BMC Bioinformatics. In response to the growth and maturation of data-driven approaches, InCoB added BMC Genomics in 2009 and with the introduction of this conference supplement, BMC Systems Biology to its journal choices for submitting authors. Co-hosting InCoB2013 with the second International Conference for Translational Bioinformatics (ICTBI) is in line with InCoB's support for the current trend in taking bioinformatics to the bedside, along with a systems approach to solving biological problems.The Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) held the first International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB) in Bangkok in 2002 to promote North-South networking. Commencing as a forum for Asia-Pacific researchers to interact with and learn from with scientists of developed countries, InCoB has become a major regional bioinformatics conference, with participants from the region as well as North America and Europe. Since 2006, InCoB has selected the best submissions for publication in  APBioNet aims to promote and support bioinformatics within its region on educational, research and network infrastructure levels as a discipline firmly anchored in life sciences. In 2002, APBioNet supported the launch of the International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB) which evolved into its annual signature event [Renowned keynote speakers Wen-Hsiung Li (University of Chicago and Academia Sinica), Manyuan Long (University of Chicago) and Philip R.O. Payne (Ohio State University) presented and discussed topics ranging from intricacies of genome assembly methodologies to advances and obstacles in translational bioinformatics. Of special interest to the audience was Phillip Payne's 4i big data approach in conjunction with personalized medicine. The 4i include international systems-level data to information to knowledge management, scalable and high through-put data integration with improved human-computer interactions and constant innovation.BMC Genomics [BMC Bioinformatics [BMC Systems Biology and in the new open access journal PeerJ [BMC Systems Biology and PeerJ were added this year to InCoB's choice of journals as a result of increasingly diverse topics of submitted papers in the fields of systems biology and biological image analysis. For the first time, oral paper presentations and posters were also offered the opportunity to submit their presentations under Common Creative License to F1000Posters [Of 108 submitted research papers, 45 (41%) were accepted after one to two rounds of peer-review by a 113 member strong Program Committee and 20 sub-reviewers  simulations are used to determine the need of clinical drug-drug interactions studies. Lee et al.  focussedet al.  developeOn the last conference day, Akihiko Konagaya (Tokyo Institute of Technology) introduced the development of molecular robots equipped with sensors and intelligence. The project is funded by a MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas. The fundamental concept of the selfness of living systems and bottom-up self-organization is applied to robotics which traditionally follows top-down approaches . Using aUntil recently APBioNet was organized in legal terms informally to provide maximum flexibility while keeping cost at minimum and providing membership for free. The resulting dynamics served APBioNet and its community well to grow and attain international competitiveness in bioinformatics. In 2012, APBioNet incorporated in Singapore as non-profit public limited liability company to sustain a high-quality regional support and provide a network to bioinformaticians that voids the gap between national societies with limited objectives and overarching goals of international societies. A modest annual membership fee structure is being developed to add new benefit for our members, which may also be collected through future InCoB registration fees. Value-added benefits will include various levels of discounted lifetime membership with PeerJ [th InCoB [th International Union of Pure and Applied Biophysics (IUPAB 2014) congress [In 2014 InCoB will be held for the first time in Australia. The three-day 13th InCoB  will comcongress  in SydneThe authors were organizers and/or co-chairs InCoB2013. TWT is the Representative Director of Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network, Ltd. All authors declare they have no other conflict of interest.CS and SR wrote this editorial. CS, BS, TWT and SR served as co-editors for the InCoB2013 supplement issues with SR as the lead editor. CS and SR managed the manuscript submission, peer-review and editorial decision processes as superchairs of the EasyChair Conference System. All authors have seen and approved this article.List of InCoB2013 Program Committee members and sub-reviewers.Click here for file


Since its creation the Royal Society has endeavoured to represent and support science in the broadest sense. Providing venues for scientists to publish their research is an integral part of this activity.Proceedings B and Biology Letters are very strong in ecology, evolution and behaviour and in overlapping areas. However, they publish very little “fundamental” research in the areas of cell biology, developmental and structural biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, neuroscience, immunology, microbiology and genetics.The Society's established research journals Open Biology, to provide a Royal Society publishing venue for researchers working in biology at the molecular and cellular level.The Society has therefore decided to launch this new journal, Open Biology is the Society's first wholly open access and online-only journal.It will publish original, high quality, research in the areas outlined above. It will be overseen by a team of Subject Editors and an international Editorial Board all of whom are active scientists. It will draw on the high standards maintained by the Society over its 350 year tradition in scientific publishing.Open Biology open access will derive from article processing charges, which will cover the expenses associated with peer review, composition, hosting, and archiving.The journal complements the Royal Society's existing optional open access journals and reinforces open access-friendly policies. The funding required to make Open Biology will be published online on a continuous publication model where articles are immediately citable. Online archiving and information on article downloads will be available. Articles will be published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, leaving copyright with the authors, but allowing anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles provided the original authors and source are cited.The editorial team will be responsible for developing the editorial direction of the journal and will be the final authority on what is published. The journal will be run with the full support of the Society's Editorial Office and the Editorial Board. Open Biology. In return we will provide the peer-review, high quality editorial feedback, rapid publication and international dissemination of your research associated with all Royal Society journals.Our vision is to provide a high quality publishing venue for biology at the molecular and cellular level. We urge you to submit your very best research to


And even those who do not believe standard peer review is beyond repair acknowledge that there are problems; everyone can see the cracks.Peer review is broken. We have all heard that phrase many times in recent years. It’s become a truism, a shorthand complaint about the The Journal of Theoretical Biology. And there’s a lot wrong for reviewers too: what proportion of referee reports are second, third, or even fourth round reviews? A referee’s hard work may be contributing nothing new to an author who would rather take his or her chances with another journal than do the extra work suggested by reviewers for journals one to three.So what’s wrong? From an author’s point of view, a lot. Peer review is slow; it delays publication. It’s almost always secret; authors do not know who is reviewing their work – perhaps an ally but, equally, perhaps a competitor. It can block ingenuity; think of the classic case of Lynn Margulis and the 15 or so journals that rejected her ground-breaking article “On the origin of mitosing cells” Sagan,  before iNature or NEJM peer review is a gate keeper that helps guarantee publication of only the most interesting articles, and yes, in theory, it helps guard against the publication of flawed work, but it’s expensive – even though reviewers work for free – and it’s time-consuming. Nature or NEJM review thousands of papers each year that would not make it into their journals; for third-, fourth-, or fifth-tier journals, somewhere further down the inevitable cascade, referees will often be doing work that has been done already on an article that was written months ago.Does conventional peer review work for publishers? Well, yes and no. Yes, at top-flight journals like If standard peer review is intended to help ensure that an article is good enough to be published, is it working? And in this context, what does “good enough” even mean? Since most papers will eventually be published, cascading until they find a journal, that means that most papers are good enough for someone and peer review’s supposed qualitative gatekeeper role is not supportable. The impact of peer review on the publication of an article is not so much a question of yes or no, it’s more likely to be a question of when and where.Yet even acknowledging the flaws, redundancies, and costs of the conventional peer review system, it is clear that we need peer review. The more specialized science becomes the more we must rely on experts to help us navigate the multiplicity of subject areas we are not expert in ourselves. Peer reviewers are those experts and we depend on the refereeing process to protect us from sloppy work and invalid conclusions.So peer review is important but the way it happens is problematicAt F1000, we believe that most of the weaknesses of standard peer review can be linked to two core issues, first that it is conducted pre-publication and second that it is secret. Pre-publication peer review allows journals and reviewers to delay, filter, and interrupt the essential conversation of science, and secrecy makes these problems impossible to resolve.F1000.com.A little background: faculty of 1000 began in 2002 with a post-publication review service called F1000 Biology. Its remit was (and still is) to work with named experts to identify and recommend the most interesting papers published across 24 different subject areas in biology. In 2006 F1000 Medicine joined it – with the same aim, more experts and coverage of 20 medical specialties. We merged the two services in 2010, and biology and medicine are now both covered at F1000 Research.Since then, we have launched F1000 Posters, an open access repository for posters and presentations – again in biology and medicine – and we are now in the early stages of launching our new open access, post-publication peer review journal, F1000 Research, and secondary peer review of the best already-refereed articles, published in any biology or medicine journal, at F1000.com. Both are illustrations of Clay Shirky’s “publish then filter” model  makes it difficult for researchers to stay up to date with their own specialized fields, let alone with peripheral fields – all those other subject areas they should be keeping an eye on. Sure, you can search for articles and find, more or less, what you are looking for, but it’s helpful to have access to expert opinion for timely guidance on what’s especially significant and why. The fact that F1000’s reviewers are named puts their opinions in perspective. No one has ever suggested that our F1000 Faculty Members should conduct this form of post-publication review anonymously.F1000 Research, F1000’s new primary open access publishing program in biology and medicine, publishes immediately, and offers fully open, post-publication peer review. We published our first articles in mid-July and are planning for a full launch at the end of this year.F1000 Research are first processed through an in-house sanity check and then, assuming they pass, published immediately. Post-publication they are subjected to formal peer review. Referees’ reports are published on the site and all referees are named.Articles submitted to The most important task for our referees is to tell us immediately whether or not an article is good science. We do not need to know if it’s exciting, or novel, or ground-breaking, we simply want to know that it’s valid; that it’s sensible work, carefully done. We expect the vast majority of submissions to be approved as good science. If it is good science, an article will be marked as such. If it’s not, or if it’s good science but the referee has reservations, we require that the referee add a report describing the problems and – if applicable – suggesting improvements. We encourage, but do not require, referees to add reports to articles they have approved as good science.Authors have the opportunity to respond to a referee’s comments and are encouraged to update their articles and publish revised versions on the site. All versions are separately citable. All articles and all versions are clearly marked with their referee status and articles that have not yet been refereed are labeled as “Awaiting Review.”The strengths of this model are that it’s fast, all good science can be published immediately and become part of the record to the benefit of scientists and others worldwide; it’s fair, publication cannot be blocked or slowed by the refereeing process; and it’s open, and openness discourages bias.We do not see many weaknesses or risks with this model ourselves – standard peer review has few fans and is overdue for change – but then you might expect us to say that. We do understand though that there are concerns. These include:Is there a risk that F1000 Research will publish junk?: No, there is not. It will publish good science and let the community decide what the ultimate value of a specific piece of work is. As an aside, we expect that less junk – however one might define that term in science – will be submitted to F1000 Research than to conventional journals because few people will want to see a severely negative review of their work become part of the public record. Because F1000 Research will publish immediately then review openly, sloppy work will be publicly described as such.–OK, if not junk then uninteresting science: Maybe, maybe not. Uninteresting science is still science, and we believe it should be published. There is a reason for top-line journals to sharply restrict what they publish, that’s how they create and maintain their identities and Impact Factors, but it’s hard to argue that such restrictions on scientific discourse are, overall, a good thing. We believe they are not. Valid science should be published.–No reviewer will want to be openly negative about another scientist’s work: Having now published our first articles we are seeing in real time that this is not the case. Referees are happy to criticize and authors are happy to be able to respond, to present their case. And because everything is happening in the open, interested scientists can, for the first time, read the back-and-forth and make up their own minds.–F1000 Research’s version of “publish then filter” is an innovation in life-science publishing and no doubt additional concerns will arise as we fine-tune our model. However, it’s clear to us that the research community as a whole is more than ready to contemplate and, we believe, support real change. Complaints about conventional, pre-publication, closed peer review systems are mounting and the risks associated with our “publish first/referee openly later” system seem relatively trivial when compared with the increasing expense and frustration associated with the status quo.F1000 Research and its novel publishing model take openness to the next level. Open access removes barriers for readers. Open, post-publication refereeing removes barriers for readers and authors alike, and it refocuses the role of peer review from, at its worst, a behind-the-scenes variety of censorship to, at its best, the process of expert criticism and advice that has always been its core and upon which the progress of science depends.We were the inventors of and original advocates for open access. We created Biomed Central, helped set up PubMed Central, and fought the publishing establishment for years to prove that open access can work, that it can be a profitable alternative to standard subscription models.


Annals in 2009 had been published previously in BMJ Case Reports. Our enquiries, conducted jointly with BMJ Case Reports, established that the corresponding author had submitted the same material to the Annals immediately after it had been accepted for online publication in BMJ Case Reports. The text and authorship of the two publications are identical. Duplicate publication of any sort is publication malpractice, which wastes resources, including the time of editors and reviewers, as well as publication space that could be offered to other, original work. Both journals will deal robustly with any confirmed example.Recently, we were made aware of a case of duplicate publication.BMJ Case Reports and the Annals in 2008. On discovery of this in 2012, following the indexing of BMJ Case Reports, the article in the Annals has been retracted as per the Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines. Manuscripts may not be duplicated. This includes submissions to online as well as paper journals, regardless of indexing. Authors unsure as to whether parts of manuscripts or different aspects of their research may be submitted to multiple journals are advised to contact the editorial teams of the respective journals before submission, to include this in their disclosures and to check carefully the final drafts of the manuscripts before publication online or on paper. Further advice is available at http://publicationethics.org/.This article was submitted as a duplicate publication to


Cerebrospinal Fluid Research in its new format as Fluids and Barriers of the CNS. Editors-in Chief, Hazel Jones and Tetsuya Terasaki, anticipate that this expanded journal will provide a unique and specialist platform for the publication of research in cerebrospinal fluid and all brain barriers and fluid systems in both health and disease.This article celebrates the re-launch of  Fluids and Barriers of the CNS, formerly Cerebrospinal Fluid Research!Welcome to Cerebrospinal Fluid Research in its new format Fluids and Barriers of the CNS. Since its inception in December 2004 [Cerebrospinal Fluid Research has published 106 research, reviews, and commentary articles, and also supplements containing the proceedings of the Society for Research into Hydrocephalus and Spina Bifida. The journal has published manuscripts on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and choroid plexus in health and disease interpreted in the widest sense. This has included articles on CSF physiology, secretion, flow and absorption, fluid dynamics, and fluid composition both in health and in disease states such as hydrocephalus, neurodegenerative diseases and CNS infections. CNS disorders that impact the CSF system such as neural tube defects, Chiari malformation and syringomyelia have also been included. Articles on the choroid plexus, either in vivo or in vitro have included topics such as junctional proteins, transport systems, gene expression, receptors and peptide secretion. All articles are open access; i.e. freely available to anyone with access to the internet, and previously published articles are fully indexed and will be accessible from the new journal platform.This month sees the re-launch of ber 2004 , CerebroFluids and Barriers of the CNS (FBCNS) http://www.fluidsbarrierscns.com. Homeostatic maintenance of the internal environment of the nervous system through normal functioning of brain fluids and barriers is vital for health of the organism. Hitherto, the subject area of brain fluids and brain barriers has not had a specialist platform. Several thousands of articles on these topics are published every year in a variety of different journals; we hope to bring a good proportion of these under one umbrella into FBCNS. We recognise that the scientific community working in the research fields of the blood-brain barrier, the blood-retinal barrier, the blood-nerve barrier together with the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier and the role of the cerebrospinal fluid and the brain interstitial fluid, is currently not especially large. However, we expect significant synergistic effects among those scientists with this new publishing format, by facilitating the progress of the research and simultaneously providing more opportunities to expand the community to those with fringe interests. Accordingly, our aim is to bring the field under one comprehensive umbrella offering quality peer-reviewed manuscripts on all aspects of fluids and barriers of the CNS.After discussions with the current editorial board and the journal's publisher, BioMed Central (part of Springer Science+Business Media), we have decided to expand the journal's scope into all brain barriers and to re-launch with a new title, FBCNS will continue to publish articles on all aspects of CSF and choroid plexus in health and disease. The cerebrospinal fluid, its composition, circulation and absorption, has multiple roles in both normal and abnormal brain function and is closely associated with the neuronal interstitial fluid. From now FBCNS is, in addition, actively seeking manuscripts on all CNS barrier systems including the blood-CSF barrier, the blood-brain barrier, the inner and outer blood-retinal barriers, and the blood-nerve barrier which perform functions such as fluid secretion, chemical signalling, physical and chemical buffering, specialised directional transport and facilitation of immune surveillance. Particularly interesting are topics such as how the barrier tight junctions are constructed and regulated in pathophysiological conditions and how different cells and cell types interact to maintain a dynamic barrier function (cell-cell direct interaction and paracrine effects). This includes biochemical and physiological studies on the interactive mechanisms between endothelial cells, astrocytes and pericytes at the blood-brain barrier, and between endothelial cells, Müller cells and pericytes at the inner blood-retinal barrier. It is important to explore the similarities and differences between the blood-CSF barrier, i.e., choroid plexus epithelial cells, and the outer blood-retinal barrier, retinal pigment epithelial cells and also the similarities and differences between the blood-brain barrier, and the inner blood-retinal barrier, and the blood-nerve barrier. The fluids and barrier systems are important in neurodevelopment and neurodevelopmental disorders such as hydrocephalus and neural tube defects, in aging and aging disorders such dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and normal pressure hydrocephalus. Throughout all stages of life they play an important role in brain inflammation, brain injury and repair, and neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Manipulation of the blood-brain barrier can provide a route for drug delivery to the brain. Chemical analysis of the CSF can potentially be used for the diagnosis of neurological diseases, and may provide a supplementary route for drug delivery to the CNS.http://www.fluidsbarrierscns.com/about/edboard and aim to have a broad range of expertise in all relevant fields.To facilitate this expansion, Tetsuya Terasaki, Distinguished Professor, Tohoku University, Japan, has recently joined the journal as joint-Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Terasaki has published a number of articles on transporter function and tight junction proteins in the blood-brain barrier and the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier. He has published as a co-author, studies on the blood-retinal barrier and the blood-nerve barrier which have been performed by his colleagues. He also recognises the importance of technological advances and development to facilitate barrier research. He will have responsibility for the publication of articles on neural barriers including the blood-brain, blood-nerve and blood-eye barriers. Furthermore, we are delighted to have Distinguished Professor William M. Pardridge , Professor Joan Abbott , Professor Yuichi Sugiyama , world-leaders of these research fields, who will act as Honorary Advisors to the journal by giving advice on policy, promoting submissions and acting as special advocates. Along with these, we are now recruiting people with BBB expertise to our international Editorial Board Fluids and Barriers of the CNS including research articles, review articles, commentaries, book reviews and meeting proceedings. Each manuscript will be reviewed by a member of the Editorial Board or, where appropriate, allocated to external reviewers. Usually two or three reviewers, who remain anonymous, will be sought for each manuscript and authors are asked to provide a list of suggested reviewers on submission of their manuscript. All articles are published immediately upon acceptance. Articles are archived in PubMed and the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library. Publications are tracked by PubMed Central, CAS, EMBASE, Scopus and Google Scholar. BioMed Central is working closely with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in FBCNS will be available.We strongly encourage you to submit any articles relating to the scope of our journal, http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/apcfaq#grants. APCs pay for online submission and efficient peer review, for the article to be freely and universally accessible in various formats online, and for the processes required for inclusion in PubMed and archiving as described above.Open Access defines the way in which articles are published. All articles become freely and universally accessible online, and an author's work can be read by anyone at no cost. Second, authors hold the copyright for their work and can grant anyone the right to reproduce and disseminate the article, provided that it is correctly cited and no errors are introduced . BecauseOpen access was started 10 years ago by Public Library of Science (PLoS) and separately by BioMed Central. Open access is growing in popularity as libraries fill up with paper-based journals. By a recent report, up to 11% of all peer-reviewed journals and about 20% of peer-reviewed articles are now freely available through open access . FurtherCerebrospinal Fluid Research, we aim only to publish good science and will strive to maintain a high standard and fast route for publication. We invite you to submit your articles through the online system http://www.fluidsbarrierscns.com/manuscript/ and help us to make this a top class journal serving all researchers with an interest in brain barriers and fluids.We are launching the new look journal with a newly-designed website and some key articles covering the following topics: historical aspects of the subject, a review on comparative molecular aspects of the blood-CSF and blood-brain barriers, reviews on barrier mechanisms for immune surveillance, on intracranial pulsatility, on microvascular pericytes and on cancer cells in CSF, a commentary on drug transport via the CSF, and some key research articles. Similar to


Improving the peer review process, overcoming the limitations of print journals and providing open access to the very best work in the life and biomedical sciences are three highlights of our first year. Science in 2008 said it all: ‘The stress associated with publishing experimental results—a process that can take as long as obtaining the results in the first place—can drain much of the joy from practicing science’ . In the interests of transparency, we encourage authors to endorse publication of the most substantive parts of the decision letter, and their responses, along with the main article.Compared to other journals, the eLife approach. Because there are no print issues, we do not arbitrarily limit the number of words, figures and references in an article. We can also seamlessly integrate movies into the text, and link underlying data sets to their graphical summary representation. This is complemented by eLife Lens, a new way of dynamically displaying scientific articles online, instead of merely replicating the print version  and plants performing arithmetic so that they do not run out of starch by morning, to the evolution of cancer after targeted combination therapy and the discovery of the Hepatitis B receptor. Notably, from the very beginning, the average quality of submissions has been very high, with only a small minority not meriting any discussion at all among the editors.So, is eLife, we were united in our conviction that the publication landscape was in dire need of change. We were not alone in this view, and were able to recruit a fantastic team of editors. Our combined efforts are being richly rewarded by the great manuscripts that researchers are submitting to eLife and by the enthusiastic feedback we are receiving from authors, referees and readers. Our publishing activities are only the beginning of a great journey: please join us in making eLife a journal that is truly designed for science at its very best.While the three of us felt some trepidation when we agreed to devote a significant amount of our time to


Open Biology late last year, our goal was to offera high-quality, open access journal that met the needs of scientific researchersworking in biology at the molecular and cellular level. I feel that we are well onour way to achieving this goal and wish to update you on the progress we have madeso far.When we launched Open Biology's mission is to provide a service that activelymeets the needs of biologists with cellular and molecular interests. This includesproviding a rapid, constructive and fair peer review system that allows valuablework to proceed quickly to publication. At the launch event, the President of theRoyal Society, Paul Nurse, succinctly summarized the essence of our ethos:This new journal will be run by scientists for scientists with an editorialsystem that will be making decisions rather than weighing opinion.I have been extremely encouraged by the feedback I have received from our authors sofar, who have commented on the speedy turnaround, excellent reviews and decisivehandling of the papers by Editors who provide constructive, scientific input.Mycobacteriumtuberculosis, a novel drug target for the treatment of tuberculosis[The challenge with a new journal is to build and maintain momentum. Since launching,we have published a relatively small number of articles. However, I am very pleasedwith the quality and potential impact of the articles published so far. In thesefirst few months, we have published papers that cover such diverse topics as thestructural biology of the transketolase from rculosis, to the rculosis.Drosophila as a model to study how theAdenomatous polyposis coli (APC) tumour suppressor enables Axinto promote the degradation of the Wnt signalling effector β-catenin [apcnull mutant Drosophila tissues, they discovered parallels withAPC mutant human tumour cells in attenuating Axin degradasomesassembly. Their results suggest that APC both promotes Axin to assemble intodegradosomes and also opposes its inactivating interaction with Dishevelled.Of particular interest is an elegant report from Mariann Bienz' laboratorythat uses -catenin . By examDario Alessi and Miratul Muqit at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit in Dundee sentus their study on the mutation of PINK1 kinase in Parkinson's disease . This fiWe also attracted a very exciting report from Mitsuhiro Yanagida's group aboutcondensin, a chromosome-associated protein whose diverse roles are poorlyunderstood. Their study suggests that condensin can unwind DNA to allow proteinssuch as the replication protein A to be removed from chromosomes after DNA repairand before the onset of mitosis .Another fascinating study came from Neil Barclay and colleagues who examined thestability of a disulphide bond in CD132, part of the receptor for the cytokines,interleukins-2 and -4 . EnzymesOpen Biologyindexed in the appropriate databases, the most important of which isPubMed. In order for PubMed to evaluate a newjournal, they need a minimum number of published articles and I am pleased to reportthat we are to make our submission for inclusion very soon. In addition, I canconfirm that we are already being tracked for inclusion in Web ofScience and Journal Citation Reports.I am grateful to these and all of our authors for sending the results of theirlabours to us. I am also indebted to the work of the Subject Editors, EditorialBoard and Royal Society Editorial Office in handling submission, peer review andpublication in a timely manner. One priority is to get Open Biology, the Society continues to demonstrate itssupport for open access publishing. The journal will be funded by charges forarticles accepted for publication. Since launch, we have offered a promotionalwaiver for these charges. However, in order to make publication sustainable, thesecharges will apply for accepted papers submitted from 1 March. I would like to takethis opportunity to explain a little about how this works.By launching Open Biology is a selective journal with a relativelyhigh rejection rate. Therefore, this price reflects the fact that we are accepting(and therefore charging for) a lower proportion of articles than less-selectivejournals.The Society has set a price of £1200 for the article processing charge. Thischarge covers the costs of peer review, composition, hosting and archiving. Whilethe charge is slightly higher than some other open access journals, it is linked tothe fact that Open Biology. It has received a positive reception and anumber of key institutions have already signed up. I am encouraged by this move byinstitutions to support open access and benefit their authors by lowering thefinancial barrier for publication.Another means of funding open access publication is institutional open accessmembership. Such memberships allow institutions to pay an annual fee and in returnresearchers at the institution receive a discount to the article processing charge.The Royal Society has recently launched membership programmes for all its journals,including Open Biology, but I am encouraged byits reception in the scientific community and I welcome your feedback. The RoyalSociety has a long record of scientific publishing, originating with its oldestjournal, Philosophical Transactions, which spans three and a halfcenturies . I feel confident that we can addto this rich history in this very latest forum for communication between scientists.I would like to encourage all of my fellow biologists to join with us in making ournewest journal an equal success.It is still very early days for


The journal increased in its impact factor by 9.5% (from 1.69 to 1.85). The number of submissions and publications grew by a similar percentage, whereas rejections remained constant at 40%. In 2006, when the journal was founded, case reports dominated – yet now largely replaced by research papers. Originally dealing only with human disease, the journal now accepts veterinary research as well as articles investigating therapeutic responses or representing meta-analyses. A broad spectrum of routine research, innovative science, recently implemented new ideas, reviews and letters to the editor are also distributed to readers. The journal site is visited over 50,000 times per month by researchers, mostly from the USA, followed by India and China. Maintaining these themes, we cordially invite authors to submit for publication their scientific ideas, research data, medical diagnostics, and results of theoretical and applied pathology.We try to review all submitted articles in a fair and independent manner. The comments of at least two reviewers are used to accept, modify or reject a submission. Authors are invited to propose reviewers for their paper, and their wishes are normally accepted. We aim for a short turn-around period for submissions, and want urgently to shorten it: currently, the mean period between date of submission and publication is still 70 days. Approximately 50% of invited reviewers do not respond, providing a significant delay in handling authors’ submissions. In turn authors require an excessive time to revise their paper, despite reminders. Consequently, we have had to further reject – reluctantly – some 5% of previously-accepted submissions.The current submission system uses somewhat outdated technology. Potentially automated steps require interactive  interventions. Important communication between authors, reviewers and editors is not presently monitored, requiring several hours of independent editing daily. The publisher’s concept of placing all its journals under the same umbrella - in terms of science, number of submissions, creativity, and performance - is a constraint towards achieving progress. Our journal however contributes only minimal profit to the publisher. Additional personal elements are also present.Authors must pay once their article has been accepted for publication. The fee has been established at the publisher’s discretion, without reference to the editor. The basis of their calculation is not apparent. The present publication charge is 1115 GBP (1315 € or 1780 US$). Despite the considerable increase in published articles in 2013, the publication charge will increase to 1170 GBP (1380 € or 1870 US$). We appreciate that the publisher offers a significant reduction of its publication charge to colleagues working in developing countries. Fees are adjusted according to the official financial situation of the respective country.The open access journal site, Diagnostic Pathology is organized in a similar manner to peer-reviewed printed journals. Articles are published and may be cited in a date-oriented citation method, in combination with pseudo-page numbering. This feature permits easy and issue-oriented retrieval as well as simple survey and reading.Diagnostic Pathology still remains the only scientific journal that offers the publication of virtual slides (VS): i.e. large data images of completely digitized microscopic glass slides. The mandatory logistic background is managed by three digitalization centres which cover America , Asia and Africa , and Europe  together with a central logistic manager . The publication of virtual slides requires external image servers and viewers, continuous registration of articles and included images (DOI), and a separation of VS processing from article publication, in order to avoid delays in publication. Therefore, dummy links have been implemented which can be replaced by the article’s links at any time and independently from the date of publication.The article-associated publication of VS offers several advantages. These include:a) Microscopic image viewing by intellectual distinguishing information content and area of interest (field of view);b) Comparison of the area of main interest with its environment;c) Quality evaluation of submitted images;http://www.diagnomx.eu/vipi);d) Potential use for automated image analysis and measurements. Applicable systems are already available, with open access examples offered by the Virtual International Pathology Institute (VIPI), (e) Potential source of unique educational and research material in combination with the submitted text.In 2013, we were able to include approximately 200 VS in some 75 published articles: approximately two thirds of suitable articles have been equipped with VS. We do thank authors for their efforts, support and enthusiasm in taking advantage of the recent development of electronic communication tools in order to further develop the journal.In principle, running peer-reviewed scientific journals should be a compromise between the publisher’s financial interests and the editor’s assurance of quality and information distribution in science and research. The editor should be able to independently define policy and not simply follow the publisher’s decisions: publishers and their administration tend to be motivated mainly by short term profit. Certainly we do have responsibility to the general financial situation of our journal; however, to maximize profit is not one of our aims. Despite this somewhat negative element, we still aim to improve communication in research and science and to promote our journal in this direction.Competition between open access journals is increasing. Editors and publishers should be aware that even ‘big players’ will become victims of recently developed electronics and networking if they remain focussed on short term profit - as was the fate of large mobile phone companies. Our targets focus on solving discrepancies in scientific quality, reviewer comments, publication velocity and article documentation and author-reader interaction. Some of these tools will probably be accessible to our readers and authors in the coming year. We aim to test automated review tools, on-line interactive author-reader communication, and continuously open article communication. We will guide authors and readers to new horizons of scientific communication.Christmas is close. It confers unlimited hope and joyful anticipation, especially for children with their expected numerous gifts. I wholeheartedly wish all our readers, authors, reviewers, and supporters a ‘Merry Christmas’ and a fruitful, healthy, and enjoyable New Year. I also thank all members of the editorial board and I appreciate very much all their support and efforts in keeping our journal running at its present high level. I include myself in joyful anticipation on having you all on board again when the coming New Year starts with its challenges and perspectives.Klaus KayserEditor-in-chief


Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas sharply repudiated the "separate but equal" principle of public education. The Court concluded that racially segregated education is "inherently unequal". In scientific publishing today, there exist two segregated means of knowledge dissemination --- the subscription journals and the Open Access (OA) journals. For those who can pay, there is immediate access to scientific papers published in both subscription and OA journals; those who cannot pay can access only OA journals. The status quo is thus an "inherently unequal" playing field between the "haves" and the "have nots".In 1954, the United States Supreme Court in a landmark decision of Nature News website, Richard Van Noorden reported that "the proportion of research papers freely available is slowly and steadily creeping upwards... in 2009, it's above 28%. ". The good news is that approximately 30% of published papers can be accessed freely. The bad news is that 70% of published, publicly funded research remains off-limits to those who cannot pay.How unequal is the current situation? In an August 1, 2011 posting on the Can equal access be had by the "haves" and the "have nots"? To the extent that the subscription and OA tracks will likely co-exist, the foreseeable future is a "separate and unequal" reality. Without equal access, the next best goal is perhaps to achieve equivalent access.What is equivalent access? Imagine two very similar papers reaching essentially the same conclusions; one is published in a subscription journal and the other published in an OA journal. The paying reader can read both papers; the non-paying person can read only the OA paper. This is "unequal" access. However, if the OA paper sufficiently conveys the same information as the subscription paper, then it is possible that "equivalent" knowledge is conveyed to both the can-pay and cannot-pay audiences.Retrovirology experience suggests that such benchmark can be achieved  that match their subscription counterparts. The d Figure .Retrovirology papers [Achieving qualitative parity will go a long way towards advancing equivalent access to important biological findings. One could raise the recent XMRV-Chronic Fatigue Syndrome controversy  as an exy papers -9 knowleCell will launch a top tier OA publication, Cell Reports; and the Wellcome Trust/the Howard Hughes Medical Institute/the Max Planck Society will also start a similarly high profile OA journal. Because intelligence and ambition are distributed equally around the globe [st century publishing.The quality of OA publishing will continue to improve. In 2012, he globe , freely


It is a fundamental obligation of scientists to publish their work, to make it accessible to a wide audience and to contribute this knowledge to the community. Yes, a “publish or perish” culture still lives, but this is in large part because researchers want to publish their results and know and respect the value of publishing. Research results that go unpublished are simply a hobby. Research that is published but not read or acted upon is a tragedy. Researchers know this, and in my experience they spend considerable time, thought and discussion over where they can publish their results. Where will their research be seen, and therefore cited most often? Which journal reaches the right audience? No one submits work for publication without expecting it to be ultimately accepted and published – and then to have influence over the field. Alongside the considerable work of the authors to produce high-quality research results and manuscripts, editors and reviewers work to ensure that their journal maintains its quality, impact and prestige.This system works well, but there is a natural tension. Editors of excellent journals realise that they will end up rejecting well over two thirds of the papers that are submitted. Authors all expect their manuscripts to be in that top third but not all are. Furthermore, editors aren't sufficiently broad to be expert on every topic in their journal and we therefore invite opinion from knowledgeable reviewers. Reviewers also know the statistics, so when reading a paper they assess not only the quality of the science and writing, but also the suitability of the work for the journal for which they are reviewing. Editors pick reviewers who they believe to be expert and have the judgement to help them pick out the papers that belong in their journal.There are a number of reasons a paper may not be accepted. There may be fatal flaws, such as a lack of sufficient controls, inappropriate analyses, pseudoreplication, etc. In my experience, this is relatively unusual. More typically, there are flaws that can be corrected. Often alternative analyses show the same thing, but they are requested by reviewers because statistics has moved on and there are newer, preferred methods. At first glance, the need for new analyses appears fatal, but isn't because the new analyses do not change the interpretations or conclusions. Another reason a paper is rejected is because it “just doesn't pass the quality threshold for our journal”. This is entirely subjective, but often reflects the sense that the work is confirmatory of a large body of already published papers, is taxon-specific, lacks sufficient sample size, or just isn't exciting. Often the real reason for rejection, whatever the detailed criticisms of the reviewers, is that the authors failed to communicate their ideas clearly, resulting in poorly argued arguments, or poorly explained methods or hypotheses, which lead reviewers to misunderstand what was being presented. This is the fault of the author, not the reviewer, but it is does frustrate authors because it can be fixed. And finally, papers are usually not accepted when they receive conflicting reviews. This may not be fair or desirable, but faced with maintaining a high rejection rate, what is an editor to do? Rejection is understandable from the editor's perspective; the reviewers were chosen to advise based on an expectation that the chosen reviewer was qualified, fair, and knowledgeable. In the case of a disagreement, the advantage naturally goes to the reviewer.None of this would matter except for three things: first, we are wasting the time and valuable effort of the reviewer community if the original reviews were valid. Second, faced with rejecting most of the papers that are received, editors are unable to accept many excellent papers and thus waste the time of the authors and delay the publication of their work. And finally, if editors solicit two or three reviews, a single negative review is enough to get a paper rejected despite one or more positive reviews indicating a paper should be accepted for publication. The result of rejection is (one hopes) that the authors revise the paper. But this means tailoring it for another journal and yet another round of reviews. While the review process is important, and results in far superior research papers, there is a diminishing return on this. Serial peer review that does not materially change papers under consideration is a waste of everyone's time and expertise. At some point we need research where the ideas are stimulating debate. Such ideas are most likely to come from the original paper, not a version that has been revised time and again until no one can find areas of disagreement.Ecology and Evolution will be different. Our goal is to improve the efficiency of the process for everyone involved while maintaining the integrity that peer review delivers, and providing an outlet for the dissemination of important research. We will begin to make more efficient use of the excellent work done by reviewers and allow authors to promote their work, as closely as possible, in the form they originally intended. In doing so, this journal will publish first-rate papers across the spectrum of ecology, evolution and conservation.So do we need yet another journal for the fields of ecology and evolution? And if so, is it sufficient to simply add to the list or should it be different? Well, the growth and increasing importance of both fields suggests that the answer to the first question is yes, and the increasing pressure on journals suggests that the answer to the second is that there is an opportunity to do something different. Ecology and Evolution is to provide a journal where we are considering what the authors want while respecting what the reviewers require. Journals that are produced as paper copy as well as online have page limits, resulting in limits in the number and length of papers that are published. As an open access online-only journal, we are freed from this constraint. Shorter papers are read more often and cited more, and are encouraged, but we can allow authors the space to develop their ideas. More importantly, we can allow them to express ideas where not everyone agrees. One of my favourite sayings (I have many – you don't live in Kentucky for 8 years without picking up a few) is that I would rather be wrong than boring. We won't publish things that are wrong, but I also hope that we can avoid the continual polishing of research ideas until the shine of opinion is eliminated. In my ideal world, authors don't necessarily revise their manuscript exactly as proposed by the reviewers. However, they have to acknowledge the disagreement and should address it in their paper. Nothing is more frustrating to me as an editor than to get in a cover letter a perfectly argued response to a reviewer comment that finishes “so we did not change the manuscript”. Well, but what if other readers of the paper have the same concerns or misunderstandings? Better to force the discussion into the open. Educate others to your view. Have the discussion become a citable part of the literature.My goal with Ecology and Evolution works with other journals in the Wiley portfolio, including journals that are owned by leading societies, to provide an opportunity for authors to transfer their work if it is not accepted by the original journal. You can see these partners on our homepage – quite a line-up. All of them have very high rejection rates and so there is the real opportunity to reduce reviewer overload. Where authors agree, their manuscript and the accompanying reviews are transferred and a rapid decision can be made. We also welcome direct submissions, which will undergo full peer review, and I intend to work to balance my author/editor hats and accept that both the reviewers and the authors can be right and that both views should be aired.Ecology and Evolution will, as a result, publish some of the very best papers we can produce while preserving the originality of thought and diversity of opinion that is such a vital part of research.I believe that by making full use of the effort put into peer review across some of the highest profile journals in our fields we will maximize the contribution of the outstanding work done by authors and peer reviewers.


MicrobiologyOpen is a peer-reviewed journal delivering rapid decisions and fast publication of microbial science, a field which is undergoing a profound and exciting evolution in this post-genomic era. The journal gives priority to reports of quality research, pure or applied, that further our understanding of microbial interactions and microbial processes. MicrobiologyOpen gives prompt and equal consideration to papers reporting theoretical, experimental, applied and descriptive work in all aspects of microbiology.The journal aims to serve there search community by providing a vehicle for authors wishing to publish interesting and high quality work in both fundamental and applied microbiology. MicrobiologyOpen will consider submissions across eukaryotic microorganisms, prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) and viruses infecting or interacting with microorganisms, including genetic, biochemical, biophysical, bioinformatic and structural analyses.The journal features original research articles, reviews and editorials. Original research papers must report well-conducted research with conclusions supported by the data presented in the paper.MicrobiologyOpen publishes papers submitted directly to the journal and those referred from a select group of prestigious journals published by Wiley-Blackwell.MicrobiologyOpen is a Wiley Open Access journal, one of a new series of peer-reviewed titles publishing quality research with speed and efficiency. For further information visit the Wiley Open Access website at http://www.wileyopenaccess.com.MicrobiologyOpen are fully open access: immediately freely available to read, download and share. All articles accepted from 14 August 2012 are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. All articles accepted before this date were published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. The Creative Commons Attribution License permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and allows the commercial use of published articles. Copyright on any research article in a journal published by MicrobiologyOpen is retained by the author(s). Authors grant Wiley a license to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. Authors also grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identifi ed. Further information about open access license and copyright can be found at http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/details/content/12f25db4c87/Copyright--License.html.All articles published by corporatesales@wiley.com.Print reprints of Wiley Open Access articles can be purchased from The Publisher and Editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this journal; the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily refl ect those of the Publisher and Editors, neither does the publication of advertisements constitute any endorsements by the Publisher and Editors of the products advertised. Wiley Open Access articles posted to repositories or websites are without warranty from Wiley of any kind, either express or implied, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. To the fullest extent permitted by law Wiley disclaims all liability for any loss or damage arising out of, or in connection with, the use of or inability to use the content.


Dear Editor,1 Salamat et al.1 concluded that “quality of publication ethics, as instructed to the authors, can improve the quality of the journals.” Indeed, the quality of a journal depends on several factors such as referencing/citation, accuracy, editorial board member, editor-in-chief, publisher, and publishing regularity as well as the publishing ethics. In order for any journal to achieve the desired quality, the publisher, editor, and author must work all together by taking into account the said factors.The recent report on the quality of publication ethics in instructions to authors is very interesting.2 Instructions to authors constitute an integral component of a journal; nevertheless, some journals tend to overlook this vitally important detail or fail to regularly publish it in each issue.2 A recent study by Jaykaran et al.3 in India lends further credence to the previous study and chimes in with the Salamat et al.1 study inasmuch as it concludes that the incompleteness of instructions to authors is common.As regards authors’ contribution, it is important that the journal provide the author with relevant information on the preferred manuscript format. “Specific recommendations aiming to improve publication practice” should be included in instructions to authors. 3 reported that complete guidance regarding ethics was provided in only seven out of the ten journals investigated. Another report from Brazil showed a very interesting statistic in that up to 79% of the journals assessed had no recommendations on ethics in their instructions to authors.4 Jaykaran et al.2 suggested that “medical journals must upgrade their instructions to authors to include ethical requirements.”2With respect to publication ethics, Jaykaran et al.1 however, not all journals furnish their authors with clear instructions. Ideally, a journal’s policies, formatting requirements, and publication standards (including ethics) should be clearly elucidated in its instructions to authors. According to Salamat et al.The reasons for the failure of a journal to provide appropriate instructions should be further investigated. Some journals might overlook the importance of instructions to authors and omit to publish this information due to page constraints or publication costs. It should be noted that any indexing and accrediting body assesses the quality of a journal’s instructions to authors when rating the quality of that publication.5 Some journals might assume that their authors possess the required knowledge for manuscript submission, but it would always be safer to assume that it is not possible that all authors have a good basic knowledge of publication ethics.5 Wager6 says, “Journals do not provide consistent guidance about authorship and many editors are therefore missing an important opportunity to educate potential contributors.” In regard to ethical contraventions , the usual excuse cited is lack of knowledge and resultant confusion in consequence of insufficient instructions to authors.In conclusion, no journal should overlook the importance of instructions to authors. Nevertheless, the next question is how we should set out to encourage authors to read and follow these instructions. There is no doubt that the problem of scientific misconduct and breach of publishing ethics is common at present, and possible explanations might be the author’s failure to peruse the ethical standards stated in instructions to authors and the author’s failure to comply with such guidelines. More research is required to shed further light on the reasons for violations of publication ethics.


Indian Journal of Orthopaedics,The year 2010 is coming to an end. It is one year since we reported the progress of www.ijoonline.com, One month ahead of the scheduled print publication date.This year, we have published 473 pages of scientific contents which include 06 Editorials, 08 Review Articles, 49 Original Articles, 20 Case Reports, 04 Book reviews, 04 Letter to Editors and 03 Obituaries. Three issues  were thematic. All four issues were released on www.ijoonline.com has improved substantially. We have added many new features this year. On release of article/issue on web, the PDF is sent electronically to authors and table of contents to over 15,000 registered users. If any of the articles is cited, a citation alert is sent to the authors. Citations appear on the article page. The website can be accessed by mobile and other handheld devices such as iPad, iPod, etc. On archives of www.ijoonline.com, we can get instant download for table of contents, authors, mapping on Google, number of times each article is downloaded and citation received for particular issue. Most viewed article is marked as popular. One can also browse the entire issue as e-book or flip book.Our website The journal is included in various other databases and collections such as Rightlinks, Gale CCNGAGE learning, Summons Web Scale Discovery, ALPSP Learned Journal Collection and EBSCO Discovery Service. The number of visitors on our website has increased by over 30% since last year. These visitors are spread globally with over 60% of the visitors coming from USA and Europe. Our citation has increased by about 66% from the last year .Figure www.ijoonline.com and are available on website. Twenty-eight issues which are not available with journal office are to be collected from voluntary donation from the members and are to be digitized and uploaded.As promised last year, all back issues available at the Varanasi Office since 1967 have already been digitized and uploaded on We have started an e-mail alert to members. When the journal is dispatched, an e-mail, giving the postal details of the issue, is sent so that enquiry can be placed to post and telegraph department on non-receipt of the journal. Every year, we print the list of the journals which are not delivered. A website is created to correct and update addresses online. On any information to journal office, the addresses are updated.We have a good database of reviewers which is the foundation of peer review process.Indian Journal of Orthopaedics avails submission of articles in large numbers from our learned members and we assure that no article will be delayed/rejected because of scaricity of print pages. This will reduce submission to publication time, and further, our members will have an increased page space to get their submission published. This year, we have introduced “IOA Best Publication award” in Research category beside SN Baxi Best Publication Award in Clinical Research category. For the year 2009, the winner of SN Baxi award was Dr. K.H. SanchetiIndian Journal of Orthopaedics and if the number of case reports are good then we can even print them as supplement. We are likely to get our first impact factor in 2011. To have a high impact factor, we need to ensure that all our future publication will use references published in Indian Journal of Orthopaedics for citation. We are planning to conduct workshop on “Research method and scientific writing”. We have conducted one such workshop in Delhi. We can conduct similar workshops in every state. We are bringing out a section of 5–7 pages on Evidence Scan from 2011, wherein one article on “How to evaluate various kinds of published articles” will be printed. The summary of an already published article with commentary will be published. Readers can submit the commentary on a given summary of second published article. The best commentary will be published in the next issue. Next six issues will cover the controversies in skeletal trauma as a special section. Two or three articles covering various controversies in skeletal trauma will be published.We are increasing the number of issues from four to six per year from the year 2011. Now, We are thankful to our authors, reviewers, editorial board members, staff at Medknow Publications and office bearers of IOA. We still have to go a long way to explore a new horizon. We believe together we can and together we shall attain new heights.


This issue of Poiesis & Praxis will give—by means of its recent “Forum” section—opportunity to a broader and enhanced debate about new and emerging fields of research, thus contributing to early assessments and ethical evaluation of recent developments in science and technology. Nevertheless, “early warnings” in this field—although favorable—basically suffer from still poor knowledge on corresponding evolving developments and on their chances and risks to the society. The underlying problem is known as the so-called Collinridge-dilemma, which describes the necessity and—at the same time—the difficulty for timely science and technology governance.Fighting in the legal grey area discusses the problems and needs of an interdisciplinary dialog in the case of pre-implantation diagnostics which normative implications are still ambiguous—at least from a German perspective. Another contribution on Privacy revisited? by A. Bialobrzeski reflects different bioethical concepts that might be applied to the adequate arrangement of medical biobank regimes. The main problem within this is based upon the dilemma between social interests in broad access to patient data on one hand and reasonable privacy rights of the individuals on the other hand. The author proposes a contested concept along Rawls’ theories for a just solution of the data handling problem. The paper of M. Decker et al. on Service robotics frames an interdisciplinary technology assessment on the changing roles and environments of sophisticated modern robots that will intrude progressively in peoples’ daily life and might affect the autonomy of the human users. The question whether “you know your new companion” is leading for the formulation of a corresponding interdisciplinary research initiative by the authors. Finally, D. Cansier’s article on Rainforest conservation as a strategy of climate policy unfolds a promising concept for the still pending implementation of rainforest conservation and utilization as an element of international climate protection policy. He proposes respective emission credits and certificates as instruments for the realization of his ideas and states that the combination of corresponding national and de-central approaches might give the best results for all relevant actors.This “Forum” section exposes a wide field of technology reflection, ranging from biomedical issues over developments within robotics to the adequate design of climate policies. The article by S. Benöhr-Laqueur on forum of interdisciplinary communication and exchange of ideas. Therefore, the editors of this journal are curious about the corresponding feedbacks.The quoted papers resemble the full spectrum of technology assessment. Those readers who feel addressed or even challenged by the articles of this issue are highly welcome to bring in their points of view and to debate the given theses as well as to elaborate new discussion notes on other emerging themes by submitting their papers to Poiesis & Praxis. In this way, the journal might even literally serve as a


EMBO Molecular Medicine is a peer-reviewed, open access online journal dedicated to a new research discipline at the interface between clinical research and basic biology. It offers clinicians and researchers in this area the opportunity to publish their bestwork in a broadly distributed and highly visible forum, thereby lending a strong impetus to this important and rapidly developing field and helping to forge new links between clinicians and molecular biologists. Studies based on model organisms also fall within the scope of the journal, provided that the results presented are evidently and directly relevant to human disease. EMBO Molecular Medicine publishes research articles as full-length research papers and short reports. In addition, the journal publishes editorials and review articles in innovative formats that target a broad and non-specialized audience. For further information visit http://www.embomolmed.org.EMBO Molecular Medicine is now part of the Wiley Open Access publishing programof fully open access journals published byWiley. For further information visit the Wiley Open Access website at http://www.wileyopenaccess.com.EMBO Molecular Medicine are fully open access: immediately freely available to read, download and share. All EMBO Molecular Medicine articles accepted from 14 August 2012 are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Articles accepted before this date were published under the agreement as stated in the final article. Copyright on any EMBO Molecular Medicine article accepted after 7 March 2012, the date on which EMBO Molecular Medicine became an open access journal, is retained by the author(s). Authors grant toEMBOandWiley a license to publish the article and for Wiley to identify itself as the original publisher. Authors also grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified.All articles published by Use of Wiley Open Access articles for commercial, promotional, or marketing purposes requires further explicit permission from Wiley andwill be subject to a fee. Requests to reproducematerial fromthis journal content are being handled through the Rightslink® online service.Locate the article you wish to reproduce on Wiley Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com)Navigate to the abstract pageClick on the ‘Request Permissions’ link, under the ‘ARTICLE TOOLS’ menuFollow the online instructions and select your requirements from the drop down options and click on ‘quick price’ to get a quoteCreate a RightsLink® account to complete your transaction Read and accept our Terms & Conditions and Download your licensecustomercare@copyright.comFor any technical queries please contact http://www.wiley.com and select Rights & Permissions.For further information and to view a Rightslink® demo please visit rightsDE@wiley.com. Print reprints of Wiley Open Access articles can be purchased from corporatesalesDE@wiley.com.Special requests should be addressed to The Publisher and Editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this journal; the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Publisher and Editors, neither does the publication of advertisements constitute any endorsements by the Publisher and Editors of the products advertised. Wiley Open Access articles posted to repositories or websites are without warranty from Wiley of any kind, either express or implied, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. To the fullest extent permitted by lawWiley disclaims all liability for any loss or damage arising out of, or in connection, with the use of or inability to use the content


PLoS Computational Biology has helped to create a sense of community amongst a broad group of scientists and educators. While the journal labels itself as a PLoS “community” journal, if that label has any true meaning, it must come from the community itself. We feel that, after six years, we are indeed serving the community well, but as always you can disagree at any time, either publicly with a comment in response to this article or by email (ploscompbiol@plos.org).In 2011, during discussions at various conferences, as well as informally with authors, readers, reviewers, and editors, we were struck by one resonating theme: the view that That service comes first and foremost from the research we publish, but also from our desire to educate, report on open-source software, provide a history of the field, capture the vision of our editors, and move beyond the boundaries of traditional publishing to inform people within and outside of our community. Before we take a look at developments in each of these areas, and what is to come in 2012, let us first review how we served the community in 2011.According to Google Analytics, 2011 saw over 553,000 unique visitors to our website and more than two million article views . Visitors came from 211 countries/territories, which was undoubtedly helped by the fact that the journal is open access. India, Spain, Russia, and Iran each showed over a 40% increase in visitors from the previous year. From the journal website, the most accessed Research Article was “Effect of Promoter Architecture on the Cell-to-Cell Variability in Gene Expression” by Sanchez et al. Also in 2011, 1,623 research articles from 57 countries were submitted, up 16% from 2010, and 384 were published (down 2% from 2010). Receiving more but publishing about the same number in real terms should reflect the increasing quality of our content. We are very grateful to our Associate Editors, Guest Editors, reviewers . This year we introduced a collection, Editors Outlook series, with five published In July 2011 we began the ploscompbiol@plos.org).That our journal is fully open access provides opportunities for maximizing the use and reuse of our scholarship; we intend to explore this further in 2012. Early in 2012 we will launch our first Topic Page on circular permutations in proteins. Wikipedia is a valuable resource for knowledge dissemination, yet Wikipedia pages are lacking in coverage of computational biology. In part this is because authors gain little career-based reward for creating Wikipedia pages. We aim to bridge the gap. Topic Page articles, which will be published in the journal and will each receive a PubMed identifier and DOI, will become the copy of record, thereby crediting the author(s). At the same time the Topic Page will be used to seed a Wikipedia article and become a living version of the same material–a viable option thanks to our Creative Commons license. Look for an announcement of this development in the new year, but in the interim if you have ideas for Topic Pages you would like to contribute, please do get in touch for further information Click here for additional data file.


PLOS Biology turns ten and, as part of our Tenth Anniversary Collection, Senior Editor Emma Ganley notes how the publishing landscape has changed over the past decade. PLOS Biology, and it's as good a time as any to pause and take stock of how the last decade, PLOS, and PLOS Biology have seen irreversible changes in academic publishing. And these changes are for the better.This issue marks the 10-year anniversary of th anniversary of Martin Luther King's ‘I have a dream’ speech – a highlight of the American civil rights movement that achieved many important goals during a single decade and was in turn celebrated in the first decade of the 21st century by the election of the first African American to the office of President of the United States. Political and social change on this kind of scale requires not only attitudinal change—often brought about by campaigning communities—but also legislative support to act as the foundation for sustained change. For the Open Access movement, the last 10 years have been a pivotal time for addressing the financial and commercial considerations of academic publishing, moving from grass roots initiatives to the introduction of government policy changes.Historically, individual decades have seen changes in social norms and attitudes, changes that have, very occasionally, resulted in the unthinkable becoming…well, thinkable. This year, for example, the United States marked the 50Over this same 10-year span of time, the world as we know it witnessed an acceleration of technological transformation, driven in large part by advanced internet and new communication technologies, which have easily kept pace with exponential growth predictions made from Moore's law PLOS Biology, we all feel immense pride in our 10-year involvement in the Open Access movement, which has seen a wide uptake and acceptance of open access publishing. Further progress toward greater accessibility occurred earlier this year with the introduction of a bill to the United States Senate and House of Representatives—the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act From year to year, scientific, technical, and medical (STM) research has also advanced in leaps and bounds, with corresponding increases in the number of research publications . Studies in the humanities and social sciences also forge on with new findings and theories being published all the time. With the benefit of technology, the results of these academic pursuits can be published online and that one online copy is, theoretically, within the reach of everyone, everywhere. But is this really the case? Over the last decade, there has been an immense effort to change how accessible all of this new (and old) information is to the world at large. At PLOS ONE, Laasko et al. discussed how open access publishing developed between 1993 and 2009, reporting an estimated 191,000 articles published in 2009 in 4,769 open access journals; an average annual growth rate of 18% in the number of open access journals from the year 2000, and an average annual growth rate of 30% in the number of open access articles. At the time of this writing, the Directory of Open Access Journals  contains 9,901 journals and 1,503,096 articles. What an amazing achievement.Although PLOS wasn't the first open access publisher , we have, we feel, played a pivotal role alongside these and other kindred publishers in promoting and supporting the progression and uptake of the Open Access movement. In a study published in 2011 in After many scientists did not follow through on their initial pledges to support open access publishing, PLOS' founders saw the need to fill a publishing hole, their intention being to create more open access venues where scientists could publish. The launch of PLOS had the additional desired effect of creating more pressure on traditional publishers to consider their business models. And, too, it met the need to dispel a myth— demonstrating that open access publishing did not equal vanity publishing, even though it is the author who pays the costs associated with publishing in this model. PLOS also showed that open access publishing could be done in a way that might tempt scientists to submit their best work to somewhere other than the established traditional journals.PLOS Biology, closely followed by PLOS Medicine), to quickly adding a suite of Community Journals, to finally, in 2007, launching PLOS ONE. And while PLOS has stopped there, the relatively small number of journals has not limited our capacity to publish large numbers of articles; on the day of this writing, PLOS ONE had 72,774 papers in PubMed. This demonstrated success of high-volume publishing has been instrumental in the launch of several other similarly modelled open access journals by other publishers. In more recent times, another fundamental shift in those providing implicit support for the Open Access movement occurred when three international research funders – The Wellcome Trust, the Max Planck Society, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute – confirmed their commitment to open access with the launch of their own journal, eLifeIn the last decade, PLOS has grown from publishing just two flagship journals (PLOS Biology's long time editorial board members, Tom Misteli, noted to us recently that, ‘PLOS Bio[logy] has been a catalyst for change in the publishing landscape and… has changed the way we think about publishing.’ Success has definitely been achieved, but arguably, the focus is now altered. How can we lure those authors who routinely send papers to those subjectively perceived ‘top-tier’ closed access journals so they might, instead, submit their papers for publication in an open access journal? One key area that needs a lot of work is to redress how academic and other institutions assess research output for career progression. It seems inappropriate that researchers' work, and indeed the researchers themselves, are ranked according to the impact factor of the journals in which the work is published, a metric derived from non-open, unavailable data But has the progress in the last decade achieved everything that we might have wanted for open access publishing? One of http://www.plos.org/about/open-access/howopenisit/.Another important area to consider is whether all forms of open access publishing are equal. One key purpose of providing access is to enable and facilitate reuse of the content, but the licenses publishers use can vary radically from one journal to the next. If a paper is ‘open’ via deposition in a repository, or as part of a publisher's hybrid access model, it may still, unfortunately, remain ‘closed’ from a reuse perspective. In an effort to detail the intricacies of the different licenses and what they all mean, PLOS put together an Open Access Spectrum. We recommend you take a look: PLOS Biology are very keen to push availability of and access to data as well as to the article itself. Very commonly, the data on which research articles draw are not freely available alongside the published article. There are some longstanding databases for easily housed data types, and we've seen some new initiatives in the past few years that have facilitated deposition and ‘publication’ of corresponding data (Figshare, Dryad, JCB DataViewer PLOS Biology, we have an established link with Dryad to facilitate the deposition of datasets alongside your publication Taking the extension of open access a step further, all of us at PLOS Biology, like PLOS itself, has an expanded mission to improve all aspects of scientific communication. Open access was just the first step. Editorial board member Ann Stock summed up nicely our importance with her view that, ‘PLOS Biology provides to the publishing community what its articles provide to the scientific community, a force that pushes the envelope into previously unexplored areas’. All of us at PLOS Biology are excited by the challenges that remain. We look forward to experimenting further and continuing our endeavours to change the publishing landscape and to making sure that STM publishing evolves to keeps pace with the scientific and technological times.In sum, the open access mission is well underway, but it has not yet been fully accomplished. At PLOS, we are delighted to welcome Elizabeth Marincola, our new Chief Executive Officer, who brings with her such wealth of experience that we're sure that PLOS is about to embark on a new era. And as we enter our second decade, we believe PLOS Biology a high-ranking, leading open access journal. We are grateful for every moment you spend working with us to assess and/or review manuscripts along the way. We have a loud voice, we like being controversial, and we urge you to continue working with us to help us innovate, keep on pushing boundaries, and make big ripples on the publishing pool. We love making your fascinating science open to the world, so please carry on sending us your best data and manuscripts!And last, but by no means least, we want to thank our editors, reviewers, authors, and readers for their support over the last decade – given generously to what was initially a fledgling journal that managed to make quite a big splash in the vast STM publishing pool. Our editors, especially, work with us tirelessly to maintain our unique partnership of professional and academic editorial oversight for all papers that we review and publish. The support we've received has continued and grown over the last decade, making


Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives (www.jchimp.org), volume 1, the efforts of many individuals are no longer a concept but a reality. The journal's origins can be traced back to 2007 at the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM) semi-annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to that meeting, the Department of Medicine at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland had conducted a very successful research survey of internal medicine program directors in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Using this regional success as a model, a national network was organized in Minneapolis. The informal Community Hospital Education and Research Network (CHERN) (www.cherninfo.com), an offshoot of the APDIM Community Hospital Assembly, was formed. Community hospitals sponsor more than half the Internal Medicine Residency Review Committee (RRC) accredited programs in the United States. Sponsoring internal medicine training requires substantial scholarly activity by residents and faculty as part of the RRC's scholarly requirements.With this, the first issue of the Electronic journals have filled gaps worldwide. We are in the age of web-based e-Journals. Open access journals, based on the Internet and free to any reader with access to the Internet, continue to grow and can be accessed by clicking on a link on a home page. The page limits of paper journals and slow turnaround time do not exist here. David Solomon, from Michigan State University, a pioneer in the field, has written a commentary in this issue discussing the revolution of open access journals. On January 8, 2011, I accessed the Directory of Open Access Journals. At that time the directory listed 5,953 journals.In the summer of 2010, during our 18th annual research fellowship, we began investigating the possibility of developing a community hospital based open access internal medicine journal. The objective was to develop an efficient electronic journal whose scope would include general internal medicine, particularly focusing on trainee research and on community hospitals’ perspectives. The journal was to be open access, online only and peer reviewed. Union Memorial Hospital Department of Medicine is the initial sponsor, and as the Chief of Medicine and Program Director I am the first editor. A voluntary editorial board of 15 was organized largely from Union Memorial faculty. We networked through the APDIM and at the Maryland ACP to develop a list of reviewers. As of April 2011, we had in excess of 100 reviewers and approximately 200 (and climbing) committed registered readers. We advertise locally, by word of mouth, and announcements. Initially, we expect a large proportion of articles to be invited. We have received commitments on 20 manuscripts that make up this issue and most of the next. We contracted with Co-Action Publishing in Stockholm to be our publisher.Though the initial effort has largely been from one institution, our plan is for this to be a national journal with a diverse readership and editorial board, which may also be of interest to an international audience. Our 100 reviewers are drawn largely from APDIM members from around the country. Each issue will include general internal medicine in the sections of original research, brief reports, clinical vignettes, perspectives, commentaries, medical education, ECG images, and letters to the editor. A second type of issue will have themes, with invited papers.Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives. In this issue, David Solomon describes open access medical publishing, where it has been, and what is its future. In an original research article, Cheryl Quianzon, a medicine fellow, reveals the prognostic value of an initial EKG in cocaine using patients admitted for chest pain. A medical education paper by Rosalyn Stewart reviews a new education model starting in year one for students in ambulatory offices in university and community settings, an excellent example of educational linkage between university and community sites. The JCHIMP ECG editor, Marc Mugmon, discusses an interesting ECG and clinical vignette and correlates ECG images with cardiac catheterization results. A resident case report by Elena Forouhar on urban leptospirosis points out once again that Baltimore alleys can be infectious places. The timeliness of the publication of the case report – 6 months from hospital presentation to Internet publication, points out the tremendous advantages of online journals.We are now posting volume 1, issue 1 of the We plan to publish quarterly initially. Our next issue will include invited articles on patient safety. Later this year, we intend to publish the Maryland ACP sponsored student and resident award winners from the 2011 meetings. Our journal is financially subsidized by the MedStar Institute for Innovation and the Union Memorial Hospital Department of Medicine. There is a $350 publishing fee to offset publication costs. No fees are incurred for invited articles or letters to the editor. All articles undergo a blind peer review by at least three reviewers in the field. There is no advertising in the journal. Except for publishing-associated costs and legal expenses, this is totally voluntary. We cannot guarantee a timeline at this point for publication, but we believe that our process should have a manuscript ready for publication a few months after it is submitted to JCHIMP. All reviews and communication are by email.We would like to thank David Solomon. He is the architect who helped us make a structure out of a concept. We have leaned on him extensively to make this journal stand up and last. His support has been essential and we will continue to use his guidance in the future.Finally, we invite all to participate in our journal as a reader or a reviewer. We encourage you to submit manuscripts on a variety of internal medicine clinical and educational issues, particularly those involving community hospitals, students, and residents.Robert P. Ferguson, MDEditor


Text-based plagiarism, or copying language from sources, has recently become an issue of growing concern in scientific publishing. Use of CrossCheck  by journals has sometimes exposed an unexpected amount of textual similarity between submissions and databases of scholarly literature. In this paper I provide an overview of the relevant literature, to examine how journal gatekeepers perceive textual appropriation, and how automated plagiarism-screening tools have been developed to detect text matching, with the technique now available for self-check of manuscripts before submission; I also discuss issues around English as an additional language (EAL) authors and in particular EAL novices being the typical offenders of textual borrowing. The final section of the paper proposes a few educational directions to take in tackling text-based plagiarism, highlighting the roles of the publishing industry, senior authors and English for academic purposes professionals. AlthougThe primary purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some issues and developments concerning the tackling of the phenomenon of textual borrowing, or text-based plagiarism Li , in sciecan be expressed in terms of the were excluded) , produced at the University of Arizona, was applied to computer science articles to search for self-plagiarism , to launch CrossCheck, an anti-plagiarism program powered by iThenticate (iParadigms’s corporate text-matching software). Similar to the working principle of Turnitin, CrossCheck works on the basis of a continuously expanding database of scholarly full-text literature, and a text-similarity analyzer (the web-based iThenticate tool) which compares an authored work against the database. CrossCheck exposes both “very blatant unethical cases of plagiarism” as well as language reuse of various degrees of severity Butler , p. 167.Nature pointed out, “plagiarism-detection software is an aid to, not a substitute for, human judgement” , has published two flowcharts, on What to do if you suspect plagiarism with (a) Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript and (b) Suspected plagiarism in a published article respectively (COPE The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), “a forum for editors and publishers of peer-reviewed journals to discuss all aspects of publication ethics”  seems acceptable to some journal editors, concerns the description of highly standard experimental or statistical procedures in the methods section , Yuehong Zhang  found “Direct copying of Methods section, with new data inserted” to be “a particularly common phenomenon in biomedical papers”  seem to think this is a good strategy  tend to appear in low-profile journals  to justify their language reuse, as noted above. Gatekeepers tend to acknowledge the language barrier as a cause, but they have also cited culture and insufficient ethics education as contributing factors Brumfiel . Errami Research in language education has reported differences between expert and novice writers in their attitude toward textual borrowing Dong . AutomatParticipation of novice/junior EAL scientists, typically doctoral science students, in scientific publication has been widely reported Li . The invWhere there is a lack of monitoring by experienced senior writers, textual borrowing may carry into submissions and even published papers, though CrossCheck now potentially forestalls this. A different scenario, where the senior experienced author plays a dominant role in the process of writing for publication, seems ideal insofar as eliminating textual appropriation is concerned Li . HoweverA recent initiative by iParadigms, the company that provided software technology for both Turnitin and CrossCheck, is to extend the iThenticate solution (the text-matching software that CrossCheck relies on) to serve individual authors and researchers (research.ithenticate.com). The idea is to allow individuals to screen their work against a massive live database of scholarly literature before submission  integration of originality-verifying software into the scholarly publication process is sure to alert research writers to the issue of plagiarism, including text-based plagiarism, so that they are more vigilant In the foregoing sections I reviewed issues and developments concerning the occurrence and handling of text-based plagiarism in scientific publication. In this section I will make proposals with an educational intent, highlighting the roles of three parties: the publishing industry, senior authors (by which I refer in particular to disciplinary advisors at the graduate level), and EAP professionals.On being a scientist: Responsible conduct in research , just to name two. Yet it seems text-based plagiarism needs to be separately addressed, in the level of detail and depth it deserves, for dispelling various misconceptions that scientist authors  may have concerning language reuse, and for providing a valuable reference in the ethics education and English enhancement training for these authors. It is worth noting that an in-depth analysis of text similarity in scientific writing is in the plan of a team of recent recipients (and the first Chinese recipients) of the COPE grant for publication ethics research. Yuehong Zhang, who leads the China-based SCI publication Journal of Zhejiang University-Science (noted earlier), with her editorial research team, has won COPE’s December 2010 grant, to work on their project CrossCheck guidance: An analysis of typical cases of plagiarism in different disciplines. A major target of the project is to produce a handbook listing the “typical cases of plagiarism in different disciplines” based on investigations using CrossCheck , are potentially valuable teaching materials, both for supervisors’ self-education . In addition, a case study approach centering around discussions of publicized cases of plagiarism, especially where the accused authors argued that they had reported original research (such as the cases reported in Brumfiel The issue of text-based plagiarism in scientific publishing intimately bears upon the stakeholders that EAP professionals commonly work with, i.e., authors who use English as an additional language, including novice EAL scientists. EAP practitioners, perhaps especially those working with EAL students, have extensively addressed the issue of how to help novices to avoid text-based plagiarism in disciplinary writing (e.g., Abasi and Akbari In short, the publishing industry, senior authors, and EAP professionals need to collaborate in the educational undertaking of addressing the problem of text-based plagiarism and promoting healthy scholarly publishing.