A scientific publication system needs to provide two basic services: access and evaluation. The traditional publication system restricts the access to papers by requiring payment, and it restricts the evaluation of papers by relying on just 2–4 pre-publication peer reviews and by keeping the reviews secret. As a result, the current system suffers from a lack of quality and transparency of the peer review process, and the only immediately available indication of a new paper's quality is the prestige of the journal it appeared in.Open access (OA) is now widely accepted as desirable and is beginning to become a reality. However, the second essential element, evaluation, has received less attention. Open evaluation (OE), an ongoing post-publication process of transparent peer review and rating of papers, promises to address the problems of the current system and bring scientific publishing into the twenty-first century.Evaluation steers the attention of the scientific community, and thus the very course of science. For better or worse, the most visible papers determine the direction of each field, and guide funding and public policy decisions. Evaluation, therefore, is at the heart of the entire endeavor of science. As the number of scientific publications explodes, evaluation, and selection will only gain importance. A grand challenge of our time, therefore, is to design the future system, by which we evaluate papers and decide which ones deserve broad attention and deep reading. However, it is unclear how exactly OE and the future system for scientific publishing should work. This motivated us to edit the Research Topic “Beyond open access: visions for open evaluation of scientific papers by post-publication peer review” in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. The Research Topic includes 18 papers, each going beyond mere criticism of the status quo and laying out a detailed vision for the ideal future system. The authors are from a wide variety of disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, medicine, molecular biology, chemistry, and economics.The proposals could easily have turned out to contradict each other, with some authors favoring solutions that others advise against. However, our contributors' visions are largely compatible. While each paper elaborates on particular challenges, the solutions proposed have much overlap, and where distinct solutions are proposed, these are generally compatible. This puts us in a position to present our synopsis here as a coherent blueprint for the future system that reflects the consensus among the contributors.total transparency. Total transparency means that all reviews and ratings are instantly published. This is in contrast to current practice, where the community is excluded and reviews are initially only visible to editors and later on to the authors (and ratings are often only visible to editors). Such secrecy opens the door to self-serving reviewer behavior, especially when the judgments are inherently subjective, such as the judgment of the overall significance of a paper. In a secret reviewing system, the question of a paper's significance may translate in some reviewers' minds to the question “How comfortable am I with this paper gaining high visibility now?” In a transparent evaluation system, the reviews and reviewers are subject to public scrutiny, and reviewers are thus more likely to ask themselves the more appropriate question “How likely is it that this paper will ultimately turn out to be important?”Almost all of the 18 visions favor paper priority score that produces a ranking of all papers. Such a score could be computed as an average of the ratings. The individual ratings could be weighted in the average, so as to control the relative influence of different rating scales  and to give greater weight to raters that are either highly regarded in the field  or have proved to be reliable raters in the past.In a totally transparent evaluation process, the evaluative information (including reviews and ratings) is publicly available. Most of the authors suggest the use of functions that combine the evaluative evidence into an overall plurality of evaluative perspectives on the literature is desirable. Rather than creating a centralized black-box system that ranks the entire literature, any group or individual should be enabled to access the evaluative information and combine it by an arbitrary formula to prioritize the literature. A constant evolution of competing priority scores will also make it harder to manipulate the perceived importance of a paper.Most authors support the idea that a closed, pre-publication stage of evaluation (such as the current system's secret peer review) is desirable is controversial. On the one hand, the absence of any pre-publication filtering may open the gates to a flood of low-quality publications. On the other hand, providing permanent public access to a wide range of papers, including those that do not initially meet enthusiasm, may be a strength rather than a weakness. Much brilliant science was initially misunderstood. Pre-publication filtering comes at the cost of a permanent loss of value through errors in the initial evaluations. The benefit of publishing all papers may, thus, outweigh the cost of providing the necessary storage and access. “Publish, then filter” is one of the central principles that lend the web its power . It might make it more difficult for the system to correct its errors as more evaluative evidence comes in (unless papers can cross back over to the “unapproved” state). Another argument in favor of an initial distinct stage of OE is that it could serve to incorporate an early round of review and revision. The authors could choose to either accept the initial evaluation, or revise the paper and trigger re-evaluation. However, revision and re-evaluation would be possible at any point of an open evaluation process anyway. Moreover, authors can always seek informal feedback (either privately among trusted associates or publicly via blogs) prior to formal publication.Instead of a closed, pre-publication evaluation, we could define a written reviews and numerical ratings. These classical elements of peer review continue to be useful. They represent explicit expert judgments and serve an important function that is distinct from the function of usage statistics and social-web information, which are also seen as useful by some of the authors. In contrast to explicit expert judgments, usage statistics, and social-web information may highlight anything that receives attention (of the positive or negative variety), thus potentially valuing buzz and controversy over high-quality science. Finally, citations provide a slow signal of paper quality, emerging years after publication. Because citations are slow to emerge, they cannot replace the other signals. However, they arguably provide the ultimately definitive signal of a paper's de-facto importance.There is a strong consensus that the OE process should include Signed evaluations are a key element of five of the visions, only one vision strongly discourages heavy reliance on signed evaluations. When an evaluation is signed, it affects the evaluator's reputation. High-quality signed evaluations can help build a scientist's reputation (thus motivating scientists to contribute). Conversely, low-quality signed evaluations can hurt a scientist's reputation (thus motivating high standards in rating and reviewing). Signing creates an incentive for objectivity and a disincentive for self-serving judgments. But as signing adds weight to the act of evaluation, it might also create hesitation. Hesitation to provide a rash judgment may be desirable, but the system does require sufficient participation. Moreover, signing may create a disincentive to present critical arguments as evaluators may fear potential social consequences of their criticism. The OE system should therefore collect both signed and unsigned evaluations, and combine the advantages of these two types of evaluation.Authentication of evaluator identities is a key element of five of the visions, one vision strongly discourages it. Authentication could be achieved by requiring login with a password before submitting evaluations. Authenticating the evaluator's identity does not mean that the evaluator has to publicly sign the evaluation, but would enable the system to exclude lay people from the evaluation process and to relate multiple reviews and ratings provided by the same person. This could be useful for assessing biases and estimating the predictive power of the evaluations. Arguments against authenticating evaluator identities  are that it creates a barrier to participation and compromises transparency . However, authentication could use public aliases, allowing virtual evaluator identities (similar to blogger identities) to be tracked without any secret identity tracking. Note that (1) anonymous, (2) authenticated-unsigned, and (3) authenticated-signed evaluations each have different strengths and weaknesses and could all be collected in the same system. It would then fall to the designers of paper evaluation functions to decide how to optimally combine the different qualities of evaluative evidence.meta-evaluation of individual evaluations. One model for meta-evaluation is to treat reviews and ratings like papers, such that paper evaluations and meta-evaluations can utilize the same system. Paper evaluation functions could retrieve meta-evaluations recursively and use this information for weighting the primary evaluations of each paper. None of the contributors to the Research Topic object to meta-evaluation.Most authors suggest evaluate the evaluators. Evaluations of evaluators would be useful for weighting the multiple evaluations a given new paper receives. Note that this will require some form of authentication of the evaluators' identities. Scientists could be evaluated by combining the evaluations of their publications. A citation-based example of this is the h-index, but the more rapidly available paper evaluations provided by the new system could also be used to evaluate an individual's scientific performance. Moreover, the predictive power of a scientist's previous evaluations could be estimated as an index of reviewing performance. An evaluation might be considered predictive to the extent that it deviates from previous evaluations, but matches later aggregate opinion.Almost all authors suggest that the system perpetually ongoing OE process. Ongoing evaluation means that there is no time limit on the evaluation process for a given paper. This enables the OE process to accumulate deeper and broader evaluative evidence for promising papers, and to self-correct when necessary, even if the error is only discovered long after publication. Initially exciting papers that turn out to be incorrect could be debunked. Conversely, initially misunderstood papers could receive their due respect when the field comes to appreciate their contribution. None of the authors objects to perpetually ongoing evaluation.Almost all authors suggest a formal statistical inference in the evaluation process. Confidence intervals on evaluations would improve the way we allocate our attention, preventing us from preferring papers that are not significantly preferable and enabling us to appreciate the full range of excellent contributions, rather than only those that find their way onto a stage of limited size, such as the pages of Science and Nature. To the extent that excellent papers do not significantly differ in their evaluations, the necessary selection would rely on content relevance.Many of the authors suggest a role for the ideal system for scientific publishing can evolve from the present one, requiring no sudden revolutionary change. The key missing element is a powerful general OE system. An OE system could initially serve to more broadly and deeply evaluate papers published in the current system. Once OE has proven its power and its evaluations are widely trusted, traditional pre-publication peer review will no longer be needed to establish a paper as part of the literature. Although the ideal system can evolve, it might take a major public investment (comparable to the establishment of PubMed) to provide a truly transparent, widely trusted OE system that is independent of the for-profit publishing industry.Almost all authors suggest that OA and OE are the two complementary elements that will bring scientific publishing into the twenty-first century. So far scientists have left the design of the evaluation process to journals and publishing companies. However, the steering mechanism of science should be designed by scientists. The cognitive, computational, and brain sciences are best prepared to take on this task, which will involve social and psychological considerations, software design, modeling of the network of scientific papers and their interrelationships, and inference on the reliability and importance of scientific claims. Ideally, the future system will derive its authority from a scientific literature on OE and on methods for inference from the public evaluative evidence. We hope that the largely converging and compatible arguments in the papers of the present collection will provide a starting point.


Patrick O Brown, known as Pat, did his undergraduate and medical training at the University of Chicago, where he also studied under Nicholas Cozzarelli for his PhD. He was a paediatrics resident at Children's Memorial Hospital, before taking a postdoctoral research position with Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus at the University of California at San Francisco. He subsequently moved to Stanford where he played an instrumental part in the development of microarray technology and its applications and where he is now a Professor of Biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.BMC Biology; so we asked him to give his own perspective on open access and how it began.Pat has a long association with BioMed Central, dating from its origins at the beginning of the open access movement, and is on the Editorial Board of It occurred to me in a kind of a roundabout way. I had been working on studies that involved looking at the expression of thousands or tens of thousands of genes under hundreds of different physiological conditions and in different developmental states, mostly in yeast, some in humans, so we had in our hands data sets that consisted of millions of quantitative measurements of gene expression that you can think of as a map that relates physiology and development and disease to patterns of expression of thousands or tens of thousands of genes.Yes. Some of that data is interpretable without any external information, but its value is hugely enhanced if we can use it as a way of linking on the one hand things that we already know about physiological systems or developmental systems or diseases or particular tissue cell types, and on the other hand whatever we already know about the genes or their products: the links that are provided by those millions of data points in the gene expression arrays add a huge amount of value to existing information.So every time we did an experiment my colleagues and I found ourselves digging up hundreds of papers to educate ourselves about things that we were seeing in the data. By that time a substantial fraction of the journals that were most relevant to what we were doing were being published online and since we were at Stanford we had access to at least most of them, but we knew we were not getting full value out of our data, first because we still didn't have ready access to all the available knowledge that was published somewhere and would enable us to make better sense of it. Equally importantly, the manual search for published information that could add value to our data was unscalable. So we wanted to put the entire corpus of relevant articles in a database that would let us automate the process, but we were thwarted by publishers who strictly forbade downloading and automated analysis.That led me to ask why should publishers be able to control what I can do with information that was published by my scientific colleagues whose motivation was exactly to have their discoveries contribute to future discoveries? And it became obvious that there were things about the way the scientific literature was organized that were anachronistic in 1997 when we had already existing tools that we could use to so to speak hyperlink things so that you could reorganize information in systematic ways, but they weren't really being exploited by the conventional scientific literature.Then at about that time my lab had published a paper that involved a lot of supplementary information that we posted online the main server at Stanford, which was used by maybe a hundred scientists at Stanford, and more than half of all the bandwith of the server was taken up by people downloading our data. And so I thought OK well actually we should just stop publishing in journals altogether, and when we have something to report we'll just post it up on this server and spread the word and bypass the whole annoying experience of publishing in journals, and just let the world decide if what we have is interesting. Well that was kind of a primitive idea but...http://arXiv.org] that Paul Ginsparg had created, but it was very close to that kind of thing that I had in mind. Paul had started a little server as an informal mechanism for exchanging preprints in his small community that just grew organically because it was such a useful thing.I was just about to say that. At the time I wasn't aware of what was then called the XXX.LANL preprint server , and a few months later when I was organizing a genomics meeting with Gerry Rubin at Banbury [the Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor] I set up a session to which I invited David and Paul Ginsparg - because they hadn't met - with the intention to brainstorm about how we could transform scientific publishing.Then around the same time Harold Varmus, who was then Director of the NIH - he was a friend of mine because he'd been my postdoc advisor some years before, and a fellow non-conformist personality was coming out to San Francisco, so I met him at a coffee shop, and went through the idea of setting up a NIH hosted server where scientists could post their work when they felt it was ready to share with the world, and where it would be organized in a systematic way. David Lipman and I had already started having conversations about things that still actually haven't come to pass, discussing how one could make the system work. I still think they're good ideas, but...anyway, the upshot of it was that Harold was quite receptive and organized a follow-on meeting at NIH, and there was a lot of enthusiastic support, and from people of all stripes: it wasn't just a bunch of genome geeks and bioinformatic types.http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/ebiomedarch.htm.And then over the next month or so Harold and I were bouncing back and forth by e-mail some documents about how this system might operate and what it could try to accomplish, and then Harold sent around to some publishers and societies, and also posted on the Director's website a proposal for something that was dubbed e-Biomed. It's still up there, at Absolutely not. What we had in mind originally was much more radical in every way. And I should say those of us who have been involved in this for some time have absolutely not given up on this, it's just been more slow and incremental than we had wished.Well let's put it this way: I think the tipping point was reached quite a while ago, and so in that sense it's won: I think that there's absolutely no going back: there's a relentless ratchet effect so that step after step after step the subscription business model is becoming less and less sustainable, and the notion of open access publishing as the only right way to do things is becoming pretty well established I would say in the scientific community, and I think most of the existing publishers recognize that.The thing that is most sick right now, besides the continued existence of restricted access, is the delay between an important discovery or idea or publishable body of information and its actual publication. For example, when a scientist makes an observation that's the genesis of a new way to treat an important disease and submits it to a journal, nobody sees that paper until nine months later. Nine months later someone sees it, takes the next step, submits their own paper and it finally comes out another nine months later. Do a few cycles of that and something that, let's say, can save millions of lives actually becomes available two years later than it had to, entirely because of a delay between a discovery being made and its being shared with the world. And that's the situation we're in now. That delay is the opportunity cost we pay for requiring peer-review before publication. I'm all for peer review, but I'm not for way it's done now. You could have the peer review process - or a better peer review process - AFTER a paper has been published.sine qua non for everything else we wanted - to have the scientific literature be available unrestricted, to anyone to use in any way they wanted. Once you have that, then you not only make the benefits of the published research available to the whole world, but you have the potential for all kinds of experimentation, for building new tools, news ways of structuring the information, and so on.But let me just take a step back and say one thing: when we first started thinking about open access there were a lot ideas about how to fix scientific publishing, but we all realized quickly that by far the most important was open access. That was the It's not fully exploited, though I think it's almost at the point where it will be, because for people to invest in building new systems for organizing and navigating the information you have to have a critical mass of raw material. You can't have a patchwork. And I think the open access literature at this point is approaching a critical mass where that body of information is enough to allow us to ignore all the non-open access literature. We'll reach a point where there's a positive feedback loop: with enough information, people will develop tools to make open-access information more valuable, and then it will become increasingly more valuable than the restricted-access information because it's not only accessible but it's had value added to it in ways that can't be applied to the restricted-access material, so that non-open access becomes progressively marginalized, and nobody wants to be in that space.BMC Biology tenth anniversary series. Other articles in this series can be found at http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbiol/series/tenthanniversary.This article is part of the


The Cardiovascular Journal of Africa (CVJAfrica) has updated its electronic presence with a modern website to provide for quick and easy access to the Journal’s contents and services. Importantly, for narrow-band users in developing regions, the Journal has ensured that access to its articles is direct to text in compact PDFs.For our advertisers, within both the pharmaceutical and academic environments, the Journal site has links via advertisements to further product details. For authors, their articles are indexed in PubMed, Medline, Embase and Scopus and are tracked by Thompson Reuters (Web of Knowledge – ISI) which provides the Journal’s impact factor.CVJAfrica are provided as full text, free of charge on the Pubmed and CVJAfrica site. The copyright of published articles is held by the CVJAfrica and if these articles are reproduced internationally, payment is made via the US-based Copyright Clearance System. Again, the charge for academic use is extremely low (0.1 American cents per page) while commercial use reflects the actual costs more closely.Reassuringly, in the current debate on ‘open access’, all articles published in the Printed versions of the Journal are provided to South African reference libraries and to relevant specialists in South Africa. Increasingly, the Journal is accessed electronically, with 1 800 visitors to the site monthly, who view on average four pages of Journal content. In addition, 2 500 articles are downloaded per month globally by readers using the Pubmed full-text facility.The challenge for all e-based, independent journals is how to ensure sufficient financial support. We have reluctantly introduced a modest ($50) submission fee to help us cover the significant costs of Editorial Manager; the well-known and highly regarded Aries manuscript submission system. Many open-access journals such as those in BioMedCentral charge a $1 000 author submission fee.CVJAfrica focus is to publish quality research articles in the field of vascular disease. We thank our authors, reviewers and editors across the country for their support of the Journal’s activities.The


Acta Neuropathologica Communications (ANC) different to the other publications in the field? Unlike many of the other newcomers, ANC focuses on publishing high-quality articles and providing an excellent service to authors. We offer a fast and convenient publication process, as well as ensuring that all work published in the journal is highly visible and immediately available upon publication for all to read; a benefit not only to authors and other researchers but also the interested public.With the number of new neuroscience journals being launched increasing on what seems to be a monthly basis, many may ask themselves, do we really need another journal? What makes Acta Neuropathologica, ANC publishes work on pathology and mechanisms of neurological disease using structural, molecular and cellular techniques. We are interested in observational (“descriptive”) articles using human and animal tissues as well as experimental papers using in vivo and in vitro models of neurological disease. Studies bridging neuropathology with biomarker analysis, neuroimaging or neurophysiology are also welcome.Similar to our sister journal, ANC we feel that bibliometric measures such as the Impact Factor are important to consider, but they do not represent the only indicators of a good journal. Fast turnaround times are of utmost importance to us; the quicker we can get a decision on a manuscript for the authors the quicker we can get work, results and data in the public domain. We aim for a mean time between submission and first decision of around 11 days for ANC, something we have been doing on Acta Neuropathologica for the past few years and know we will be able to match.At Acta Neuropathologica for several years. They provide the necessary critical input, guarantee fair and smooth editorial handling and are enthusiastic in developing an appealing and useful journal for you.Each manuscript is assigned to an editor who, if the submission is deemed suitable for the journal, selects referees, oversees the peer-review process, and makes the final decision. The group of 30 editors have been selected on the basis of their insightful, dedicated and prompt service as referees for ANC we request only minor revisions that can be performed (and have to be performed) within three weeks. This may also include outlining limitations as identified by referees. Submissions that require major revisions to be deemed scientifically sound will be rejected.One of the chief complaints from authors is when referees suggest major revisions that may or may not be useful. As an author and an editor I sometimes wonder whether these often unnecessary additional experiments, which can take many months, are worth the effort. For manuscripts submitted to ANC we aim for it take no longer than two months between submission and online publication, including authors´ revisions.This policy ensures that we publish articles as quickly as possible. At Acta Neuropathologica is a subscription journal (though authors may choose to publish their work open access within it), ANC works entirely on the open-access model. Publishing your work open access has many advantages including free and universal online access to the article immediately upon publication, the potential for it to reach a much larger set of readers than any subscription-based journal, and copyright that is retained by the author. Being an online only journal, there are no page or color charges and we can host unlimited numbers of figures, data sets and movies. A single Article Processing Charge (APC) is applied to all articles, regardless of their length and we aim to ensure that the APC is always competitive and affordable.Whilst ANC shares a scope with its sister journal Acta Neuropathalogia, so many of you will be asking what’s the difference between the two journals? In a nutshell, ANC is an open access journal aiming at ultrafast online publication following submission and does not ask for major revisions. ANC will not compromise on the quality of articles published within the journal, as you can see by looking at the first articles published.As mentioned previously ANC, manuscripts originally reviewed for Acta Neuropathologica can be transferred to ANC, should the authors request it. To make this easy for authors we are currently creating a tool which will transfer all the manuscript files to the new journal on the authors’ behalf, meaning that authors will not need to spend time reformatting and re-uploading files onto a new submission system. We expect this to be operational later this year.In addition to direct submissions to ANC and the publishing team from BioMed Central are doing their best to provide excellent service and to publish the most interesting papers. Try it out! We greatly appreciate any feedback that you may have.All the editors of


Dr. FraDr. Frank was committed to Turkey during his lifetime and he became a Turkish citizen. After the Second World War, he received brilliant offers from American and German universities because of his scientific capability and creativity, but he declined these opportunities, stating that: “While I was experiencing the bitter astonishment of being thrown out from my country, only Turkey opened its arms and embraced me. This is my country, and I cannot show ingratitude”. Dr. Frank was buried with a state funeral in the Istanbul Aşiyan Cemetery according to his wishes after he passed away in 1957. Prof. Dr. Orhan Ulutin, who had been Dr. Frank’s assistant, gave a conference in 2006 entitled “The Place of Prof. Dr. Erich Frank in the World of Science and His Contributions to Turkish Medicine” and then prepared a book including other information about Dr. Frank . Int. Intth cDuring the transition of TJH to an international journal in the 1990s, main targets were to become an open access journal and to be indexed in the major databases. The first target was achieved in a short time, followed by indexing in various indexes such as the Science Citation Index Expanded, EMBASE, Scopus, CINAHL, Gale/Cengage Learning, EBSCO, DOAJ, ProQuest, Index Copernicus, and the TÜBİTAK/ULAKBİM Turkish Medical Database . During TJH made its first application to PMC immediately in 2000, as soon as PMC was launched. At that time, technical difficulties obstructed the path, but in 2013, TJH became indexed in PMC. TJH is the third journal indexed from Turkey and this number is increasing. Although this is a good achievement, compared to countries such as South Korea, India, or Iran, there is still a long way to go. One-third of the open access medical journals in South Korea are also indexed in PMC. This is also true for India, where nearly all biomedical journals are open access and some have found their way into PMC . SupportDespite these achievements, there are also problems with open access journals. The main criticism is directed toward the peer-review process. A recent paper published in the 4 October 2013 volume of Science  underlinIn the medical sciences, open access is a revolutionary approach to sharing and distributing research, development, and innovation, provided that strict rules for quality control are maintained all throughout the process. TJH now fulfills this requirement and is proud to be a member of the open access community.


When an article is rejected by a medical journal, the standard assumption is that the article is unsound or there is something wrong with the author. Alternatively, it may have been because the journal editor was concerned about the consequences should the article be published. This article seeks to inform discussion by providing a series of instances in which editorial concerns about the consequences to journals may have counted for more than any assessment about the truth-value of the article or the motives of its authors. This claim is based on the fact that different journals may treat exactly the same article in an entirely different fashion; some issues appear to be taboo in certain journals, no matter who the author, and there is a series of explicit communications from editors that publication has been held up by their legal departments. Let Them Eat Prozac in this journal .Leemon McHenry's review of  journal , with itNew England Journal of Medicine had originally accepted the review but, months later, changed their mind. The letter of acceptance was arguably a contract and McHenry might have considered suing for breach of academic freedom; instead he chose to send the review to the Journal of Medical Ethics, who accepted the review but whose legal advisors then counseled against publication for fear of libel, even though a review of the book had appeared in a sister journal, the British Medical Journal.The On publication of McHenry's review, the issue was taken up on the WAME listserve, where initial contributions focused on the qualities of the review and the book rather than on the dilemmas facing medical editors. This article outlines 14 sets of editorial decisions, in roughly historical order, that make it difficult to believe that the only factors involved in editorial decisions center on the article or idiosyncrasies of an author.BMJ.In 1999, having agreed to testify medico-legally, I became aware of documents shedding light on the propensity of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibiting (SSRI) antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine), to trigger suicidality and of the company's efforts to avoid giving warning of the risk. The documents were in the public domain but few were aware of their existence . My immeBMJ had carried an article with a company-only authorship line that, despite demonstrating a 1.9-fold increased risk of a suicidal act on Prozac compared to placebo, was widely spun as evidence that there was no risk from the treatment   .International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine, whose editor, Graham Dukes, commented that: “It seems to me your approach is original and fair… I have not seen the issues of litigation, regulation, and patents juxtaposed in this way before… I agree entirely from my own experience with many of your comments; there are some striking examples of companies tenaciously hanging on to a profitable and patented drug despite evidence that it is doing more harm than good. Their motives are a mixture of opportunism and genuine belief that the product is being wrongly accused. I also agree with your remarks about the failure of the present overall research approach to elicit a reliable picture of adverse effects and the sometimes unrealistic defenses put up by industry when their products are the subject of injury litigation” (quoted with permission). The article was given guest editorial status to emphasize its message . The review outlined the key points being made by the book, without endorsing the position of the author. It added that I was in possession of five highly critical reviews of the book by distinguished American psychiatrists, with accompanying documentation showing that public relations agencies working for Lilly had provided these reviews to media outlets and encouraged them not to feature the book. I sent the review and the accompanying documents to the editors. The review was initially accepted but failed to appear. On enquiring, I was told that the journal could not find a balancing reviewer and that they could not carry my review. The response made little sense.Around this time, a much smaller journal Open Minds and Young Mind requested pieces on the issue. Both journals declined to publish on what I was told was legal advice. They made it clear that the decision was entirely because they had decided they did not have the resources to handle any difficulties they might run into with pharmaceutical companies as a result of the articles and that such difficulties could put them out of business (Available on request).When the issue of antidepressant-induced suicidality in paediatric populations emerged, Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) featured a series of articles on Aubrey Blumsohn who had “blown the whistle” on Sheffield University and Proctor and Gamble over company concealment of data on the response to therapy with risedronate, a treatment for osteoporosis . A series of letters were submitted to THES commenting on aspects of the case. Mine sought to make clear that Blumsohn's case was not unique. THES amendments to the letter stripped it of its meaning. I suggested that their revisions had made the letter pointless, to which they responded:“We have also had to run these letters past our lawyers as this is, as you are aware, a very sensitive issue and there are certain legal amendments we had to make” . They did not publish any letter from me.In 2005, the Evidence-Based Mental Health approached me to provide a 300-word commentary on a JAMA article on antidepressants and suicide by Jick et al. (www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/04/transcripts/2004-4065T2.pdf (p154.)The above articles largely involved commentaries. In 2004, This seemed to be an unusual development for the journal - frontline staff invoked the senior editors. In spite of indicating that it seemed to me that the best way forward surely was to have new evidence made available, perhaps with an accompanying comment by any other party of their choosing, the journal decided instead to abandon any comment on Dr. Jick's article.In follow-up correspondence I noted that: “I think, looking at the confidence intervals in the originally published version, it was pretty clear that a reanalysis of the figures would throw up problems for anyone who was committed to the view that SSRIs pose no problems. And that's just what a reanalysis did.Evidence-Based Mental Health; 29/10/2004). The view of my colleague authors and I of this article was that the JAMA reviews had not pointed out any substantive problem with the article and, indeed, the BMJ later took the same article essentially unchanged and it has been among the top three cited articles in the BMJ in recent years.“JAMA has also published another article on the treatment of adolescent depression (TADS) where again the abstract and headline and content are at variance with the data from the study which, by strict criteria, is a failed Prozac study. But JAMA have turned down pretty well all correspondence on the Jick article or the TADS article, while running lengthy commentaries praising these same articles, both of which have also attracted front page New York Times and Boston Globe coverage. At the same time, I and colleagues have sent a meta-analysis of all 677 (published) SSRI trials to JAMA, who have turned it down on the basis of a point that could have been handled by a simple rewording. Make what you will of this” .Study 329 was the key study of GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK) SSRI antidepressant, paroxetine, in depressed children. Faced with the results from this trial, company documents show GSK had concluded in 1998 that the drug did not work and that the data could not be presented publicly or even shown to the regulator. Nevertheless the “positive” aspects of the data would be selected for publication , the journal with the highest impact factor in child psychiatry. Apparently authored by some of the most distinguished psychopharmacologists in America, the article claimed that paroxetine was safe and effective for children , it's a baffling and shocking state of affairs” .In 2007, I was approached by The resulting article covered the evolution of ghostwriting and the lack of access to clinical trial data, focusing on Study 329. An iterative process began that finally got to the lawyers: “Our lawyer has just taken a look at your piece, and I do need to ask you for more chapter and verse on some points.“I realize this is taking up more of your time than you bargained for and do apologize - lawyers must make you weary by now - but I am sure you'll understand that it's necessary.”Index on Censorship self-censored: the article is under review elsewhere.The process ended with: “The documents made interesting reading - and certainly answered the concerns - along with the cuts. But I've still got worries about running the piece. I regret how things have turned out very much. I've appreciated all your help in finding documents and in cooperating with all my requests. As I've said before - it's a hugely important subject and we should be covering it.” . Lancet taking issue with Benbow's claims in a letter clearly stating that as an expert in the legal case involving Study 329 Jureidini had a conflict of interest. The Lancet agreed to publish their letter (letter available from author) but sent it first to GlaxoSmithKline who replied that it would not be appropriate to publish the letter, given Dr Jureidini's role as an expert witness involved in these issues, implying that seeking publication in the Lancet was a tactic designed to achieve a legal advantage (letter available from author). On this basis, the Lancet declined to publish McHenry and Jureidini's letter (letter available from author) even though the original Benbow letter could as readily be construed in this fashion, as New York State had taken a fraud action against GlaxoSmithKline for their lack of transparency in 329 and related studies, which the company later settled. The difficulties with the publication of a critique of 329 do not seem to be solely due to its author. Following the emergence of evidence that SmithKline Beecham had viewed 329 as a failed study but nevertheless considered selecting the good bits for publication, the Lancet published an editorial : “DepresBMJ wrote to them saying she had heard of their paper and wanted to fast track its publication. Six months later, after revisions, the BMJ indicated that their lawyers still had concerns and they would not publish.McHenry, Jureidini, and Peter Mansfield wrote a further paper on Study 329: “Clinical Trials and Drug Promotion: Selective Reporting in Study 329.” The editor of the JAMA editorial, Catherine de Angelis tackled the issue of why leading journals could not ban further articles from those linked to tainted articles, saying that “leveling sanctions against an author who fails to disclose financial interests by banning publication of his or her articles for some time period would only encourage that author to send his or her articles to another journal; it cleans our house by messing others. So what about all editors or at least a group, such as the ICMJE , agreeing to share the information and jointly to ban the offending authors? Those who suggest this approach have not considered the risk of an antitrust suit” . Companies have the resources, and may have the incentive, to sue even if there is little prospect of winning.Statements like this, which are actionably false, may have been made to invite a suit, knowing that such an action would drain a company critic of energy and time. The fact that I continue to leave statements like this uncontested may colour the attitude of editors to material that comes their way. The legal departments of journals will also necessarily take some cognizance of the fact that pharmaceutical companies actively explore the possibility of suing those they find inconvenient. I am in possession, through freedom of information requests, of documents from Eli Lilly indicating just such an approach . E-mails to and from the Some of the issues raised here might be defused if the data from clinical trials were open to scrutiny. At present, journals permit companies to publish material without requiring that they conform to the norms of science by making the data available. These articles have become a primary tool for companies, who use them to market compounds under the banner of science. Availability of data might enable journals to publish defensible alternate claims.Many articles on medical issues interface with the business of medicine as much as its science base and, as such, the publication or non-publication of these articles may hinge not only on the truth-value of the article's contents or the qualities of its author but also on an editor's perception of the problems a company may pose to the journal.Why are journals apparently unwilling to ensure that publications relating to pharmaceutical products conform to the norms of science in making data available?Why are academic meetings unwilling to ensure that presentations of pharmaceutical company data conform to the norms of science by making data available?Do our medical publications still deserve the sobriquet journals or should they be renamed periodicals?Is it time to rebrand our academic meetings as trade fairs? Even if not entirely given over to marketing, the presence of non-company presentations and material at such meetings helps generate an impression of science that is useful for marketers.Would the marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies prefer the public at large to think that the real issues center on undeclared conflicts of interest or on the failures of journal editors and academic meeting organizers to ensure that journals and meetings are in fact scientific?David Healy is a Professor of Psychiatry in Cardiff University, a former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, and author of over 150 peer reviewed articles, 200 other pieces, and 15 books, including The Antidepressant Era and The Creation of Psychopharmacology from Harvard University Press, The Psychopharmacologists Volumes 1-3, and Let Them Eat Prozac from New York University Press, with Mania forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.He has been involved as an expert witness in homicide and suicide trials involving SSRI drugs and in bringing these problems to the attention of American and British regulators. He has raised awareness of how pharmaceutical companies market drugs by marketing diseases and co-opt academic opinion leaders by ghostwriting their articles.


PMC Biophysics previously published by PhysMath Central, in its new format as BMC Biophysics published by BioMed Central with an expanded scope and Editorial Board. BMC Biophysics will fill its own niche in the BMC series alongside complementary companion journals including BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Medical Physics, BMC Structural Biology and BMC Systems Biology.This editorial celebrates the re-launch of  PMC Biophysics joins the BMC series of journals as BMC Biophysics. The 'P to B' transition is not some strange quirk of molecular dynamics but the consequence of integrating PhysMath Central journals into Springer and BioMed Central portfolios which has resulted in a very welcome addition to the BMC series. Previously, PMC Biophysics had been published by PhysMath Central but will now be published by BioMed Central - as is the case with all journals in the BMC series. When BioMed Central was founded in 2000, the BMC series of journals were among the first to be launched. Since then, this portfolio of journals have grown rapidly and become well-recognised in the research communities they serve. We are committed to the future of BMC Biophysics and the journal will be in good company among the many successful titles in the BMC series.This month PMC Biophysics was originally launched in 2008 in response to the gathering strength of the open access movement and the multidisciplinary nature of research in biological physics [BMC Biophysics will maintain this ethos, and continue to publish articles in experimental and theoretical aspects of biological processes from the microscopic to macroscopic level. Topics include (but are not limited to) thermodynamics, structural stability and dynamics of biological macromolecules and mesoscale cellular processes. We also welcome studies on membrane biophysics, nucleic acids, signalling and interaction networks and novel biophysical methods. In keeping with recent developments, we have also broadened the scope of the journal to explicitly cover computational and theoretical biophysics.Under the stewardship of its Editor-in-Chief, Huan-Xiang Zhou,  physics . BMC BioBMC-series stable, BMC Biophysics has an international Editorial Board which retains much of the PMC Biophysics Editorial Board with additional new faces [BMC Biology [As with the other journals in the ew faces  and comp Biology .PMC Biophysics content will remain open access and will be freely accessible from the new BMC Biophysics platform. New submissions to the journal will be assessed by our Section Editors for their suitability for peer review and our Section Editors will work closely with our Associate Editors to facilitate the review process and ensure consistency of decision making. The journal is further supported by a group of Editorial Advisors with specialist knowledge in particular fields. Together the Editorial Board will liaise with in-house Editorial staff to maintain journal thresholds and policies, and to steer the future of BMC Biophysics.All previous Despite recent government funding cuts, which can often hit interdisciplinary research areas the hardest, biophysics is rapidly gaining momentum. There is of course a history of physics in biology but the need for collaboration is still strong today, from such diverse fields as mapping cancer cell behaviour  to novelBMC Biophysics can provide. Articles published in BMC Biophysics will of course be open access and be freely and universally accessible online immediately upon acceptance, ensuring that research is disseminated to the widest possible audience. In order to cover the costs of publication, an article-processing charge (APC) is levied to authors or their institution on acceptance of the article. This flat fee is among the lowest charged across other publishers offering open access [BMC Biophysics also welcomes initiatives that encourage standardized reporting and public deposition of datasets [We are of course preaching to the converted when highlighting the benefits of publishing open access to the physics community who have long accepted the advantages offered by self-archiving in arXiv.org . Howevern access . Publishn access . We are n access . Finallydatasets ,13.Research published open access has the potential to reach a much wider range of readers than any subscription-based journal, either in print or online . And of BMC Biophysics with an inaugural thematic series on 'Biological diffusion and Brownian dynamics' guest edited by Rebecca Wade, Paolo Mereghetti and Andy McCammon. We also take this opportunity to encourage researchers to consider the journal for publishing their own results of workshop meetings. In these fast-moving times, where researchers from many fields are coming together to make up the interdisciplinary field of Biophysics, there is a clear need for the scientific community to keep abreast of the latest developments in an open-access format. So, if you are a physicist working on biological systems, or a biologist using the tools of physics, or a biochemist somewhere on the interface of these disciplines we do hope you will take the time to read more about the journal and consider us for your future submissions.We are delighted to be relaunching


Research studies performed in the field of pharmaceutical sciences are often attempted to be converted into published manuscripts. A research manuscript published in a national or international journal of repute is essentially regarded as a substantiation of reliable and dependable studies carried out by a concerned research group. Manuscripts may be published in scientific journals as research articles, reviews, short communications, commentaries, proceedings, expert opinions or editorials. The most significant and popular types among them are ‘Research’ and ‘Review’ articles, which are frequently written, read, and popularized. After the author(s) put in a lot of effort and commitment to inscribe, each manuscript, when completed, is sent to a journal for publication, where it is selected depending on the topic of the manuscript and the broad field of the journal and its scope. Before sending the manuscript, it is the duty of the author(s) to understand the scope of the journal and make sure the topic of the manuscript fulfills the journals’ requirements. This will allow for avoiding unnecessary delays.The Editor-in-Chief of the journal based on the potential of the topic and its suitability in the journal, decides in a meeting with the editorial staff whether the manuscript deserves to be sent for reviewing to the related reviewers. About 20-30% of the manuscripts can very quickly be categorized as unsuitable or beyond the scope of the journal. The Editor-in-Chief has the discretion to reject the manuscript straight off even before sending it to the reviewers for reviewing. Sometimes such a judgment can be made on the obvious quality of the manuscript; more often the quality may be high enough, but for one reason or the other it still does not fit the image and the scope of the journal. The editor(s) feel that the fairest treatment they can give authors is to notify them quickly of their decision. Thus, they reject the manuscript even without sending it to the reviewer or may send it only to one reviewer to confirm the decision.Often after the process of reviewing, the most conspicuous, prominent, and outstanding article and its related manuscript will be the one winning the race among the other contemporaries, and the others may be declined giving reasons for rejection (reviewers’ comments). It seldom happens that a ‘stand out’ manuscript is accepted as such (without any improvements). Often for such articles the reviewer will ask the authors (through Editor-in-Chief) to improve upon the points listed to make it even more apposite and worthy of being published.In this editorial the publication requirements of the two popular types of manuscripts, that is, research and review manuscripts, and the reasons for their denial have been discussed for fellow researchers, in particular for those who have entered the area recently, with the intention to share the prerequisite required for manuscripts and their submission to journals, including Journal of Young Pharmacists.A research article is a publication that illustrates one or more outcomes of a well-planned scientific research. A research manuscript is written by and for researchers, with the purpose of making specific findings known to the scientific community at large. Journals provide a protocol that is to be followed when writing a research article, in terms of the layout.There can be a number of reasons; the most prominent ones (non-limiting) are discussed:Novelty and unobviousness are the primary criteria that an editor of a scientific journal stresses upon the most. A mouth dissolving tablet preparation of a drug with conventional methods, technology, and / or known excipients presents no novelty to the existing state of the field unless the researcher demonstrates something new, adding to the existing knowledge. Also there is little or no scientific value in presenting an obsolete study, when newer methods are already available.The objective of doing research is to emphasize with proper justifications, backed by sufficient data. A controlled release formulation of a practically water insoluble drug may be denied on these grounds straight away. The whole manuscript should revolve along the rationale, which should be the central theme of the article. Usually the aim(s) and objective(s) should form the last sentence under the introduction section. Lack of focus and failure to adhere to the theme of the manuscript contributes to rejection. Probably in an attempt to have a voluminous article many manuscripts wander away from the objective, referring to things that are not within the scope of the study.Publications in peer-reviewed journals are to disseminate knowledge. Therefore for a manuscript to be published in a well-recognized, international journal it must have significant scientific value. Again the editor is in search of something that is new and at the same time fulfills the requirements of the scope of his journal.Some manuscripts reflect improper methodology of the work done in the research study. This is attributed to the poor literature survey before starting the work, demonstrating the paltry knowledge of the researcher. A 300 mg tablet prepared using an 8 mm round punch will cause increased thickness in the tablet and is actually not suitable to be prepared. If this is shown in the manuscript it will make an unscientific impression in the mind of the reviewers. This may not be reflected in the reviewers’ comments to the author, but may be presented to the Editor-in-Chief in the confidential comments. If the methodology of a study is flawed or questionable, the result is bound to be flawed or questionable as well, and many highly rated peer-reviewed journals will not accept such a study.The researcher should have a sufficient know-how to interpret the exact reasons of the research outcome. Even if the results are out of specifications, the author should be able to critically interpret the cause in the discussion section. It is not mandatory to show positive outcomes alone. Manuscripts can support future research if they accurately interpret the root cause of the negative results.Application of statistics in the methodology and results sections of a manuscript creates an extra edge over the others, statistics being the need of the moment. Precisely showing the results with application of statistical principles will increase the probability of acceptance of the manuscript.Sometimes, as an oversight the manuscript may be sent to a reviewer who may not be an expert in the field of the subject under review and he may give a casual glance to the manuscript deciding its eventual fate. In such cases it is believed that there are more chances of the manuscript getting accepted, however, the reverse may also happen. Although, in reputed international journals, the Editor-in-Chief will certainly consult another reviewer if the comments from one or two of them do not appear to be an outcome of critical evaluation.The Editor-in-Chief always looks at the scope of the research study with respect to that of the journal before deciding whether to send it for reviewing. Some journal will look for research related to lead molecules rather than the existing and established drug molecules, unless the manuscript is out of the ordinary. Also the time of publication and the value of the particular subject matter being published in a journal are also critical.in vivo drug estimation technologies and methods to estimate the drug concentrations in minute quantities in a particular subject, a manuscript appears to be handicapped if the in vitro data is not supported by relevant in vivo findings and correlations. Acceptance of the manuscripts relying completely on the data generated solely through in vitro evaluations is something that is difficult in the present scenario.With the advent of sophisticated In some cases, a less than borderline article may be published if well-packaged. In some cases an assessor finds it difficult to distinguish between ‘introduction’ and ‘discussion’. Introduction is to introduce the subject under research and to give the objective(s) and / or aim(s) of the article. The ‘discussion’ is to discuss the research, making references to similar studies done previously and interpreting the results obtained. ‘Materials and methods’ should be detailed enough so that any reader can duplicate the study. In fact this is good for verification of the authenticity of the study. The ‘Discussion’ should be relevant to the study. Previous studies that support or disagree with the present study should be mentioned. Impressions and guess work should be avoided. Any important statement that is not the direct result of the study should have a reference. The discussion should be limited to what has been studied.Some manuscripts have potential, however, due to the popularity of the journal and due to the large number of hits to the journal the prospective manuscripts have to be declined as they face tough competition from the even superior research manuscripts kept in a higher grade by the Editor-in-Chief. However, if such a study is denied on these grounds, it sooner or later is able to find a fitting place in some other popular equally rated journal.everything relevant to the topic, and then sorts it all out into a coherent view of the ‘state-of-the-art,’ as it now stands. Review manuscripts describe the recent major advances and discoveries in a particular area of research, significant gaps in the research, and current debates and ideas of where research might go next.Review articles are an attempt to sum up the current state of the research on a particular topic. Ideally, the author(s) does an extensive literature survey and searches for Review articles are virtual gold mines if one wants to find out what the key articles are for a given topic. If one reads and thoroughly digests a good review article, he / she should be able to ‘talk the talk’ about that research topic. The key difference that distinguishes research from review articles is that the former strictly presents facts, rather than serving as a letter of opinion or a summary of the existing scientific literature. However, most scientific journals simultaneously publish such letters, as well as reviews of the body of existing research methods and findings.Major (non-limiting) causes for a review article being rejected have been discussed.The most common comments received on evaluation of ‘ordinary’ review articles is the lack of critical observations and the opinion of the authors. Reviews are not just compilations; they are a mode of assessment of the previous researches done and are welcomed if the critical and judgmental opinions of the experts (authors) are incorporated. Simply collating the previous studies will not in any sense shape a review. Sometimes it appears as if the author is simply propagating and promoting the previous studies without his own personal outlook and critical reviews. The ‘grafting together’ of various statements from various authors without fully discussing the pros and cons of such statements will make the manuscript unacceptable for publication. A thorough understanding of the study followed by critical comments will create an edge rather than simply reproducing the text verbatim.A review article needs time, even when it is an invited review, and the Editor-in-Chief gives at least three to four months to the authors for critical and extensive literature survey as well as for the right compilation of such articles. More importantly, the literature survey done should include the most recent ones, as the reviews of the archaic studies might have already been published. Therefore, reproducing such published compilations will make lesser sense. An extensive literature survey done on the subject prior to writing a review will make a tentative representation or an illustration of the manuscript in the authors’ mind, which may take lesser time to cast into words.Similar to the case with research manuscripts, the reviewer needs to be an expert on the subject matter over and above the author(s), to critically analyze the authors’ opinions on the subject. Preferably the reviewer selected for reviewing should have prior or present research experience in the subject, to be able to assess the manuscript meticulously.Sometimes a particular research area is emphasized upon at a particular time, based on its present need and importance as also on its usefulness and potential in the future or theme issue. Considering today’s scenario, for example, if an author is working on a review article that encompasses all the recent delivery systems for effective treatment of swine flu, it will be of palpable interest to publish the manuscript. Obviously the editor will go for a peer review ; the only thing that is to be emphasized is the fact that this provides priority to the manuscript for peer review and publication.The reasons discussed earlier are chiefly the ones that are related to the manuscript type (research / review), due to which the manuscript becomes liable for rejection. Other additional reasons that may play their part adding to the above-mentioned reasons, irrespective of the journal type may be:Favoritism or partiality based on the country of origin of the manuscript Missing Conflict of Interest statementImproper manuscript uploading in the journals’ author center (this may add to the frustration of the Editor-in-Chief)Missing covering letter or with improper authors’ affiliationsImproper formatting and language, grammatical lapses, and typographic errorsInadequate corrections of galley proofs: Galley proofs should be corrected ‘boldly’ preferably with a red pen so that the printer can easily see it, and not corrected on a separate sheet of paper. In addition most journals send them along with author queries (AQ) and instructions to be followed for correcting the galley proofsInappropriate reference citations ignoring the journals’ formatBackground: Provides a brief defining statement about the area under discussion and its importance Objective: What questions did you set out to address? Methods: How did you define the scope of the manuscript / what were the limits of your literature search? Results / Conclusion: What were the most important findings overall?Abstract not given as per journals requirements: Some journals require a brief (< 200 words) synopsis clearly outlining the scene and article scope, briefly putting it into context. The aim of the abstract is to draw in the interested reader, so a clearer and more insightful abstract will generate more interest and will make the manuscript attractive. In most of the journals, the following structure is advised nowadays to make the most of the abstract: Other factors such as file formatting, spacing, and headings, units and abbreviations, spellings, companies and drug brand names, bibliography, tables, illustrations, chemical structures, submission deadlines (in case of invited reviews), copyright forms submission at appropriate time, grammatical and syntax errors, and so on are all to be taken care of for every specific journal, having distinct requirements for each. Failure to meet the above-mentioned criteria may not necessarily reject the manuscript, but can delay the publication of your manuscript adding to unnecessary afflictions.Obviously not. Realize there are many reasons for rejection. As stated earlier, publishers are often looking for something quite specific. Do not be disappointed and do not take it personally. An unknown person reads your manuscript and makes a judgment based on certain well-established criteria. Respect his comments, one should be mature enough to understand the comments whether they are genuinely written or have been written just for the sake of writing. Invigorate yourself, read your article again, asking yourself if it could be improved in any way, along with the comments of any of the reviewers. Authors have to become their own best editor, best critic, and strongest supporter. Read your article with a questioning mind to see if it strolls off the subject at some point, or states a problem which it does not solve, or repeats the same point several times. Ask your competitor or peer group having the knowledge of the subject matter to read it giving additional comments. One may rewrite a part or may improve it by doing some more research to try and find a better match. Based on reviewers’ comments, improve upon the manuscript and send it to the same journal again. If one journal rejects your article, try another one, and another one, and yet another one!In summation it is true that performing research is not a walk in the park, to add to the obscurity, getting your manuscript to be accepted and published in a reputed journal makes the matter even more convoluted. It will actually take you to the field of competition. Reputed journals by no means face scarcity, with potential manuscripts queued up to get published, but high-degree research and corresponding well-drafted manuscripts are the ones that will eventually win the race. Emphasize more on the quality of research rather than being into the numbers game: just to fill the pages of the curriculum vitae! Many highly reputed journals are not likely to accept such articles. The key: Give yourself as well as the manuscripts the time they deserve and come up with a luminary manuscript. Keep thinking, give some time daily and you will be served with new ideas / thoughts / phrases / texts to improve upon your manuscript taking it to the extremes of betterment.Wishing the readers happy researching for their scientific writing.