Many papers published in the field of Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology use statistical methods, hence the importance of statisticians on the editorial board of our journal Graefe’s Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology.Our responsibility is focused on ensuring that methods are reproducible, the analysis is appropriate, and the results are useful . Advanced statistical methods are rarely applied, and perhaps one reason for this is the suggestion that statisticians cannot be named authors or a restriction upon the number of statisticians that may be included as co-authors. In the editorial published in 2011 [What would happen if statisticians were acknowledged as named authors?First of all, we believe that there would be an increase in the use of appropriate statistical methods. One of the most frequent reasons for paper rejection is suboptimal or even incorrect statistics. In our journal, a total of 76 papers have been sent for statistical peer review during the past 2 years (2018 and 2019), 40 papers were accepted, 26 papers rejected, and 13 papers received the option to transfer to alternate journals since the authors were unable to revise.Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data,Drafting the paper or revising the content,Final approval of the work,Responsibility, integrity, and accountability.An author contributes according to the following current definitions, by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors  all of:AHelping design the study, advising on appropriate data collection, and taking responsibility for statistical analysis—descriptive (graphs) and inferential—the time to consult a statistician is before data collection wherever possible,Translating statistical methodology used in the analysis—so that statistical terminology is understood by research collaborators,Identifying limitations with the data and analysis and ensuring interpretation of analyses are robust, being responsible for statistical analyses and more ,Authors respond in full to statistical reviewers’ comments.Statisticians who are collaborating with you will meet the criteria by:The research project has more chance of proceeding well if all collaborators agree to the project plan beforehand. Many published articles need the contribution of specialists from more than one field. The benefit of reporting any statistics is obvious (see (a) above). Papers with a lack of statistics (b) or poorly integrated (c) may not be sent for external peer review. Acceptance for publication is more likely, when all specialists in the team respond to review comments (d). Are there downsides?Statistics in Medicine [There may be a cost. Statisticians, like other professionals, need resourcing. You may find the statistician irritating—their tendency to stay on the fence and temper conclusions may jar. A classification for statistical co-authorship is described in greater detail in Medicine .Some research may necessitate the use of advanced statistics, and some projects can be lengthy; thus, more than one statistician may be required. Statisticians usually work in departments distinct from ophthalmology but with a similar inner structure and pressure to publish. Many projects could profit from a formal collaboration with two or more statisticians working on different parts of the project―e.g., preparatory work and analysis of final results―as a result being acknowledged as a named co-author in one article. In our own experience, the papers worked in collaboration with ophthalmologists, and one or two statisticians have resulted in higher citations and often higher than the journals’ impact factors suggested . The JouPeer review by statisticians has led to recommendations like the CONSORT-Statement . Our preWe would like to take this opportunity and thank our statistical reviewers who help and support the journal with the peer review of papers. This helps in upholding the standard of the journal, and your assistance is very much appreciated.


The SARS-CoV-2 virus is having a devastating impact as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to spread in communities around the world. Many health-care professionals among us are battling on the front lines of this pandemic, seeing patients and helping to develop treatment and research protocols in real time. Scientists from diverse fields are redirecting their research to help develop diagnostics, therapies and vaccines. And all across the globe, labs are closed and people are working from home while worrying about their family, friends and colleagues, both near and far. In this time of crisis and uncertainty, we want to emphasize to everyone that nothing is more important than taking care of your health and sanity, and that of everyone around you. Publishing will not and should not be anybody’s first priority in the coming months.However, it does seem that quite a few colleagues plan to take time away from their workplaces to write papers, and we will do everything we can to keep the journal running smoothly for them. We have surveyed our editors, and while some – especially clinicians and experts in virology and public health – will have to cut back on journal duties, most say they expect to be able to handle a roughly normal load of papers.But even if people find the time to write papers about work they have already done, data they planned to collect may be in limbo, and it will be impossible for many to do additional experiments. And at a time when the speed of scientific progress is more important than ever, and people have a lot of other important things to attend to, the last thing we want to do is for publishing to contribute to delays.We think it is essential that eLife changes how it functions in response to this new reality, so we are planning to take the following steps.elifesciences.org/about/peer-review). This policy was meant to strike a balance between the desire to let authors control their own science, and the reality that sometimes additional experiments make papers stronger.eLife has always taken a strong stand against reviewers and editors imposing additional work on authors, and it has been our policy to restrict requests for new experiments or analyses to those that can reasonably be completed in two months .We believe these changes will help authors whose research has been affected by the pandemic to publish their work without compromising eLife’s standards.In recognition of the fact that revisions may take longer than the two months we typically allow, until the research enterprise restarts in full, we will give authors as much time as they need to submit revised manuscripts. This applies to papers currently in revision and any submissions made during the pandemic.author-driven, immediate publishing is the future of research. We will continue to let authors decide whether preprinting is appropriate for their manuscript. But to emphasize how important we think speed is when conveying new research, we will now make posting to bioRxiv or medRxiv – either by the authors or the journal – the default for all eLife submissions. Authors will be able to opt out, but we will strongly encourage them not to.One of the most inspiring things about research in the age of COVID-19 has been the way that scientists studying the many manifestations of the virus and the pandemic have embraced preprint servers, and how this has greatly sped up the pace of research into understanding, preventing and treating the disease, and has also facilitated public understanding of what we are facing. eLife has always supported preprinting, and we believe that Of course, posting to a preprint server is only part of the process: it is still essential (arguably even more so) that works get peer reviewed, and this is the main function of eLife and other journals. We have begun experimenting with a new system to attach eLife peer reviews to manuscripts on bioRxiv, and will roll this out more broadly as staffing and technology allow.Beyond scoops to best practices’ and ‘FAQ on preprints and scoop protection’). With many authors posting preprints as a means to establish priority, to avoid people feeling pressure to post their papers prematurely, we wish to emphasize that our scoop protection policy applies to preprints as well as peer-reviewed journal articles. Specifically, if our editors consider that work has been done simultaneously by multiple groups, we will not consider any of the groups’ efforts to have been rendered less significant by the posting of work from another.It has always been eLife policy that the novelty of a finding is not diminished by related work published while a paper is under review at eLife , and now do this across the journal. We will now bring forward our plan to invite early-career researchers to be eLife reviewing editors, as an effort both to increase opportunities for them to gain editorial experience, and to diversity and expand our editorial board.For the past few years eLife has been working with a global group of early-career researchers to increase their involvement in publishing. We carried out a successful trial of encouraging the use of early-career researchers as reviewers (see ‘One last note. We ask for your patience on behalf of all the people who work incredibly hard to make eLife an amazing journal – our editors, reviewers and staff. Just like the rest of you, they have a lot going on and, while we hope to operate at peak efficiency, this may not be realistic for a while.


A major part of the scientific editors’ job is finding suitable reviewers for the articles submitted to the journal. As most editors know, this is the most challenging and time-consuming task. The peer review was introduced in 1831 by professor William Whewell from Cambridge University, who convinced the Royal Society in London, the publisher of the first scientific journal Philosophical Transactions (established in 1665), to commission reports on manuscripts submitted to the journal  endorsed by University of Milan-Bicocca, which allows scientists to register reviews and conference talks and offers peer review certification  were sent to the reviewers. The average reviewer's invitation rate was 5.6 and the average time for receiving reviewers' opinions was 110.7 days. This confirms the premise that the editor's task to obtain good quality reviews is not easy at all.i.e. low response from the reviewers), we have conducted a short survey among the reviewers using SurveyMonkey. We sent it to 2000 reviewers from our reviewer database, and collected responses from 5 to 29 December 2019. In that period, we received only 100 responses, most probably due to holiday season. The questions in the survey were the following: did they receive the invitation to review the paper, was the time to complete the review (3 weeks) long enough, is the reviewer's form clearly written and with enough details, what were the reasons for rejecting the reviewer's task, what would encourage them to accept the task, did they gain any benefits from their institution for acting as a reviewer, and how can we improve the reviewing process to make it more appealing?In order to investigate the possible reasons for such high invitation rate .Most of the reviewers (82%) answered that they had received the review invitation and 86% of respondents think that the time we give them for the review is long enough. For 91% the reviewer's form is written clearly and with enough details. Main reasons for declining the task were: work overload (22%), the paper was out of the reviewer's expertise (14%) and the paper was of poor quality (7%). The answers to the question what would encourage you to accept the task were various: mainly they were related to the paper topic, paper quality, lack of time, impact factor of the journal, and finally to some kind of certification or acknowledgement. Only 19% of reviewers gain any kind of benefit from their institution for acting as a reviewer, which is surprisingly low. As for the suggestions on how to improve the peer reviewing process, there were only a few, such as to check the mailing system (since they had not received the invitation mail), then to improve the FTB Comet interface (our online submission system), give more time to review the paper, and to provide certificate  is planning to organize workshops on academic writing and to give recommendations to journals regarding, among others, how to conduct and improve the peer review process.Peer review operates on the goodwill and dedication of scientists and as such is a most noble cause. That is why it must not be taken for granted. We believe that there is room to improve the current situation of reviewer fatigue but responsibility to reduce the pressure on scientists needs to come from everyone involved in the scientific process, starting from educators and mentors, who should teach early-career researchers the importance of writing sound research papers and brushing up the skills of reviewing a research paper, editors who should carefully choose the appropriate number and quality of the papers they send to each reviewer, and most importantly, reviewers' home institutions must find a way of not just recognizing the work of reviewers but also giving them more time for this honourable task.


The European Society of Dermatopathology (ESDP) decided to publish their official journal with MDPI Publishers, Basel, Switzerland. ESDP follows the same direction as 113 other societies before who already decided to cooperate with MDPI. This trend fits with the overall growth of our journal program and the dynamic activities of MDPI all over the globe.What is behind this trend and why are more and more authors and editors submitting their articles or contacting us?Yes, there are a lot of advantages for the authors in open access publishing—especially with the non-restrictive cc: by 4.0 license. However, being a pioneer and now the largest open access publisher in the world cannot be the reason, because, meanwhile, more and more other publishers are also intensifying their open access activities.While talking with ESDP during their decision process, we learned that a consequent policy pays off. Our policy to keep all our services under one roof is not always easy to manage but it not only improves the efficiency of our services but it also keeps them on reasonable pricing scales.STM publishing is a well-controlled market and keeping quality at its best is not just a target—it is a must!Dermatopathology Editorial Office and all our employees, let us express a hearty ‘Welcome to Dermatopathology’ and the European Society of Dermatopathology!In the name of the new This journal is going to appear with four issues on a quarterly basis.Good luck!Peter Roth,PublisherJune 25, 2020


Journal of the Belgian Society of Radiology (JBSR) is now in its fifth year as a free access online journal. During the tenure of the current editor-in-chief, the only print exceptions have been related to a special scientific event, such as the annual meetings of the Belgian Society of Radiology (BSR). In this report we briefly describe noticeable evolutions of the journal across this time with emphasis on the past year.The The journal content has progressively shifted towards a preference for state-of-the-art and original paper articles over case reports. Nevertheless, the JBSR is strongly committed to encouraging Belgian radiologists’ submissions, as these are often among the authors’ first scientific articles. For this reason, high-quality case reports and images in clinical radiology articles with great teaching values are still being considered, though they represent a decreasing proportion of articles published every year.Sustaining the journal content trends over the last five years did little to prevent the JBSR from keeping a strong national identity. In 2019, the number of submissions from Belgium-based authors equalled the sum of contributions from all other countries, with Turkey and South Korea being respectively ranked second and third. In contrast, the journal is fully open to the world’s scientific community, and Belgium ranks only eighth among countries from which the number of article views and downloads originate (Table The submission acceptance rate dropped from 35% in 2018 to 23% in 2019, due to a higher editorial selection process. As a result, the 2018 JBSR impact factor reached 0.475, while it was only 0.027 in 2017. Despite the journal’s ongoing success, articles’ turnaround time remain high. The timelines for submission-to-acceptance or -to-rejection and acceptance-to-publication were respectively 88, 55, and 83 days. Similar to many biomedical journals, the JBSR faces difficulties regarding external peer reviewing, which delays editorial decisions. Expediting our decisions will force us to re-think the peer-reviewing strategy of the journal, asking for more participation from the authors in the choice of available peer reviewers.


Royal Society Open Science [It is over 5 years since the launch of  Science , and 4 s Science . Much haIn the last year alone, the journal has pioneered several innovations in the Royal Society's publishing portfolio. At the beginning of 2019, we moved from an optional open peer review model to publishing the peer review and decision history of all accepted papers . I have The journal has remained at the forefront of the Royal Society's mission to support and promote high-quality science to a global public. Our publications have not only dispelled widely held views about the relationship of heavy metal music and video games to violent behaviour but also reported distressing news of the looming extinction of a porpoise species native to Mexico –7. We haFurthermore, while the world's politicians appear ever-more insular in outlook, I am reassured by the global nature of science. While the journal's administrative office is based at the Royal Society in London, an overwhelming majority of submissions received and published by the journal are from non-UK-based authors . I speak for all of the journal's Editors and staff when I offer my thanks for the support of all our authors, readers and reviewers [That said, my role as Editor-in-Chief, and coincidentally as Chair of the Athena Forum, which advocates for greater diversity , gives mRoyal Society Open Science means that I am generally invited to offer a view on the more troublesome manuscripts or matters that arise. In a recent unfortunate example, a female early career researcher whose paper had been accepted for publication received several unpleasant messages from disgruntled correspondents regarding a matter largely resolved . I wanted to draw upon this example for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is sadly not uncommon for promising young scientists to experience such toxic behaviour and working environments. It is one thing to disagree with someone scientifically, it is quite another to send messages implying that an individual's career will be ruined by associating themselves with Prof. A or Dr B. Where individuals from any background, gender, ethnicity, sexuality or other protected characteristic work in an environment that feels unsupportive at best, and bullying at worst, it is no great surprise that they feel they must leave that environment. Indeed, in a separate case recently, a number of promising female post-doctoral researchers indicated to their supervisor that they would leave science because their broader scientific environment was too unpleasant to work in. When individuals are so harassed or shouted down, or simply ignored, by their ostensible colleagues that they leave active research, the community is poorer for it, and we should be ashamed when this happens.The role of Editor-in-Chief at Royal Society Open Science, for instance, is working to improve the geographical and gender representation of its Editors and reviewers. We welcome volunteers to both roles, especially from under-represented groups [A second reason that I wanted to touch on these cases (and others I have witnessed) is that we each have a responsibility to ensure as welcoming a working environment as possible—not just in the laboratory but throughout the wider culture of research and academia—and we can all do more to develop a more inclusive and diverse research infrastructure. d groups . ThirdlyIt may be uncomfortable for some readers that I am using this editorial as something of a soapbox, but I would urge you to ask yourself, ‘What am I doing now and what could I be doing to make the workplace more supportive and inclusive?' Only by working together can poor behaviour be called out and tackled, to be replaced by a better environment and, dare I say it, a better society for everyone, regardless of who you are or where you come from.Royal Society Open Science to take up this rallying cry in 2020. I hope you will join me.I will be encouraging the Editors, staff, authors, reviewers and readers of


PLOS Biology in the form of “Preregistered Research Articles” (or Registered Reports), allows a scientific journal to maintain high selectivity for the importance and rigor of research while simultaneously eliminating outcome bias by editors, reviewers, and authors. I believe the rise of Registered Reports among selective journals will change how research is evaluated and may trigger the realization that frontloaded selectivity is the most secure way of advancing knowledge.Prestigious scientific journals traditionally decide which articles to accept at least partially based on the results of research. This backloaded selectivity enforces publication bias and encourages authors to selectively report their most persuasive findings, even when they are misleading, biased, and unreliable. One answer to backloaded selectivity is to curtail editorial selectivity altogether, deciding publication on the basis of technical merit alone. However, this strategy is unlikely to win appeal among highly selective journals. A third way is to frontload selectivity—reaching editorial decisions based on rigorous evaluation of the research question and methodology but before the research is conducted and thus regardless of the eventual results. This model, now offered at  This Perspective article introduces the concept of "frontloaded" selectivity as a means for journals to remain highly discerning while also eliminating publication bias. The newly launched "Preregistered Research Article" format at PLOS Biology (AKA Registered Reports) is a working example of this principle. What does it mean for a scientific journal to be highly selective? To anyone outside science, the notion of “selectivity” conjures images of a competition to choose the “best” of something—in this case, the research of the very highest quality. But is that what a highly selective journal actually does? What if selectivity means something else?To illustrate, consider the following thought experiment. Two research teams in your field independently perform the same set of experiments to test an important hypothesis. Each team uses the same cutting-edge, rigorous methodology. After conducting their experiments to the same (exemplary) standard, one team confirms the hypothesis with striking clarity, reporting beautiful, unequivocal results. The other team finds mostly null, complicated, and inconsistent results that do not yield a strong conclusion. Each group prepares a separate manuscript based on their findings. Now ask yourself: would both manuscripts have the exact same chance of being published in your field’s most selective, prestigious journals?If the answer is yes, then congratulations—your field is doing well. Stop reading now and get back to doing science. If, more likely, the answer is no—and not just no but “not in a million years would these manuscripts have the same chance of being published; in fact, the one with null results might never even be submitted because experienced scientists in my field know better than to even try publishing such results”—then keep reading, and congratulations, your field belongs to a very broad, very inclusive club: fields suffering from publication bias.Publication bias is a form of outcome bias that occurs when, all else being equal, gatekeepers decide what to publish (or what to submit for publication) based on the results. It arises because in many sciences, the contribution that a study makes to a field—its impact or newsworthiness—is often judged not only on what the researchers did but also on what they found.A quick scan of the policies of the most prominent journals in science reveals this value system in full glory. Selected papers will be the most “influential,” the most “original,” the “most important”  to specialist and nonspecialist researchers; they will be work that has the “greatest potential impact” both within and between disciplines, the most “novel” and the most “significant.” The competition for publishing in such journals is extreme, with only 5%–10% of submissions making the cut.Notice what is not mentioned. Reproducibility. Transparency. Rigor. Quality. Of course, this does not mean that these characteristics are irrelevant. Scientists know they will need to reach some essential minimum in these areas to have a look-in. But their absence signals to authors that these dimensions are not enough to distinguish the winners from the losers. Of the manuscripts that meet whatever quality standard applies, those that succeed in the competition for “space” will be the ones that also report the most beautiful, novel, clear, striking, groundbreaking, unexpected, remarkable, thought-provoking, persuasive, game-changing results.p-hacking, hindsight bias, and other forms of selective reporting that litter journals with irreproducible findings [Selecting what science should appear with what prominence in the scientific record based on results is what we can call backloaded selectivity. We have known for decades that this kind of bias distorts the evidence base by deprioritizing negative or null results arising from studies of equal quality, and—possibly worse—incentivizes researchers to leave no stone unturned in forcing their results to tell a good story. Backloaded selectivity transforms the research environment into a breeding ground for findings .Why, given the terrible consequences of backloaded selectivity, do prestigious journals persist in it? I believe there are 2 main reasons, one deliberate and one accidental. The first is that, deep in their (often corporate) identities, many prestigious journals see themselves less as records of science and more as news outlets drawing attention to spectacular observations. Results are currency, currency is power, and the most prominent journals strive to channel that power. This indulgence—reinforced by academia’s fetishization of such journals—then allows the editorial leadership to rationalize publication bias as a community service. “We don’t promise that what we publish is true—what journal can—but we guarantee it will turn heads.” The regretful editor, desperate to reject 9 out of 10 submissions, tells the unlucky  author that while their submission is “methodologically sound,” the “findings do not represent a sufficiently major advance” to warrant publication in the journal, punctuated with the solemn recommendation that the author should consider submitting their solid, albeit boring results to a “more specialized” journal. Specialist journals, not wanting to miss out on the big leagues, then start applying the same formula, and before you know it, any null result is so specialized as to out-specialize even the most specialist journal.The second reason why backloaded selectivity persists is invisible cognitive bias. When expert reviewers see null results, they are more likely to go on the hunt for imperfections in the methodology or rationale . This biPLOS ONE or Frontiers paper in your track record only dilutes your résumé,” intones the professor  to their trainee, but the advice can stick. Reducing selectivity overall no doubt helps reduce publication bias, but it also fuels the impression that the journal (and the researcher) will publish anything that passes some minimal quality threshold. To many scientists, this is a feature of good practice, because there are already numerous prestudy filters for selecting the research that is worth attempting. But to the older generation especially, it can be regarded as a bug, and to prestigious journals, it is alien.For some journals, the solution to backloaded selectivity is to reduce selectivity altogether, deciding which manuscripts are published purely on the basis of “technical merit.” As praiseworthy as this is, such journals then predictably become seen by many (particularly senior) scientists as dumping grounds for lower-quality science. “The presence of a PLOS Biology under the name “Preregistered Research Articles” [The question, then, is whether there could be a unifying third way that enables a prestigious journal to maintain the same degree of selectivity while eradicating publication bias. Registered Reports (RRs), now offered by rticles” , providerticles” .The RR model is important because it enables journals to embrace selectivity in a way that protects, rather than threatens, their sense of reputation and prestige. Instead of conditioning even implicitly on unstable findings, it prompts the reviewers and editors to probe more fundamental issues. Which questions are the most important for our field to answer? What methods of answering these questions are the most rigorous and insightful? Which studies are so well designed and so theoretically incisive that any obtained result will significantly advance knowledge? The assumption behind RRs is that rather than focusing on the outcomes, it is by scrutinizing the process blind to those outcomes that we direct laser-like precision on one thing that matters most in scientific evaluation: quality.From my perspective, as one of the cofounders of RRs, I find it fascinating how the most prestigious journals have responded to the presence of RRs in the publishing landscape. When we first launched the initiative in 2013, many senior scientists dismissed out of hand the possibility of the format being offered by even one major journal. The received wisdom was that because such journals exert an iron grip over which results they will publish, RRs would always be an impossible proposition. But the critics were wrong, and instead, we are seeing the selection process at Stage 1 being deployed in interesting ways to invest in the predicted value of future results.PLOS Biology, like the founding journal Cortex, explicitly judges Stage 1 manuscripts according to “the importance of the research question,” on the assumption that studies asking more important questions will generate more important answers. Journals such as Nature Human Behaviour go one step further, assessing “the importance of the research question(s) and relevance for a broad, multidisciplinary audience.” Other outlets, such as PLOS ONE, Royal Society Open Science (RSOS), and F1000Research, eschew judgments of importance altogether, replacing this criterion with “the scientific validity of the research question” (RSOS) or by instead asking reviewers “is the rationale for, and objectives of, the study clearly described?” (F1000Research) In this way, a Stage 1 RR that PLOS Biology or Nature Human Behaviour might consider too incremental or specialized—for example, replicating a well-known phenomenon in order to establish an unbiased parameter estimate—would, if methodologically valid and based on a clear rationale, be routinely accepted and published in RSOS, F1000Research, or PLOS ONE.For example, Nature Human Behaviour requires all prespecified hypothesis tests to achieve 95% power to detect the smallest effect size of interest or to feasibly achieve Bayes factors (BF) >10 (strong evidence). At Cortex, the threshold is power of 90% and BF > 6 (moderate evidence), whereas PLOS Biology sits in the middle, requiring power of 90% and BF > 10. RSOS, on the other hand, sets no threshold at all, on the grounds that research lacking statistical power or evidential strength can still make an important contribution to knowledge, especially when deploying expensive methods or in hard-to-reach populations. One small but unbiased brick in the wall is better than a house made of paper.Another way selectivity can be frontloaded at Stage 1 is through the strength of statistical evidence required. PLOS Biology go about frontloading selection. Given only the theory and methods, how will reviewers and editors decide which science is worthy of in-principle acceptance? Which questions will be judged the most important and why? What new means and standards will emerge for assessing research quality? Which prominent journals will follow? PLOS Medicine? Science? PNAS? Nature? That they will join this evolution in scientific evaluation now seems inevitable; the only question is when and on what terms, and what happens next.With RRs now offered by over 200 journals, the goal of pushing the format into the mainstream has been achieved. This means we can now observe how prominent journals such as And what happens next may be an even deeper realization. In law, it is said that justice must be blind to wealth and power, or it is no longer just. Insofar as the results of research are a currency, then the normalization of RRs may lead us to conclude the same truth about science: that we must judge research blind to results, or we are no longer producing knowledge.


Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology (JFMK), a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), is committed to the highest scientific and ethical standards and encourages all authors to take into account and to comply, as much as possible, with the contents and issues reported in this technical note. This could be useful to improve the quality of the manuscripts and avoid misconduct, as well as to stimulate interest and debate, reflecting upon uses and misuses within our disciplines belonging to the medicine area (sports medicine and movement sciences) categories: anatomy, histology, orthopedics and sports medicine, rheumatology, sports sciences, physical therapy, sports therapy, and rehabilitation.Research is required to minimize uncertainty and to be reproducible, that is, the design, implementation, evaluation, interpretation, and reporting of the presented data, must follow a good practice. An appropriate experimental design, an accurate execution of the study, a strict criticism of the obtained data while avoiding overestimation, as well as a suitable interpretation of main outcomes, represent key aspects in reporting and disseminating research to the scientific community. Furthermore, author contribution, responsibility, funding, acknowledgement, and adequately declaring any conflict of interest play important roles in science. The  JFMK is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) [JFMK adopts a zero-tolerance policy in the case of results falsification and inappropriate authorship credit. Furthermore, to guarantee high-quality scientific studies and avoid plagiarism, JFMK adopts a strict peer review process and it makes use of iThenticate [JFMK may publish a correction or retract the paper.Over the years, the scientific world, as well as associated ethical issues, have been rapidly evolving. In this document, we report the best research practices, taking into consideration ethical aspects and international laws, in order to promote high-quality research and its integrity. The reported guidelines in the present document ensure that submitted research within the vast, interdisciplinary field of the medicine (sports medicine and movement sciences), categories: anatomy, histology, orthopedics and sports medicine, rheumatology, sports sciences, physical therapy, sports therapy, and rehabilitation, meet community-agreed standards in term of quality and integrity. s (COPE) . JFMK adenticate  to checkJFMK must abide by the following:Any facts that may represent a possible conflict of interest of the author(s) must be disclosed in the document prior to submission;Authors should critically show their research findings and propose an objective discussion of the significance of their results;To ensure the reproducibility of results, data and methods performed in the research must be presented in detail;Place your power analyses in the manuscript to obtain an "n sample" adapted to the study;Authors wishing to publish their documents in JFMK strongly encourage the use of ANOVA and t-tests; Bland and Altman tests are recommended for assessing the agreement between two methods of clinical measurement; Pearson, Kendall, and Spearman for correlation studies; factorial analysis when subjects are “> 100”;Ensure that statistical analysis using the reliability of the dependent measures with intra-class correlation coefficients and ∆% . The results must be clear, intuitive, and not duplicated in table/s and vice versa;Raw data have to be available for presentation to referees and/or editors of the journal if requested. Authors need to preserve raw data for a reasonable time after publication;A concise and explanatory cover letter must be included with each manuscript submission. It should describe the aim and content of the document according to the scope of the journal.JFMK implies that the study described has not been published before and that it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else. Its content, figures, and tables have not been published or submitted elsewhere in print or electronic format and will not be submitted elsewhere during the period of review. The republishing of non-novel content  is not tolerated. The main types of scientific contributions include:Original Articles: These provide novel scientific information, whose quality and impact will be considered during the peer review process. Authors are encouraged to not divide their study in different related manuscripts, although Short Communications of preliminary, but significant, results will be taken into consideration.Reviews: These provide concise and precise updates on the latest progress made in a given area of research e.g., narrative review. Systematic reviews should follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines .Observational study: This provides nonexperimental data and it should follow Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) guidelines. See strobe-statement.org for statements and/or explanations.Meta-analyses: These should be performed according to PRISMA, Quality of Reporting of Meta-analyses (QUOROM), and Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (MOOSE) guidelines.Case reports: These should comprise an accurate report of the symptoms, signs, diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes of patients. Case reports usually show findings that shed new light on the possible pathogenesis of a disease or an adverse effect, as well as new therapeutic approaches .The submission of a manuscript to JFMK. It is important that any type of investigation adheres to research ethics in order to ensure the credibility of the scientific community and the perception of the readers to judge and accept new findings.If authors include already published figures or images, it is necessary to obtain the permission from the copyright holder to publish under the CC-BY license. All submitted image files must conform to the original. Manipulations and/or adjustments are not allowed. The irregular manipulation comprises the grouping of different images that should be shown separately , and modifying the contrast, brightness, or color balance to obscure, eliminate, or enhance some details. If irregular image manipulation is detected during the peer review process, the manuscript can be rejected. The detection of image manipulation after publication can cause a correction or retraction of the paper. Authors are expected to comply with the best ethical publication practices when publishing in JFMK. For subjects aged < 18 years, the informed consent must be provided with appropriate written documentation by a parent/guardian/tutor. The information regarding the informed consent should be stated in the manuscript and not submitted as separate files, only in case of request should they be provided to the editorial office. It is necessary to provide, if it exists, information regarding the funding/sponsor, or other potential conflicts of interest of the participants (which should be clarified and detailed). For the purposes of publishing in JFMK, consent should comprise unlimited permission for publication in all different formats and in sublicensed and reprinted versions.Research involving human subjects, must to be conducted with respect to the participants’ rights, safety, and wellbeing. When reporting on research that involves human subjects, human material, human tissues, or human data, authors must declare that all the investigations were performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki . As repoJFMK endorses the Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments (ARRIVE) guidelines [Research involving animals must be conducted ethically in accordance with the principles of the Code of Practice for the Housing and Care of Animals Used in Scientific Procedures . The acqidelines  for expeidelines .Authors submitting research with cell lines should indicate, in the methods section, the origin of any cell lines. For established cell lines, the provenance should be indicated, and appropriate references of published papers or commercial sources must also be reported . ResearcResearch involving plants  must be conducted in accordance with the Convention on Biological Diversity  and the Research involving the use of bio-banks must to conducted in accordance with ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) .In the specific field of sports medicine and movement sciences, research/surveys and other contributions can be conducted by consulting specific databases  ,20,21. JFMK should following the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines [-the planning and contribution of some component of the study  which led to the paper;-writing a draft of the paper or revising it for intellectual content;-final approval of the version to be published. All authors should review and approve the article before it is submitted for publication.Manuscripts submitted to idelines , accordiThose authors who contributed to the work but do not qualify for authorship should be included in the acknowledgements.All authors have to meet the authorship conditions, and any change to the author list should be approved by all of them. The corresponding author should inform and involve all authors in major decisions about the publication. The corresponding author must also include, in a separate section of the document, the summary statement “Conflicts of Interest”, reflecting all the collected potential conflict of interest disclosures in the form. As reported in the ICMJE guidelines, “Authors should avoid entering into agreements with study sponsors, both for-profit and non-profit, that interfere with authors’ access to all of the study’s data or that interfere with their ability to analyze and interpret the data and to prepare and publish manuscripts independently when and where they choose". The authors must disclose all relationships or interests that could unsuitably influence their study. Potential conflicts of interest comprise financial interests, e.g., honoraria, grants, or other funding, and non-financial interests, like personal relationships and affiliations. The authors are encouraged to include the following sentence: the funder/sponsor had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.JFMK endorses different databases, such as the EU Clinical Trials Register or others listed by the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. JFMK endorses the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Statement [Clinical trials can be pre-registered with the international clinical trials register. tatement  to amelitatement , which phttps://www.mdpi.com/editorial_process#standards.Submission process guidelines. JFMK. To achieve the maximum effect within the scientific community, all editors and authors should comply to universal standards and good practices. Authors must ensure the integrity of the submitted study and conduct studies in humans, animals, or others ethically and in accordance with JFMK guidelines. The scientific community must be based on truth, responsibility, innovation, openness, and transparency. Given the importance and impact of research on society, a high level of ethical awareness is required for authors who aspire to publish academic papers in our journal.In summary, this document aims to help authors understand the integrity and ethical issues of research and publication and to avoid misconduct or distracting mistakes in papers related to sports medicine and movement sciences submitted to


Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology has become the target of a massive attack of fraudulent papers originating from paper mills. This editorial highlights 20 important features we observed with paper mills and explains how the journal is responding to this serious threat to restore the integrity of science. Hopefully, this editorial is also helpful for editors of other scientific journals.Fraudulent papers from paper mills are a serious threat to the entire scientific community.  Paper mills are commercially motivated malicious enterprises apparently operated by knowledgeable “scientists” that produce custom-designed papers containing no real scientific data but only fake data. Depending on the amount of money the customer is willing to pay, paper mills also offer manuscript submission and manuscript revision services and take care of all correspondence with the journal (full-service premium package). The purpose of paper mills is to promote the “academic career” of their customers by delivering publications in prestigious scientific journals.https://forbetterscience.com/2020/01/24/the-full-service-paper-mill-and-its-chinese-customers/).Two recent excellent papers have summarized several major (sad) features of paper mills  email address.Uneventful peer review process: All papers passed the routine text similarity check with the iThenticate software without any problem. With very few exceptions, the peer review of papers was very uneventful and went smoothly. Editors handled paper mill papers without noting anything unusual. In this context, it must be noted that we do have an excellent reporting system in place should anything unusual happen during peer review. These safeguards were bypassed effectively by the paper mills. This is indicative of the “professionalism” behind paper mills. It can be assumed that experienced “scientists” (or more precisely misguided ex-scientists) with extensive and in-depth experience in the scientific publication process and familiarity with professional plagiarism software are the core of paper mills. It is likely that employees of paper mills have worked with real scientific journals before. Consequently, in our revised editorial guidelines, we request an explicit statement by authors that no paper mill was used.“Scientific” focus of the fraud: Most paper mill papers in our journal deal with chemically defined natural compounds, mostly from plants in the context of “highly important,” “highly relevant,” or “medically underserved” diseases for which there is “no cure yet” and a “high medical need.” Often, paper mill papers advertise a breakthrough in a given pharmacological field. Thus, it can be assumed that customers are not just interested in getting “a” publication but a “medically important” publication. This is compatible with the assumption that the primary purpose of paper mills is to facilitate rapid “academic career” advancement and professional rewards for the “customer.” Since most paper mill papers allude to high clinical relevance, it can be assumed that “premium” customers of paper mills are clinicians who have no scientific experience. This assumption is corroborated by the fact that in many cases, authors list clinical departments as their affiliation.No reporting of service laboratories: Several papers included data from so-called service laboratories, but the papers did not mention this fact in the Materials and Methods section. Therefore, in our revised editorial guidelines, we request an explicit statement that all data were generated in-house.Elusive “service laboratories”: Authors blame the “service laboratories” of having provided “problematic data,” but we never obtained any information about the precise nature of the “problematic data.” In no case, the authors admitted that the data from “service laboratories” are fake, and not a single service laboratory could be localized physically . In no case, the name of a person behind a “service laboratory” was provided. Thus, it appears that paper mills do their very best to prevent identification of the “service laboratories” because they are an integral part for their business to be successful.No data at all: In all cases, the authors were unable to provide original data (raw data). Sometimes no reason was given; sometimes ridiculous reasons were given (the COVID-19 pandemia being the most popular “excuse”). The pandemia was blamed to have caused lack of access to data files or complete loss of data. This is a hitherto unknown facet of the pandemia that SARS-CoV-2 also infects computer hard disks and USB sticks. In an extreme case, an author’s child was blamed of having spilled coffee into the computer, resulting in total data loss with no back-up of data, “unfortunately.” Thus, in addition to having no data, the authors of paper mill papers have no clue how to properly store and back-up data. Because of the lack of original data in all fraud cases, in our revised editorial guidelines, we request original data already upon initial submission. Otherwise, no peer review will take place. The request of original data right from the beginning is the most effective measure to fight paper mills.Cut and paste beautiful images: The fraud data particularly concerned flow cytometry experiments, fluorescence cell images, western blots, and histology. We noted several types of fraud: images were flipped. The same data  were used in experimentally totally different contexts, not just within one paper but also within completely different papers unrelated to each other. Most notably, in western blots, only “regions of interest” without molecular mass markers were shown, never full-length blots. Thus, it appears that paper mills arbitrarily collaged “impressive” data sets from a library of “data modules.” As a precaution against fraud of this type, in our revised editorial guidelines, we now request submission of full-length western blots with molecular mass markers. This is also a very effective measure to fight paper mills.No email signatures: In no case, the corresponding authors used professional  email signatures in the emails. Apparently, an important element of paper mills is disguising the precise origin of the email and rendering it virtually impossible to localize the fraudulent author. Evidently, this substantially reduces the risk of negative academic consequences for the author.Extremely poor English in emails: The English language used in email correspondence was extremely poor and, astonishingly, much worse than in the respective papers. In the papers, the English, in general, was decent and passed the English language check. This discrepancy indicates that the paper mill employees “polishing” papers  are much more proficient in English than the employees taking care of the journal correspondence that will not be published.Rapid informal agreement to retraction: Most surprisingly, when confronted with the suspected fraud, quite often the corresponding authors very quickly  agreed to a retraction without actually admitting the fraud openly. Often, authors mentioned the global term “problem with the data” without being specific what the problem is.Blaming others: In some cases, corresponding authors blamed one of their graduate students (unnamed) of having generated “problematic” data, and that the respective student had already faced consequences (“punishment”) by the academic institution. In no case, we received any official evidence that a student was “punished” and what the precise academic misconduct and “punishment” was. Evidently, the corresponding authors do not recognize that they also bear a major responsibility for the entire group.Painful formal retraction process: The formal retraction process was very sluggish from the side of the authors and lacked professional conduct.Communication without content: Evasiveness and disinformation tactics prevailed in email communication with the corresponding authors. Often, the content of the emails was close to zero when it came to answering specific questions of the Editor-in-Chief or the publisher SpringerNature. Apparently, the authors wished to convey the impression that their English is “unfortunately” too poor to understand the questions of the Editor-in-Chief or the publisher.Puzzling email clusters: Strikingly, in several fraud cases, the Editor-in-Chief received emails from authors from apparently different groups within a short period of time (minutes to hours!) as if the emails were sent by one and the same person under different email addresses. It was also noted that the text was rather similar. Thus, it can be assumed that a single paper mill employee is handling multiple fake submissions in one and the same “work session.”Sluggish email communication (if any): Sometimes, there was no communication at all, because email addresses  did not work or because authors did not respond. Sometimes, we had to wait for up to 6 (!) months to get an answer. Blocking of emails by servers was used as another common “excuse” for not responding quickly. However, we never received any message from email servers that a message could not be delivered, unless an email address was invalid. The sluggish email communication is the major reason why it took so long to publish the retraction notes. We would have liked to proceed much faster, but we could not because the Editor-in-Chief and SpringerNature had to play the formal retraction process by the formal rules. Most unfortunately and to our dismay, fraudulent authors only care about rapid publication of their papers but not about rapid procedurally correct retraction. This is highly unethical and unprofessional conduct.No academic institutions: In two cases, it turned out to be impossible to get into contact with the respective academic institutions from which the papers were generated.No ORCID IDs: Very few authors used ORCID IDs. This is an effective method of disguising the identity of an author, particularly when first names and family names are very common in the literature.Fake reviewers: When Editors used reviewers proposed by authors in fraud cases, in some cases, reviews were delivered in unusually short time (minutes!). In general, these reviews were very brief, uninformative, and written in extremely poor English. In all cases, these “fake reviewers” were not used as first-choice referees by the editors but as “very last-choice” when multiple attempts (up to 10) to recruit trusted referees failed. In this context, it must be noted that several of our trusted referees got extremely exhausted by the large number of review requests and, accordingly and understandably, declined. In fact, we received several complaints by referees for the high workload. We can only apologize to our referees. We were simply not aware of the problem. Thus, paper mill authors intentionally exploit and exhaust honest and trusted referees as a most valuable resource of a scientific journal so that desperate editors, as last-resort, use the author-suggested fake reviewers.s-mediated cognitive improvement in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s type: A key role of BDNF-H2S-Nrf2 signaling versus . Changing the term “aldosterone receptor “against “mineralocorticoid receptor” points to the paper mill employees having solid pharmacological knowledge. Thus, it can be assumed that the paper declined in our journal was sold de novo to new “authors” without informing them that this paper has been flagged as fake already before. When the editor of Fundamental & Clinical Pharmacology was contacted by us, we were notified that the paper underwent regular (uneventful) peer review and that there is no need for action. We had the impression that the editor of Fundamental & Clinical Pharmacology was not aware of the severity of the problem. It is very likely that this example is not an isolated case because there is no generally accessible data base of rejected fake papers. Thus, paper mills can aggressively exploit this lack of data base on rejected fake papers and the fundamental assumption of author honesty for their business model. This type of fraud can only be detected by chance. As a minimalistic precaution against detection of this type of fraud, paper mills slightly change the paper title, barely disguising the identity of the content.Same paper, different authors: In one particularly egregious case, a paper administratively withdrawn from our files because of suspected fraud was submitted shortly thereafter to another pharmacological journal, the only major difference being that the list of authors was totally different. The title of the paper was slightly modified  reminders. The respective papers were then all administratively withdrawn by the Editor-in-Chief prior to acceptance or rejection. All authors from fraudulent papers were flagged to prevent future submissions to the journal.Once the Editor-in-Chief of Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology was considered to be a highly desirable and attractive target for “academic promotion,” both by customers and paper mills. With an average of about 1,000 submissions per year to our journal in 2019 and 2020, we come to the sad conclusion that around 5% of the submissions to our journal were from paper mills. Probably, this high percentage is related to the fact that the journal traditionally publishes many papers on natural compound pharmacology and that career incentives to publish in this field in the target country and in this journal must be very substantial.A total number of 10 paper retractions in a single journal within 1 year is quite a large. Even more dramatic, the high number of submissions (40) from paper mills caught prior to online publication illustrates that the problem was massive and that Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology probably would have experienced a further dramatic increase in paper mill submissions. Paper mills could have advertised the journal as “easy prey,” charging higher prices for customers for higher publication success rates. We may have stopped the fraud wave at the beginning of an exponential growth phase.If the Editor-in-Chief had not reacted immediately, Molecular Brain) in a somewhat different scientific field reports a substantial quantitative problem with fake submissions as well  presented in tables and figures in a generally readable format. Excel files are preferred. Pdf and Prism files are acceptable as well. Supplemental data must be cited in the main text. These data will be made available to the reviewers and published if the paper is accepted.Request of supplemental immunoblot data. Specifically, full-length immunoblots with molecular mass markers are requested. Supplemental immunoblot data must be cited in the text. These data will be made available to the reviewers and published if the paper is accepted.Authors must include the following statement in the section “Authors Contributions”: The authors declare that all data were generated in-house and that no paper mill was used.These measures are meant to protect the scientific integrity of your work and the scientific integrity of our journal.Papers that do not follow these guidelines upon submission are administratively rejected but can be resubmitted when the formal requirements are met.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology. To our delight, from several authors, we received very positive comments about the new editorial guidelines.The new editorial policies have been in place now for more than 6 months. The overwhelming majority of authors abides to the rules and considers them as a quality criterion for their work and Only very few authors expressed concerns that original data could be “stolen” by peer reviewers. We take this concern extremely seriously and select only trustworthy reviewers with a proven track record and prefer referees whom the editors know personally. The Editor-in-Chief is not aware of a single case in which data from an author have been “stolen” by another scientist. We would react immediately if such scientific misconduct from the side of reviewers ever occurred. As a result of the paper mill attack, we are very reluctant at using author-proposed referees whom we do not know personally.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology had become an “attractive” target for paper mills, we had no other choice than to massively tighten our editorial guidelines to protect the integrity of our authors, the editors, the referees, the journal, and the publisher SpringerNature. In addition, we want to ensure that at its 150th anniversary in 2023, Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology enjoys the status of a leading and rigorous pharmacological journal, promoting scientific integrity and quality. Interestingly, Molecular Brain also proposes that the inclusion of raw data along with the initial submission is the only solution to eradicate paper mills effectively (Miyakawa We realize that the updated editorial guidelines may appear “harsh” as compared to other scientific journals. However, due to the fact that Miyakawa .Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology are based on honest science. We have weeded out a total of 50 fraudulent papers from the publication pipeline at various stages during the last year and will rigorously continue this path.The Editor-in-Chief, associate editors, reviewers, and the publisher SpringerNature do their very best to ensure that papers published in Finally, the Editor-in-Chief hopes that this editorial may be helpful to editors of other scientific journals how to handle the paper mill problem that has the malicious potential to cause a long-lasting and serious contamination of the scientific track record.


In 2012, I received a call from Prof. Matthew Freeman, head of the William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford, asking if I was interested in a Senior Editor position at a relatively new The Company of Biologists’ journal called Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM). Launched with Vivian Siegel as the first Editor-in-Chief (EiC), the vision was that the journal would grow to fill a niche for translational studies related to human disease that were carried out in model organisms. Ross Cagan, a fruit-fly researcher, and I were to become DMM's first research-active Senior Editors, starting in January 2013. It was to be an upward, but rewarding, climb; in spite of the success of the Company's other journals, including Development, Journal of Cell Science and Journal of Experimental Biology, nurturing a new journal into healthy growth is not easy.organisms to model systems.DMM's roots lie in a broad range of scientific topics, and many different models . Indeed,https://dmm.biologists.org/content/ras).To branch out into different scientific fields, DMM publishes special issues that cover one of a wide range of health-related topics, or focus on a certain model system, with expert Guest Editors determining the content. Our special issues have covered disease or health-related topics including neurodegeneration, neuromuscular disorders, drug discovery and cancer metabolism. We have also published special collections with a ‘spotlight’ on the rat, worm, fish and flies. DMM Scientific Editor Julija Hmeljak and I wrote an editorial on how model organisms have helped to diagnose and understand rare diseases, leading to a special collection on rare disease research . Our nexI realised early on that rigorous standards for scientific reporting, and fast but realistic academic standards for manuscript handling, would eventually yield a vital solid root system for the journal. At a time when mouse models were under fire, Paraminder Dhillon, then DMM Reviews Editor, and I wrote a report on how to improve the validity and reproducibility of clinical translation . This waSupporting our authorsOver the years, DMM has undertaken numerous initiatives to improve the experience of authors, including partnering with Dryad to improve data accessibility, permitting format-free submission, adopting continuous publication (enabling speedier publication of the version of record), joining the Review Commons initiative and offering play-in-place movies.Supporting preprintsbioRxiv. Authors submitting to DMM can simultaneously deposit their article in bioRxiv, and vice versa.DMM has long had preprint-friendly policies and, since 2016, has had a two-way portal between DMM and Supporting early-career researchersOutstanding paper prizeThe DMM outstanding paper prize was set up to inspire young researchers embarking on their scientific careers. Each year, the journal awards a prize ($1000) to the first author of the paper that is judged by the journal's editors to be the most outstanding contribution to the journal that year.DMM Conference Travel GrantsConference Travel Grants of up to £600 to early-career researchers wanting to attend meetings and courses relating to the areas of research covered by the journal. We also welcome applications from independent group leaders and PIs with no independent funding.Launched in November 2015, DMM offers DMM Travelling FellowshipsTravelling Fellowships of up to £2500 to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers wishing to make collaborative visits to other laboratories. These are designed to offset the cost of travel/accommodation and other related expenses.DMM also offers First Person interviewsFirst Person’ interviews, the first authors of Research articles published in DMM talk about their work in and out of the lab, the journeys that led them to where they are now and the issues they feel are priorities for early-career researchers.In our popular ‘Early-career Editorial Board membersIn 2019, DMM appointed new members to its Editorial Board, with the aim of increasing its diversity in terms of career stage. We were delighted to announce the appointment of the following: Lukas Dow , Susumu Hirabayashi , Yun Li , Rachel K. Miller  and Eirini Trompouki .Supporting our reviewersCross-referee commentingDMM operates cross-referee commenting, whereby we invite referees to comment on the other referee reports before the editor makes a decision. The aim of this ‘cross-referee commenting’ step is to help resolve differences between referees, identify unnecessary or unreasonable requests, or – conversely – highlight valid concerns raised by one referee but overlooked by others.Partnership with PublonsPublons allows reviewers to easily track and verify every review by choosing to add the review to their Publons profile when completing the review submission form.DMM's partnership with Supporting Open Accesswaivers for corresponding authors based in low-income and lower-middle-income economies and for other authors who genuinely have no funds to cover APCs. In 2019, all applications for an APC waiver fitted the criteria for approval and were granted a full or partial waiver.DMM has been awarded the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) seal. This is a “mark of certification for Open Access journals, awarded by DOAJ to journals that achieve a high level of openness, adhere to Best Practice and high publishing standards”. All DMM articles are published under the CC-BY license and deposited in PMC. DMM grants full article publication charge (APC) The Company of Biologists is a not-for-profit publishing establishment that is run by scientists, for scientists see .Box 1.In 2019, I had the privilege of hosting the first ever DMM Journal Meeting – with co-organisers Len Zon, Nancy Speck and Paresh Vyas – called ‘Blood Disorders: Models, Mechanisms and Therapies’. Blood disorders were chosen as our first topic for the meeting series because researchers in the field of haematopoiesis have made significant progress in advancing therapies developed from model organism research to the clinic. These advances, including bone marrow transfers, stem cell replacements and immunotherapies, have also had a large impact on the treatment of non-blood disorders. Held in the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center, embedded in the Harvard University campus, the meeting brought together diverse front-line researchers, stimulated discussions across basic research and clinical disciplines, and fostered collaborative links among researchers .https://www.biologists.com/meetings/mechanismtotreatment2021/). The meeting aims to bring together developmental biologists, human geneticists and clinical researchers who are united in the goal of understanding and treating developmental disorders.The Company of Biologists also hosts unique Workshops that bring together researchers that might not otherwise find each other to collaborate. As EiC, one of my benefits was to be able to attend (at least one) Company-sponsored workshop each year. One of my favourite workshops was ‘Understanding human birth defects in the genomic age’ . The sucEndeavouring to make my job as EiC of DMM more of a breeze than many might believe possible are the wonderful staff at The Company of Biologists’ Bidder Building in Cambridge, UK. Managing Editors Kirsty McCormack and, more recently, Rachel Hackett work calmly and steadily to ensure a smooth workflow. Claire Moulton, the publisher, is a force, with whom I share a particular vice that is not mentioned here. Reviews/Scientific Editors Sarah Allen, Paraminder Dhillon and Julija Hmeljak  have been an essential source of knowledge and support, in addition to their main role in crafting DMM's informative and timely ‘front section’. Each submission received the careful attention of administrators and, further downstream, copyeditors, with special mention to Debbie Thorpe, Laura Mason, Melissa Ray and Jodie Houghton, as well as the support of illustrators, marketing staff and the production team. The knowledge and experience I gained during my time as Senior Editor and EiC at DMM is invaluable: working within a not-for-profit community publishing environment is a joy.Now, I am thrilled to pass the torch, after an exhaustive recruitment process led by the Board of Directors of The Company of Biologists, to Prof. Elizabeth (Liz) Patton . Liz has


Bolstered by ever affordable computational power and open big datasets, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are bringing revolutionary changes to our lives. This article examines the current trends and elaborates the future potentials of AI in its role for making science more open and accessible. Based on the experience derived from a research project called Microsoft Academic, the advocates have reasons to be optimistic about the future of open science as the advanced discovery, ranking, and distribution technologies enabled by AI are offering strong incentives for scientists, funders and research managers to make research articles, data and software freely available and accessible. Science magazine, that has publicly shifted its stance and launched an OA journal Science Advances in 2015 to join the OA movement. Within the few short years, the new OA magazine has published more than 2,600 papers from 20 thousand authors that jointly have received more than 50 thousand citations and show no sign of impacting its non-OA counterpart. Similarly in the Open Data and Open Source arenas, guidelines, mandates, and commitments have been made , research data (Open Data), and the protocols and other software tools that gather and process the data (Open Source). Recent decades have seen scientists, research managers, and funding agencies embrace the Open Science idea with concrete actions. On OA, many have declared mandates and increased spending  powered by the ever-easier access to big data and cloud computing. They enable us to take a scientific approach to study the structure, the evolutions and the societal impacts of science itself at a scale that is unimaginable only a decade ago , have both entered this category in recent years (see With MAG being publicly available, researchers can take a closer look and examine various arguments on Open Science with data. ears see . Figure ears see : papers ears see . Since sTechnologies are also changing how research contributions can be recognized in the era of Open Science Piwowar, . For exaCurrently, the Open Science movement clearly benefits the publication industry and the scientists who want to access published materials. However, the cost of publishing is still not falling fast enough for many scientists. Highly regarded journals often charge as high as five thousand dollars for publishing an article, and even newer alternatives that cut the charge by an order of magnitude can still be out of reach to scientists from less affluent regions that have a lot to share with the rest of the world. This might be just a natural outcome of the economic law of supply and demand where highly sought-after publication venues can demand higher prices. There are many remedies to this problem, and we see the new discovery capability enabled by the technologies is one of them. Based on the citation behaviors, MAG has shown that scientists are increasingly treating preprint articles in the same way as those that have undergone peer review and been published in prestigious venues. It is no longer uncommon that an article with a future publication date in some traditional venue has already accumulated tens or even hundreds of citations because it is already widely read in its preprint form. In a way, a low cost yet effective medium for scientific discourse is emerging outside of the publication industry. Granted, there is no guarantee that these services will remain low cost, but the web search engine based solutions have the reach to the entire web to quickly identify wherever and whenever an alternative appears. Coupled with the improving natural language understanding techniques that enable high precision recommendations, the modern technologies have the potential to make high quality materials readily discoverable even though they are not present on the traditional distribution channels. Encouraged by the individual preprint articles being able to stand out on their scientific merits alone without the prestige of their eventual publication venues, we have reasons to be optimistic that the future Open Science will foster an even more inclusive and vibrant community where the new discoveries are streaming in from every corner of the world and technology advancements can be developed in a much more frictionless and economic fashion and applied to where they are most needed.https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/academic-services/graph.Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. The dataset described in the article is free and open to the public but is distributed only through the Azure platform. This data can be found here: The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.KW was employed by the company Microsoft Research.


Journal of Molecular Cell Biology (JMCB), which was launched in October 2009, started a new journey following the new routes in the scientific publishing world from the beginning of 2019. Here, I would like to go through what JMCB has fulfilled in the first year of change.In recent years, the scientific publishing world has been significantly changed from focusing on impact factor to encouraging scientific merit and from subscriptional access to open access . JournalJMCB devotes itself to expressing the appreciation on the important scientific discoveries in the past and bringing the new development based on these discoveries for the future. In 2019, JMCB focused on the famous tumor suppressor gene p53, which was discovered 40 years ago. A memorial symposium with the theme ‘The Legend of p53 vs. Cancer’ was hosted by JMCB in May 2019 in Hangzhou, China (As an academic journal, u, China . In addiu, China , b and ou, China  were pubu, China .JMCB also recognizes that science benefits from openness. Since January 2019, JMCB has been transformed from a traditional subscription journal to a fully open access one. This transformation has significantly increased the accessibility, evidenced by the fact that the total downloads of JMCB publications per month in 2019 increased by more than 70%, compared with that in 2015–2018. In addition, JMCB allows advance posting on preprint servers, such as bioRxiv, prior to publication to help authors share their work as early as possible and receive feedback from a wider audience. We believe that open access publication of JMCB provides a more direct and efficient way for science communication, and in turn, the journal will benefit from an open scientific community.JMCB will do its best in this changing world and provide better service for the community.The new decade is coming! While the ecosystem of scientific publishing world is still in course of reconstruction,


Genome Biology. Another champion of such journals is Plan S, launched by Science Europe in 2018 and adopted by many funding agencies, which aims to encourage scientists to publish in open access journals or platforms [I am very fond of open access journals like Genome Biology spend a considerable amount of time engaging with the scientific community in conferences and communicating with other editors in the team and with the editorial board. Thus, the article processing charges (APCs) of the top tier journals would increase if they were to switch to full open access, which could shift from inequity in access to published work to inequity in access to publishing, as scientists and their funders in emerging economies may be less capable of shouldering such APC costs [In the companion editorial by Halffman and Horbach, editorial innovations are discussed that could make the peer review process more cost effective while retaining the quality of the process. In the age of information overload, with the large numbers of papers coming online each day, a high-quality peer review process remains of paramount importance, not only to evaluate scientific quality but also to identify the most ‘paradigm-shifting’ studies. However, the cost of this process increases with the selectivity of the journal: Springer Nature estimates that it costs, on average, €10,000–30,000 to publish an article in one of its journals, partly due to low acceptance rate and partly in order to produce non-research content, such as news and opinion articles . Thus, aPC costs . MoreovePC costs , 6.eLife. This works as an excellent complementary system, but I wonder if we scientists could find sufficient time to act as editors for most scientific literature. The most brilliant scientists can be the worst editors if they have little time to read or engage with a paper, and we scientists have networks of colleagues and other biases of our own that are hard to avoid. The other alternative would be a system of public reviews such as PubPeer, twitter threads and science blogs, integrated with machine learning that would collate all information to rank the impact of papers. Again, while this is already developing into a valuable and ongoing complement that is bound to grow, it lacks moderation by editors and could bias towards those who invest more effort into networks or language of self-promotion as a way to stand out of the crowd if it were to replace peer review. Indeed, learning from the rapid rise of social networks over the last decade and their suddenly dominant role in news distribution demonstrates their potential for skewing the conversation into extremes.In response to these concerns, Plan S recently adopted a more flexible stance towards hybrid open access and towards ‘new, innovative publishing models’ that would retain a diversity of cost-effective publishing options . It has A compromise that would satisfy most concerns has recently been proposed as a ‘Plan U’, in which funders require that grantees deposit manuscripts on a preprint server such as bioRxiv under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) before submission and peer review in any type of journal . While tGenome Biology find ways to link open access, new data curation and repository innovations with high-quality peer review and reasonable publication charges.In conclusion, the innovations in science publishing are taking place at multiple levels: open access to publications, presentation of data in an accessible manner, transparent and unbiased systems for evaluating scientific output, and reasonable costs of publishing, including in the top tier journals. It will be exciting to watch as new innovations emerge at all of these levels and to see journals such as


Journal of Synchrotron Radiation to 100% open access from January 2022 is announced.The proposed conversion of  Journal of Synchrotron Radiation (JSR) to become fully open access has arrived. With this issue we are pleased to announce that JSR will become a fully open-access journal from the beginning of 2022. More specifically, and with the approval of the IUCr Executive Committee, the decision has been made to convert JSR to fully open access from the January 2022 issue.The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) has concluded that the time for converting accepted paper (or their institution) to pay an article processing charge (APC). The APC will apply to all accepted papers (after reviews are completed), unless a waiver or discount has been agreed between the contact author and the Editorial Office. Authors from developing countries will be able to apply for a full or 50% waiver of the APC. All papers in new JSR issues from January 2022 will be made open access and freely available to all researchers (i.e. they will be gold open access). The costs of peer review, of journal production, and of online hosting and archiving will be met from the APC.Full open access will require the contact author of each Further details will be made available as we get nearer to the conversion date, and the following transitional timetable will apply:JSR issue will reprise the announcement of full open access coming to JSR for papers published from January 2022.(1) Submission for publication from now and through all of 2021 – this will be the open-access transition period, in which publication of conventional behind-pay-wall articles is still possible but open access will be increasingly encouraged. Discounts in the open-access APC will be available where appropriate. Each 2021 if their article is accepted, unless a waiver or discount has been agreed between the contact author and the Editorial Office.(2) For papers submitted from 1 October 2021, the contact author will be asked to agree to payment of the open-access APC JSR becomes fully open access from the January 2022 issue. Conventional behind-pay-wall articles will no longer be possible, although APC discounts (and sometimes waivers) will still be available.(3) JSR, presenting both challenges and opportunities, ultimately it is made in the spirit of expansion rather than contraction.While this is a major change for JSR’s supporting institutions, and we hope other major facilities will also consider supporting JSR as the journal of choice for papers focused on synchrotron or FEL-based X-ray structural science by taking up an open-access facility arrangement.In this connection, we much appreciate the help of


The International Symposium on the Future ICT (Future-ICT 2019) in conjunction with the 4th International Symposium on Mobile Internet Security (MobiSec 2019) has been held on 17–19 October 2019 in Taichung, Taiwan. The symposium provided academic and industry professionals an opportunity to discuss the latest issues and progress in advancing smart applications based on future ICT and its relative security. The symposium aimed to publish high-quality papers strictly related to the various theories and practical applications concerning advanced smart applications, future ICT, and related communications and networks. Furthermore, it was expected that the symposium and its publications could be a trigger for further related research and technology improvements in this subject matter.The authors of conference papers falling in the Sensors’ scope at this symposium have been invited to submit the extended versions to this Special Issue for publication. Moreover, new papers strictly related to the conference themes have also been welcome. Among the 18 submissions, the guest editors picked 12 high-level contributions for publication after several rounds of review carried out by invited experts.The authors of  introducA direct byte read (DRB) durable hybrid RAM disk (DHRD) scheme for hybrid storage systems, composed of RAM disk and SSD, is presented in . The proThe authors of  advance A census transform with the Haar wavelet (CTHW) method, enhancing the efficiency with a wavelet transform, and an adaptive window census transform (AWCT), to allow the conversion window size adjusted for every point, are introduced in . The sugThe authors of  propose The authors of  propose A secret image sharing solution based on a new maze matrix is presented in . A pair The authors of  propose A second-order Markov model for predicting the frame-level communication failures in an Industrial Wireless Sensor Network (IWSN), based on the preliminary tracks collected in a real-world factory, is introduced in . The proThe authors of  suggest A global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based crowd-sensing policy for distinct geographic regions, useful to determine how many targets are in precise topographical ranges or whether a target is in a definite territory, is introduced in . The appThe authors of  present Finally, the guest editors are grateful to the Editor-in-Chief and the editorial staff of Sensors for accepting their special issue proposal and the kind cooperation, patience, and active engagement.