Achieving less than 1 ms end-to-end communication latency, required for certain 5G services and use cases, is imposing severe technical challenges for the deployment of next-generation networks. To achieve such an ambitious goal, the service infrastructure and User Plane Function (UPF) placement at the network edge, is mandatory. However, this solution implies a substantial increase in deployment and operational costs. To cost-effectively solve this joint placement problem, this paper introduces a framework to jointly address the placement of edge nodes (ENs) and UPFs. Our framework proposal relies on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and heuristic solutions. The main objective is to determine the ENs and UPFs’ optimal number and locations to minimize overall costs while satisfying the service requirements. To this aim, several parameters and factors are considered, such as capacity, latency, costs and site restrictions. The proposed solutions are evaluated based on different metrics and the obtained results showcase over  For instance, services under the ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (uRLLC) category require high reliability and low response time whereas others belonging to the enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) class need high bandwidth and processing capacity. Thus, flexible and customizable deployment of the required User Plane Functions (UPFs) is necessary. Concretely, latency and reliability stringent requirements can be satisfied by placing UPFs closer to the end-users and assigning more than one UPF to the access nodes. However, this kind of approach implies an increase in the number of UPFs by a factor of 20 to 30 times the original amount . A higheIn this context, a core approach to reduce CAPEX/OPEX is the joint optimization of the EN and UPF placement strategies. A solution to this problem can exponentially increase overall deployment and operation cost savings, while effectively guaranteeing 5G service requirement satisfaction. Solving this problem is challenging due to the numerous trade-offs involved. For instance: (a) only minimizing the number of ENs and UPFs, results in performance degradation and unsatisfied end-user demands, (b) the inter-dependence between EN sizing and location-dependent costs leads to unmet requirement scenarios due to service demand variation and unexpected events , (c) through the use of current in-use sites  significant cost reductions can be achieved, however, if the forecasted demand does not follow the expected path, it may be better to choose other locations closer to the user demand in spite of its lack of IT capabilities, as it would considerably decrease the expenses over time.A framework proposal for the joint EN and UPF placement optimization problems.A novel solution approach to the UPF placement problem (UPFPP) considering optimally located edge service infrastructure, user mobility, latency and reliability requirements.Given this situation, this paper proposes a framework for a cost-effective deployment of both the edge service infrastructure and the required UPFs to guarantee overall cost minimization and service demand satisfaction. To that aim, our main contributions are:Two main research areas are involved in the solution of the problem presented in the previous section: Edge Node Placement and UPF Placement under 5G networking. The following sections present a comprehensive study of current literature on both topics.Extensive research has been carried out in subjects closely related to the EN placement problem (ENPP) within mobile network planning, facility location and EC implementations studies ,7,8,9.Wang et al. , proposeThe authors of  present Facility Location Problems (FLPs) and server placement problems ,15 are cThe 5G UPFs are analogous to Service Gateways (SGWs) and Packet Gateways (PGWs) in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks. However, unlike SGWs and PGWs, UPFs only perform user-plane related functions. The placement of SGWs and PGWs has been addressed in a wide variety of research works ,17,18,19The authors in  put forwOther papers such as ,19 addreDespite the plethora of papers tracking the placement of mobile gateways , the existence of a model capable of integrating aspects such as mobility, latency, reliability, costs reduction and gateway available capacity is missing. Moreover, all the works mentioned above take as reference the mobile network architectures based on LTE systems. In a previous work , we propThe 3GPP architecture for 5G networks  is an evThe main component of the 5G user plane is the UPF while the control plane is formed by the NSSF, AUSF, UDM, AMF, SMF, PCF and AF. To solve the problem presented in The first stage collects and processes all the input data required for the upper layers see . Namely,ee is placed, 0 otherwisee and a TG at tt is covered by an EN at e, 0 otherwiseeOverall, in this stage our goal is to place computing, storage and network resources at the edge of the network in a cost-effective manner. To decrease the EN network costs, we aim to optimize the site selection and reduce the number of ENs deployed and the capacity assigned to each EN. The underlying problem formulation models the service demand, distributed over a given area, as traffic generators (TGs) . In moreThrough expression  the mainse cases . For thiInfrastructure Placement module is in charge of the ENPP solution. At first, it carries out a partial demand distribution characterization, by classifying the service areas as urban or rural and it executes additional pre-processing optimization procedures. By conducting this kind of classification the problem complexity can be reduced, since a straightforward co-location strategy can be followed in less dense areas, placing the ENs within the TG infrastructure site. This kind of approach reduces CAPEX and OPEX as the demand in these areas is primarily scattered over large underpopulated territories. Within this stage, further pre-optimization is carried through pre-processing optimization procedures, i.e., isolation analysis, where those TGs outside the coverage range of any other EN potential location are immediately upgraded to ENs. Finally, the EN placement method is executed to find the optimized locations to place the ENs. After the ENPP is solved, the framework outputs the set of restriction-free locations where the edge infrastructure should be placed, the allocated capacities and demand covered per EN, and additional relevant data regarding the performance of the executed solution methods.The Hybrid Simulated Annealing (HSA) presented in [Evolutionary Algorithm [Solving the ENPP implies the analysis of all possible EN-TG combinations in order to find the minimum cost solution. Given the latency and reliability constraints and the need to satisfy all TG demands in a capacity-dependent cost model, the combinations cannot be split to reduce computation time. Additionally, ultra-dense networking and 5G strict requirements will presumably push the EN deployment to thousands of nodes in large cities. Taking this into consideration, exact methods were dropped as solutions for high-scale scenarios and two heuristic methods were implemented for performance analysis purposes: an extended and adapted variant of the ented in  and an Elgorithm . These hlgorithm ,26,27. Tlgorithm  was modiBy placing the UPFs at the network edge not only the network response time but also the bandwidth consumption can be significantly reduced. However, placing a UPF in every available EN results in a rise of costs and UPF relocations. Therefore, the main objective of the UPF placement stages is to determine the optimal number of UPFs and their location in the given EN infrastructure, so that 5G services requirements can be satisfied while costs are minimized. Please note that, unlike the ENPP, where the access nodes can be simplified as TGs, the UPFs placement is strongly dependant on the behaviour of their underlying end-users .Placement Analysis and UPF VNF Placement. The former is in charge of processing and preparing all the data required for the UPFs placement. It is a compound of three modules: Service Classification, Placement Criteria and Candidate Placement Selection. The Service Classification module aims at clustering the services into categories with similar placement requirements such as mobility, latency and reliability. For each one of these parameters, different thresholds or levels can be established. The demands of those services that belong to the same category are considered as a whole and the placement priority for each category is established.The UPF placement consists of two main stages: placement criteria such as optimization objective and placement considerations are determined within the namesake module. For instance, the required number of backup UPFs for each service category is calculated according to its reliability level. The last module is responsible for selecting the candidate locations  for the UPF placement by taking into account available resources within the underlying infrastructure as well as the UPF maximum capacity and latency requirements of the service category. As a result, we obtain a set of UPF candidate locations for each access node  and a Near-Optimal UPF Placement (NOUP) algorithm. Finally, the The OUP model aims at reducing deployment costs by minimizing the number of UPFs. Additionally, it also deals with the operational costs related to UPF relocations. However, not all users have the same mobility patterns, being many of them static sensors or indoor that produce zero relocations. Because of this, the proposed model allows distinguishing the optimization objective by taking into account whether the UPFs to be placed will serve users with mobility characteristics (m = 1) or not (m = 0). The OUP model can be formulated as follows:Minimize: c (Expressions (2a) and (2b) represent UPF placement costs for services with and without mobility requirements, respectively. In (2a), the first term is associated with the cost of deploying a UPF at location The constraints of the system are described from (3) to (14). Expression (3) ensures that only a main or backup UPF is placed at a specific candidate location, thus guaranteeing only one UPF type for a given service category. Thus, in case of a failure in the infrastructure hosting a main UPF, its backup UPF can be instantiated in a safe location. Moreover, constraints (4) and (5) indicate that an access node must be assigned only to a candidate location where there is a main or backup UPF in place.The constraint (6) guarantees that the demands of an access node are served by only a main UPF at a given time. In addition, restriction (7) forces the assignment of the access nodes to at least the minimum number of backup UPFs (The Expression (10) ensures that the access nodes cannot be assigned to a main or backup UPF if the latency requirement . Afterwards, it proceeds to determine the UPF placement for the At this point, Algorithm 2 is executed, which is in charge of setting the UPF service area. Its first step is to ensure that restriction (11) of the problem formulation is satisfied (lines: 1–3). To achieve this, the algorithm checks whether the candidate is a main UPF co-located with an access node (line: 1). If this is the case, the (R)AN node is assigned to the service area and the UPF available capacity . If the UPF has enough available capacity to serve the selected access node, the next step is to verify that no access node is affected by the assignment (line: 15). An assignment may affect other access nodes when their corresponding main UPF cannot be placed without violating constraint (11). If a critic access node cannot be served by the available capacity in the candidate, an error indicator is activated and Algorithm 2 is interrupted (lines 20). Otherwise, the set After Algorithm 2 is executed, the next step in Algorithm 1 is to verify whether the candidate service area was successfully created. If the execution of Algorithm 2 was interrupted due to the existence of an unassigned critic access node, a sub-process to find a candidate for the critic access node is launched (line: 10). If a candidate is found the node is assigned and the sets of UPF locations . The best candidate is the one that has more access nodes assigned and avoids the greatest number of UPF relocations if m = 1. Each time that the best candidate is chosen, the sets Algorithm 3 is executed (line: 28) after a level Algorithm 3: ReassignmentMoreover, for a level of main UPFs with mobility requirements, Algorithm 3 tries to reduce the occurrence of relocations (lines: 13–18). For each access node that has been assigned during this level, it searches for whether there is a better UPF (lines: 15). If a better UPF in terms of relocations avoidance is found, the access node is reassigned and the UPF service areas are updated (lines: 16–18). At the end of this algorithm, two additional steps can be included to ensure that each access node is assigned to its nearest UPF and to reduce the load imbalance.Finally, in Algorithm 1, the output sets are updated and the level indicator is decremented (line: 29). Steps 2–29 are repeated while there are available candidates and levels of UPFs pending for placement.A territory of interest with a size of 10,000 kmnsidered ,36. TablFor the ENPP solution, the latency constraints were translated into Euclidean distances considering the propagation times of a direct link between any TG-EN pair. Namely, for ultra-low latency requirements, a lower bound was fixed in 2 km while the upper bound was set to 6 km (considering an approximate propagation time of 5 μs/km ), for ulThe results for the conducted experiments are shown in We strongly believe these results prove the complexity of the ENPP and the limitations to be considered in order to select an adequate solving heuristic. In this particular case, when applying EA to the ENPP, the coverage nature of the problem forces a high probability of occurrence for a “dominoes effect”, where a continuous EN-TG re-arranging is caused after changing a previously selected EN-TG pairing solution. Since the node density is significantly high (as expected in future 5G networks), changing a valid EN-TG assignment, i.e., through the mutation and crossover techniques applied by evolutionary techniques, commonly results in a large chain of EN-TG reassignments throughout the complete service area. As a consequence, invalid solutions are typically generated and “repair” procedures have to be executed. This situation leads to a lower probability of a child solution enhancing a parent valid EN placement. The cost savings achieved by the placement strategies, in particular by the HSA, are directly linked to the EN network deployment costs. Nevertheless, our problem formulation and solving scheme ensure a significant reduction in the operating expenses as well due to the capacity assignment optimization and the reduction in the total number of ENs deployed.For the UPF placement solutions, a scenario composed of 100 access nodes (TGs) and the set of EN locations obtained from the HSA were selected. To evaluate the performance of our solutions regarding user mobility considerations, similar placement conditions are mandatory. Hence, the use cases presented in For the UPFs dedicated to services with high requirements, we assumed 1 ms for the overall user plane latency and 1 backup UPF  were compared regarding the number of UPFs, UPF utilization, UPF relocations and execution time. The mathematical models were implemented with the Python-based package Pyomo  along wiship see  all the In general, a reduction in the number of UPFs with the increase of their capacity can be noticed. This result is more remarkable for the second group of services where the latency requirement is less strict. Furthermore, almost all the access nodes  were assigned to the required number of UPFs according to the reliability levels established. This showcases the assertiveness of the proposed strategies for the edge infrastructure and UPFs placement.The load distribution was measured only in the main UPFs because the backups do not have any access node assigned in normal network conditions. For services with high requirements in urban scenarios, the four solutions provide similar levels of UPF utilization for all values of capacity, as shown in In It can be observed from The UPF relocations rate was determined by considering the service data rate and the frequency of handovers between the radio access nodes . For each use case, a probability of handover was established according to their user mobility requirements and type of region.In lity see . For serThese results are expected as in OUP_M1 and NOUP_M1 the main objective is not only to minimize the number of UPFs but also the relocation occurrence. It can be noticed that most of the time NOUP_M1 provides similar results to OUP_M1. The difference among solutions with and without mobility considerations is more remarkable for the second group of services where the rate of relocations is much higher. This is because in this category there are more services with mobility requirements and therefore the effects of this parameter are more pronounced.Overall, a reduction of UPF relocations with the increase of the capacity can be observed. This is more noticeable for the first group of services in City_2 region where relocations are completely reduced for Finally, the four solutions are compared in terms of their complexity and execution time. The computational complexity of a mathematical model is given by the size of the problem which is expressed in terms of the number of variables (n) and constraints (m). However, formulating a function that relates both terms is hardly possible since this is an open issue . In the nxm . Please Regarding the computational complexity of NOUP, it is determined by the main loop of Algorithm 1. This while loop will be executed The computation time of the proposed solutions is summarized in In this paper, we provided a framework to optimize the UPFs placement based on a previous optimal location of the edge service infrastructure . The main goal was to determine the optimal number and location of ENs and UPFs to meet 5G stringent requirements in a cost-effective manner.A thorough evaluation of the proposed placement solutions was presented. To optimize the EN placement, two strategies were proposed considering their proven use in similar problems. Overall, HSA outperformed the evolutionary method tested achieving cost savings over Regarding the UPFs placement, the devised solutions allow minimizing not only the deployment costs (measured in terms of the number of UPFs) but also the operational costs related to UPF relocations. Concretely, regarding user mobility, the UPF solutions regarding user mobility allowed reductions in the UPF relocation rate of up to Future research should focus on the simultaneous and online solution of both optimization problems , comparing sequential and simultaneous approaches on 5G emulated scenarios or testbeds.


Open Access Atlas of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Operative Surgery and Open Access Guide to Audiology and Hearing Aids for Otolaryngologists, as well as the African Head and Neck Society (AfHNS) Clinical Practice Guidelines for Head and Neck Cancer in Developing Countries and Limited Resource Settings. The author outlines the simplicity, advantages, and popularity of this form of publication and why societies and individuals should embrace open access publishing to benefit especially those studying and practicing in developing countries. He discusses some of the challenges related to open access publishing and calls for medical societies to become involved in evaluating the quality of open access texts and videos for their members.Accessing educational and scientific material is key to improving otolaryngology care in developing countries. Yet current financial models of publishers restrict access to academic information. This article describes the author’s experience with self-publishing 2 open access textbooks,  Open Access Atlas of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Operative Surgery (OAA) and Open Access Guide to Audiology and Hearing Aids for Otolaryngologists. More than 100 authors from >20 countries have contributed, and volunteers have translated chapters into Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Recently, the African Head and Neck Society (www.afhns.org) launched another open access resource, the African Head and Neck Society (AfHNS) Clinical Practice Guidelines for Head and Neck Cancer in Developing Countries and Limited Resource Settings. This article describes the author’s experience with these open access resources.Accessing educational and scientific material is key to improving otolaryngology (ENT) care in developing countries. Yet many trainees, practitioners, and researchers cannot afford textbooks and pay-to-view journals. The author self-publishes 2 open access textbooks, OAA (http://www.entdev.uct.ac.za/guides/open-access-atlas-of-otolaryngology-head-neck-operative-surgery) provides detailed descriptions of surgical procedures. The authors are mostly international leaders who volunteered to contribute. It includes surgical procedures no longer performed in developed countries such as hammer and gouge mastoidectomy, which would not be included in modern textbooks. Being in electronic format, chapters are very detailed with numerous photographs and videoclips. Chapters are still being added, and existing chapters are edited from time to time. This illustrates an important advantage of electronic textbooks: they do not have to be completed before being published, as chapters can be added over time. OAA: as additional chapters are added, it becomes better known and translations are added. The OAA received the Open Education Consortium 2017 Award for Open Education Excellence, a tribute to its contributors (http://www.oeconsortium.org/projects/open-education-awards-for-excellence/2017-oe-award-winners-oer-categories/).The 2 This textbook, Open Access Guide to Audiology and Hearing Aids for Otolaryngologists (http://www.entdev.uct.ac.za/guides/open-access-guide-to-audiology-and-hearing-aids-for-otolaryngologists), aims to improve audiologic care by ENTs. Only 4 countries in sub-Saharan Africa train audiologists. Hence, audiology and hearing aid fittings are generally done by ENTs, as occurs in some central European countries.https://creativecommons.org). Readers may use material provided it is referenced. Hyperlinks to individual chapters are maintained on the IFOS Developing World ENT website (www.entdev.uct.ac.za.guides/).Chapters are submitted in Microsoft Word format, and the author (J.J.F.) edits, formats, and uploads a PDF version to the University of Cape Town webserver. The textbooks are registered with the Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation that issues public copyright licenses . Although intended for developing countries, 8 of the 10 top users are developed countries Table 1.Editors have little idea what readers wish to read when planning a textbook. However, online textbooks, of which chapters are individually downloaded, provide such data Table 2.Even though it is tempting to monetize open access textbooks to raise funds for worthy causes, this was not done, as the authors contributed with the understanding that it is a philanthropic project.www.afhns.org) launched this novel open access resource in 2019. African surgeons and oncologists formulated the guidelines (https://developingworldheadandneckcancerguidelines.com/) in consultation with American and European colleagues to ensure resource-appropriate best care for patients in developing countries. Thyroid, parotid, and submandibular gland guidelines have been released and are precisely tailored to availability of diagnostic investigations and therapeutic interventions. Guidelines for other head and neck sites will be released in the future. This ability to self-publish web-based guidelines permits countries in the “Global South” to assume leadership and take responsibility for their own regions without having to work through established institutions or publishers. That there were 1630 visitors and 7860 page views of the guidelines in the first 3 months demonstrates the power of web-based publishing.International guidelines have limited value in limited resource settings because of lack of cytology, imaging, (chemo)radiation, complex surgery, and even thyroid and calcium replacement after thyroidectomy. Clinicians in the “Global South” should therefore develop resource-appropriate guidelines for developing countries, rather than be guided by institutions in the “Global North,” as they know best what the challenges, limitations, and possibilities are to deliver care. The AfHNS (Apart from the benefits previously described, reasons why societies and individual authors should adopt an open access policy for educational material include the following:Our open access texts have not cost a cent to produceAuthors retain copyrightPublishers cannot discontinue publicationsChapters can be edited/updated, even on a mobile phoneReaches remote areas including conflict zones where textbooks are inaccessibleNiche topics can be includedCan be read on a mobile phoneElectronic texts will become translatable into many languagesThe author’s experience demonstrates how open access publishing is a great leveler across developed and developing worlds by making educational material freely available and empowering one to bypass established publishers and institutions.However, open access publishing presents challenges such as the pay-to-publish model, a barrier for authors from developing countries, and concerns about the quality of predatory journals. Just as governments are regulating social media, medical societies should identify reputable YouTube videos, textbooks, and journals for their membership.Johannes J. Fagan, conceived, designed, and authored the article.Competing interests: None.Sponsorships: None.Funding source: None.


Despite dealing with scientific output and potentially having an impact on the quality of research published, the manuscript peer-review process itself has at times been criticised for being ‘unscientific’. Research indicates that there are social and subjective dimensions of the peer-review process that contribute to this perception, including how key stakeholders—namely authors, editors and peer reviewers—communicate. In particular, it has been suggested that the expected roles and tasks of stakeholders need to be more clearly defined and communicated if the manuscript review process is to be improved. Disentangling current communication practices, and outlining the specific roles and tasks of the main actors, might be a first step towards establishing the design of interventions that counterbalance social influences on the peer-review process.The purpose of this article is to present a methodological design for a qualitative study exploring the communication practices within the manuscript review process of biomedical journals from the journal editors’ point of view.Semi-structured interviews will be carried out with editors of biomedical journals between October 2017 and February 2018. A heterogeneous sample of participants representing a wide range of biomedical journals will be sought through purposive maximum variation sampling, drawing from a professional network of contacts, publishers, conference participants and snowballing.Interviews will be thematically analysed following the method outlined by Braun and Clarke. The qualitative data analysis software NVivo V.11 will be used to aid data management and analysis.This research project was evaluated and approved by the University of Split, Medical School Ethics Committee (2181-198-03-04-17-0029) in May 2017. Findings will be disseminated through a publication in a peer-reviewed journal and presentations during conferences. Qualitative analysis of interview data from a wide range of editors of biomedical journals will allow an in-depth understanding of the communication practices prevailing within biomedical journals.Quality assurance will be employed throughout data collection and analysis to ensure traceability and verification.Journal editors of a selection of biomedical journals will be interviewed; therefore, research findings cannot directly be extrapolated to all biomedical journals and other scientific fields.Most journals in the biomedical field implement a prepublication process which primarily involves the interaction of three key stakeholders around an academic research manuscript: journal editors, peer reviewers and authors. This process, typically referred to as ‘peer review’, is strongly embedded in the field of biomedical publishing and in its broadest sense refers to the evaluation of manuscripts submitted for publication by researchers from the same or related areas of expertise. Thus far, there is no universal definition of ‘peer review’, and its specific objectives are not clearly defined.The peer-review process has at times been criticised for being ‘unscientific’.7 8In light of this criticism, there have been several attempts to improve the peer-review process and the quality of peer-reviewer reports in the biomedical field.12is a highly social and subjective process driven by communal as well as scientific goals, and influenced by reviewers’ and editors’ sense of their own authority, power and moral responsibility, as well as by unavoidable prejudice and intuition’.17Researchers have argued that limited success of interventions might be due to the underlying nature of peer review, which has been described as an intellectual process that encompasses objective and subjective elements.Our broader research framework aims to generate an understanding of the communication practices within the editorial and manuscript peer-review process in biomedical research. Disentangling current communication practices for a range of biomedical journals, and outlining the specific roles and tasks of the main actors might be a first step towards establishing the design of interventions that counterbalance social influences on the peer-review process. In this study, we aim to identify and characterise the roles and tasks of the different actors in the process of peer review from the perspective of journal editors.To examine biomedical editors’ experiences of their interactions with peer reviewers and authors.To characterise journal editors’ perspectives, expectations, understandings and perceptions regarding the roles and tasks of peer reviewers.Our specific objectives are:Given its underlying social and subjective dimensions,19Drawing on a pragmatist epistemological position that the aim of inquiry cannot be independent from human experience,The use of qualitative interviews will enable participants to speak freely and at length about such aspects, thus providing rich data embedded in personal experiences and practices.Data will be analysed using thematic analysis (TA) as described by Braun and Clarke primarily because of the methods flexibility and epistemological assumptions that are compatible with a pragmatist approach.21Study participants will be offered the possibility of conducting the interview either face to face or by phone/conferencing system, according to personal preference and availability. This will also enable the interviewing of people in geographically distant locations.We will use maximum variation purposive sampling to recruit a heterogeneous study sample of biomedical journal editors, allowing us to select editors with different characteristics that we anticipate may influence their perspectives. This sampling method enables conceptual exploration using the characteristics of individuals and journals as the basis of selection in order to reflect the diversity and breadth of the sample population, rather than achieving population representativeness.22Participants will be recruited through different sources. The study recruitment pathway is shown in Initially, interviewees will be drawn from a professional network of contacts (members of the Methods in Research on Research (MiRoR) projectThe research publishers BMC (part of Springer Nature) and BMJ are partners of the MiRoR project and this partnership will be used to recruit interviewees. Editors in chief operating within the BMJ Publishing Group will be contacted by the lead researcher via email, provided with study details and asked to either participate themselves or recommend suitable journal editors who can be contacted instead. One follow-up email will be sent after 2 weeks to non-respondents.Due to a different standard operating procedure, a different recruitment strategy will be employed at BMC. The publishers’ communication manager will communicate with all editors via internal mail, introduce the lead researcher and the research and encourage them to respond if interested in participating.Concurrently, the conference participation lists from the Eighth International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific PublicationFollowing the maximum variation sampling strategy, journal editors who agree to be interviewed will be categorised using the characteristics presented in 25This step will help to determine the characteristics that are under-represented and inform the sampling strategy for identification of further participants in such a way as to maximise the diversity of interviewees.Lastly, the journal editor identification process will be supplemented through snowball sampling.Saturation is a core guiding principle to determine sample sizes in qualitative research, yet few qualitative studies report in detail on the parameters that influenced saturation in their studies.purpose of the study, which in this case is to capture themes from the data using the TA method. The second parameter is population. For the purposes of our study, we want do grasp as wide variety of biomedical editors as possible and will thus obtain a heterogeneous sample. This parameter will be satisfied by interviewing journal editors with different characteristics . Our data collection strategy will be iterative, involving continual data collection until a sample covering wide variety of experiences and viewpoints has been achieved. We aim to collect thick data in order to provide deep and rich insights and capture explicit and concrete codes as well as conceptual codes that capture subtle issues. Our codebook will be emerging including a broad range of codes, including explicit, subtle and conceptual codes.The first parameter is the saturation goal and focus of our study is to achieve data saturation, that is, the point where no new issues or themes are identified from the data.28Lastly, the Although the process of reaching saturation cannot be meaningfully quantified in advance and involves an iterative approach until saturation is obtained, we used a recently developed quantitative method to offer an initial estimate of expected number of participants in our study. Following the approach suggested by Fugard and Potts1710.1136/bmjopen-2017-020568.supp1Supplementary dataStudy participants will consist of journal editors of biomedical journals, referring to individuals who are currently involved in the communication process between authors and peer reviewers and/or who are in a position to decide about the fate of manuscripts. They might also, but not necessarily, contribute to the determination of journal content and policy.Journal editors will be contacted between October 2017 and February 2018. They will be sent an invitation email and information sheet by the lead author (KG), followed by a phone call to determine if they are interested in participating in the study.A preliminary topic guide for the semistructured interviews see  has beenAll interviews will be conducted by the lead researcher (KG) either face to face or by phone or online call , according to the circumstances and preferences of the interviewees.With the permission of the participants, interviews will be audio recorded and notes will be taken.Interviewees will be asked if they could be contacted again if further clarification is needed.Based on the pilot interviews, it is anticipated that interviews will take around 30 min to complete.Data will be analysed using Braun and Clarke’s six phase TA described as ‘a method for identifying, analysing and reporting patterns (themes) within data’.31It is not bound to any pre-existing theoretical framework, therefore, it offers relative theoretical independence and compatibility with various approaches which is compatible with pragmatist position that we subscribe to.Data analysis will take place concurrently with data collection in an iterative cycle. This serves two purposes: first, it will help to further refine the topic guide and allow the interviewer (KG) to reflect with the senior investigator (DH) on her own interviewing technique and style for subsequent interviews. Second, it will help the researchers to determine when saturation occurs.The six phases of TA analysis consist of: familiarising with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, producing the report.The first phase will start by familiarising with the data—rereading each transcript at least twice and noting down initial ideas.In the second phase, initial codes will be generated from a subset of interviews using both, deductive codes from topics in the interview guide and inductive content-driven codes. The codes will be developed line by line from the interview content, focusing on the identification of both semantic  and latent  features.In the third phase, the codes will be clustered into potential themes to give an indication of their prevalence for the assessment of (code or meaning) saturation, and into a preliminary thematic map displaying the main themes.The fourth phase will consist of reviewing themes and will be divided into two stages: the reviewing and refining of the data at the level of the coded data extracts, and subsequently at the level of the entire data set. These two stages will lead to the generation of a thematic map of the analysis.The aim of the next phase will be to definitively define the scope and content of each relevant theme and precisely name them. This will involve debriefing between the study team. Debriefing with an outside expert  as suggested by KingAfter the establishment of the final themes, the last phase will consist of writing up the study findings as a journal article. Direct quotes will be used to illustrate specific points of interpretation and the extraction of themes. All themes and subthemes will be presented in the result section and discussed in the light of existing literature.The most widely used criteria for evaluating qualitative analysis are those developed by Lincoln and Guba,35et al—which provides a detailed description of how to conduct a trustworthy TA—will be followed.In order to establish trustworthiness in this research, the step-by-step approach proposed by Nowell We will use reporting guidelines for reporting qualitative research to provide detailed reporting of methods used.37There will be no patient or public involvement in this research project.This research has multiple potential uses. As a standalone research piece, it will generate context-based information from journal editors’ perspectives that will help to provide insight into the communication patterns within biomedical journals, including differences and similarities across biomedical journals. It is also embedded within a larger project that will inform the analysis of peer-reviewer reports.The study findings can further be used to inform biomedical journal policies and develop training courses for peer reviewers and journal editors.Interviewees will receive an information sheet about the research and a consent form before the interview. The information letter includes details on the maintenance of anonymity and confidentiality throughout the research process. Prior to the interview, information from the information sheet and consent form will be reiterated verbally, and interviewees will be asked to consent to participation and recording of their interviews. Participants will be able to choose not to be directly quoted in any publications resulting from the study.Findings will be disseminated through a publication in a peer-reviewed journal and presentations at academic conferences and other meetings.


Journal of Cheminformatics from Christoph Steinbeck and David Wild [Two years ago, Rajarshi Guha and Egon Willighagen took over the Editor-in-Chief roles for the vid Wild . This yevid Wild , a 100% https://jcheminf.biomedcentral.com/about/editorial-board).When Guha and Willighagen took over, they set out to further the field in its transition to Open Science . The firall authors in a paper [Journal of Cheminformatics is that it allows us to follow young researchers that may be potential reviewers. Of course, the same applies to our readers who can now much more easily find other research by the authors of an article they are interested in, e.g. with EuropePMC [And starting this year, we extend this layer of FAIR-ness of our journal by requiring ORCID identifier for  a paper . The man a paper , 6 and auropePMC  and SchouropePMC .eLife [https://github.com/jcheminform  and have and Issue Tracker to allow authors and readers to give feedback (https://github.com/jcheminform/jcheminform/issues). And we here fork source code repositories associated with Journal of Cheminformatics articles. This project is still under development, and we have yet to iron out how we want to use this. Feedback is most welcome in our new Issue tracker. Smiling Emoji.A fourth change we recently made was following the example set by eLife , and we see Fig. . FollowiJournal of Cheminformatics would not be a viable journal. It is with your support that we can continue promoting and supporting Open Science in chemistry. We also thank and say goodbye to Samuel Winthrop, who has been publishing editor for several years but now stepped down. We acknowledge we have a long way to go, which becomes crystal clear when you reread Steven Bachrach’s vision from 2009 [Finally, we like to stress our continued gratitude to our Editorial Board, all our reviewers, and all our authors. Without them, the rom 2009 .


This is why EuPA Open Proteomics provides an open platform to share good experiments within the field of proteomics. Here, novel biology is a by-product of good experimentation.Advancing knowledge requires taking risks. However, novel biology is often a prerequisite for publication, and this requirement is currently holding scientists back from taking risks. This is stalling scientific progress. Yet, every experiment that is built on a •benchmark datasets;•protocols;•reviews and opinions;•original research articles;•heralded datasets.EuPA Open Proteomics welcomes:EuBIC Guidelines for Reproducible MS-based Experiments (https://eubic.github.io/ReproducibleMSGuidelines/).The focus is on detailed method description (wet lab) and on extensive annotation of metadata (dry lab). This in turn propagates corroboration, repeatability and alternative interpretations of methodology as well as biology. EuPA Open Proteomics endorses the 2EuPA Open Proteomics is making an extra effort to support early career researchers in their scientific development. The different article formats are an impulse to take risks and critically assess scientific methodology, promoting good practice and keeping an open mind on solid experimentation. Additionally, at least one junior scientist (3rd year PhD student to 5 years post PhD) is appointed as a reviewer for each submission, so that young researchers can take part in the revision process. Notably, reading a published paper to extract the relevant conclusions for your own research is very different from reading a paper to verify the robustness of the claims that were made. It opens up your mind to other perspectives and teaches you how to write a good manuscript.If you are interested in getting involved, please fill out the form below / send an e-mail to the Managing Editor describing your experience, your research subject and providing your current position, affiliation and contact details.3“Abstract”, “Keywords”, “Introduction”, “Materials and Methods”, “Results and Discussion”, “Conclusions”, Artwork and Tables with Captions. EuPA Open Proteomics strongly encourages the authors to additionally include an “Unexplored” section before the conclusions, wherein they highlight what should be taken into consideration to correctly interpret their results. This includes unexplored validation strategies, potential future additions to the experimental design, alternative data analysis approaches, etc. This shows to both the reviewers and the readership that the authors are aware about the strengths and the weaknesses of their research. Hiding weaknesses in hopes of passing the reviewers is not in anyone’s interest.There are no strict formatting requirements but all manuscripts must contain the essential elements needed to convey your manuscript, including 3.1Sample preparation, data acquisition and data processing are all prone to error. Intelligent experimental design allows the thorough inspection of each step in a novel approach. Benchmark datasets are highly curated and validated datasets that contain the fundamental information to allow the verification of whether a new experimental approach gives the desired outcome. Benchmark datasets allow the elucidation of the strengths and weaknesses of new approaches, and help in figuring out where varying biological conclusions come from. For the bioinformatics community, they are a cornerstone for developing new algorithms and in time EuPA Open Proteomics aims to provide a substantial database of such datasets freely available to the bioinformatics community. Benchmark datasets/samples would also include inter-laboratory comparisons to help to understand variability.3.2Repeatability or test-retest reliability is essential to demonstrate that the current state of knowledge is correct. This format of paper allows the presentation of new, properly validated protocols. Submissions should contain data from experiments that illustrate the benefit and applicability of the protocol, as well as a discussion of its limitations. Protocols cover every step in a proteomics workflow: sample preparation, data acquisition and computational analysis.3.3Reviews should describe the state of the art illustrated by the recent literature, including an analysis of the current strengths, weaknesses and direction of development of the field. Alternatively, they provide an analysis of the diversity in a field. EuPA Open Proteomics especially welcomes reviews that focus on the diversity in biological conclusions. Assuming that biology is relatively coherent, contradicting biological results, at least in part, can be attributed to different experimental designs. The generation of the biological samples, the use of different analytical techniques  or the application of different data analytical strategies, all give different perspectives which not uncommonly lead to different biological conclusions. Such contributions would focus on these aspects of experimentation in an effort to figure out why a single biological phenomenon can look so diverse from different perspectives.Opinions focus more on certain protocols or experimental designs that are not working “in your hands”. This could be due to many different reasons. The protocols should be described in a way that they pinpoint protocol misuse or overuse in the community. Opinions can contain novel data of the detailed experimental study of e.g. each step in the protocol.3.4•Datasets from well-designed experiments that do not yield the hypothesized biology or methodological outcome. By making these results available publically, future researchers can look for hints of other biology or figure out why the conclusions do not match with the initial hypothesis.•Corroboration is as important as the initial discovery. EuPA Open Proteomics welcomes manuscripts describing experiments that corroborate recently published biology. Scoops are only relevant from a commercial point of view, not from a scientific one.• Re-use of public data can increase annotation rate and alternative quantification strategies can surface more subtle changes. This is why these efforts are welcome.•Proteomes that are mined to increasing depths. Knowing that certain proteins are expressed in certain cell lines / tissues / organisms / conditions is essential to build a protein atlas of the biotic world. EuPA Open Proteomics welcomes contributions that dig deeper than previously described.•Proteomics on non-model organisms is specifically hard and requires separate workflows, like proteogenomics. EuPA Open Proteomics provides a platform to share this data.The journal will accept all types of high quality primary research. This includes:3.5To illustrate the willingness of EuPA Open Proteomics to publish good experiments irrespective of their outcome, authors can e-mail their experimental design to the journal before they start the experiment. For these heralded datasets, an editor is appointed to assess the validity of the research protocol and to be the senior reviewer in the reviewing process of the article, once the data has been generated. This way, researchers can initiate their research with the promise of consideration for publication, irrespective of the biological outcome. EuPA Open Proteomics can delay the publication of the detailed description of the experimental design if authors choose to publish the biology elsewhere (to avoid issues of prior publication).


Preprint servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv represent a highly successful and relatively low cost mechanism for providing free access to research findings. By decoupling the dissemination of manuscripts from the much slower process of evaluation and certification by journals, preprints also significantly accelerate the pace of research itself by allowing other researchers to begin building on new results immediately. If all funding agencies were to mandate posting of preprints by grantees—an approach we term Plan U —free access to the world’s scientific output for everyone would be achieved with minimal effort. Moreover, the existence of all articles as preprints would create a fertile environment for experimentation with new peer review and research evaluation initiatives, which would benefit from a reduced barrier to entry because hosting and archiving costs were already covered. Preprint servers are a low-cost mechanism for providing free access to research findings, and can also significantly accelerate research itself by making results available immediately. This Perspective article proposes that funding agencies should mandate preprint posting to ensure universal free access to the world’s scientific output, as well as stimulate new peer review and research evaluation initiatives. Since its inception, the Internet has had the potential to provide free and rapid access to the results of scientific and medical research. However, despite numerous efforts, this potential remains largely unrealized. The incumbent system of research communication has 2 main problems. It is slow: It typically takes around a year for a manuscript submitted to a research journal to be peer-reviewed, accepted, and published online . And resPrevious attempts to address these problems have focused on changing the economics of journal publishing, shifting from subscription journals to publications funded by upfront payments that enable immediate free access to published articles, or on encouraging governments and funders to mandate the deposition of published papers in repositories after an embargo period in which journals continue to charge subscriptions for immediate access.These efforts have made a growing proportion of the research literature freely and immediately available online, but researchers complain that overall delays to publication are getting longer, and most published papers remain behind paywalls during the period they are of most value in accelerating research , 3.Arguably the most effective mechanism for providing free, immediate access to research has been the nonprofit preprint server arXiv . In operThe growing popularity of preprints speaks to the desire of authors to provide early evidence of productivity and share their work with colleagues as soon as they choose to do so, together with their frustration with the slow pace of the journal publication process. The attention being given to preprints by readers highlights the importance they place on receiving and evaluating newly available information.The early availability of new research on preprint servers allows other researchers, where appropriate, to begin building on the results immediately; a rough estimate is that the aggregate time saving could make the pace of scientific discovery 5 times faster over 10 years [Because preprint servers do not perform peer review (see below), they are able to operate at low per-paper costs that can be covered via central funding, making them free at the point of use to both authors and readers. With such low per-paper costs, the world′s entire research output could be accommodated on preprint servers relatively easily.If all research funders required their grantees to post their manuscripts first on preprint servers—an approach we refer to as Plan U —the widespread desire to provide immediate free access to the world’s scientific output would be achieved with minimal effort and expense. As noted above, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists have been relying on arXiv as their primary means of communication for decades. The biomedical sciences were slower to adopt preprinting, but bioRxiv is undergoing exponential growth and several million readers access articles on bioRxiv every month . DepositThere is a precedent for mandating preprint deposition: since 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has mandated that all grantees deposit preprints prior to or at submission for formal publication [Plan U would establish preprint servers as the de facto means for disseminating all scientific research, which has long been the case in fields covered by arXiv. It is assumed that most preprints would subsequently be peer reviewed. This could occur via variations of the current system, with author submission to journals, reviews, revisions, and decisions to accept or reject proceeding as they currently do but with a vital difference: The work in question would be available to interested readers while these processes take place. This is more or less what happens in physics today, with arXiv providing access and journals providing peer review.The availability and permanent online archiving of manuscripts before their evaluation would also provide an opportunity for innovation in how peer review is organized and performed and how it might be tailored to the needs of particular disciplines and audiences. Crucially, because the costs of ingestion, online display and permanent archiving of manuscripts would already be covered by a preprint server, there is a reduced barrier to entry for new peer review initiatives that emphasize curation, commentary, and evaluation rather than manuscript hosting.Plan U therefore creates fertile ground for a dynamic new ecosystem, opening opportunities for experimentation with peer review rather than prescribing a particular process, endpoint, or business model. Such flexibility may be of particular benefit to scientific societies, nonprofit organizations, journals, and self-organizing groups of academics who wish to improve on existing approaches to peer review and/or explore alternative ways to evaluate academic output.When fully implemented, Plan U would define minimal requirements for preprint servers. These would include permanence of deposition (articles cannot be removed but may be flagged as withdrawn for a specific reason), the ability to revise an article, easily indexable and standardized metadata , provisions for text mining, forward linking to evaluation and/or certification mechanisms , and guaranteed long-term preservation strategies . Under Plan U, funders would mandate that grantees post preprints as early as possible; however, they could allow posting delays for research linked to patent filing, for which a preprint, like other forms of dissemination, would constitute public disclosure.Plan U advances the goals of efforts by funders to achieve free access to the research they sponsor, such as the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Public Access policy , the Nat


Hence the first meeting was held on February 13th 2019 followed by another meeting on March 1st 2019. It was decided in principle to publish the supplement. Other decisions taken in this meeting included the following:Indus Hospital is a part of the ever expanding Indus Health Network which is providing state of the art tertiary care facilities to the people free of cost. Over the last five years this institution has made tremendous progress and also earned Charter to become one of the medical universities functioning in Pakistan. In order to promote research culture they have also established a full-fledged Research Department and have been collaborating with numerous national and international institutions. Hence when they approached us on February 2The authors of the manuscripts to be published in the Supplement will follow the instructions and guidelines for authors by Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences both in letter and spirit. Each manuscript to be accompanied by Letter of Undertaking signed by all the listed authors and Ethics Committee approval.They will follow the authorship policy of the Journal.Indus Hospital will select two Guest Editors who will collect all the manuscripts, review them for their suitability, then arrange for their Peer Review by at least two experts, get the papers revised and then send it to Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences.These manuscripts will undergo another editing by the staff of Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences before final acceptance, those not found in order will be returned to be further revised and once they are finalized, they will be uploaded on the Journal website.PDF files of the manuscripts will be sent to the Guest Editors to be passed on to the respective authors for proof reading before final publication.th 2019 and a Workshop on Peer Review was conducted for some of the senior faculty members, guest editors and other related staff to facilitate them in editing, peer review of the manuscripts before they are forwarded to the Journal.Later a Memorandum of Understanding giving details of other commitments on either side was signed on April 17The Guest Editors and other members of the team in Indus Hospital looking after this project did a commendable job which ensured that the selected manuscripts were of good quality and covered interesting topics which will help further enhance the image and credibility of Indus Health Network. However, as usually happens, there were still some problems with References, some needed further editing, some tables, figures had to be re-drawn, some manuscript being too lengthy had to be shortened and revised and all this went on for almost over six months before the manuscripts were finalized. Indus Hospital team was told to follow different deadlines to accomplish this project in time and they successfully managed that. This must also have been a great learning experience for them and helped them in their professional capacity building. Not only that, they must have realized that publishing a good quality peer review journal is a very stressful and frustrating experience. Particularly dealing with the authors is an uphill task and then coordination with the Reviewers was also not so easy. Many of these manuscripts must have been revised more than once before getting a final shape. Yet another meeting was held during the month of September 2019 to sort out some of these issues related to certain manuscripts which had to be resolved.On our part in order to encourage the authors and as a special gesture of good will towards Indus Health Network, we had agreed to include even some of those manuscripts like Case Reports, Manuscripts based on routine surveys, lengthy Reviews and CME manuscripts which otherwise has a very low priority with us and normally we do not entertain such manuscripts. Working with the Indus Hospital Team looking after this project in general and the Guest Editors in particular has been a wonderful experience and we wish the organizers of the ICON 2020 a great success.


Disputes over authorship are increasing. This paper examines the options that researchers have in resolving authorship disputes. Discussions about authorship disputes often address how to prevent disputes but rarely address how to resolve them. Both individuals and larger research communities are harmed by the limited options for dispute resolution.When authorship disputes arise after publication, most existing guidelines recommend that the authors work out the disputes between themselves. But this is unlikely to occur, because there are often large power differentials between team members, and institutions  are unlikely to have authority over all team members. Other collaborative disciplines that deal with issues of collaborative creator credit could provide models for scientific authorship. Arbitration or mediation could provide solutions to authorship disputes where few presently exist. Because authors recognize journals’ authority to make decisions about manuscripts submitted to the journal, journals are well placed to facilitate alternative dispute resolution processes.Rather than viewing authorship disputes as rare events that must be handled on a case by case basis, researchers and journals should view the potential for disputes as predictable, preventable, and soluble. Independent bodies that can offer alternative dispute resolution services to scientific collaborators and/or journals could quickly help research communities, particularly their most vulnerable members. Academic authorship is an example of attribution , where pThere are no widely accepted criteria for what constitutes authorship –4. IndivThe Vancouver guidelines  only tryThese practices mean that academic authorship is not only a valuable resource; it can be a limited resource. That some authorship designations are more valuable to career advancement than others  increasePeople have used creative ways to spread the benefit of receiving key authorship credits. An increasingly common practice is to use author’s notes to designate equal contributions –34. The The combination of many people  given vague guidance  about distributing limited resources  with clear career consequences  make authorship disputes a completely predictable outcome. Studies on the prevalence of authorship disputes usually report somewhere between a third to two-thirds of researchers have been involved in authorship disagreements , 43–46, Many papers discuss the importance of dispute prevention, often mentioning the need for clear guidelines and extensive communication about authorship expectations between collaborators, mentors, and journals , 48–52. Disputes can harm both the individuals involved and the communities they belong to. Communities usually have practices intended to prevent disputes before they occur and resolve them if they do occur. Good policies and guidelines can help prevent disputes or help parties involved resolve their own fights. Even with good policies, however, disputes can still happen. People expect communities to have mechanisms to help resolve disputes . If two neighbors fight, others in the community may hope they sort it out themselves, and combatants might argue that only they have the right to end the fight. But it would be unethical for no community member to ever get involved in the fight, instead allowing the conflict to escalate until one person was dead. Having no way of resolving disputes in progress has corrosive effects on communities, particularly its most vulnerable members. Yet this is close to the reality of the situation in research communities for authorship disputes: researchers may struggle to find any help in resolving disputes.The Committee on Publication Ethics  recommenThere is no guarantee that internal discussion will resolve the problem, despite clear incentives to do so, because journals reject or retract papers with authorship disputes , 66. RetIf internal discussion fails to resolve the issue, there are no generally recognized avenues for authors to seek help in resolving it. Some options discussed below might exist for some authors, but there are no norms in the research community for dispute resolution.A trainee might inform an institutional administrator, like a department chair or college Dean, who oversees the principal investigator of the project. But when faculty from multiple departments or institutions are involved in collaborative projects, it may not be clear who is the relevant administrator to discuss the dispute with . AdminisAuthors might ask journal editors to resolve authorship disputes. By submitting a manuscript to a journal, authors implicitly recognize the editor’s authority to decide what goes into a journal. Some suggest this is part of an editor’s responsibility , and somThere are many collaborative fields where attribution is contentious  that migThe Flintsones movie, but only three names appeared on screen when the film was released [Lethal Weapon 3 read, “Screenplay by Jeffrey Boam and Jeffrey Boam & Robert Mark Kamen. Story by Jeffrey Boam.” Details like why Boam’s name is listed twice in the “Screenplay” credit or why names are joined with “and” versus an ampersand are as baffling to people unfamiliar with screenwriting conventions as scholarly authorship is to people outside academic fields. Unlike some of the cases with comics, however, disputes over screen credits usually go to arbitration rather than court. Usually, the Writer’s Guild of America is the final arbiter [Another collaborative field where there are routinely credit disputes is screenwriting for television and movies in the USA , 32. Thereleased . Second,released . For exa arbiter , 81. The arbiter , albeit Mediation, arbitration, and combinations of these  areA major difference between screenwriting and science is that Hollywood screenwriters are part of a single unionized workforce , while sThe tacit recognition of editorial authority could be made explicit. For example, when a journal accepts a paper, the editors could require authors to sign a form agreeing that by having this paper published in this journal, they would submit to binding arbitration if a dispute arises. Many journals already have such processes in place for copyright transference, payment of page charges or open access fees, and so on. Mandated arbitration poses potential ethical problems , so jourThe simplest scenario is one in which a dispute arises after a paper has been submitted to a journal. Depending on the journal’s specific policy, journal staff would either recommend mediation or arbitration, or simply initiate the process by contacting the alternative dispute resolution agency. Because alternative dispute resolution processes come in many forms , 84, jouAlternative dispute resolution could be supported by funds from publishers and journals, as part of their commitment to ethical publishing practices . AssistaThe description above focuses on dispute resolution occurring after a manuscript has been submitted to a journal. But alternative dispute resolution agencies could also be involved in dispute prevention by providing services to authors directly. This would be similar to independent businesses that assist with writing and editing (often for authors writing in languages that they are not fluent in) , which aOne advantage of alternative dispute resolution systems is that they increase transparency by providing a clear pathway for dispute resolution. The increased presence of alternative dispute resolution on the publishing landscape may encourage improved record-keeping, because clear documentation of the project’s progress would be essential to having a decision in one’s favor. The more authorship disputes go through arbitration or mediation and are resolved through that process, the more likely that authors will become aware of the need to talk to each other about their expectations for authorship, much like how early fights by comic creators changed practices in that industry , 92.The model for alternative dispute resolution for authorship suggested here is similar to research ethics consultation services , 93. TheCreating alternative dispute resolution processes within academia faces a common problem that individual interests are not always aligned with community interests. People who now have the seniority to try to determine or influence authorship credit could have that power reduced if alternative dispute resolution services were well known and readily available to authors. But because many academics have personally experienced authorship disputes, they might see the value for the research community for having new mechanisms for resolving disputes. Furthermore, because authorship disputes reduce scientific productivity, stakeholders who are concerned with maximizing research outcomes  have incentives to join community leaders on this issue in raising awareness and creating new policies.Authorship disputes can be anticipated and ameliorated. While more can be done to prevent authorship disputes, the lack of options for resolving authorship disputes that occur is a major ethical challenge that the research community needs to address. To borrow from the old saying, an ounce of prevention may be better than a pound of cure, but when it comes to authorship disputes, it seems that currently, there are only ounces of prevention and no cure in any quantity. Alternative dispute resolution that is facilitated by journals’ staff but not necessarily run by them could help address this problem.


Journal of Cognition (JoC), the new official journal of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP). The submission portal has been online since 19 May 2017 and the editorial team has already started to handle the first submissions. With the startup of JoC, ESCoP says farewell to the Journal of Cognitive Psychology (JCP), which – initially under the title European Journal of Cognitive Psychology (EJCP) – has been ESCoP’s official journal since We are thrilled to present the The EJCP started in 1989, four years after the foundation of ESCoP. EJCP has been indexed in ISI since 1992, and has had an impact factor that fluctuated between 0.42 (in 2000) and 1.89 (in 2015). One of the papers from the early days  became aDuring our term as Editor and Associate Editor of JCP (2013–2017) many psychological scientists began to reconsider the field’s research standards as psychology was confronted with several issues appearing to threaten the credibility of our discipline. These include low replication success e.g., , underpoPsychonomics journals , and which explicitly draw attention to issues such as statistical power, pitfalls of multiple null hypothesis significance tests , cherry-picking from multiple conditions, variables, experiments, or tests, and “harking” (hypothesis testing after the results were known). The guidelines further encourage authors to provide rich descriptions of their data and to use the statistical methods that “best describe and convey the properties of their data” .We felt that part of the responsibility for promoting good standards in our field lies with journal editors such as ourselves. We therefore decided upon two sets of actions. First, JCP adopted a set of methodological guidelines that were first introduced by the https://cos.io/our-services/top-guidelines/, an initiative devoted to promoting transparency and openness in science. One essential element of openness in science is that authors, by default, make their data available to the reviewers and editor during the review process, and to the public after the paper is accepted. That is, in principle, data should be open, unless of course there are good reasons not to disclose them .JCP’s publisher, Taylor and Francis, were helpful and supportive with respect to the implementation of the aforementioned changes. However, Taylor and Francis and ESCoP did not reach an agreement with respect to our wish to break with the traditional publishing model and move towards open access. In 2016, the publisher proposed to add an annual open access supplement to the traditional journal, but imposed the condition that ESCoP should still fill an entire “traditional” volume each year. We worried that these two publishing models could not be simultaneously promoted, at least not forever. If we encouraged authors to publish in the open access supplement, we could have ended up with too few contributions for the traditional volume to satisfy our obligations to the publisher. After considerable discussion and negotiation, the ESCoP executive committee decided unanimously to not renew the contract with Taylor and Francis. As Taylor and Francis own the title “We are very glad that with the start of JoC, ESCoP has regained control of its own official journal. The society, not the publisher, owns the title and the journal is completely open access. JoC will offer cognitive psychologists worldwide an open access outlet for their research, in a journal that strongly promotes excellent research practices (including open science), with strong quality control, and at a reasonable price for authors that reflects the real costs of evaluating and producing an article.JoC’s board of editors is firmly committed to promoting excellent scientific standards and views an open science policy as intrinsic to the best research practices. Thus, JoC has signed the TOP initiative, has an open data policy, and has a set of guidelines promoting high standards in the analysis and reporting of data. We encourage the submissions of registered reports and data reports in addition to standard empirical and review articles.JoC is committed to quality control. This is all the more important in a time when the open access model itself is under threat from questionable publication practices, which range from for-profit models with little incentive to weed out weak papers, to clearly predatory practices e.g., . We feelPsychologica, Psychological Science, and JCP since 2004) and Matthias Kliegel , the complete team of associate editors  joined the founding editorial board of JoC. Additionally, several new associate editors have joined us, namely Pablo Gomez, Katharina Schnitzpahn, Bob Slevc, Hedderik van Rijn, and Bettina von Heleversen. We hope that the journal will attract submissions from every corner of the planet (as did JCP) and every sub-discipline in cognition, but that it will become an outlet of choice particularly for members of ESCoP.The transition from JCP to JoC is supported by all former associate editors of JCP; in fact, with the exceptions of Rob Hartsuiker (who is taking a break from editing after having edited for Acta outgoing editor, Journal of Cognitive Psychology.Robert J. Hartsuiker, incoming editor, Journal of Cognition.Candice C. Morey,


BMC Biology—which this year celebrates its 15th anniversary—continues to provide a home for outstanding research in all fields of biology. Buoyed by the pioneering spirit of BMC and its dedicated editorial team, BMC Biology has shaped itself through innovation in publishing and a commitment to the highest standards of author service.Launched in November 2003 as the flagship Open Access journal of the BMC Series, BMC Biology, and what we feel are our defining features. We are doing so through a series of commissioned pieces, and a timeline that marks the history of our journal.To celebrate this occasion, we shall be revisiting moments that, over the past 15 years, have helped build BMC Biology has been an eager innovator, adopting policies and practices designed to reduce waste of time and effort in publishing. Re-review opt out, portable peer review, and initiatives geared towards improving reproducibility allowed us to publish impactful and rigorous studies while offering authors a better publication experience. As editors, these policies also remind us that thinking outside the box has the power to make publishing better, and inspire us to think of ways to tackle the next challenges.Keen to meet the changing needs of the scientific community, BMC Biology is our formidable Editorial Board. Over the years, our editorial board members helped to establish the journal, and continue to serve as trusted advisors, sources of innovative ideas, and guides for our inroads into new fields. We get to benefit from their authoritative voices, and on this occasion we are delighted to share them with you through a series of Open Questions that bring the reader to the frontiers of our editorial board members’ respective fields. These comments explore topics in search of answers, such as what we still need to understand about the biology of CRISPR, how many genes we actually have, what are respiratory chain supercomplexes good for, and others. We hope these Open Questions  will spark your curiosity and inspire your own research.A distinguishing mark of Authors’ lives and career paths, their inspirations, successes, and failures, underpin the research that we and other journals publish, yet these largely stay behind the scenes—and for every paper that gets published, there are many untold stories. To provide a voice to these stories, and draw on the wisdom of our past authors, we interviewed a number of scientists who have published on the pages of our journal. Their profiles provide a sketch of what is it like to be a scientist today, the questions that inspire their research and that are still open in their fields, their lab life, and advice they would have given themselves, and would now like to offer to others. We hope that our readers—from trainees to senior scientists—see themselves reflected in these portraits and find them motivating, and useful.Peer review is the cornerstone of publishing, and we could not rightly celebrate the journal’s anniversary without acknowledging the invaluable contribution and efforts of our reviewers throughout the years. Included in this collection are interviews with a selection of past reviewers  from various fields, who offer their thoughts on the current state of peer review. Especially with the increased numbers, length, and complexity of submissions, we would like to extend our thanks to all of our conscientious and dedicated reviewers.BMC Biology was launched as a vanguard of a big new idea in publishing—the Open Access movement. Fifteen years later, Open Access is not so radical. But, in the intervening years we have seen a renewed focus on open science and reproducibility, the arrival of preprint servers, and a growing awareness that journals need be able to distinguish themselves in the way that they serve authors and science as a whole. What’s in store for the next 15 years? It is hard to tell, but we do know that we will be here to bring even more outstanding science to our readers, while continuing our commitment to bright new ideas.In 2003


Genetics Selection Evolution (GSE) celebrates its 50th anniversary. Indeed, it was in 1969 that the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) created the journal “Annales de Génétique et de Sélection Animale”, which was renamed “Génétique Sélection Evolution” in 1983, and translated into the current English title in 1989. Initially created to disseminate INRA’s academic and applied research in animal genetics, from the 1980s the journal aimed at extending its international influence and recognition under the impetus of its editors Jean-Louis Foulley and Francis Minvielle (see complete list of GSE’s editors-in-chief at the end of the article). During the last 20 years, GSE has established itself as one of the premier international scientific journals in its field, with currently at least half of the editorial board and two editors-in-chief of non-French origin, and more than 80% of the articles from non-INRA authors. GSE has been instrumental in developing quantitative genetics applied to farm animals, but also population genetics, including model species such as Drosophila under the leadership of Jean David (editor for GSE), whose research is dedicated to understanding the mechanisms of evolution using this model. Milestone papers include theoretical work on the properties of BLUP related to selection, methods for estimating variance components by REML, the use of Bayesian methods for parameter estimation, the development of reaction norm models, computation algorithms for genetic evaluation and parameter estimation, of non-linear models for categorical traits or survival analysis, of QTL mapping methods, and of genomic prediction models, as well as methods for prediction of rates of genetic improvement and inbreeding. The journal also published many applied research articles, among which those on estimates of genetic parameters, the first large-scale genetic diversity analyses of animal populations based on microsatellite data, QTL detection analyses, and the characterization of several major genes in different species. From the 2000s, the field of animal genetics was revolutionized by the emergence of SNPs and GSE published an early visionary article by Vignal et al. entitled “A review on SNPs and other types of molecular markers and their use in animal genetics” , followed by numerous articles on genomic prediction and selection.This year, GSE has strived to extend its readership, first by releasing a free online version of its archives in 2006, and second by switching to Open Access with BioMed Central as publisher as early as 2009. These changes have taken GSE to a new level with a clear increase in both the number of articles submitted and published and in its impact factor; since 2012, it ranks among the top three journals in its category and has become the premier source of scientific literature on genomic prediction and selection.With the changes in scientific publishing in the last 15 years, GSE targets are evolving fast. Major advances in technologies of genomic analysis on the one hand, and phenotyping methods on the other hand, are renewing current research in quantitative and population genetics. As in the past, GSE also benefits from developments in statistics and computing technologies. In the coming years, GSE aims to continue to consolidate its position as a leader in the field of animal genetics by supporting pioneering contributions, including the following areas:The sequencing of entire genomes will be systematic and on a very large scale. Thus, we will have access to very large designs and datasets to analyze the genetic architecture of traits and build more universal prediction models than the current genomic prediction models that are primarily valid only within a population.To better target genetic variants of interest and predict their interactions, statistical models for analysis of quantitative traits will be extended to integrate more biological information, which often consists of heterogeneous data, in particular, biological, functional, or more generally “Omics” data. To use such information and decipher its complexity, present statistical models used for genetic analysis may be challenged by prediction methods based on machine and deep learning.The contribution of two new major sources of information will be integrated into models for the analysis of trait architecture: on the one hand, contributions from studies on non-additive genetic effects and on intra- and trans-generational epigenetics, and on the other hand, contributions from studies of the microbiome (metagenomics). Future studies will show whether these two sources can improve the prediction of quantitative phenotypes and measure similarity between individuals.The availability of large amounts of phenotypes , e.g., spectra , automatic feed consumption recording, kynetics (with accelerometers), milk flow in milking robots, imaging data for animal tracking and behavior, GPS data and pregnancy test outcomes in cattle raised in extensive conditions, abattoir measurements of carcass quality, etc., will foster the need to develop new analytical methods for precision farming.To date, animal genetics has relied mainly on the characterization and use of the natural genetic variation that exists in populations. The potential of genome editing is considerable for understanding how the genome works, as well as understanding the genetic control of traits. If accepted by consumers and society, it can also have a major impact on breeding programs by being able to create new variation.GSE that focus on aquaculture have increased. In the coming years, the list of agriculturally relevant animal species covered by GSE will expand to include insects. Articles on plant genetics are also welcome when they introduce methods of interest for GSE’s readership. These will bring new challenges because of their population structures and reproductive characteristics.In the last decade, contributions to To face up to the new challenges of livestock farming, in particular agro-ecological challenges, renewed selection objectives are targeted. They have already evolved considerably over time by integrating an increasing number of traits, but we need to go even further to produce animals that are more resilient, more resistant to disease, and better adapted to expected global changes and to more sustainable production systems. Rather than searching for the best genotype to be disseminated in all the environments, we must identify robust genotypes that are adapted to each environment by better understanding, predicting, and capitalizing on genotype × environment interactions.While it was initially hoped that genomic selection would provide a means of better managing diversity, it appears that this is not always the case and that biodiversity may be faced with faster erosion. Thus, new approaches are needed to address the long-standing issue of the trade-off between selection and management of diversity. In addition, in contrast to present methods of genomic prediction, which are especially adapted to large populations, future methods must better take advantage of local genetic resources to characterize and use, and thereby preserve them.Currently, the scientific disciplines that GSE for their valuable contributions to the scientific field in Genetics, Selection and Evolution, and is looking forward to publishing the next-generation of scientific discoveries in these areas.The journal’s editorial team would like to sincerely thank all authors of publications in GSE’s editorial boardJean-Jacques Lauvergne (1969–1982)Jean-Louis Foulley (1983–1985)Jacqueline Vu Tien Khang (1986–1988)Claude Chevalet (1989–1990)Louis Ollivier (1991–1996)Jean-Jacques Colleau (1997–1999)Francis Minvielle (2000–2005)Hélène Hayes (from 2006)Philippe Baret (2006–2011)Didier Boichard (from 2010)Jack CM Dekkers (from 2012)Julius HJ van der Werf (from 2015)French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), FranceDr. Didier Boichard, Iowa State University, United States of AmericaProf. Jack Dekkers, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), FranceDr. Helene Hayes, University of New England, AustraliaProf. Julius van der Werf, Università Cattolica del S. Cuore, ItalyProf. Paolo Ajmone Marsan, University Hohenheim, GermanyProf. Jörn Bennewitz, Wageningen University, NetherlandsProf. Henk Bovenhuis, Universidad de Vigo, SpainProf. Armando Caballero, Wageningen UR Livestock Research, NetherlandsProf. Mario Calus, University of Buenos Aires-CONICET, ArgentinaProf. Rodolfo Cantet, La Trobe University, AustraliaDr. Hans D Daetwyler, The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, UKProf. Andrea Doeschl-Wilson, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), FranceDr. Vincent Ducrocq, University of Liege, BelgiumDr. Frederic Farnir, Wageningen University, NetherlandsProf. Martien Groenen, Aarhus University, DenmarkProf. Bernt Guldbrandtsen, Jiangxi Agricultural University, ChinaProf. Lusheng Huang, Farm Animal Biology Dummerstorf, GermanyProf. Dr. Christa Kuehn, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), FranceDr. Andres Legarra, The Roslin Institute, UKDr. Ricardo Pong-Wong, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), FranceDr. Bertrand Servin, Recombinetics, St. Paul, Minnesota, USADr. Tad Sonstegard, Natural Resources Institute Finland, FinlandProf. Ismo Strandén, CSIRO Agriculture & Food, AustraliaDr. Toni Reverter, INSERM, French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, FranceDr. Daniel Vaiman, ARS National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture, USADr. Roger Vallejo, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), FranceDr. Alain Vignal, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), FranceDr. Martine Yerle-Bouissou,


Introduction: Research and scholarly output are integral parts of residency training for both residents and faculty. With the transition to a single accreditation system, scholarly activity and output of osteopathic physicians have garnered significant interest. Previous research has shown that osteopathic physicians in emergency medicine and obstetrics and gynecology infrequently publish original research in high impact journals.Objective: To determine whether there is a disparity between osteopathic and allopathic physicians among authors who publish original research manuscripts in three high-impact pediatric journals.Methods: The medical degree designation of the first and senior author (last author) and any advanced degree either author may have obtained were retrieved from the Journal of Pediatrics (J Pediatr), Pediatrics, and JAMA Pediatrics (JAMA Pediatr) for the years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. Data was analyzed using simple descriptive statistics and linear regression.Results: In total, 2232 manuscripts and 4296 authors were reviewed with 0.58% (25/4296) of all authors being osteopathic physicians. A total of 0.81% (18/2232) of first authors and 0.34% (7/2064) of senior authors were osteopathic physicians. For those with a dual degree, a total of 0.64% (5/777) of first and 0.33% (3/904) of senior authors were osteopathic physicians. No statistical trend could be established for increased first (p=0.24), senior (p=0.16), dual degree first (p=0.08) or dual degree senior (p=0.06) osteopathic physician authorship. Likewise, no statistical trend for increased authorship could be established for any Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) authorship role in the three journals over the time period studied.Conclusion: Very few osteopathic physicians have served as either the first or senior author in published original research manuscripts for the Journal of Pediatrics, Pediatrics, or JAMA Pediatrics for the years studied. Also, no statistical trend could be established for increased osteopathic physician publication over the same years. Scholarly activity has been an integral component of graduate medical education since its early inception and has been a driving force in academic medicine. In 2001, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) noted that only 10% of graduates from a pediatric residency pursue traditional research careers despite encouraging early research training and the establishment of defined curriculums . InsteadAs the transition into a single graduate medical accreditation system occurs, research has shown that the publication of manuscripts by Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) is lacking in certain specialties as compared to their allopathic Doctor of Medicine (MD) counterparts despite ACGME recommendations -5. HowevStudy designThis was a retrospective analysis of medical degree (MD vs. DO) trends in publications from the Journal of Pediatrics (J Pediatr), Pediatrics (Pediatrics) and JAMA Pediatrics (JAMA Pediatr). Journals were chosen based upon having a minimum impact factor of 3.5  and a five-year impact factor of 4.0  according to the 2015 Journal Citation Reports, as well as citation half-life of at least 15 years according to each journal’s website. The senior author trained the other authors in proper abstracting technique in person by identifying the authors and degrees for the first month of Pediatrics together. Only original research manuscripts from 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015 were included in the final analysis. Research articles were reviewed to ascertain the medical degree of the first and senior author. This was determined by inspection of the abstract or manuscript that was publically available through each journal’s website. Manuscripts that were not authored by a physician were excluded from final analysis. For those with more than one advanced degree, both the medical degree and advanced degree  were obtained for analysis. Following final data collection, 100 total data points were chosen by a random number generator to determine inter-rater reliability. Data analysisThe proportions of MD and DO authorship across the years were compared by using simple descriptive statistics. The proportions of those holding both a medical degree and a second advanced degree were also analyzed using descriptive statistics. Trends in authorship were analyzed using simple linear regression. Inter-rater reliability was determined using the kappa coefficient. Statistical significance was defined as a P≤0.05.A total of 2232 manuscripts and 4296 authors were reviewed for the years included in analysis. A total of 2232 authors were considered first authors and of these 777 authors held a dual degree. A total of 2064 authors were considered the senior author on a manuscript with 904 of these authors holding a dual degree. Inter-rater reliability for first and senior author degree designation was K=1. Overall, 0.58% of all authors 25/4296) were osteopathic physicians, while 99.42% 4271/4296) were allopathic physicians  or senior author roles (p=0.16) for published manuscripts over the time period studied (Table 4 or seniMuch like in emergency medicine and obstetrics and gynecology, osteopathic physicians rarely published original research manuscripts in the studied three high-impact pediatric journals over the time period studied -5. Data Based upon the data, very few of those DOs who published research manuscripts held a dual degree. Similar data has also been seen by those DOs who have published manuscripts in emergency medicine and obstetrics and gynecology -5. CurreAlthough a large number of students enrolled in osteopathic medical school have a research background, it has been hypothesized that a lack of research training during medical school may play a key role in the decreased publication rate of osteopathic physicians -10. The Mentoring has been described as central to academic medicine and those with an academic mentor have been shown to have an increase in both research productivity and grant success . The comTo combat the issue of low academic output, both residencies and national organizations have been conducting research in order to determine the best pathway for increased research involvement and productivity. On a national level, the Committee on Pediatric Research recommended a bottom-up approach in which scholarly activity training should begin in medical school and should be followed all the way through junior faculty status . From a LimitationsAlthough a large number of data points were obtained, the authors are unable to comment on the years, or other journals that were not reviewed. The authors also cannot comment on those articles that were submitted to these journals and not accepted for final publication. Due to the nature of the study, authors who published multiple times or in multiple roles were not removed from the final analysis. This may have altered data in that one prolific author may have skewed trends in one direction. Due to the overall number of data points collected, however, it is felt this is highly unlikely. The authors also relied on each journal to publish the author's degree designation. The authors did not review each authors degree designation through an internet search but feel that inaccuracies are not likely. All attempts were made to include only original research manuscripts by using journal specific sections for “Original Research” but studies that were not reviewed found in other sections of the journal may have also fit into this category. Given the large number of research studies included in the final analysis, it is felt that accurate trends were established based upon available data. Other types of journal articles including case reports, clinical images, reviews and letters to the editor were not reviewed. If reviewed, a trend may have been established for osteopathic or allopathic publication over time.Osteopathic physicians, compared to MDs rarely served as either the first or senior authors in manuscripts published in three high impact pediatric journals over the years studied. No statistical trend over time could be established for publication of research articles with DO first or senior authors, including those with a dual degree.