’s criterion of “outstanding scientific importance”) than on the more objective judgments about the quality of the work.One major shortcoming of the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” approach stems from the subjectivity of the judgment. What looks extraordinary to you might be less surprising to me: One’s judgment is heavily weighted by prior knowledge and biases. This was exactly the case for the article that spurred the present discussion. In particular, I was predisposed to accept the finding that honeybees can do arithmetic—thereby judging it as very interesting but nonextraordinary—based on previous theoretical work showing that basic number skills can emerge even in quasirandomly wired neural networks , or for what it says about human cognition (less complex than expected). The same dichotomy of inferences applies to surprising findings in animals more generally. I’ll offer a personal example of straddling this division. Some years ago, I published a paper claiming that we had documented metacognition in rats  extraordinary claim might hold up in replication, so the claim can be rejected only by offering a more parsimonious (and probably less extraordinary) theoretical account. The latter “extraordinary claim scenario” is very different from the one discussed earlier in connection to replication failures: Improving data collection and statistical inference methods would not help here. Nevertheless, the theory level is likely to play an important role in the replication crisis. Indeed, weak connection between theory and empirical testing has been highlighted as a further cause of poor replicability .If the literature can be considered the public part of scientific practice, as many of us would like it to be, then we should—must, really—trust other scientists to reason with results as well as we do. To do otherwise would disrespect their agency and raise the potential for deception. We will experience many scientific blind alleys in our own work; to the extent that these inform our own conclusions, they can and should also inform others. They are both a necessary aspect of scientific progress (not something to be avoided!) and often unclear when they occur, maybe even for years. The problem is, and has always been, (1) selective publication, and (2) that the anything in the Having failed in my PhD to replicate a rather famous affective priming effect, and then being told by a prominent priming researcher that everyone knew that the paradigm doesn’t “work,” I definitely feel the tension. I think research communities often have this knowledge without a way to efficiently use it.Psychological Review: a place for synthesis).What we lack, for historical and technological reasons, is a tiered approach to publication that mirrors the way we think about evidence. Experiments that have no business being taken as strong evidence for broad claims end up being so because publication is an either–or proposition. A system that separates, to a larger extent, publication of results from publication of claims, and that allows a more nuanced view of the quality of evidence, would be welcome. Methods and basic results for all experiments we run, along with methodological post mortems, should be published as tech reports . This would allow the “everyday science” to be seen by everyone, warts and all. Scientific progress occurs through synthesis of results, and at this level is where scientifically interesting claims should happen  would prevent much of the nonsense we see. But to reiterate: science is not straightforward, and people will be led astray, potentially for decades, sometimes. This is something that has to be allowed and even celebrated as a core element of the scientific process. We should be allowed to fail, in good faith.An issue raised by a reviewer concerns differences in policies among journals. Because the number of journals in our fields (as well as others) has proliferated in recent years, because prior reviews and editorial decisions are not always transferred when a rejected article is submitted elsewhere, and because there is always noise in reviewing and editorial decisions, an article rejected from one or more journals can be submitted to others until an acceptance occurs. This present state of affairs could be an argument for a strict publication criteria if used by all or most journals. This is not the case at present. Even if all journals would agree to use similar criteria for publication, the present dialogue shows disagreement concerning what that criterion should be.A related issue raised by a reviewer concerns the editor’s choice of reviewers. How this factor should affect choice of publication criteria is not obvious. If reviewers are chosen to be knowledgeable and sympathetic to the claims, that would in effect produce a liberal criterion, but if knowledgeable and skeptical of the claims, it would in effect produce a strict criteria.Following up on Richard Morey’s suggestion for a tiered publication approach, I think it is important to acknowledge the role of the present publication culture and the academic incentive system in this discussion. I agree with previous comments that science should be built on cumulative knowledge, acquired over multiple studies of varying evidential value. I believe that studies producing “ordinary” results can be important for scientific progress, and there is no way of knowing in advance if an ordinary result supporting an extraordinary claim is just a fluke or the basis of the next groundbreaking theory. If a study is methodically rigorous and the data are theoretically well-situated and openly available, I think the study deserves publication.However, I also think there are some efficiencies to be gained: for psychology as a field, it took Bem’s  extraordHowever, this is easier said than done. We do not do science in a vacuum: We want others to read and build on our work, and we need publications to climb the academic ladder. Consequently, we must view the question as to how we should evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific claims in light of the culture that journals, funders, institutes, and scientists themselves have built. I tend to think that science as it stands is ultimately self-correcting, but that self-correction is often delayed by the current academic structures. In particular, the tendency of journals to reject null results and replication failures contributes to a climate where results that contradict the established scientific fashion are difficult to challenge. Journals also prefer strong claims and clean stories as opposed to the messy reality, and my impression is that the higher impact the journal, the cleaner the stories and the stronger the claims need to be. Current incentives are shaped by funding agencies and institutional tenure committees’ emphasis on the number of publications, impact factors, and citation metrics. This makes it difficult to resist the temptation to take shortcuts, exaggerate claims, and aim for high-impact journals that sometimes place more emphasis on perceived novelty than scientific rigor.I think that before we can rely on efficient self-correction, where scientific dead-ends reflect the healthy progression of science instead of unhealthy stagnation, we need to change the publishing culture and the incentive system in academia. A tiered publication structure may nicely fit in such a new world, although issues such as how to avoid overburdening peer reviewers, and how to search and summarize burgeoning outputs, will need to be faced.I think that the historical emphasis upon null hypothesis testing has misled many scientists who should know better  to view results as “true” or “false.” Consider E.-J.’s statement: “I do not believe there is much progress to be made by assuming that these ‘cathouse’ effects are small and real instead of completely spurious.” Pretty much all effects we study and report are highly context dependent, and all hypotheses, models, and theories based on them are  approximations to reality. This implies that scientists need always to exercise a good deal of skepticism concerning reports, whatever is their judged likelihood of the validity and strength of the findings and conclusions, and implies that the exercise of good scientific judgment is a critical component of the practice of science. This would be the case even if a much stricter criterion for publication would be imposed. Of course, a scientist’s job would be far easier if a scientist could rely on reported findings and conclusions drawn from them. However, a system of scientific practice that attempts to implement such a state of affairs would instead produce an enormous bias to reify what is already assumed to be true, and stifle progress.This discussion of publication criteria for extraordinary claims should not omit discussion of biased criteria applied to the claims (extraordinary or otherwise) of scientists from underrepresented groups. For example, there is evidence that women’s scientific claims are met with more suspicion, including more hostile and patronizing questions by colleagues ; the solutions should, at least in part, involve questioning the use of criteria itself.Mary makes a strong case that the criterion for publication is subject to a gender bias. Is there a remedy? To a certain extent such biases on the part of reviewers and editors can be reduced by deidentifying authors (though this is hard to do effectively). However, it would not be sensible or appropriate to deidentify the authors when a publication appears. Women authors publishing unlikely data or claims would likely find reactions more negative and skeptical, and would likely encounter a higher probability of subsequent publications attacking their findings and views, than would be the case for male authors. In addition, knowledge or fear that this would occur might make women scientists less likely to submit such manuscripts. Finally, I believe that use of a severe criterion for publishing unlikely data or claims would exacerbate gender biases: Making delicate and fine discriminations about sufficient evidence to satisfy a high criterion would likely magnify biases. Use of a liberal criterion would not solve the problems of biases, but would at least allow women authors to get their potentially important findings and ideas into the literature.Throughout this discussion, we have often reflected on the status of the scientific literature. There certainly appears to be a duality, at least, in how the literature is perceived. If one thinks of it as mostly a vehicle for reporting the careful low-level observations that researchers have made, then there is no reason to limit what observations can be published as long as authors can be trusted to be truthful in their communiqués. If, on the other hand, one believes that the scientific literature serves mostly to promulgate robust claims about natural laws and regularities, then studies that provide only small amounts of evidence should perhaps not clutter the field.In my experience, the literature is all of these things: It contains reports of clever studies that individually contribute bits of evidence; there are brilliant ideas about the workings of nature or how to carve it; and I occasionally see high-level integrations of larger bodies of work that lay significant questions to rest.As Morey points out, it’s very unfortunate that our current publication ecosystem is such a hybrid beast that does not clearly differentiate between these functions of the scientific literature. Some of the questions we have asked here might be more easily answered if these different goals of publication were made more explicit and salient—I would say a “synthesis” literature could set certain standards that an “observations” or “ideas” literature does not need.Circling back to the more recent topic of biases: If such a system came to exist, publishers could be in a position to design more customized policies to combat the various biases that have been discussed. For example, a literature with selective publication criteria could focus on blind review more, while another could encourage “light touch” peer review. One could encourage preregistration, while another could target a broad readership, and so on.The diverse viewpoints expressed in this dialogue illustrate some of the many complexities that arise when producing science. Is there a “best” method? This discussion shows that the criterion that ought to be used for publishing seemingly unlikely results is a matter for debate. This issue is likely not unique: Many other aspects of the way we practice science are unclear. We believe this dialogue has been useful and interesting, and similar dialogues concerning other practices could also be illuminating.


Genome Biology and Evolution and we thought we would take this chance to look back at how the journal has evolved over these last few years. When we took over from Bill Martin, who had been EiC for the previous 10 years, the journal was in very good shape. We still continue to receive around 500 manuscripts a year, of which we publish about 250. These papers cover a broad range of topics, from the data-rich papers on genome evolution in microbial lineages, to studies of human population genomics and the evolution of photosynthesis among eukaryotes, to newly developed methodologies for analyzing genome-scale data. We also have a growing number of reviews and perspectives that synthesize results from across fields and systems. We consider ourselves to be an inclusive journal, publishing papers on genome evolution from any species so long as the science is sound, and the question is interesting and has an evolutionary focus. We are now entering our fourth year as Editors-in-Chief (EiC) of Molecular Biology and Evolution, shares the same policy, and all waiver decisions for both journals are now handled by a committee that is independent of the editorial boards. Both journals are owned by the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), and the income generated from the journals goes to support these waiver requests as well as the activities of the society, including subsidizing the annual meeting as well as satellite and regional meetings.We have also launched several initiatives. As a society journal, we felt it was important to publish science irrespective of the authors’ ability to pay, and we have developed a waiver policy that reflects this—if authors do not have the funds to pay the article processing charges, then we ask authors to submit a waiver request regardless of their geographic location or seniority. Our sister journal, Early on in our tenure, we appointed a social media editor, Casey McGrath. As a science writer with a background in evolutionary biology, she writes highlight articles about our content and manages our social media accounts. We have seen a 50% increase in traffic to our website as a consequence of her efforts, and articles covered by her highlights see a significant boost in interest .Special Section on “Within-individual genome variation and germline/soma distinction.” Special Sections are collections of papers on a particular topic. This has been followed by a Special Section and Virtual Issue on the “Phenotypic effects of synonymous mutations,” and we have just published one on “Comparative population genetics.” Several of these arose out of symposia from the annual SMBE conference. We now offer the chance for all symposium organizers to propose a Special Section, Review or Perspective from their symposium; we will extend this invitation to organizers of satellite and regional meetings when these recommence this year. We also welcome suggestions for Special Sections, Reviews, and Perspectives from the readership; if you have a good idea then please approach us.This year saw the publication of our first GBE over the previous 2 or 3 years on a particular topic. We have published Virtual Issues on Human Genetics, Computational Biology, and Viral Evolution. The papers published in these issues see a substantial increase in website traffic as a consequence of the edition. We have also initiated a biography section of the journal with the aim to highlight the many paths that scientists take in their career with a particular focus on scientists from disadvantaged backgrounds. We were honored to feature Wen-Hsiung Li, who has contributed so much to our understanding of molecular evolution, in our first biography. It has, however, turned out to be quite hard to get other scientists to write their biography—they are all too busy. So, we will be changing the style of these articles to an interview format. We hope that these pieces will serve as inspiration for the next generation of scientists and encourage students from all backgrounds to engage in a scientific career.Along with the Special Sections, we have been publishing Virtual Issues, in which we collate papers published in GBE is committed to inclusion and diversity. Currently, 31 (56%) of our 55 associate editors are women, and we have been working hard to increase ethnic and geographic diversity on the editorial board. We have also conducted our first audit of acceptance and rejection rates with regard to gender. We analyzed all manuscripts submitted to GBE in the calendar years 2016–2020 (inclusive). We used the genderize.io software ; we found that 29% of first authors and only 19% of last authors were female (Overall, e female . The hige female . We inte2 tests: P = 0.80 for first authors; P = 0.56 for last authors, 2 test: P = 0.41; 2 tests versus combined male and female data P < 0.001 in all cases, In contrast to the bias in submission rates, we find that acceptance rates are the same for female and male authors, independent of whether they are first or last authors (χFinally, we would like to thank the readership for reading the papers we publish, and the authors for submitting their work to us. We are proud of the journal and the society it serves.


I am the Chair and Professor of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Tokyo Medical University. It is my great honor to be designated as the first Editor‐in‐Chief (EIC) of DEN Open, the official journal of Japan Gastroenterological Endoscopy Society (JGES) and sister journal of Digestive Endoscopy (DEN), which has 4.774 Impact Factor (IF) value in 2019. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the arrangement committee members of DEN Open, Prof. Haruhiro Inoue, the President of JGES, Prof. Shinji Tanaka, the Vice‐president of JGES, and Prof. Takayuki Matsumoto, the current EIC of DEN, for their tremendous effort to create the concept of DEN Open.I contributed to DEN as an associate editor between 2012 and 2015 with the former EIC, Prof. Choitsu Sakamoto, and Prof. Hisao Tajiri, the former President of JGES. In 2012, they created the “young” editorial team for new DEN in order to make DEN a leading endoscopy journal in Asia‐Pacific region. Since then, young editors have been willing to edit to the best of their abilities. As a result, DEN has become widely accepted as an internationally dedicated journal of gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy. Nowadays, DEN is also getting popular as one of the friendly GI endoscopy journals in the world, like “Endoscopy” and “Gastrointestinal Endoscopy”.Recently, the number of submissions to endoscopy journals is increasing year by year. DEN has been accepting a considerable number of manuscripts, including Review article, Original article, Video article, etc. However, the number of publications is limited due to journal space. Thus, in this moment, we will open the new journal, DEN Open, in order to further distribute the outstanding and sophisticated manuscripts in GI endoscopy for researchers and readers in the world, particularly in the Asia‐Pacific region. We believe that the new space of DEN Open will be able to contribute not only to endoscopists, physicians, and surgeons, but also to the industry‐academia collaborators in endoscopy. In order to be accepted in the world, we will aim for early registration as an accepted journal in PMC .Despite publishing more, DEN Open will uphold the quality of the journal. Nowadays, responsible conduct of research, including research ethics and integrity, is required for clinical and epidemiological researches. Such conduct is also required for articles published in medical journals. While CONSORT requirement is well known as the one necessary for prospective clinical trials, other statements, including STROBE  and RECORD , may become mandatory for articles published in DEN Open. In addition to shortening in time and appropriate assessment for peer‐review, DEN Open will introduce those statements in the instruction for authors.The memorable first editorial board members of DEN Open are promising endoscopists and gastroenterologists who will make DEN Open sophisticated and popular like DEN. Furthermore, senior advisory board members from DEN will also help us as strong supporters and guide us in the right direction. In addition, I deeply appreciate the secretariat team of JGES in managing the new journal. I am very happy to experience the best start of a new journal as an EIC of DEN Open.Finally, I would like to ask all endoscopists, gastroenterologists and surgeons in the world for further active participation in DEN Open. So, let's get started!1 September, 2020


JCI editorial board at Johns Hopkins, I am filled with gratitude and would like to extend a warm ayekoo  to our editors, staff, reviewers, and scientists for supporting the Journal. I am delighted to welcome the next JCI Editor in Chief, Elizabeth McNally — the first woman to lead the JCI since it was founded almost a century ago — and her team from Northwestern University.As the curtain draws on the 5-year term of the  JCI goes through a comprehensive process of selecting a new editor in chief and editorial board of active scientists, mostly ASCI members. This transition provides an opportunity for fresh ideas for publishing cutting-edge discoveries in an increasingly competitive environment of journal publishing. When Gordon Tomaselli was selected as the JCI editor in chief in 2017 . Users of our published articles are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, and link to full journal texts, and use material for any lawful purposes, without seeking prior permission from the author or publisher (ASCI) so long as they appropriately cite the original publication. Thus, the JCI fully meets cOAlition S requirements for authors who receive funding from “Plan S signatories,” and we are fully compliant with open-access policies of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, and UK Research and Innovation, among others.The s online . RecentlJCI has adapted to increasing demands for more immediate access to scientific results. Under our watch, the journal began considering manuscripts posted on preprint servers in 2018, and at the same time gave our authors the option of rapidly publishing the accepted manuscript in the In Press Preview format. These changes are critical to our responsiveness, and became all the more important during the COVID-19 pandemic. To better address immediate issues that may arise after publication, in June of 2021 we instituted a Letter to the Editor category. The bar for the published letters is very high — the critiques regarding methodology, results, or data interpretation must be substantive, and the authors of published papers being critiqued are given an opportunity to respond. To date, we have published 11 articles in the Letter to the Editor category.In addition to enhancing our open-access policy, the JCI Insight. Seven hundred eighty-four manuscripts that did not meet the JCI’s publication priority but were viewed as high-quality research were transferred to and published in JCI Insight. I am pleased that many of the transferred papers were successful. We expanded our guaranteed review option, in which authors can designate a manuscript for external peer review and bypass initial editorial rejection, to include frequent reviewers for the journal in addition to ASCI members ; Nobel laureate, Lasker awardee, and member of the National Academy of Sciences (Gregg Semenza); department chairs ; several directors of divisions, institutes, centers and laboratories; and 9 members of the National Academy of Medicine . For me, working with our board was a daily revelation of knowledge, teamwork, and tireless desire to serve the scientific community. I will surely miss all of you.Finally, I am most honored to have had the opportunity to work with an exceptional team of editors and advisors. In my opinion , the Johns Hopkins adinkra symbols from my birth country, Ghana, that capture the essence of our JCI editorial team (Adinkra (meaning “farewell” or “good bye” in the Asante Twi language) symbols are printed on cloth to express societal beliefs, values, and philosophy. I have selected four symbols in celebration of our board: (a) one who does not know can know by learning; (b) wisdom, ingenuity, intelligence; (c) interdependence, cooperation; and (d) vigilance, preparedness for action. It’s been a fantastic journey. We have been honored by the trust granted to us by the ASCI to serve its membership and the greater scientific community. We wish great success to Elizabeth McNally and her team.In bidding farewell, I would like to share some ial team . Adinkra