In this article, we describe our views on the benefits, and possible downsides, of openness in engineering research. We attempt to examine the issue from multiple perspectives, including reasons and motivations for introducing open practices into an engineering researcher's workflow and the challenges faced by scholars looking to do so. Further, we present our thoughts and reflections on the role that open engineering research can play in defining the purpose and activities of the university. We have made some specific recommendations on how the public university can recommit to and push the boundaries of its role as the creator and promoter of public knowledge. In doing so, the university will further demonstrate its vital role in the continued economic, social, and technological development of society. We have also included some thoughts on how this applies specifically to the field of engineering and how a culture of openness and sharing within the engineering community can help drive societal development. This includes sharing data openly (open data), publicly releasing the source code for research software under a permissive license (free and open-source software), publicly releasing the designs of research hardware under a permissive license (free and open-source hardware), and making the written products of research openly accessible (open access).3. These two movements derive from two complementary principles, that the software source code and hardware design should be openly released and licensed for reuse and modification5.The field of engineering provides an interesting case study for examining the impacts of open practices since engineering touches every aspect of human life. Engineering research is inherent to the development of goods and products such as medical devices and pharmaceuticals, so issues around the protection of intellectual property and innovation draw stark contrasts, for some, with the tenets of open science. On the other hand, work being done in the free and open-source software (FOSS) and free and open-source hardware (FOSH) movements can enable us to engineer the tools of modern scientific discovery, greatly reducing the costs of scientific research6. For some, particularly state universities subject to the whims of state legislation, this could mean abandoning the pursuit of fundamental or basic knowledge generation in favor of marketable vocational training models that cater more directly to industry needs. While this model is in line with the Morrill Act of 1862, which created land-grant colleges and underpins the missions of many US institutions, the university has evolved since that time to encompass a much greater proportion of the economic development of the country6. Despite the challenges faced by institutions today, our opinion is that it is critical for the university to continue to position itself as a center of societal development—economically, technologically, and socially. Additionally, under our interpretation of the mission of the land-grant university program, the university should push this model further towards positioning itself as the main driver of social and technological innovation in its geographic region. To achieve this, it is necessary to organize and market the business of the university, as clearly as possible, as a service provider to many relevant stakeholders. This can be best accomplished by disseminating and distributing the products of university activities as widely as possible through open-access publishing, open research, and open innovation, and further demonstrating the impact that these products have on local, state, national, and international populations. As stated by Ashley Farley of the Gates Foundation, “Open research should be the norm. Knowledge should be a public good”7.In a time of constrained university budgets, which are not expected to improve as long as most public universities rely heavily on public funding from state and federal sources, many universities are being forced to evaluate their institutional priorities8 separately discussing this topic. We discuss the importance of open science, describe how practicing open science increases the societal impact of research, provide recommendations for researchers to practice open science, summarize challenges to working openly, and conclude with some recommendations for university leaders to promote open (engineering) research. While many of the issues discussed herein apply more broadly beyond the field of engineering, we have elected to focus our discussion on engineering rather than speak for other disciplines.This article seeks to motivate the importance of open science, particularly for engineering research, and synthesizes our earlier white paperset al.9 further discuss these and additional benefits for researchers working openly. Tennantet al.10 review in detail the benefits of open-access publications to academics and society.Transforming research communities from traditional, closed environments to open ones is important for a number of reasons, including (but not necessarily limited to) the following seven. McKiernanValue and credit: Conducting open research entails recognizing the value of all of the products of research. This includes all the final, polished products of that work—papers, software, and data—as well as the failures and null results12. The dissemination of these artifacts may on occasion comprise an act of humility, but ultimately it recognizes that each of these items is a piece of the research process and that even your failures have value in the lessons you learned and can be passed on to others. Often researchers will contribute significant time and effort to developing products other than journal articles. If this work is not properly credited, career progress can be stifled as a result. One example of this is the development of scientific software, which can support the work of other researchers around the world16. If this activity is not supported in terms of career progression, the entire research community suffers as a result.Accessibility: Openness in research ensures that research products, particularly written output, remain accessible to all. This includes the research community, funders, policy makers, and the general public. Accessibility of research products is particularly important for publicly funded research—since the public paid for the research, the public should have access to it and be able to benefit from it. This does not prevent innovators or other parties from developing commercial intellectual property based on the findings, but ensures that the original discovery, when funded by the public, remains accessible to all. While nearly 50% of all published work is available freely through open-access sources, institutional archives, or online social networks, this percentage is notably lower in engineering: approximately 35%17. However, Piwowaret al.18 found that this percentage drops below 20% when not considering articles self-archived on author websites, which can lack assurance of long-term availability.Reproducibility: Releasing products of research, including software and data, helps enable reproducibility. This is particularly true for computational science, where a written description of methods can never describe an approach as completely as the source code19. In general, access to research software used to perform a computational study, or the data from an experimental study, should enable others to reproduce the findings of the original researchers. However, open science is a necessary but not sufficient aspect of reproducibility, as it can be challenging to reproduce or replicate results even with available research software and data21.Recognition: As a selfish motivation, performing research openly helps increase the recognition received by the work. Studies have shown that open-access papers are cited more in most research fields. In engineering, open-access papers are cited around 1.5 times more often than non-open-access papers22. Similarly, papers with associated open data were cited 9–50% more than those without23. Vandewalle24 showed that papers in the image-processing field receive up to three times the number of citations when source code is made available. We must note, however, that the concept of recognition should not be solely regarded through the measure of citations. The true societal impact of the work is likely more important but also more difficult to quantify25. This point is discussed further in the following section.Establish priority: Some researchers hesitate to embrace open science out of a fear of being “scooped,” where competitors will use some findings, software tools, or data made available and then publish first. However, contrary to this belief, practicing open science can actually prevent being scooped: releasing preprints can establish priority of discoveries or techniques prior to the publication of a traditional peer-reviewed journal article27.The peer-review and editorial process of such papers can take many months or years, but journal articles are still necessary for research findings to be considered valid (and for researchers to receive credit). Publishing a preprint of an article publicly time-stamps the work, even as it undergoes peer review and possible revision.Encourages trust: Embracing openness in scientific research can help encourage other researchers to trust published results, by giving the ability to inspect data or software. Soergel28 estimated that 5–100% of computational results given by software may be incorrect or inaccurate. While simply releasing source code openly will not solve this problem, this is a necessary step towards verification and reproducibility.It’s nice: In addition to the above benefits, sharing products of research openly is kind to colleagues and the greater research community, as it prevents people from wasting time by unnecessarily repeating work. For example, many graduate students begin working on their dissertation research by attempting to reimplement another group’s methods and reproduce some of their published results. However, lacking access to software source code or datasets can hinder this work. As a result, significant time can be wasted guessing about minor implementation details or inputs not discussed in the corresponding published papers. This can be avoided by sharing the source code and data, which would allow these junior researchers to more quickly move on to new work. Graduate students and other researchers constantly face similar challenges that could be avoided by greater openness in research.29c. Those who do read most papers likely come from research institutions similar to those of the authors, even if the findings could be impactful beyond these confines, for example by leading to policy changes or technological solutions for humanitarian purposes. In part, this is due to the challenging technical content, jargon, and niche topics—but it is also due to a lack of access to the journals where most research findings reside. Making the content of these papers actually understandable or digestible by most potential readers is another challenge.Many published journal articles go unread, even in their topical domains. One study of citation rates found that 27% of papers published in the natural sciences and engineering go uncited30, research results should not be limited to those with the means to purchase access. By self-archiving  or publishing articles in open-access journals, researchers can ensure access for all members of society, including policymakers, funders, members of the media, entrepreneurs, and the general public—as well as scientists and engineers in the Global South.Considering the high and ever-increasing cost of scholarly journal subscriptions31.Furthermore, being more open with all outputs of research  could help improve the general public’s perception and trust in scientific research. Simply making research products available will not solve all of these problems—for one, it will not sway those who strongly believe ideas contrary to fact. However, ensuring everyone has access to the data researchers generate and analyze, and the software tools on which we rely, could eliminate one major barrier to trust in our findings32. Thus, the clear benefit of using open research and development practices is achieving greater impact with your research products. Indeed, from an ethical standpoint, engineers working on technologies targeted at the world’s most vulnerable communities should prioritize the open release of these technologies. The counter argument to this is that, through patenting, the entrepreneur can more easily market and sell their product in developed markets, which could then increase their ability to affect change by subsidizing their efforts in developing nations. This situation may hold true for products with broad appeal and therefore it is necessary for the inventor to assess which path will produce the greatest impact.  It could be argued that in the majority of scenarios, open dissemination will yield greater impact through simplified adoption and adaptation by others, especially if the front-end development activities are incentivized in other ways. Indeed, we can begin to measure this impact through metrics such as download counts for open source software and hardware projects to demonstrate market penetration. From another perspective, there is some evidence that the pursuit of patents for university research slows innovation33, while the return on investment for publicly and privately funded research is high35. Similarly, the use of FOSS and FOSH may actually increase the return on investment when used to their full potential36.Looking specifically at the field of engineering, we can also find examples of the positive effects of open knowledge dissemination. According to Chris Ategeka, founder of Health Access Corps, “Patenting a social-impact product hinders scale, ultimately obstructing the maximum impact that particular product would have in the world if it was open source”37, the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative38, and others. While these exemplars provide useful case studies, it is important to emphasize that each individual must define for themselves a workflow that works for them. Sometimes it is enough to simply be more open than the current norms in their field.For the new researcher looking to build their profile and develop their research agenda, we present a vision and plan for performing research openly, synthesized from literature practices and advice. The ideas presented here are heavily inspired by examples from others active in this area such as Lorena Barba’s Reproducibility PI Manifesto18. Thus, the engineering researcher looking to publish in open-access venues can quickly become discouraged. Early career researchers looking to make their work available while operating within this research environment can take simple steps such as submitting preprints of any publications to the engrXivd, and deposit (otherwise non-accessible) conference papers or slide decks on Figsharee or Zenodof.Many fields within engineering lack reputable open-access journals; indeed, only 17% of published manuscripts in engineering can be accessed by the public for free legally, while some sub-disciplines, such as chemical engineering, are lower at 9% availableFor the researcher looking to develop their open workflow further, we recommend the following steps:g If funds are available through research grants or library sources designated to support open-access publishing, a researcher may choose to follow the hybrid gold open-access model by paying a non-fully open journal to make a paper accessible. Note, however, that the fees associated with hybrid open-access journals are detrimental to researchers at smaller institutions39 and thus this model should not be viewed as the solution in keeping with the goals of the open-access movement.Make all written research products openly accessible, either through green or gold open-access avenues. For fields that lack recognized, fully open-access journals, this objective can be met by submitting preprints to services such as arXiv, engrXiv, PeerJ Preprints, Figshare, or Zenodo, depending on the topic. Conference papers, when not submitted to an open venue, can also be made openly available. Where possible, release all preprints under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.16. The Git version-control system  should be used to track the history of software projects, and software releases associated with publications or data should be archived (with DOIs) using Zenodo. In addition, implementation details should be described as thoroughly as necessary to reproduce the work. Similarly, the design of any research hardware that is developed should be publicly released under a permissive license.Any new research software developed should be done openly , released publicly under a permissive license, such as the BSD 3-clause license, and cited appropriately in any publications that rely on itWhen making use of existing research software and/or hardware, use FOSS/FOSH whenever possible to permit the greatest reproducibility.h. This data may also include figures and the plotting scripts that produce them, which can then be shared under a CC BY license and cited where appropriate.All data generated through research, when serving as the basis for a publication, should be archived publicly and cited appropriately in manuscripts or other documents40.As a means of supporting these efforts, researchers should take care to implement these policy statements by incorporating them into funding proposals, for example in Data Management Plans. Note that policies where data and code are made “available upon request” are generally not sufficient for reproducibility41 and the FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group, which developed the Software Citation Principles16 with the goal of standardizing software citation to help ensure authors/developers receive academic credit for their work in releasing open research software. On the publishing side, community-driven research journals have been built to promote open publishing practices. Some examples include theJournal of Open Source Softwarei42 and theJournal of Open Engineering43. Similarly, engrXiv, an open archive for engineering publications, has been developed to serve the engineering community, inspired by the success of arXiv.Several community efforts have developed in recent years with the goal of defining and supporting open science practices. Some examples include the Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE) seriesk, the National Science Foundationl, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationm, and the Wellcome Trustn as well as from research institutions who require deposition in a repository. More information on these policies can be found on the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policieso. Additionally, authors themselves can in some cases work with publishers to modify the standard publisher copyright transfer agreements allowing the author to retain more rightsp.The primary challenges facing those individuals interested in conducting open research generally involve incentives (or the lack thereof) and restrictive policies maintained by traditional publishers, in addition to the lack of a culture of sharing within the researcher’s disciplinary field. First, researchers are often pressured to carefully consider the venue in which they publish their work and to select only those that are “well established” and “high impact.” However, if these venues are not amenable to open research activities such as the posting of preprints, these challenges disincentivize those activities. To remedy this, the research community must continue to pressure publishers to modify their copyright transfer policies. Some progress has already been made in this effort through policies from funding sources such as the National Institutes of Healthlose money through their technology transfer offices, since translation of university intellectual property to commercial success is generally poorly realized45. Instead, institutions may pursue alternatives which promote universal knowledge dissemination as a mechanism to create impact from university research outcomes as opposed to monetary aims. Ultimately, it is likely that societal pressure is necessary to push more institutions to participate in such initiatives. For that to happen, the public first needs to be aware of the possible benefits of broad knowledge dissemination and needs to experience those benefits first hand. Researchers may even see benefits in terms of their scholarly productivity, as Frankenhuis and Nettle46 argue that open-science practices may actually increase creativity and researcher output.Additionally, promotion and tenure requirements typically focus exclusively on the final published manuscript and associated metrics, neglecting other research outputs such as code, data, solid models, etc., and their associated impacts. Some institutions actively discourage making these alternative research products available due to idealistic dreams of future income generation from licensing revenues. However, in reality, the majority of universitiesq. Of course, some technical problems remain: How do we make results of computational science, particularly when it involves demanding high-performance computing resources, truly reproducible? How can we cite software and data consistently, when the version might change regularly? How can open practices be integrated into a researcher’s workflow without further straining the researcher’s already overburdened time?The challenges impeding greater adoption of open-science practices are mainly institutional and cultural, rather than technical. General venues for sharing and developing the products of research openly abound these days, with the availability of services like arXiv, engrXiv, and PeerJ Preprints for ensuring open access of publications; repositories like GitHub for developing (and version-controlling) research software openly; and data and software archives like Zenodo and Figshare, which practically have no file size limitations18. It could be that the industry connections and strongly applied nature of engineering have hindered adoption of open practices.As cultural inertia and lack of institutional recognition/rewards pose significant challenges to increased openness in science, the biggest barrier to greater openness in research may be apathy in many research communities. Many academic researchers either disagree on or are unaware of the importance (and benefits) of working openly. Since they were not trained in doing this, e.g., during graduate school or during postdoctoral training, they also may simply be unaware of how to research openly, or the resources that are available to do so. Furthermore, since most of their colleagues, collaborators, and competitors do not practice open science, no pressure comes from the research community to change. In addition, some communities do not support or actively oppose activities such as submitting preprints. These challenges seem to be particularly prevalent in engineering, especially when compared with some sub-disciplines of physics where accessibility of scholarship is markedly higher24.This lack of pressure is related to the other major issue: lack of institutional recognition and reward for open practices. Many academic researchers will focus on what gets them credit for promotion and tenure—anything beyond that requires strong intrinsic motivation, or external motivators from the research community. At most institutions, promotion and tenure review includes some judgment (whether explicit or implicit) of where faculty publish their work, but many, “high-impact” traditional publication venues—particularly domain journals—may not support, e.g., the posting of preprints. Along with pushing publishers to support the posting of preprints, progress may be made by reminding researchers about the citation advantages of open access publishing and open dissemination of data, software, and hardwareone more paper. These broader impacts have real benefits in terms of institutional reputation, particularly among the general public where perception of the institution’s value can be tied to this increased societal impact.As already discussed, there are real career advantages to open-access publishing and open dissemination of data, code, or other research products and therefore, for some, the incentives to conduct open research may already be in place. However, for many, citation metrics alone are not enough to ensure success in promotion and tenure, and therefore they must play to the norms of their field, department, and institution. Therefore, the institution (and the department) should look to institute policy that redefines how we measure success in academic engineering research. Some suggestions include focusing less on journal-level metrics and lending greater credibility to article-level metrics. For article-level metrics, go beyond the citation count and look for other evidence of research impact such as alternative metrics  and replication by others. Lastly, look for evidence of broader implications such as economic development, student development, or even lives saved. Encourage your researchers to aim for those broader impacts and value them greater than the publishing ofThinking about what institutions can do to promote open engineering research and create support structures around open dissemination, we provide the following recommendations:Require research products to be made openly available and then support this requirement by having a high-quality institutional repository, supporting other open repositories, and lobbying publishers to modify their copyright policies to promote the publishing of preprints and other products prior to journal submission as well as archiving of final version manuscripts.Convert technology commercialization offices into research impact offices. Use these offices as a mechanism for helping researchers broaden their impact through open research best practices, for funding social entrepreneurship, and for advocating these institutional activities at the state, national, and international levels.47, institutions should promote and support these efforts.Empower and fund our university libraries to help with open knowledge dissemination. Others have described ways in which research outputs can be pushed public in real time with the support of the library48—broaden this approach in a thoughtful and impactful manner, being careful to ensure that students are learning the right lessons and that partnering communities are not unduly burdened49. These approaches can help ensure that young engineers remain passionate about the field and hold onto the core societal mission of engineering50.Educate our undergraduate and graduate students on the importance of open knowledge dissemination and the practices that support it. Create and sponsor workshops that train participants in open-source software development, open research dissemination, and global development. Many institutions embrace service learning as a mechanism for greater civic engagementThinking specifically about the perspective of the researcher within an institution, the following list of recommendations for departments are mostly targeted at changing criteria for promotion and tenure, and performance reviews, to encourage faculty to practice more open science:Consider accessibility/openness of research products along with quantity and “quality” in promotion and tenure review. Mandate self-archiving of publications .Recognize research products such as software and data, and their associated impacts , as equal to traditional publications in scholarly impact.Reduce the importance of publishing in traditional venues for promotion and tenure, recognizing these may be barriers to openness.Provide educational opportunities that train faculty and other researchers in open science skills, and those necessary to work with software and data.Research communities that impede openness cannot be forced to change from the outside. Instead, by making changes to institutional reward systems, researchers will be encouraged to improve their open practices, and thus evolve communities from the inside.In this paper we have reviewed the existing state of knowledge on the benefits and challenges of practicing openness in engineering research. We have further briefly outlined our thoughts on how open research practices in the sciences, engineering, and other fields can and should be employed by public universities to position themselves as centers for the creation and broad dissemination of knowledge as a public resource. Resistance to this proposal is prevalent through reluctance to change and, in some cases, apathy on the part of researchers. Additionally, many researchers operate in an environment that devalues an educated populace and with systemic practices and policies that exclusively reward the monetization of any form of intellectual property. Change likely needs to be driven with grassroots initiatives that demonstrate the possible benefits and make it clear that tax dollars could fund these efforts if distributed properly and with accountability. However, many of the recommendations provided here would require little or no additional funding as the mechanisms that would enable them, such as recognition of diverse research products in hiring and tenure and promotion criteria, already exist as part of normal academic routines. I read "The case for openness in engineering research" and found it to provide a good overview of the state of openness in general. My main remark for the authors is that I felt like I was familiar with the contents of the opinion piece, despite having zero knowledge about engineering research. Maybe the case for openness in engineering research is simply the case for openness, give a few field-specific details? I'd expected more differentiation, given the statement that it would be focused on engineering. All in all, I found little to nothing to actively disagree with in respect to factual claims. One particular aspect that might be specific to engineering research are patents. Public disclosure can preclude an invention from patenting, if it takes longer than 12 months for the patent to be filed after initial public disclosure of the invention. However, patents are relatively rarely discussed in the open space compared to licensing, so I don't know whether this would fit in or not. It might also be relevant to refer the "Patent trolling" scenario to the authors for this. https://www.eff.org/reclaim-invention/pledgeIn the "Accessibility:" paragraph, licensing isn't mentioned. For something to remain accessible, permissive licensing is necessary (otherwise it may disappear at any point)."Reproducibility:" helps understand, not enable, reproducibility in my perspective but I'm nit-picking (this is a good sign because there's hardly anything else to comment on)."Establish priority:" is a good section. I usually refer to this as the Scooping Paradox, which helps people remember. Never wrote it down, so if you like it, it's yours.Regretfully, PeerJ preprints will stop accepting new preprints September 30th, which may (or may not) affect the authors' willingness to include it as a recommendation. https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/1168809204062269442 Some minor aspects:I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. The authors make a clear case for more openness in engineering research. They give a well-balanced set of arguments for researchers to perform open research, and argue that it increases the societal impact of the research. They also discuss potential obstacles that researchers may encounter when making their work more open. Finally, they also give a set of recommendations for university leaders to improve and support openness. The funding paragraph in the introduction is currently very much focused on US public universities, which of course does not cover the entire readership. The arguments provided in this article mostly hold for publicly funded academic research in engineering. A lot of engineering research is also performed in industry, or at universities  funded by industry. In such projects, contracts often do not allow full openness of publication, code and data. It could be a useful addition to mention this (more) clearly in the paper. 1). Just providing this information for your reference. Regarding my work on citation analysis of image processing papers with and without code, I recently presented an update of this analysis at the WIC Symposium  not provide a real threat. In the section "It's nice", the authors argue that it prevents unnecessary repetition of work. I fully agree with this argument, and see this improved efficiency as one of the strong benefits of more openness. Meanwhile, there are also some advantages to such an independent repetition of an experiment, as it reduces the risk of repeating or overlooking the same bugs. It could be useful to add a comment in that sense to the article to keep arguments well-balanced. Finally, in the introduction to "Open science and the scholar's research agenda", the authors mention that "sometimes it is enough to simply be more open than the current norms in their field." While this makes sense for researchers wanting to get some benefits of being open by doing somewhat better than their peers, I believe we should set sufficiently high standards for open research, and at least aim for full openness where possible. As already mentioned above, these comments were mostly my views about some aspects of the present opinion article. In general, I think it is already a well-written article and I would like to thank the authors for their efforts in putting this opinion article together to further promote open science. I have some minor questions/comments, which I hope can help in further strengthening the points made in the article. I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. The authors have revised the article to address most of my prior comments/concerns and that of Dr. Pearce, the other official reviewer. In particular, the addition of references, addition of text , and wording revisions have strengthened the work. The article is an important contribution to the literature on open science. The article should promote additional dialogue on this important topic.I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. Although this is an opinion piece I would encourage the authors to avoid all unsubstantiated claims. Ideally every fact not derived from the authors' own work should have a citation.Although I agree with the first line - the article would be stronger if the footnote offered either a substantial list of referenced arguments for it -- or wait until the end to make the claim.Instead of simply saying open source software - it would be better to use FOSS (and explain the difference).To be correct in the definition of open science - the use of free and open source hardware should be included in addition to FOSS.I am not sure that open science is benefited by "the half-baked ideas, the napkin sketches, the first drafts, and the failures." For example, engineers working on water purification technology should not publish their tech until they are sure it works unless it has warning notices all over it.It would be interesting to speculate on why engineers lag so far behind say physicists in making their work open access. Is it because the various engineering societies have more restrictive publishing agreements than the major publishers?There are some examples of method to quantify the impact of research on society. There is a rich literature showing high ROIs for industry funded research for the business world. In addition using the concept of downloaded substitution value one can calculate the value to society for open source scientific hardware designs as well as software.Increasing societal impact of research + you make a good point about the scientists in the Global South - but you should consider going one step further and encouraging engineers working on technologies that can solve the problems of the world's poorest people to make sure they are released as open source appropriate technologies.Impact - you can make a stronger case. Patenting slows innovation (and there are a ton of studies showing this) and increases costs for consumers. One of the most clear recent examples is the staggering decrease in costs and increases in performance of 3D printers following the open source release of the RepRap project.Engineering journals + most of them do offer some sort of open access policy - either to post preprints or pay for open access.Open workflow should encourage the use of FOSS and FOSH whenever possible.pg 5 seems overly pessimistic and also does not cite proof. I have found that most researchers are sympathetic to open science and that many forward-thinking institutions are pushing open access pretty hard.Even just going to article level metrics - where OA has an advantage for citations should be useful and already has a built in incentive.Something should be said about open source business models. Patents are not the only way to go -- i.e. RedHat is a multi-billion per year open source company.Finally, many of your suggestions are good but could be strengthened if you hone in on university leaders self interest for encouraging them to actually implement them.This is an important paper - and sadly still needs to be written in 2018 - as open science should clearly be the default for the maximum rate of progress in any field. It is clear that we are headed this way but the rate of change could certainly be faster. In addition to the comments from the other reviewers I offer the following constructive points:I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. Dr. Pearce,Thank you for your thorough review. We agree that open science practices should indeed be the default for engineering research and progress. We'd like to address your individual points below.1) Although this is an opinion piece I would encourage the authors to avoid all unsubstantiated claims. Ideally every fact not derived from the authors' own work should have a citation.We have gone through the paper again and attempted to address any issues with uncited statements. Several new citations and references have been added.2) Although I agree with the first line - the article would be stronger if the footnote offered either a substantial list of referenced arguments for it -- or wait until the end to make the claim.The first line is stated as an opinion, which we intend to use as the basis for the rest of the paper. This statement is fleshed out more fully with references to other related works in the following paragraphs.3) Instead of simply saying open source software - it would be better to use FOSS (and explain the difference).We have added language to make this distinction.4) To be correct in the definition of open science - the use of free and open source hardware should be included in addition to FOSS.Agreed. We have added hardware to this definition.5) I am not sure that open science is benefited by "the half-baked ideas, the napkin sketches, the first drafts, and the failures." For example, engineers working on water purification technology should not publish their tech until they are sure it works unless it has warning notices all over it.We agree with the first sentence here and have modified the language to word this differently. For the second sentence, we agree that there needs to be more education on what early work is and its use cases. However, we don't feel that this is limited to any one sub-discipline such as "water purification technology" and is actually an issue that applies to virtually all of engineering.6) It would be interesting to speculate on why engineers lag so far behind say physicists in making their work open access. Is it because the various engineering societies have more restrictive publishing agreements than the major publishers?This is a difficult question to answer. Perhaps there are cultural limitations due to the applied or industry connected nature of engineering. We've added some discussion to the "Challenges" section to try to address this better.7) There are some examples of method to quantify the impact of research on society. There is a rich literature showing high ROIs for industry funded research for the business world. In addition using the concept of downloaded substitution value one can calculate the value to society for open source scientific hardware designs as well as software.We have added some discussion and relevant citations to the societal impact section of the paper.8) Increasing societal impact of research + you make a good point about the scientists in the Global South - but you should consider going one step further and encouraging engineers working on technologies that can solve the problems of the world's poorest people to make sure they are released as open source appropriate technologies.Agree and we have added some additional discussion to this section of the paper.9) Impact - you can make a stronger case. Patenting slows innovation (and there are a ton of studies showing this) and increases costs for consumers. One of the most clear recent examples is the staggering decrease in costs and increases in performance of 3D printers following the open source release of the RepRap project.Have added some discussion and references to support this.10) Engineering journals + most of them do offer some sort of open access policy - either to post preprints or pay for open access.We have to generally disagree with this point. Several of the larger engineering societies are lagging in explicit support of preprinting. Additionally, we don't view hybrid OA journals as a solution to this problem as they are largely shifting the fees and associated publisher profits from one hand to the other. We view hybrid OA journals as a temporary solution on the path towards full OA journals with reasonable APCs operated by societies or other non-profit academic institutions.11) Open workflow should encourage the use of FOSS and FOSH whenever possible.Have edited the language to match.12) pg 5 seems overly pessimistic and also does not cite proof. I have found that most researchers are sympathetic to open science and that many forward-thinking institutions are pushing open access pretty hard.We have edited the language here. Also, it seems that these forward-thinking institutions are pushing OA publishing but not open science.13) Even just going to article level metrics - where OA has an advantage for citations should be useful and already has a built in incentive.True, we have reiterated this point.14) Something should be said about open source business models. Patents are not the only way to go, RedHat is a multi-billion per year open source company.This is true, though we've tried to focus this paper more on research than industry/innovation.15) Finally, many of your suggestions are good but could be strengthened if you hone in on university leaders self interest for encouraging them to actually implement them.Have edited language to reiterate the benefits of self-interest. This is a well-written opinion article that presents a well-articulated argument for the science community to increase the practice of “openness” in research. After clearly defining  “open” research (caveat below), key components of the article include a discussion on the importance of open research to science, some recommendations on how researchers can conduct their research “openly” and how universities can support such work, and there is a discussion about challenges to open science. The article is a valuable contribution to this growing movement.The authors reference the work as a “review” but in the parlance of F1000Research, it is an opinion article and it is written as such since it is an argument for conducting more open research. Thus, this reviewer suggests not referring to the work as a “review.”The article title and a few areas within the text are written specifically toward engineering research, but this topic transcends disciplines and much of the content can be applied broadly. As such, the authors should consider whether the title and respective text should be less restricted to engineering. Perhaps the authors could present the topic as one that is more broadly applicable but then more clearly state that they are using engineering as a case study/example to illustrate their points.The authors begin the main text with a clear definition of open science, but it is unclear if this is the authors’ definition or if it is taken from the literature. This should be clarified.The authors should consider adding a bit more discussion on the challenges associated with open research. For example, more could be said about how the culture of academia doesn’t particularly value open research currently. Today’s academic culture is still too focused on where a journal is ranked based on impact factor and this plays into aspects of faculty life such as faculty hiring, promotion/tenure, faculty performance evaluations, post-tenure review, etc.  While the authors touch on some of these points, a greater discussion and recommendation for a culture change could be a valuable, thought-provoking addition to the article. More could also be said regarding some of the minutia of how open research needs to be implemented especially related to the infrastructure needed to support it and the financial costs associated with the infrastructure. Who should pay for hosting, pay publications costs, etc.? Although the article is well written and the argument is clearly articulated with appropriate references to the literature, I believe that there are a few points that the authors should consider and respond to prior to this work being approved for indexing. In summary, this is a well-articulated article on an important, timely topic. The few points above slightly dampen this reviewer’s enthusiasm at this time related to giving full approval. As such, I look forward to reviewing a revised version of the article.I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. Dr. Vanderford,Thank you for your thoughtful review of our paper and for your specific suggestions for improvement. We've attempted to address your comments in this revision as outlined below.1. The authors reference the work as a “review” but in the parlance of F1000Research, it is an opinion article and it is written as such since it is an argument for conducting more open research. Thus, this reviewer suggests not referring to the work as a “review.”  We've revised the language to make it more clear that this is not a review article and more of an opinion article.2) The article title and a few areas within the text are written specifically toward engineering research, but this topic transcends disciplines and much of the content can be applied broadly. As such, the authors should consider whether the title and respective text should be less restricted to engineering. Perhaps the authors could present the topic as one that is more broadly applicable but then more clearly state that they are using engineering as a case study/example to illustrate their points.We agree that many of the issues that we've addressed are not unique to engineering and do indeed apply more broadly. However, our goal with this work was to write a targeted paper for the engineering community that specifically addresses the issues from that frame. There are other works in the literature that take a more general approach and we've tried to reference them appropriately to bring them to the reader's attention.3) The authors begin the main text with a clear definition of open science, but it is unclear if this is the authors’ definition or if it is taken from the literature. This should be clarified.The definition of open science included in our paper is a synthesis of other available definitions found elsewhere. We've edited to make this more clear and inserted some references to support this.4) The authors should consider adding a bit more discussion on the challenges associated with open research. For example, more could be said about how the culture of academia doesn’t particularly value open research currently. Today’s academic culture is still too focused on where a journal is ranked based on impact factor and this plays into aspects of faculty life such as faculty hiring, promotion/tenure, faculty performance evaluations, post-tenure review, etc. While the authors touch on some of these points, a greater discussion and recommendation for a culture change could be a valuable, thought-provoking addition to the article. More could also be said regarding some of the minutia of how open research needs to be implemented especially related to the infrastructure needed to support it and the financial costs associated with the infrastructure. Who should pay for hosting, pay publications costs, etc.?We have addressed issues around a lack of valuation for open science practices and the need for change in promotion/tenure evaluation criteria. We've tried to emphasize this more in the paper. We would also point out that many of our recommendations do not require financial support to be feasible and indeed would be possible under existing funding models.


Vision is a new open-access journal covering all aspects of experimental vision research and clinical science. We particularly want to create a forum for the development of a dialogue between fundamental laboratory-based research and clinical research practice.We are not aligned to any particular discipline or professional training. Thus we welcome and encourage research contributions and reviews that are rooted in any of the following: anatomy, cell biology, physiology, genetics, psychology, engineering, computational science, ophthalmology, neurology, optometry, clinical medicine and other disciplines. The uniting feature is that this journal will cover all aspects of human and biological vision and how its normal functioning may go wrong.Vision is a journal for, and by, all vision scientists, committed to the advancement of their field of interest.An important question is whether another journal in the field of vision is needed. Vision research has developed tremendously over the last years and has been well served by some of the available journals. We feel that a new journal, with no historical or societal affiliations, offers a chance for a broad interdisciplinary coverage and a means of highlighting the increasing number of interesting results and ideas arising from this convergence. We are therefore convinced that the launch of a truly interdisciplinary journal in the area of vision science is worthwhile, timely and necessary. Behind the launch of a new journal lies a fundamental question about why we do research at all. Our answers to this are thoroughly conventional. We want to increase understanding and fundamental knowledge about how we see. We want to see this knowledge applied to the benefit of people. This can happen individually when people receive clinical treatment. But benefit can also extend to economic and social goods, when new knowledge stimulates the creation of new systems or devices, or new ways of conducting commerce or business.For these broader reasons, we are committed to the open-access model of publication. We feel that knowledge generated by the use of public or charitable funds should be available to all. We think that this is an important step in demonstrating and providing public benefit from the use of those funds. There will be readers who have concerns about the open-access model. It is argued that the model encourages the publication of anything, even material of weak quality, provided the author can pay. The editors are jointly committed to advancing high standards to prevent any perceived slide in this direction.Vision journal. When I visited the journal offices in Wuhan (PR China) during the summer of 2016, I found an in-house staff who are knowledgeable in biomedical science, young, enthusiastic and keen to support the greater goal of improving and disseminating scientific knowledge.We feel fortunate in the association with MDPI. The publishing house is entirely devoted to open-access publishing. The standard costs of publication are modest and, until the our new journal acquires an impact factor rating, the cost of publication will be zero as part of the launch program for the new Vision  are digitally archived within this publicly available system. Thus, in the event of a major default by the journal publisher or editors or other archiving sources, there is a guarantee that the work of contributors will continue to be available through the Swiss Government’s library system.  This seems to be a useful way of bringing the public and private systems together to the greater benefit of both.MDPI have demonstrated their commitment to open access by concluding a data archiving arrangement with the Swiss National Library System. All papers published in Whether or not articles are cited is another line of defence against critics of the “pay-to-publish” model. The limitations of citation indices as a model of research quality have been widely debated, but one of the less contentious uses of volume of citations is in constructing the impact factor of journals. It is well understood that the largest impact factors are associated with journals with a very broad coverage, so there is a limit to growth for a journal such as we launch here. Nonetheless, we recognize that as a new journal we are at the bottom of a ladder, which we greatly aspire to climb.We also want to participate in efforts to build on the progress achieved through the concept of open-access to the wider goal of open science. The editorial board is considering a number of options, including on-line presentation of primary data, reviewer recognition, possible use of open reviewing, or even a section of the journal with no reviewing at all. All these policy shifts have their cautionary notes attached to them, but the opportunity provided by launching a new journal is that we can afford to take some risks and see how they work out. The editors fully intend to explore these areas in order to develop the publishing model.We see the next 10 years as an exciting time for scientific research and publishing. The surge of interest in what science can achieve, especially in highly populated countries such as India and China, is bound to bring a new stream of talent to scientific discovery and practice. Those of us whose first language is English are fortunate that the dominant scientific discourse is carried out in our language. But English has also become the common currency for more informal scientific exchange, in many ways being the most widely dispersed, second or alternative language worldwide.Our immediate plans are to widen the membership of the editorial board and to encourage and commission the submission of groups of articles with a single theme to make a “Special Issue” of the journal. Our official launch date is March 2017 and we look forward to that time point, when we aim to bring a new and differently-toned voice to the debate around the table in the area of vision research.Oxford11 Feb 2017Andrew Parker


In 2014, the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) founded the first open access journal focusing on heart failure, called ESC Heart Failure (ESC‐HF). In the first 5 years, in ESC‐HF we published more than 450 articles. Through ESC‐HF, the HFA gives room for heart failure research output from around the world. A transfer process from the European Journal of Heart Failure to ESC‐HF has also been installed. As a consequence, in 2018 ESC‐HF received 289 submissions, and published 148 items (acceptance rate 51%). The journal is listed in Scopus since 2014 and on the PubMed website since 2015. In 2019, we received our first impact factor from ISI Web of Knowledge / Thomson‐Reuters, which is 3.407 for 2018. This report reviews which papers get best cited. Not surprisingly, many of the best cited papers are reviews and facts & numbers mini reviews, but original research is also well cited. ESC Heart Failure (for short: ESC‐HF) had just been launched during the annual congress of the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). Today, we are looking back at five years of activity with more than 450 published reviews, editorials, facts & numbers mini reviews, letters, and, most importantly, original research articles. In the first year, it was not always easy to fill the journal, but today, this is no longer an issue. In 2018, we have received 289 submissions and published 148 items—an acceptance rate of just above 50%.Does the world need an open access journal focusing on heart failure, some asked in 2014 when Wiley and we managed to get ESC‐HF listed on the PubMed website. This helped our visibility and resulted in a strong increase in submissions following this. For the aficionados of these processes, we know that only a Medline acceptance truly guarantees a full PubMed listing—but our Medline application (submitted March 2017) was successful, and full MEDLINE indexing started with the 2017 volume.In 2015, our publishers http://www.scopus.com—this is the search system of Elsevier). In the summer of 2018, we received confirmation of our acceptance by ISI Web of Knowledge (Thomson‐Reuters) to be considered for assessment of citations and impact factor retrospectively since the start of the journal for their 2018 Journal Citation Report to come out mid‐2019. This is where things got interesting and several people performed analyses as to what our impact factor will be. At the HFA congress, we mentioned that it should be at least 3.3—we can now say that it is 3.407 for 2018. We are listed in the field ‘Cardiac & Cardiovascular Systems’ at position 49 of 136. This is a great success for the HFA and the editorial board together with our reviewers and for all of the heart failure research community. We have established an open access journal in the field of heart failure research. A very big thank you to all of you who contribute to the journal's progress and success and of course also to our many readers for whom we are doing this.Besides PubMed, one can find ESC‐HF articles via Google Scholar since 2014. ESC‐HF is also listed in Scopus since 2014  is then divided by the sum of full articles  published in 2016/2017. In 2016, we published 35 full papers, and in 2017, there were 83 papers. The sum of these two years was 118, and considering the above mentioned 402 citations to these papers in the literature in 2018, our impact factor was calculated to be 3.407.TableAs an indication of which papers published in ESC‐HF have received most citations, we include a table that is based on ISI Web of Knowledge, as assessed on 3 August 2019, to show all articles published in 2016–2018 in ESC‐HF with >5 citations so far. Not surprisingly, many of the best cited papers are reviews and facts & numbers mini reviews, but original research is also well cited. (European Journal of Heart Failure to ESC‐HF, which is now the source of half of all submissions to our journal.There is a lot of work where people say that nothing is really wrong with it. It may just be a little small in study size, lacking the extra control group or extra biomarker tests that some would have hoped for or that simply, for these and many other reasons, may not have priority for the limited publication space in the premier cardiology and heart failure specialist journals. We want to give room for the many other good pieces of heart failure research from around the world. This is also why we have installed a transfer process from the To manage the increasing number of submissions while maintaining a reasonable time from submission to review decision and Early View publication, we have substantially increased the size of the editorial board. If some of you feel qualified and are interested to help in this, please let us know. The biggest problem we face for a timely publication process is finding reviewers for your submissions. As many have asked in this context, we do not mind if you inform us about previous reviewer comments in your submission cover letters, but we then also request that you add response comments in your submission package for us to consider. But of course, we will trigger also our own reviewer activities. And for this, a longer rather than shorter list of suggested reviewers would also be very helpful if you want to technically support your submission to ESC‐HF.We hope that together we can keep the journal at a good quality standard, even if more papers are published in the future. We strongly suspect that submissions will further increase. From 2018 to 2019, the projected growth in submissions is >30%. And we apologize already, if sometimes there are still some delays. We do our best with the staff in Berlin and Göttingen and Debrecen. And if you sometimes feel that we are like the PLoS‐ONE of heart failure, then indeed this is what we wish to be, the major publication threshold being that the work under consideration is ‘scientifically sound’. But there are two major differences, which is that we have the support of a strong society and that a good proportion of the papers we accept also comes out in print.ESC Heart Failure for you.At last, some also have asked us about our plans and ambitions for future impact factors of ESC‐HF. We are not striving to get the top of heart failure research—we know that they primarily published elsewhere. We are aiming for an impact factor above 4, but we are committed to essentially unlimited growth of the journal. We are aiming for an acceptance rate of 40–50%. We believe that the main job of a journal like ours is to give room for discussion and for any interesting research. We are aiming to get your research published, let you keep the copyright, and make the research available for the whole world to read at no cost. This is the open access model at work for heart failure. This is


Biomedical Engineering Online is outlined, along with our plans for future directions of the journal.The future of biomedical engineering is exciting, and prospects for biomedical engineering journals are rapidly growing. In this editorial, a brief history of  Biomedical Engineering Online is under the same pressure to attract higher quality contributions.We live in exciting times for biomedical engineering. The rapid growth of various technical fields such as artificial intelligence, material science, data science, fluid dynamics, continuum mechanics, energy and all other fields are rapidly changing the face of biomedical engineering. What was unimaginable 5–10 years ago, it’s a common practice nowadays. Just consider how the development of graphical processing units and their lowering costs have enabled researchers across the globe to utilize various machine learning techniques to analyze tens of thousands of radiological images in a quick manner and publish those results within the months of the inception of their research idea. Such a rapid scientific turnover was not even imaginable a few years ago. These developments are not only changing the content of most scientific journals, but also the quality of published manuscripts. Most journals are receiving manuscripts of a higher quality, and many papers are rejected at the editorial level, which otherwise would have been published 5–10 years ago. Hence, Biomedical Engineering Online first launched as an open access journal published by BioMed Central in 2002. While initially there has been some resistance by researchers to pay for open access fees, as some researchers argued that only authors of a low-quality manuscript are paying for their manuscripts to be published. Fast forward to 2019, it is almost a standard procedure these days, and no one is questioning the quality of open access journals anymore, as some of the most prestigious journals are open-access journals (e.g. Nature Communications). Furthermore, several business changes have also occurred that had an impact on the journal. In October 2008, BioMed Central was acquired by Springer Science + Business Media. In 2015, Springer Nature was formed by a merger of several publishing groups such as Springer Science + Business Media, Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macmillan Education. While these mergers did not have an immediate impact on the journal, the latest merger, that is, the forming of Springer Nature, will have a major impact on our future as it will be outlined in the next section.The inaugural Editor-in-Chief was Dr. Alvin Wald from Columbia University, USA. Professor Kenneth Foster from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) took over in 2006, with Prof. Fong-Chin Su from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan joining as a co-editor-in-chief in 2014.The journal received its first impact factor in 2008, and it was 1.800. Over the years, the Impact Factor maintained a healthy status ranging from 1.119 in 2010 to 2.013 in the most recent 2018 Journal Citation Report. Based on these Impact Factors, the journal maintained its position in the second and third quartiles of Impact Factors within the biomedical engineering group of journals. According to the latest numbers provided by Clarivate Analytics, the journal is ranked 52nd out of 80 biomedical engineering journals. Professors Foster and Su maintained these great rankings all these years by attracting excellent manuscripts, not an easy job. They also formed a great team of Associate Editors, who work hard to obtain necessary high-quality peer reviews for a growing number of submissions. It should be noted that the journal has established a fairly low acceptance ratio, and it typically hovers around 20–30% over the past several years.After many years of tirelessly supporting the journal and the field, Professor Foster has decided to retire from the position of an Editor-in-Chief. We sincerely thank him for all his hard work and dedication, and we are happy to see him remain as a member of the editorial board, especially during the transition period ahead of us.Scientific publishing is a challenging business due to multiple stakeholders, but they all seem to have the same desire. On one hand, it’s driven by publishing houses, who are mostly for-profit organizations that desire to publish quality journals that will have value to the research communities they serve and attract readers to these journals (we are referring to reputable publishing houses here). On the other hand, scientists and researchers also desire to publish in high impact journals, as in today’s scientific surroundings, it typically attracts more research funds, translation of knowledge and career promotions to these researchers. It should be acknowledged that the Impact Factor alone, is an imperfect measure of research quality. The publisher  signed up to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) in 2017 [In light of the rapid advance of technology in the field, we have decided to challenge ourselves, and come up with a bold vision that we will try to achieve over the next few years.And, drumroll please! Our bold vision is to focus on the value of our content to the wider community and become a biomedical engineering journal that is well known for publishing high quality research. We will endeavor to publish more articles that showcase novel advances this growing field. In the medium term, we aim to be ranked in the first quartile of Impact Factors, within the biomedical engineering category of the Journal Citation Reports.In order to achieve this vision, we will definitely need to alter our approach in attracting and selecting work that reflects the rapid development of the field. What it all means? It does not necessarily mean that we will cut the acceptance ratio by half, as the current acceptance ratio of 20% is typical of other prestigious biomedical journals. However, it does signify that we will be seeking manuscripts that have broader and/or stronger impacts on the field. In other words, we will probably not consider manuscripts dealing only with healthy controls anymore, as those manuscripts typically represent early stage results that are a long shot away from a potential long-term impact. Of course, the word probably is emphasized here, as some manuscripts may represent the analysis of data from several hundreds of healthy controls, which may be of interest to a broader audience. Also, manuscripts covering machine learning algorithms which are developed and tested based on well-known open datasets will generally not be of our interest in future. Our experiences have shown that these manuscripts have allow utility to others, as these algorithms are typically not generalizable to broader and more diverse datasets.To achieve our new vision, we will also implement several procedural changes. First, it deals with special issues. From now on, we will require that each proposal for a special issue has at least three guest editors from different geographic locations in order to prevent all manuscripts representing uniform opinions. This will be requested for all special issues unless the special issue is from selected papers of an international conference/symposium. Similarly, these proposals will also need to outline the special issues in detail and list the names of potential contributors and titles of their potential manuscripts. While we understand that it is impossible to predict all contributions, we would ask guest editors to have at least 5–10 confirmed manuscripts from a diverse set of authors before the approval of the special issue. Second, we would like to welcome more review articles in the journal. However, we sincerely encourage the authors to work with the editor-in-chief to develop an appropriate topic and potentially an outline of the review paper before submitting the full draft for consideration. This process will ensure that the manuscript is of interest to the journal, and that it covers necessary points. Third, we have managed to include editorial edits for accepted manuscripts within the article-processing charge, and we will pay even more attention to the writing styles presented in submitted manuscripts. Poorly written manuscripts, even those representing innovative ideas, may be triaged at the editorial level. Some authors will be encouraged to seek help with writing, before re-submitting their work consideration for review Authors of rejected manuscripts, that are otherwise scientifically sound, will also be given the opportunity to transfer their submission to an alternative journal at the publisher, saving time and helping to reduce the burden on peer-reviewers.Our focus on quality may take 2–3 years to have an impact on journal metrics. To improve the value of the journal in the short term, we will also be working closely with our expert panel of Associate Editors to reduce our editorial triage and peer-review times at the journal. We would like to offer the best possible service to the community, with a rapid route to publication and all the benefits of visibility that open access brings.Biomedical Engineering Online has become one of the staple biomedical engineering journals due to the leadership of our previous Editor-in-Chiefs and all editorial board members. It is the time for the journal to grow even more, and we outlined a bold vision that we want to achieve over the next several years. As such, we encourage you to submit your most impactful and most novel work to the journal, and we will work with your team to publish it in the journal.


Communications Biology celebrates its 1 year anniversary of publishing advances across the biological sciences. Here we review our first year of publishing and look forward to what we hope to achieve in the years to come. Communications Biology in January 2018 to provide a forum for all biologists to publish high-quality research, reviews and commentary in any area of the biological sciences1. While many specialist journals exist across the various disciplines within biology, as do broad-scope journals publishing work of general interest across the natural sciences (such as Nature and Nature Communications), we felt that there were still few journals open to publishing a wide range of scientific articles without a requirement for broad, general interest beyond the immediate specialist field.We launched Communications Biology include its open access publishing model, our focus on early-career researchers, and affiliation with the Nature Research group of journals.Based on the number of submissions received to date, it seems that the biology research community agreed. When we ask authors their motivation for choosing to submit their paper to our infant journal, a frequent answer is that they did not feel their work was suitable for any particular specialist journal because the subject matter is multidisciplinary. Other common reasons for submission to Communications Biology. Look for these over the next few weeks.Whatever the reason, we are immensely grateful to researchers who have chosen to publish their discoveries in our pages. As of our publishing anniversary of January 22nd, 2019, we have published more than 240 primary research articles and 8 review and commentary articles. Many of our articles have been covered in the popular media and we are confident that all will inspire further advances in their respective fields. As part of our anniversary celebrations, our in-house editors have chosen a few articles that they personally found inspiring, which we have highlighted in a collection available at our homepage. In addition to our editor’s picks, we will be publishing Comment articles in which previous authors provide an update on their research since publishing their paper in Communications Biology with a number of goals in mind. First and foremost is of course our commitment to publishing high-quality, innovative research across the life sciences. In addition, we sought to make Communications Biology a journal by and for the community of biologists. Our editorial board of active researchers is part of this goal. We have also sought to highlight the contributions of individual researchers through initiatives such as our early-career researcher spotlights2, travel grants to early-career researchers , and our reviewer of the month program. As part of an effort to get more researchers involved in the review process, particularly those who feel they have not had ample opportunity, we have also placed a permanent call for reviewers on our journal website (https://www.nature.com/commsbio/referees).We launched 3, for all papers accepted to the journal starting this year.Another goal of the journal is to promote transparency in publishing. We are therefore excited to begin publishing reviewer reports and author replies alongside our research articles this year. Authors of papers submitted from January 1, 2019 will have the option to participate in this transparent peer review program. We will also begin publishing the Nature Research Reporting Summary document, as is already done at other Nature Research journalsOur first year of publishing has been very exciting, but we are more excited still for what the future will bring. We will continue to build upon our success by experimenting with ways to improve our author and reader experience and engage with our reviewers. But we have ambitions beyond simply being a great place to publish and read the latest research. Among our many goals is to further our mission of promoting diversity and inclusion in everything we do. This means ensuring diversity among our editorial staff and editorial board—in terms of gender, ethnicity, geographical location, and subject area expertise—and among our commissioned authors, reviewers, and research topics. We also hope to provide a venue to publish research and commentary that advances the goal of bringing the benefits of scientific research to a diverse community of people, particularly in the areas of human genomics, agriculture, and epidemiology.4. Their scientometric review of genome-wide association studies makes clear the overrepresentation of people of European ancestry in genetic studies, among both participants and the researchers themselves. Within their recommendations to the scientific community, they highlight the need to prioritize inclusion at multiple levels—including ancestral, geographical, and environmental—to increase the diversity of genetic data available. They also call on researchers to involve and mentor scientists from underrepresented ancestry and geographical regions, as well as early-career researchers and women, to help build the skills and capacity to conduct large-scale genetic studies independently.An example of work that fits this aim is the recently published Review by Melinda Mills and Charles RahalCommunications Biology want to take this opportunity to invite submissions of articles that advance our diversity goals. We invite research in all areas of biology that foster collaboration with and inclusion of scientists from diverse backgrounds—including geographic location, ethnicity, gender, and career stage—and that addresses biological questions affecting the non-Western world. An example of the type and quality of work we are inviting is shown in a paper published today in which researchers from UC Davis and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Kenya were able to improve the stress resistance of plantains using CRISPR/Cas95. All submissions will be assessed for novelty, scientific advance, and potential impact on their respective fields.We at We invite research in all areas of biology that foster collaboration with and inclusion of scientists from diverse backgrounds and that addresses biological questions affecting the non-Western world.We look forward to publishing these and many more exciting advances in the years to come.


Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) was an early pioneer of open access online publishing, and two decades later, some readers and authors may have forgotten the challenges of previous scientific publishing models. This commentary summarizes the many advantages of open access publishing for each of the main stakeholders in scientific publishing and reminds us that, like every innovation, there are disadvantages that we need to guard against, such as the problem of fraudulent journals. This paper then reviews the potential impact of some current initiatives, such as Plan S and JMIRx, concluding with some suggestions to help new open-access publishers ensure that the advantages of open access publishing outweigh the challenges.The  Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) authors and readers will have forgotten that, just two decades ago, JMIR was one of the very first scientific journals in any field to demonstrate the value and sustainability of open access publishing. JMIR remains the top-cited journal in the discipline of medical informatics, partly due to that bold decision by its editor, Gunther Eysenbach. Readers may have also forgotten the dark days of universal pay-for-access and the paper publishing model that preceded online publishing. Back then, a researcher periodically visited libraries to photocopy articles out of bound journals or waited weeks for an article from an obscure journal to arrive from an interlibrary loan service. So, it is timely to remind ourselves of the many advantages of open access publishing, consider some of the pitfalls, and explore some potentially fundamental changes in the publishing landscape over the next few years.Scientific journals have a 355-year history, with the first, Le Journal des Sçavans, appearing in 1665, followed the same year by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Now there are more than 5000 scientific publishing companies with 25,000 journals publishing 1.5 million articles per year, generating revenues of US $25 billion [Open access publishing brings many advantages for authors, researchers, research funders, publishers, the environment, and the patients . For theFor researchers, open access dramatically reduces the hassle of obtaining access to the full text, which is vital as openly accessible abstracts do not always fairly represent article contents . HoweverIndividual patients and members of the publicEasy to locate and access primary and secondary research results to inform their own health-related decisions or advise friends and family.Patient groupsEmpowers patient and public involvement groups to engage in reshaping health care or clinical service delivery and get involved in formulating research questions  and how researchers address these questions .Health professionalsAllows health professionals to rapidly access primary or secondary research to answer clinical questions at the point of care and thus deliver more evidence-based care.Guideline development groups and other evidence-based policy developersReduces the costs and lowers the barriers to producing evidence-based practice guidelines and incorporating evidence into other policies .Health systemsLower cost of incorporating evidence-based thinking into the structure and function of a health system.Researchers carrying out researchAllows more frequent searching from the researchers’ desktop of a broader range of literature, thus enhancing multi-disciplinary research and helping researchers stay up to date.Researchers writing articlesGives greater reassurance that their research will be read.Research fundersEnhances the uptake of results of the research they fund, reassuring patients and the public that their donations or taxes lead to published results with impact.Journal publishersWidens the reach of journals to low- and middle-income countries and nonresearchers . Promotes faster accumulation of data about article readership, enabling rapid-cycle learning (a Learning Publishing System) and enhanced impact.However, perhaps the most important new reader category that open access supports is patients and the public, allowing them to access research results to guide their self-management decisions. In my view, open access to research results is probably the most critical factor that has led to the global growth of patient involvement networks that influence clinical science. These include groups such as the National Health Service England’s Patient and Public Voice group for clinical service delivery and the National Institute for Health Research’s INVOLVE group for clinical research.However, the open-access model can also lead to several new pitfalls for authors and readers, as well as for publishers see .One issue here is fraudulent (formerly labeled as “predatory” ) publishAnother characteristic of these journals is their willingness to appoint anyone to their editorial board, sometimes in return for cash. Sorokowski et al submitted a fictitious resume for an unqualified scientist applying for membership of 360 journal editorial boards and were surprised to be accepted by 33% . ShamseeSpelling errors on the journal home page (66% fraudulent versus 6% legitimate)Distorted or unauthorized images (63% versus 5%)Promoting a bogus impact factor, the Index Copernicus (33% versus 3%)Unverified editor or editorial board affiliation (73% versus 2%)Lower article processing fee (median fee US $100 versus US $1865)ReadersTendency to ignore closed-access articles, which mainly affects older material pre-2000. This may lead to higher rates of research duplication, or to failure to incorporate tested classical theories into the design of digital interventions .AuthorsFraudulent or so-called “predatory” journals.The ability to publish is limited by cost , meaninResearchersPressure from funders to publish in open access publishers rather than those journals in which they know their research might have a more significant impact.Public and patientsIt may be unclear to those lacking critical appraisal skills which journals publish high-quality material and which are fraudulent/“predatory” publishers, thus leading to the spread of pseudo-science or fake news  .PublishersArticle processing fees may act as a barrier to authors from low- and middle-income countries or those who are carrying out unfunded research, leading to a Western bias in journal content.Added complexity of payment processing.Authors now expect faster response times and better service quality from the journal team as they are paying for the service.Some scientific society journals may experience insufficient submissions due to authors declining to pay the article processing fee, and thus declining readership .A stronger emphasis on journal position in article metric, and impact factor league tables may overrule other publishing values.As a result, authors need to be vigilant and check the rigor of a journal’s refereeing processes and the quality of published articles before they submit, especially if they are responding to one of the numerous emails soliciting articles. They can also check if their intended journal appears on one of the many white lists of journals that are likely to be genuine, such as the Web of Science Journal citation reports, MEDLINE, or the Directory of Open Access Journals. Some professional bodies also publish whitelists of journals relevant to their areas of interest including, for example:The Association of Vision Science Librarians The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ list of journals that claim to follow its Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals Research funders should only support publication in journals that commit to high-quality science, and the National Library of Medicine and other bibliographic databases should continue to reject indexing requests from those journals they judge to be fraudulent. However, bibliographic databases and research funders should not presume that all small independent publishers are fraudulent, which has been a barrier to the acceptance of high-quality journals such as JMIR in the past. Senior researchers should reject offers of gift editorship or board membership, however attractive, from fraudulent journals, as that will give the journal spurious authenticity. However, this may not be the case if they genuinely believe that their influence will lead to better quality publications.However, researchers face a dilemma when approached by an unknown open access journal to referee an article. On the one hand, they can add authenticity by adding their name to the list of reviewers. On the other, by rejecting a poor-quality article, they can improve the quality of the science that the journal publishes and help its editorial staff to better distinguish good from bad science in the future. However, since one of the hallmarks of fraudulent journals is that they tend to carry out refereeing internally if at all, this dilemma will probably not often occur.There are a several important innovations in open access publishing, one of which, Plan S, has significant potential to disrupt scientific publishing fundamentally . Plan S Science family of journals” [While many academic organizations have broadly welcomed these principles, some key concerns about Plan S have been raised by publishers, both large and small. This is because Plan S may mean that some publishers  will be sidelined, as major research funders will not recognize their unique contributions towards supporting emerging disciplines, such as health informatics. However, larger publishers are also concerned, with Plan S being described as, “ballistic” by one commentator and Elsevier’s stock price falling by 13% in autumn 2018 after Plan S was mooted . Even thournals” ,25. The ournals” . There iournals” , in whicA second innovation for open access is publishing the details of an algorithm  alongside the article which describes its development and validation . This isA final innovation with even wider potential consequences is JMIRx . This noThere is no doubt that, since JMIR pioneered this new publishing model 20 years ago, open access has led to many benefits for different stakeholders and even opened up new areas of activity, such as patient and public involvement in research and self-management. Of course, open access has led to side effects and unintended consequences, such as the growth of fraudulent journals, but it is now clear that the significance of this challenge has been overstated. More importantly, several recent innovations described above, led by respected brands, such as JMIR, with its impressive record of accomplishment and exciting plans for the future, build on the open-access model and demonstrate its continuing importance and value.Thinking about how a new open source publisher and editor might ensure that the advantages of open access outweigh its disadvantages for their journal, some suggested principles include: (1) agree with all staff and funders that the core purpose of the journal is help identify, promote, and disseminate high-quality research and its application to improve society and the environment; (2) develop a business model and partnerships that build brand reputation and encourage scientific rigor, originality, and integrity in pursuit of the core purpose, which needs to take higher priority than commercial profit or other short-term considerations; (3) make details of the article review and publishing process, including peer review criteria and scores, open to both authors and readers, and preferably to automated search agents; (4) lower cost barriers to authors where possible, especially to students, early career researchers, and others carrying out unfunded research, using a range of strategies to reduce or eliminate APCs; (5) lower the barriers to readers, especially members of the public, clinicians, and those in low- and middle-income countries, to help them easily locate and access as much of the content as possible; and (6) strive to ensure that all content is well indexed by the major bibliographic services as soon as possible, and that content is retained online long term in third party archives, such as PMC.Finally, we should encourage all scientific publishers, whether subscription only, open access or hybrid, to develop, test, and share publishing innovations to support the principles outlined above, in the way that JMIR has so clearly demonstrated in its first two decades.


Microsystems & Nanoengineering has indeed attracted the attention of its international peers in MEMS and nanotechnology since it was launched as a new journal on May 28, 2015. Microsystems & Nanoengineering is the first engineering journal co-published by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Institute of Electronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences (IECAS). On behalf of the editorial board of Microsystems & Nanoengineering, we would like to express our deep gratitude to our readers, authors, and reviewers. We sincerely thank all of you for your strong and consistent support!With time passing imperceptibly, As we all know, for an international journal to have great impact globally, its publications must be of the highest quality and reflect the research field globally. Only by receiving original papers from around the world and assessing them by international peers, we can select the high-quality papers to match the leading academic standards. The quality of the review and processing of manuscripts is essential for us.Microsystems & Nanoengineering has been adhering to the rigorous peer-review process. As it was founded last year, with the assistance of our international editorial board members and editors from around the world as well as benefitting from the international profile of the NPG, Microsystems & Nanoengineering has accumulated experts from 22 countries and regions to submit 110 invited and contributed papers on their most recent research , fabrication, characterization, reliability, packaging, and applications of devices and systems with micro- or nano-scale features. This new joint publication will provide a rapid forum for the dissemination of original research articles and selected high-quality review articles in all aspects of microsystems and nanoengineering with an emphasis on fundamental research. We will continue to publish papers alongside more general research summaries to increase readership and create impact, in a manner that will distinguish the new Microsystems & Nanoengineering will become one of the boutique journals in the field. We also believe that the advent of Microsystems & Nanoengineering is bound to make a positive contribution to the spread of new knowledge and the development of microsystems and nanotechnology globally.Benefitting from the great publication expertise of both the NPG and the IECAS, we believe that