The field of law has retained its distinctiveness regarding peer review to this day, and reviews are often conducted without following standardized rules and principles. External and independent evaluation of submissions has recently become adopted by European law journals, and peer review procedures are still poorly defined, investigated, and attuned to the legal science publishing landscape. The aim of our study was to gain a better insight into current editorial policies on peer review in law journals by exploring editorial documents  issued by 119 Croatian, Italian, and Spanish law journals. We relied on automatic content analysis of 135 publicly available documents collected from the journal websites to analyze the basic features of the peer review processes, manuscript evaluation criteria, and related ethical issues using WordStat8. Differences in covered topics between the countries were compared using the chi-square test. Our findings reveal that most law journals have adopted a traditional approach, in which the editorial board manages mostly anonymized peer review  engaging independent/external reviewers . Submissions are evaluated according to their originality and relevance , quality of writing and presentation , comprehensiveness of literature references , and adequacy of methods . The main ethical issues related to peer review addressed by these journals are reviewer’s competing interests , plagiarism , and biases . We observed statistically significant differences between countries in mentioning key concepts such as “Peer review ethics”, “Reviewer”, “Transparency of identities”, “Publication type”, and “Research misconduct”. Spanish journals favor reviewers’ “Independence” and “Competence” and “Anonymized” peer review process. Also, some manuscript types popular in one country are rarely mentioned in other countries. Even though peer review is equally conventional in all three countries, high transparency in Croatian law journals, respect for research integrity in Spanish ones, and diversity and inclusion in Italian are promising indicators of future development. Research of the peer review process, “the backbone of modern science” according to The description of law as a science includes a series of interpretations and offers many hypotheses about the meaning and scope of legal concepts, rules, and principles that may be confirmed or rejected through scholarly research. In the academic context legal science could be observed through different manifestations of law, namely “law as a practical discipline”, “law as humanities”, and “law as social science” . All thrAs a body of work produced by academics, legal scholarship is in a remarkable and singular position, because not only is it the way to communicate the science of law but is also an influential and authoritative source of law , 70. It Another peculiarity is related to authorship, as legal researchers usually work alone , 108 andIn general, research evaluation consists of two parts: qualitative  and quantitative . Quantitative “research evaluation” relies on many metric indicators, some of which have prevailed thanks to ease of use, especially in the STEM  areas. One such indicator–journal impact factor (JIF)—has become an indispensable measure the “quality” of research results published in journals. However, because there are many complex and specific issues to consider, none of the numerous discussions between legal academics has yielded an evaluation system that would be globally accepted within the legal community. Instead, two ways to evaluate research have prevailed, although unresolved problems are present in both. The first is the peer review process to which manuscripts are subjected prior to publication, and the second is the ranking of journals based on citations or peer review.Still, there is no commonly recognized transnational assessment system that would make it possible to benchmark and rank law journals and other legal science outputs . Law jouThe field of law has retained its distinctiveness regarding peer review to this day, and reviews are often conducted without following standardized rules and principles. In addition, the number of journals has consistently increased, and more and more papers are published in journals with low level of critical assessment. In most European countries evaluation of legal scholarship relies on both editorial and independent/external peer review. This co-existence reflects the lack of a general agreement about quality indicators and the lack of a lingua franca that would expand the audience and scrutiny beyond national borders , 428. InFor specific branches of law and for topics limited to the national context  the legal scholarly community might be so small that anonymized peer review makes no sense because colleagues would still recognize each other’s work. For this reason, blind peer review is rarely used in some countries. While involving reviewers from abroad might provide a solution, foreign reviewers may find themselves at a disadvantage if they do not know the language or specific national topics , 122. FuLike in other disciplines, peer review in the law domain entails no institutional recognition or reward in terms of academic appointments and promotion. Various studies show that peer review is slow and inefficient, expensive, ineffective , biased, opaque, easily abused, unreliable, and without incentive . Many ofYet, its deficiencies and weaknesses do not diminish its value and relevance. Instead, they call for changes and more innovative approaches . Peer rePublishing in peer-reviewed journals not only benefits researchers for their professional advancement but also improves the image of academic institutions and disciplines, as scholars generally believe that peer-reviewed journals produce quality science . HoweverTransparency is also in the focus of our study. We wanted to see to which extent peer-reviewed Croatian, Italian, and Spanish law journals are transparent in their editorial policies by asking ourselves four questions: where is the their peer review process information located, how are the elements of the peer review process addressed, what evaluation criteria are reviewers asked to follow, and what ethical concerns do law journals mention in their documents on peer review?We began research on various aspects of legal science assessment in 2018 as part of the COST Action ENRESSH–European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and Humanities, which ended in February 2020 . The ideJournals to analyze were selected in two steps. In the first step, we limited our research to law journals from Croatia, Italy, and Spain to cover small and large European countries in which English is not native language, yet publish much of their legal research in English. In the second step we selected journals with a sufficient level of transparency of editorial policy which declare themselves peer-reviewed in publicly available documents.Croatian law journals were selected from the HRČAK Portal of the Croatian Scientific and Professional JournalsThen we ran a pilot study collecting only instructions to reviewers (ItR) and peer review policies (PRPol) but found that ItRs mostly did not contain information on the peer review process, and only a few journals had publicly available PRPol. This is why we had to expand research to all the most recent versions of every publicly accessible document issued by the editorial board mentioning peer review for each journal. The documents were taken from journal or publisher websites, national journal databases, and where no document was found, from the content of a recent issue. Altogether we collected 135 documents in different formats  with information on the journal title, publisher’s country, ISSN, format, language, document URL, and document title . The docThe documents were then categorized by where the information on peer review is located, as follows: instructions to authors (ItA), instructions to reviewers (ItR), peer review policies (PRPol), review forms (RefForm), editorial policies (EdPol), publishing ethics (PubEth), about the journal webpage (AboutJ), other journal webpages (WP), and notes (Note). Were no English version of the document was available we collected information in the local language .The 135 collected documents addressing peer review were analyzed using automatic content analysis, in which each document (case) was the analytical unit. For text-mining, content analysis dictionary, descriptive statistical analysis, analysis of co-occurrences, and qualitative insight we used the QDA Miner5 and WordStat8. Additional variables “country” and “language” were defined in the QDA Miner and used to compare categories between the three countries and English and non-English documents. We did not convert the documents to lowercase, since WordStat is case-insensitive. In addition, we used a list of stopwords in English, Italian, Spanish, and Croatian to exclude the most common words from the analysis .In WordStat we developed a multilevel and multilanguage categorization dictionary in four languages  . Three mWithin the categorization dictionary we defined several categories that contained general terms in four languages irrelevant for analysis, namely, “PR_gen” , “eval_cri_gen” (criteria), “reviewer_gen” , “submiss_gen”  and “ethics_gen”. These general categories served to gain insight into the overall representation of the most common terms in the documents and create rules by which to record the presence of more specific categories and keywords. For example, for the “Title” we created the rule @TITLE , and percentages of documents containing the keyword. Besides considering the frequency of categories in the documents, we also assessed co-occurrences of categories, and their relation to each other within documents. Moreover, the keyword-in-context (KWIC) feature, displaying the original content and the keyword’s position, added the qualitative aspect to the analysis.Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the data, and comparisons between the groups were analyzed with chi-square test. A Information on peer review is scattered across various types of documents issued by the journal. Most information was found in the instructions for authors, editorial policies, and web pages describing the journal, usually under the link ‘About journal’ . We alsoAmong the 135 documents, 69 were in English , 30 in Italian, 17 in Spanish, and 19 in Croatian.The top three categories are represented as follows: “PR evaluation” with 3,174 mentions , “PR process” with 1,290 mentions , and “PR ethics” with 478 mentions .In order to find out what organizational and quality elements of the “PR process” are addressed in the documents, we analyzed three aspects: involvement of editorial and other boards and committees in the process, the transparency of identities during the peer review, and preferred characteristics of the reviewers. Accordingly, the “PR process” category in the dictionary includes three subcategories represented differently in the corpus of the collected documents : “GovernThe journal’s governance could be defined by journal owner , publisher, or journal. It usually involves different boards, committees, and councils with various duties and responsibilities. When it comes to the bodies that manage the journal, there is no uniform terminology in a particular language, nor are there uniform roles and responsibilities related to the peer review process. The most considerable differences in terminology were recorded in Italian journals, less in Spanish, while Croatian journals were uniform regarding the used terminology in both languages.The main pillars of the journal’s governance are editor-in-chief, editorial board, and advisory board, responsible for the journal’s mission and composed of renowned experts in the fields covered by the journal. Their full names, affiliations, and contact information are usually given on the journal website. Members of the editorial board are primarily responsible for selecting submitted manuscripts for publication. Some journals may require additional assessment by members of the advisory board, which supports the editorial board in academic duties. The journal may also have a board of reviewers and a steering committee.The editorial board comprises “renowned experts in the fields covered by the journal”  or “university professors and researchers, magistrates and well-known lawyers” . Additionally, members of the editorial board should have “research skills, proved and acknowledged by their active and regular participation in the assessment processes of leading national and foreign publications, experience in managing and editorial tasks in other scholarly journals; and full availability in the performance of their duties” . The editorial board is responsible for “keeping the editorial line of the journal and for adequately running the manuscript selection process” , including the peer review process. “Journal’s ‘management approves a list of evaluators external to the bodies of the journal, made up of Italian and foreign scholars particularly qualified in the field of study, whose inclusion in the list can be proposed by each member of the management” .In most law journals, the editor-in-chief and editorial board check whether the submission fits the journal’s scope and its overall quality. The manuscripts whose quality is low or outside the scope may be rejected without external review. Those that pass this first step are sent to external reviewers. When reviewer reports disagree or additional opinion is needed, the editorial board can send the manuscript to another reviewer. Once the editorial board has all reviews, it makes one of the following decisions and communicates them to the author(s): accept without revision, accept with revisions, or reject. The distinction between minor and major revisions was noted in only a few Croatian and Spanish journals.If appointed, the advisory board usually monitors the development of the journal, suggests new topics and special editions, evaluates journal’s yearly performance, and submits comments, proposals, and complaints to the editor-in-chief, editorial board, or journal owner. Some law journals ask members of the advisory board to make the initial assessment of submitted manuscripts in terms of quality and fitting the journal scope: “All manuscripts are evaluated, first, both by the editors-in-chief and one or more members of the advisory board.” . Members of the advisory board can also assist in checking and verifying substantially revised manuscripts in terms of journal requirements and suggestions given by external reviewers. Instead of “advisory board” some journals  use the term “scientific board” to describe similar roles and responsibilities.Under the “Governance” category, we identified three governing instances involved in the peer review process: the “Editorial board” , “Editor-in-chief” , and the “Advisory board” . The steering committee, board of reviewers, and other boards, councils and committees are referred to in less than 2% of the documents.The ‘ID transparency’ category, which includes information about peer review being single-blind, double-blind, or open, was referred to 332 times across 104 documents (77%), and all of them spoke about anonymized peer review. “Double-anonymized” peer review was mentioned in 50 documents (37%) and “Single-anonymized” in 21 documents (16%). The single mention of open peer review (visible identities), not represented in In our study, reviewer’s “Independency” was the most represented subcategory in the “Reviewer” category , followed by “Competencies” . A deeper look into the documents reveals that reviewers are sometimes recruited from advisory, scientific, reviewer, or even editorial boards. Some journals recruit “external academics not belonging to the editorial board”  or “experts in the field external to both to the Editorial Board and the Advisory Board” . When declared, “independence” most often means independence from a journal and its bodies and less often from an institution or publisher. Less represented are keywords describing reviewer’s “Objectivity” . Two reviewers per manuscript are the prevalent model , and “Three and more” are less common [ and  respectively]. Even though a reviewer is expected to keep manuscript information and ideas confidential in closed and blinded peer reviews , referenTypically, manuscript evaluation relies on specific journal criteria and refers to peer review outcomes, represented accordingly by the categories “Evaluation criteria” and “Peer review outcome” . The catLaw journals welcome a variety of “genres”, and review practices differ with manuscript types. In some law journals all submissions undergo peer review, and in others only manuscripts with scientific content are sent to external reviewers. Subject to peer review are usually scholarly articles, professional articles, preliminary communications, review articles, essays, case comments/notes, and legislative comments/notes. Peer review is not always mandatory with regional observations, expert reviews, forums, and conference papers.We included twelve publication types in this category: article , book review, preliminary communication, note, essay, conference paper, review paper, debate, experience, conference review, critical discussion, and comment. The most popular category, “Article” , has two subcategories: “Scholarly article”, which is more common , and “Professional article” . Law journals use the attribute “scientific,” “scholarly,” and “academic” for journal articles interchangeably to denote “the paper which is characterized by originality of conclusions, or which presents previously unpublished original results of scientific research” . “Book review,” “Preliminary communication” and “Note” share a 20% representation, give or take, while “Essay” , “Conference paper” , “Review paper” , and “Debate”  are less common .per se in our categorization dictionary, we did not include ‘Ethics’ in “PR evaluation”. The final number of categories in our “PR evaluation” was seven, as follows: “Relevance”, “Writing and Presentation”, “Design/Concept”, “Method/Statistics”, “Theory”, “Reference to literature”, and “Author reputation”.Journals are dedicated to publishing high-quality articles on legal scholarship that can be read by a large community of practitioners and the general public, and peer review serves to reach these goals. For the review process to ensure quality evaluation, journals should provide clear and complete evaluation criteria to authors, reviewers, and editors, in line with the journal’s scope and mission. To define categories for ‘PR evaluation’, we relied on the Bornmann, Nast, and Daniel study (2008) that identified 572 criteria and grouped them into nine main categories: 1) “relevance of contribution”, 2) “writing/presentation”, 3) “design/conception”, 4) “method/statistics”, 5) “discussion of results”, 6) “references to the literature and documentation”, 7) “theory”, 8) “author’s reputation/institutional affiliation”, and 9) “ethics”. We modified the “relevance” category by adding the “Originality”, “Appropriateness”, “Contribution to practice”, and “Significance” subcategories. To ‘Writing&Presentaton’ we added the “Clarity”, “Accuracy”, “Publication Guidelines”, and “Structure&Layout” subcategories. The last was further divided into “Discussion”, “Title”, “Abstract”, “Introduction”, and “Conclusion”. We also added the “Replicability” subcategory to “Design/Concept”. Being a category The “Evaluation criteria” category was identified in 90% of the documents, including subcategories . The mosOther well-represented categories were “Writing&Presentation” , “References and literature” , and “Methods and Statistics” . Other categories in the “Evaluation criteria” were found in less than 50% of the documents. For example, “Publishing guidelines” were mentioned by 14 documents (25%) only.Peer review outcome in the applied taxonomy contains two categories, “Acceptance”  and “Rejection”  . As mult“The main criteria for acceptance are methodological rigour and consistency, text structure and framework; scientific originality and relevance; the validity of the reasoning supporting the central thesis; accuracy/completeness of sources and bibliography.” .We did not include the concepts of minor and major revisions in our corpus, even though some journals describe the process of manuscript revision exhaustively:“If the manuscript has been accepted with modifications, the authors will have to resubmit a new version of the article, taking into account the demands and suggestions of the external evaluators. If they wish, the authors can also provide a letter to the Editorial Board to indicate the content of the modifications to the article. Articles with important corrections may be sent to the Advisory Board to verify the validity of the modifications made by the author. Depending on the degree of compliance with the requested modifications, the Advisory Board will decide whether or not to publish the article. This decision will be communicated to the author by the director of the journal.” .Legal scholarship has adopted peer review as a cornerstone of modern legal science. It relies on legal experts to deliver objective, constructive, and consistent evaluation intended to help editors make an informed decision and authors to improve their manuscript. Still, peer review can be slow, expensive, inconsistent, biased, unreliable, unable to detect errors, and abused . This, iStudies show that peer review in SSH can be the source of all sorts of biases arising from differences between reviewer’s and author’s affiliation, nationality, language, gender, race, religion, interpretation, ideology, and level of conservatism . In singOur analysis included six ethical issues: conflict of interests, research misconduct, (non)adherence to ethical guidelines, equity/diversity/inclusion (EDI), plagiarism, and confidentiality. The World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) suggests that editors should address conflict of interest as follows:“Conflict of interest exists when a participant in the publication process  has a competing interest that could unduly influence (or be reasonably seen to do so) his or her responsibilities in the publication process .” .Detecting research misconduct, like data falsification or fabrication, could be one of the most challenging tasks for reviewers. However, the burden of upholding the journal’s ethical standards rests on editors’ shoulders, and they often rely on guidelines such as those issued by the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE) or International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).Of the three top categories represented in law journals “Peer review ethics” ranked the lowest . As for the top ranking category, some journals clearly state that it is not acceptable for a reviewer to participate in the same project, to mentor, or otherwise be involved with the manuscript under review.“Reviewers are required not to accept for reading articles for which there is a conflict of interest due to previous collaborative or competitive relationships with the author and/or his/her institution.” .By accepting to review, the reviewers implicitly declare no such conflict of interest.p < 0.05  test, and the threshold of statistical significance was set at p < 0.05 .p = 0.049), Spanish and Italian journals rely more on double anonymized peer review than Croatian ones (p = 0.001), and Spanish journals refer to reviewer independence (p < 0.001) and competences (p = 0.001) significantly more often than the other two countries.The three countries show similarities in the distribution of “PR process” and “PR evaluation” first level categories. However, distribution starts to differ significantly with the second, third, and fourth level categories. Croatian and Spanish journals refer to the editorial board more often than Italian (p < 0.001) and “Preliminary communication” are significantly more relevant to Croatian than to Spanish or Italian journals . As for “Evaluation criteria”, the manuscript’s originality is more relevant to Spanish and Croatian than to Italian journals (p = 0.014). In terms of “PR outcome”, acceptance dominates in Croatian and Spanish journals (p = 0.004) and rejection in Spanish journals (p < 0.001).The “PR evaluation” category shows that publication types “Article” (p = 0.049).Ethics too seems to be closer to the heart of Spanish law journals, research misconduct in particular (p = 0.001), “Rejection” (p = 0.002), and “Relevance” (p = 0.004) subcategories (Between the documents in English (69) and those in national languages , statistically significant differences were recorded in the “Article”  peer review as the necessary guarantee of the journal’s highest scientific quality. Despite increasing demands for open peer review as one of the core principles of open science, the editors of the law journals in our sample all prefer the blinded option. Similar to the Some journals in our sample require authors to anonymize their manuscripts before submission and remove all identifying information, including references to the institution or project the manuscript is associated with, personal information in the file title or file properties, and bibliographic references which may identify the authors. Some journals even ask reviewers to contact the editorial board if they learn author identity by chance. We also noticed that some journals misinterpret double-anonymized peer review as the one in which two reviewers do not know each other’s identity. One journal in our sample misinterprets ‘open peer review’ as a single-anonymized peer review, because author identity is not hidden.As a rule, law journals in our sample expect that reviewers are competent experts in the subject matter of the manuscript they are invited to evaluate, but not all invite independent/external reviewers. External review is more often requested by Spanish and Italian than Croatian journals. Also, only certain types of manuscripts are subject to peer review. Some law journals list types of manuscripts that are not sent to external review, and these are usually book reviews, doctoral dissertations, and conference papers. Instead, such manuscripts are accepted or rejected by the editor-in-chief and/or the editorial board. Such submissions have an additional time constraint of 2 years after the book publication date, conference date, or dissertation defense date, which seem unjustifiably long (who is interested in a conference paper after 2 years?). Surprisingly, some journals in our sample do not require peer review for papers authored by a professor emeritus or a recognized expert in a relevant position such as constitutional judge. Some law journals also seem to depart from their proclaimed peer review policies in practice.Editors of smaller and less prestigious journals seem to rely more heavily on reviewers to categorize submissions by type, but the final decision remains with the editorial board. Such practice is common in Croatian journals. Once the paper is published, its category will be listed in the heading and table of contents. Decisions on manuscript type are not relevant only for journals but also for authors and their academic careers and could significantly impact journal metrics. Different types of papers are evaluated differently by academic institutions in terms of career advancement, which may be the main reason why editors ask reviewers to assist them in this matter.Ethical issues are undoubtedly under-represented in documents describing the peer review process and editorial policies issued by Italian, Spanish, and Croatian law journals. Although it is essential to disclose possible competing interests that might prevent a reviewer from providing a fair and unbiased peer review, only one-third of the documents mention conflict of interests, and all other ethical concerns are even more neglected, although it is crucial for reviewers to remain unbiased towards author nationality, religious or political beliefs, gender, ethnicity, or geographical origin. Some journals pursue balanced gender representation in their editorial boards and reviewer pools. Low representation of research misconduct  in policy documents may suggest that this is not an issue in legal scholarship as opposed to some other disciplines like biomedicine. This assumption, however, is yet to be verified or dismissed. Even so, editors of law journals should do more to check manuscripts for similarity and to preserve confidentiality.There are several internationally prominent publishing and ethical guidelines created to improve the quality of scholarly publishing such as the EASE Guidelines for Authors and Translators of Scientific Articles to be published in EnglishThanks to statistical analysis we have observed some significant differences in trends between the three countries. For example, Italian journals refer to the editorial board in their peer review documents far less often than the journals from the other two countries. One reason may be that peer review in these documents is addressed separately, while Croatian and Spanish journals tend to put both review and editorial roles together in the same document. We also noticed that, although journals in all three countries prefer traditional anonymized peer review, Croatian journals refer to author, reviewer, or editor anonymization significantly less often. Spanish journals also seem to hold reviewer independence and competence significantly more dear than Croatian journals.Interesting differences were also observed in the “publication type” category. Croatian journals mention original scientific papers in their documents much more often than the journals from the other two countries. The difference is even more significant in preliminary communications, which Italian and Spanish journals do not mention at all in their documents. This may be owed to the journal subsidy evaluation criteria issued by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education, which favor original scientific papers, review papers, and preliminary communications.Croatian and Spanish journals insist on the originality of submitted manuscripts much more than Italian journals. Such manuscripts must not be previously published and must provide an original contribution to the field of law. The high prevalence of this term may arise from cultural distinctions, as what is termed an “original scientific work” in Croatia is simply termed a “research article” or simply an “article” in English-speaking countries.Mentions of manuscript acceptance are significantly less frequent in Italian law journals, while mentions of manuscript rejection are significantly more frequent in Spanish journals. Spanish journals also refer to research misconduct, including fabrication, falsification, and manipulation of data and scientific fraud significantly more often than Croatian and Italian journals.Although we found statistically significant differences for three categories  between documents in English and local languages, this does not mean that internationally oriented journals , have adopted more advanced and globally accepted standards and peer review policies than local journals. Finally, the most important question is how to improve peer review in law journals. Some progressive ideas and experiments have already been described in the cited literature. Peer review can also be improved through contributions of editors to discussions about publishing and ethical standards, standardization of the peer review process in particular. A step further would be to make peer review open (unblinded and/or public), to incentivize and reward reviewers, to train editors and reviewers, and to provide a platform for efficient communication between authors, reviewers, and editors.In legal science, peer review is considered the guardian of publication quality, or at least “the worst way to assess research, except for all the others” . Our stuOur general finding is that law journals in our sample prefer double-blind peer review managed by the editorial board and require a high level of expertise from reviewers. Traditional approach is also characteristic for all other elements and there is little room for innovative approaches. Criticizing anonymous peer review in great many scholarly journals from all disciplines, the editor of the British Medical Journal once argued that “a court with an unidentified judge makes us think immediately of totalitarian states and the world of Franz Kafka” . While wWe were not surprised by the great variety of genres (article types), as legal scholars publish both peer-reviewed scholarly papers and several shorter and less formal types of articles specific to the field of law that are valued by their colleagues, but in view of this variety we were somewhat surprised to find that most law journals value manuscripts by relevance , writing and presentation, and exhaustive and accurate referencing.In terms of publication ethics, most law journals address conflict of interests, while other aspects such as transparency, plagiarism, best practices, bias, and research integrity are less represented and deserve more attention in future research. Law journals have yet to tackle more complex ethical issues specific to different areas of law. The most advanced in that respect are the Spanish journals.Future research should also address other issues raised by our findings, such as the lack of diversity in editorial procedures across countries and reluctance to adopt innovative approaches to peer review. In fact, our findings could serve as an incentive to law journals to make their editorial policies more transparent and comprehensive. Future research could also compare actual review practices with the declared ones through qualitative evaluation of various stakeholders in the editorial process, including editorial boards, managing editors, publishers, authors, and reviewers.With the multilingual peer review taxonomy developed for this research, it is also possible to include journals/documents from other countries and languages and increase the corpus to obtain more reliable and statistically more relevant analysis.Our analysis is limited to publicly available documents and therefore does not provide a more comprehensive picture that would include some closed commercial law journals and their practices. Furthermore, it is possible that some journals included in this study have restricted access to more detailed information on peer review (such as instructions to reviewers) to reviewers who have accepted their invitation to review submissions. Some journals provide instructions to reviewers and peer review policy with evaluation criteria only through their editorial management systems, and these documents are not publicly available on journal websites.Another limitation may be the design of our categorization dictionary. Is it intuitive and comprehensive enough? We could not find any validated instruments for our study besides the STM Standard Taxonomy on Peer Review, which is focused on four elements of the process  and on peer review evaluation criteria published by . AlthougAnother limitation could be that we used the number of mentions, documents, and shares in the total sample as a proxy for keyword relevance, which could be an imperfect solution for our corpus consisting of a small number of relatively short documents and could have affected our statistical analysis. Our future research will therefore expand to law journals from other countries.


BJUI Compass, I want to give a shout‐out to middle authors of our manuscripts. Obviously, we need first authors to take the lead on collecting data and writing up a project and we need last/senior authors for guidance, design and funding. But we often need strong contributions from middle authors who recruit patients to studies, assist in design/execution of trials/studies, and provide critical editorial work for drafting manuscripts. I was inspired to write this editorial from two different experiences. On the academic front, my research team had a manuscript reviewed by a journal and offered major revisions. They were tough ones—requiring additional analyses and statistical work. One of our strategies for revisions was to invite another urologic oncology fellow to the team to give us a fresh look at the manuscript and help us with the revision steps and getting the paper not only revised but back to word limits. The revised version completed peer review and is now published.For the May 2021 issue of “You have one good chance to make a good first impression.”Another point of inspiration came from a recent trip I made with my family—yes, a trip during pandemic times! Many of the photographs I’ve published with this editorial series were from pre‐pandemic academic trips—I have a large inventory, but in theory could run into slim pickings if this pandemic keeps dragging on. Our family loves to ski at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and rather than sit out another season, we made the journey with a long drive from Houston to Wyoming—a solid full 2 days of driving each way (I’m not quite ready for aeroplanes). In addition to the challenging skiing at Teton Village, another opportunity for winter sports is snowmobiling in Yellowstone national park—famous for its geysers and multiple volcanic activities. The whole park is actually a giant volcanic caldera—last erupted over 630,000 years ago but in theory could blow again. In Figure BJUI Compass:To the Journals … We have two nice reviews in this issue. The paper by Aluwini et alTo the Clinic … We have three clinical utility papers for your interest—focused efforts on prostate cancer pathology correlates to outcomes,To the Drawing Board … We have two papers in this section. Wei et alTo the Future … Rounding out our issue is an innovation themed paper from Silagy et al.Figure


The Northwestern team is honored to follow in the footsteps of Johns Hopkins and the NIH, Duke and the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and many prior esteemed boards. Dr. Rexford S. Ahima, the outgoing Editor in Chief, skillfully guided a midterm leadership transition from Dr. Gordon F. Tomaselli, and during this time, Dr. Kathleen L. Collins expertly navigated JCI Insight to full editorial autonomy at the University of Michigan. The journal family of JCI and JCI Insight carries a strong reputation of the highest-quality science in a broad range of disease-relevant biology. In a nutshell, the JCI works. Yet the JCI can be improved, just as the brilliant scientist Shuri from Marvel’s Black Panther continued to improve the wonders of Wakanda.As I assume the editorship of the JCI was born in 1924, a time when biomedical science was embryonic. The first papers published in the JCI described blood gas content during pneumonia and the specific gravity of urine , including abstracts describing how to culture vaccine virus and features of recurrent hay fever, reinforcing the consistent theme of the scientific inquiry of human disease (The  the JCI . In thatJCI published more work that relied on experimental nonhuman animal models, to the degree that some questioned whether the JCI was still publishing human clinical investigation. The use of genetically engineered models revolutionized our molecular understanding of countless physiological processes, but at times, these findings may have been lost on clinicians and may not have always accurately reflected human disease. I am delighted to report there is now increasing presence of human investigation in the JCI, and this is an area we hope to expand even more because the time is right. The availability of human clinical data has never been greater, and new methods and tools to explore human pathophysiology are being developed each day.Moving through the near-century-long history of the Journal, the JCI is broadly interested in human investigation that defines disease processes, from rare to common. With expanded ability to phenotype and genetically profile, rare-disease or even “n of one” studies can uncover entirely new and relevant pathways of disease. At the other end of the spectrum, there is great science coming from large data sets containing human health information — from electronic health records to deidentified “omic” data sets. “Big data,” parsed by human or artificial intelligence, can frame exceedingly good questions. The JCI seeks papers making novel observations and/or testing hypotheses derived from use of human data, cell, or animal modeling. The Journal will continue to publish papers using translationally relevant, genetically engineered models, since these remain a rigorous means of demonstrating fundamental in vivo mechanisms. At the core of the JCI is the mission to explain human disease phenomena in a rigorous and reliable manner. Testing of hypotheses may utilize genetic or pharmacological methods and, in so doing, establish therapeutic pathways, and the model systems can be human cells, organoids, or nonhuman cells or organisms. As scientists, we are driven to understand how things work. As disease biologists, we use pathology to define mechanisms and experimentally intervene to correct the underlying defects. Now at the dawn of therapeutic gene editing, a method we have had for less than 10 years, so many things are possible for the future of medicine. We want to see these papers in the JCI.The JCI, the science will be fairly weighed, no matter who submits it and no matter where they come from.Scientists and physician-scientists come in all shapes and sizes, from a range of cultural and educational exposures, and this diversity helps us be better scientists. Photographs documenting the ASCI’s early history are notable for their homogeneity and often conveyed the message that only those with a specific social and educational upbringing were welcome. So many creative minds did not have the opportunity to become scientists. Although much work remains in order to improve diversity in science, many inroads have been made in the ensuing decades, and we now recognize great science can be found in all corners of the world. Moreover, reflecting the changing demographics in the United States, the younger generation of scientists is more likely to hail from diverse socioeconomic, cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. This diversity brings new points of view and new solutions to challenging biomedical problems. At the same time, the experienced investigator often has new thoughts and approaches that derive from a lifetime of experience. At the after a manuscript’s initial submission to have their findings accepted for publication. Two years is too long. For investigators at all stages and especially trainees, important discoveries should appear in the peer-reviewed public domain more quickly. I hope to shorten the review/revision process by clarifying instructions to authors and making earlier decisions about whether a manuscript fits the mission of the JCI. I would like to avoid overburdening reviewers while ensuring that the published data sit at the right intersection of novelty, impact, and accuracy. In 2022, we plan to update guidance to reviewers about our expectations.As incoming Editor in Chief, an author, and a mentor, I am sensitive to how long manuscripts remain in the submission, revision, and re-revision process. We probably all know authors who endured 2 or more years of work JCI and expand the impact of the JCI’s featured science. The JCI has been an “open-access” journal since 1996, when the Journal first appeared online, publishing all research outside a paywall and available to anyone, whether that is your colleague, competitor, a potential investor, your patients, or even your parents. In 2022, the JCI became Gold Open Access, so that all content is available without charge to the user or their institution. We seek to publicize the work in the JCI more effectively so that your work is better seen, understood, and appreciated. Social media platforms promote scientific dissemination, and publicly available links to open-access material brings greater visibility. The global pandemic reduced conventional face-to-face scientific exchange, yet it markedly expanded electronic information exchange through preprint servers and social media. Reputable journals such as the JCI can serve as an endorsement of impact and veracity, which can magnify the impression and influence of the findings.We also plan to better measure the impact of the findings published in the JCI’s first issue coincided with the opening of Soldier Field, the home of the Chicago Bears. In 2024, the JCI will mark its 100th anniversary, and here at Northwestern, we will celebrate this century of biomedical science and human investigation. Ultimately, the JCI represents the American Society for Clinical investigation, an academically directed enterprise. We invite you to be part of the process by reading the JCI, reviewing submissions, and choosing the JCI as home for your best work.The website for more details about the Deputy Editors and Associate Editors and their expertise. We plan to highlight exciting work at the interface of scientific disciplines through publication of Editor’s notes, and we expect to diversify authors and reviewers through outreach. The JCI has a robust group of consulting editors, who serve as regular reviewers, and we envision asking some of these individuals to serve as guest editors in the future to further expand our editorial domain knowledge. We acknowledge the JCI’s strong reputation, we know we can do even better, and we hope its readership, authors, and reviewers will help us achieve this goal.Our Northwestern-based editorial team, augmented with colleagues from the University of Chicago, are the stewards of the Journal for the next 5 years. Collectively, our Editorial Board has remarkably broad expertise, drawing from strengths in cardiology, oncology, vascular biology, transplantation, the microbiome, immunology, genomics, human genetics, population science, computational biology, artificial intelligence, gene therapy, clinical trials, and more. Look to our


Despite recent advances in genotyping technologies, cohorts outside of European ancestries are still underrepresented in genome-wide association studies (GWASs). We recognize the scientific imperative of improving diversity in human genomics, and outline the steps we will take as a journal to empower research involving these underrepresented cohorts. As of January 2022, the GWAS Diversity Monitor estimates that 95.82% of all studies curated through the NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog involve cohorts with European ancestry, followed by 3.05% Asian ancestry, and <1% each for African, African American/Afro-Caribbean, Hispanic/Latin American, or other ancestries3. This overarching lack of diversity in genomics research is detrimental to our understanding of human biology, especially when considering that multi-ethnic cohorts can help discover rare variants associated with complex traits1. Humanity is also not a monolith, and certain genetic variants are ancestry-specific, raising the question of whether existing genomic resources accurately reflect the health needs for diverse populations3.Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are an important tool in probing the genetic basis of complex traits and identifying potential targets for disease therapeutics. While the resolution and cost-efficiency of genotyping technologies have steadily improved over time, making it possible to survey more individuals than ever before, the majority of published GWASs still prioritize populations with European ancestryIt is our responsibility as a journal to establish clear policies that will help advance genomics research, especially studies that focus on these underrepresented populations.2021 DNA Day Collection, Communications Biology is proud to publish studies that showcase the importance of genomics research in underrepresented or multi-ethnic cohorts. However, we recognize that authors working with underrepresented cohorts still face many barriers to publication. It is our responsibility as a journal to establish clear policies that will help advance genomics research, especially studies that focus on these underrepresented populations. After careful discussion with an advisory board of expert human genomics researchers, we have developed the following guidelines:We will not assess studies just based on their cohort size. It is unfair to enforce an arbitrary cutoff or range of sample sizes to any GWAS, whole-genome, or whole-exome sequencing study, especially when considering common vs. rare disorders. Instead, we will consider whether the study itself has sufficient statistical power to identify variants at genome-wide significance.4. To that end, we believe that it is an important advance to confirm whether variants discovered in cohorts with European ancestry are also enriched in cohorts with distinct ancestries. Alternatively, we could consider an appropriately-powered GWAS that fails to replicate a variant associated with European ancestry using an underrepresented cohort. Although on a case-by-case basis, we may also consider appropriately-powered GWASs with null results, as these studies may pave the foundation for future meta-analyses.There is biological value in confirming whether significant variants are shared between ancestries. Since launching in January 2018, part of our mission has been to publish “basic research that provides the raw material for future technological and medical breakthroughs”data availability policy typically requires that all raw sequencing data and GWAS summary statistics be made immediately available upon publication. However, we recognize that this policy may be disadvantageous to researchers in developing countries, who often lack the computational resources to quickly analyze datasets. We are willing to consider exceptions to this immediate data availability policy in cases where it is clear that future projects or publications from local researchers will suffer without a period of exclusive access to the underlying datasets.We will be flexible in terms of data availability. Our Author Contributions statement, or provided as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements, similar to the Citation Diversity statements present in some of our publications6. At the same time, we ask that authors establish clear plans to share their findings with local communities post-publication7, and are happy to discuss other ways that our journal platform can disseminate any findings.Diversity behind the bench is also important. In addition to developing diverse genomic resources, it is important for researchers to help train the next generation of scientific leaders. We strongly encourage authors to engage with local researchers and provide trainees with hands-on experience in data collection, analysis, and writing manuscripts or funding proposals. These collaborations should be outlined in the as defined by the World Bank. As editors, we are not involved in the financial process, though we encourage authors to explore our Open Research Funding & Support Services page, which provides additional resources to apply for waivers to article processing charges.We will continue to direct authors to resources for publishing open-access. The cost of open access publishing can be prohibitive for many authors in developing countries, and Springer Nature offers publishing fee waivers or discounts when corresponding authors are based in the world’s lowest income countries, As we highlighted in our Communications Biology must still provide appropriately-powered, well-controlled data that accounts for common experimental confounds. However, we hope that these points will provide clearer guidance to prospective authors, and streamline the path to publication for works involving underrepresented cohorts. We remain excited to provide a home for human genomics research, while improving equity and diversity in genomics resources.It is important to note that these criteria are not meant to be a free pass, but to set expectations of what we would consider in any human genomics study. Any work that is submitted to Communications Biology editorial board are denoted with asterisks (*).We are truly grateful to the researchers who participated in discussions to establish these guidelines, and have listed them below in alphabetical order by surname. Members of the Elizabeth Atkinson, Hélène Choquet*, Chiea Chuen Khor*, and Ambroise Wonkam.


Transplant International is starting the New Year with a new publisher. After a rigorous review process, Frontiers Partnerships was considered the best fit four our mission and was selected based on their high quality performance and their enthusiasm for active engagement in our journal ,2.One key criterion was our determination to move to a Gold Open Access model. The publication of medical science in open access format has been growing over the past decade, on what is a seemingly irreversible path. Indeed, in 2020, the number of papers published in open access exceeded for the first time those accessible by subscription only . We beliOpen access publishing has become a general request from academic institutions to their scholars, but also, and more compellingly, from most funding agencies who require that all scientific outputs resulting from their grants be made freely available to all ,7. Open However, there is much more to open access than the ethics of open science, institutional requests or publication costs. The common goal for all stakeholders in the scientific publication process is to disseminate research and increase its overall quality, acknowledgment, visibility and notoriety. Depending on perspective, a variety of metrics are available. They are useful benchmarking indicators, designed to measure different types of impact. Although often confused, they are not interchangeable. The Impact Factor (IF) is an indicator of where a specific journal is standing in the landscape of scientific titles, but not of a particular article or author. Usage metrics for articles  or the h-index for authors were designed for this purpose . Most ofEvidence indicates that open access publication confers a citation advantage, at least in selected fields of medical science -13. The Social media have emerged to a leading position among the tools of fast dissemination of scientific output ,18. TheyTransplant International is starting this year with a lot of ambitions ,2, that


JBMR Plus as its second Editor in Chief. Its founding Editor, Peter Ebeling, has done a remarkable job establishing the journal in a very crowded publishing environment, selecting outstanding content and overseeing an exponential growth in views and citations. Now that the journal is off the ground, it is my job to steer it even higher and further by adding more value for our authors and readers. Although I cannot say that becoming an Editor in Chief has been a specific career goal for me, I suppose it is in my blood. My father, Arthur Veis, served in this role at Connective Tissue Research for 25 years. I have always enjoyed helping others polish their manuscripts and grants, probably even more than starting my own writing projects “from a blank page.” My last 6 years as an Associate Editor at JBMR has exposed me to many new topics and authors in our field and challenged me to provide constructive criticisms and make difficult decisions. Taking this editorial experience together with my own as an author of primary research and literature reviews, I have firsthand appreciation for journal publications, as well as its current challenges, and I am excited about the opportunity to impact the landscape via my own leadership of JBMR Plus.I am honored to take over the reins at JBMR Plus as a key asset for the ASBMR and the field of bone and mineral research at large. Although JBMR will remain the society's flagship journal, JBMR Plus serves as a different resource for our community. JBMR can publish only a minority of submitted manuscripts. Among those that are not accepted, many still deserve publication. In some cases, although research has been rigorous, the breadth or depth of the findings may not be felt sufficient for JBMR, but the results are sound and the authors are ready to share these results—to support a grant submission, to provide a trainee with a first‐author publication, to describe a smaller story from a departing group member. JBMR Plus meets the need of expanded ASBMR publication space for these shorter, more focused but complete manuscripts. Furthermore, as we recognize the importance of reproducibility in biomedical research, publication of replication studies is essential to the research enterprise, and JBMR Plus will be a home for validation studies or studies that reproduce previous, non‐validated, or still controversial findings. Technical reports, such as those describing ways to utilize cutting‐edge technologies when working with hard and matrix‐rich tissues such as bone, will be welcome, as they can accelerate research in our field, providing critical resources to the bone and mineral community. On the clinical side, we welcome study protocols and case reports, two publication types of practical utility to the bone and mineral research community.First and foremost, I see JBMR, JBMR Plus needs to garner more direct submissions. To attract manuscripts, JBMR Plus will support authors by providing an easy and transparent process for submission and clear communication throughout. I intend to reach out individually to authors of manuscripts transferred from JBMR that appear appropriate for JBMR Plus, outlining a potential path to publication and encouraging inquiries about specifics from authors. By engaging in dialog with an editor at this stage, authors can avoid wasting effort on revisions that are unlikely to impact the ultimate decision and can rather focus efforts where they will be most useful. A similar process will be used for direct submissions. The editors will be very clear about the priority of suggestions made by reviewers for subsequent revisions, and inquiries will be welcomed before submission of a full‐scale revision. Although upfront guarantees on publication cannot be made, clear and open communication can help avoid time‐consuming and costly experiments or analyses that are unlikely to affect the outcome, preserving precious resources for their most effective use.In addition to increasing the number of manuscripts cascading from Another way in which a journal can support its research community is by providing career development opportunities. Along with the deputy and associate editors who will join me in leading this effort, I will work to find creative ways to engage a broad range of researchers at multiple career stages in the publications process. We need an engaged editorial board who will evaluate manuscripts in a fashion that is aligned with the mission of the journal. Our ideal article will not have innumerable figure panels and will be more manageable to review, thus representing a good place to learn the art of a good, constructive review. To this end, we plan to produce webinars about best practices for reviewers and assemble a junior editorial board of senior trainees who will be trained and then utilized as regular reviewers alongside more experienced scientists. Young investigators will also be invited to provide short reviews and perspectives about new techniques, hot topics, and meeting reports. Early and substantive participation in journal publications will provide tomorrow's leaders with valuable experience and insights, cracking open what is often seen as a black box along the path of career progression.JBMR Plus can promote our authors, alongside their work. Therefore, we plan to highlight more of our authors, particularly junior investigators, giving them a platform to share their interests and accomplishments. Manuscripts may be accompanied by short videos explaining a new technique or concept or introducing a newly opened lab. Clinical studies may be paired with video vignettes of related cases, presented by trainees involved in the work or with related interests, providing increased visibility and recognition for the presenter and a valuable learning resource for other trainees. We will also make greater use of social media such as Twitter to engage more readers with our content. As we move forward, I look forward to hearing more ideas to be creative with the array of formats that can be employed for communication of bone and mineral research.In addition to learning how to communicate science, publication of one's work is a way to gain visibility and stature in the field. As a fully online and open access journal, JBMR to update its reporting guidelines to support the highest degree of rigor and transparency, and JBMR Plus will now take advantage of this important work and adopt the same high standards. While implementation of these guidelines requires effort from both authors and editors, the end result is a manuscript that is accessible and transparent, effectively communicating the data within. Although JBMR Plus and JBMR may have unique content profiles, as sister journals of the ASBMR, it makes sense to leverage shared efforts as much as possible.The primary purpose of the journal is to disseminate results from studies—clinical, translational, and basic. The ASBMR Publications Committee recently partnered with the leadership at JBMR Plus as a valuable resource for both authors and readers, to engage an editorial board of emerging leaders, and to help train the next generation of investigators in scientific publishing.In closing, I am excited to take on this new challenge, to serve investigators in the dynamic field of bone and mineral research, in all its forms—in the clinic and the lab and everywhere in between. In this endeavor, I will be joined by two Deputy Editors, Drs. Matthew Drake and Hanna Taipaleenmäki. Drs. Peggy Cawthon and Emma Clark have graciously agreed to stay on as Associate Editors, and they will be complemented by Drs. Noriaki Ono and Gabriela Loots. I am especially looking forward to working with this talented team of editors to advance https://publons.com/publon/10.1002/jbm4.10565.The peer review history for this article is available at


Academic writing is something that health sciences professionals work into their busy schedules. With the rise of open access publishing, the environment has become harder for authors to navigate.Authors have several key concerns when seeking publication: finding journals likely to accept the paper, identifying open access journals, and avoiding so-called predatory journals. Often, they turn to the library for answers.Separately, each concern can be time-consuming and difficult to address. The library wanted to create a user-friendly, reliable, and expedient website to handle these requests, saving the time of both our patrons and library staff.In May 2019, the Cleveland Clinic Floyd D. Loop Alumni Library launched Where to Publish, a website that takes a user's keyword search and returns data to address all of these concerns. Due to content restrictions from Clarivate Analytics, Where to Publish is only available on the Cleveland Clinic local network.Where to Publish was built in the Python programming language. The library chose the Flask web framework because it is lightweight, well supported, and appropriate for small websites.WTForms, a Python module for generating and validating form input in web platforms, receives the user's search terms. The site's core script uses the Biopython module, which includes the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Entrez application programming interface (API), to return journals ranked by the number of times the journal has published papers that fit the search criteria.Where to Publish uses Clarivate Analytics' journal impact factor (JIF) as an indicator of journal quality in two respects. First, JIF is used by Cleveland Clinic in physicians' annual performance reviews. Second, by providing a list of journals with JIFs, Where to Publish ensures that authors will avoid low-quality journals due to Clarivate's rigorous journal selection criteria , especiaSorting by JIF works as follows:A file is created using the NLM's eDirect command line utility that contains all NLM catalog journal records and data fields like ISSNs.For each search, the core Python script passes PubMed IDs to the Web of Science APIs to retrieve papers-level metadata from Web of Science.The script compares the papers' ISSNs against the journal list generated in eDirect and produces tables of journals with and without JIFs.Open access indicators and additional metrics are attached for journals with JIFs.In its first full year, May 2019 to May 2020, Where to Publish was searched 413 times. Usage was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic as Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine students and many residents were sent home in March 2020. Removing similar searches by users as they refined results, the number of unique search topics was 206. If all unique search topics became papers, they would represent around 3.4% of the some 6,000 papers a year published by Cleveland Clinic in Web of Science–indexed journals [Where to Publish is being used by Cleveland Clinic authors to locate relevant journals for publication.Future development includes a revision of the data in the output so it is easier to read and the addition of journals' URLs so users can get to submission guidelines quickly.In addition, the library is working on a separate, bespoke search for authors in nursing and allied health professionals. This interface will use inclusion in CINAHL as a quality indicator. PubMed is no longer supporting its Nursing Journals filter , so usin


VOLUME 284 (2009) PAGES 3021–3027B presented many similar repeating features in thebackground of the top two left immunoblots. The authors state that they disagreewith the Journal’s findings. The authors state that this study was conducted morethan 10 years ago. The age of the work and the lack of availability of data storagemakes it difficult for the authors to retrieve the requested raw data. The authors’offer to replace the images in question with those from another experiment with thesame conditions was declined by the Journal. The authors state that the above issuesdo not affect the interpretation of the data nor conclusions of this research study.The authors affirm that phosphorylation of p27 occurs by activation of the MEK/ERKcascade reported in the article has been confirmed by other independent studies, andthey have indicated that they plan to resubmit their findings elsewhere forpublication.This article has been withdrawn by the authors. The Journal statesthat Fig. 5


Microbial Biotechnology (MBT) – a journal of the Society for Applied Microbiology, the UK’s oldest microbiology society. Since 2008, I served as the Editor of MBT, when it was founded by Kenneth Timmis with the vision of highlighting the ever‐changing interface between biotechnology and microbiology.It is a real privilege for me to be appointed as the Editor‐in‐Chief of ad hoc reviewers. Combined, these devoted and highly skilled individuals have helped to guide strategic direction of the journal, while helping to select and review the world’s top articles for our readers. I look forward to continuing in these endeavours. Some of my earliest efforts have been focused on further enriching the diversity of our editors and to recruit early‐career scientists to our Editorial Board – initiatives that will enable the journal to engage with a wide spectrum perspective (a key requirement for innovation).Today, the journal is renowned in the field thanks to the efforts of past  and present editors , editorial board members and MBT was published bimonthly, but starting in 2022 with this issue, the journal will be published on a monthly basis. Since its beginnings, MBT has published both regular and special issues focused on biotechnology – from basic science to applied microbiology and process development. While regular issues serve to highlight research related to any area of microbial biotechnology, special issues feature articles related to specific themes. MBT will keep this basic structure with regular articles , as well as other articles, such as editorials, opinion articles, Lilliput, web alerts and correspondence. Starting in 2022, a new type of article known as ‘Patent features’ will be added. This article type will provide a venue for industrial scientists to highlight their work, while promoting collaboration between industry and academia.During the first 15 years, MBT publishes visionary papers in the pioneering Crystal Ball Special Issue – these papers highlight the brightest biotech developments across the full spectrum of in silico to applied research. Beginning in 2022, we will begin publishing this issue more frequently, on an annual basis, to provide our readers with even more relevant, future‐focused and visionary ideas.Every other year, MBT will intensify its coverage of Engineering Biology and Synthetic Biology. This focus comes on the heels of the launch of the Synthetic Biology Special Issue in December 2021. This focus will promote multidisciplinary research to create novel, unexpected solutions for the development of eco‐friendly production processes.At our readers’ request, We will continue to work closely with Wiley – our publishing house – to facilitate and streamline the submission, peer‐review and publication process.MBT continues to serve as a vital link between all the various players in the field; (ii) to place the journal as the leading venue for sharing and discussing the advancements in the field; and (iii) to spark innovation and new industrial applications and jobs in this burgeoning area.Combined, these efforts will serve to advance the following goals: (i) to ensure that I look forward to working with you and our community – and to doing so in open and inclusive way. Join me in exploring new ideas, developing skills and in widening our understanding of the exciting and dynamic world of microbial biotechnology.None declared.No funding information provided.


Health Equity invites you to submit your manuscript for publication today!Health Equity include:High visibility, immediate and unrestricted online access to published articlesRigorous and rapid peer reviewEasy compliance with open access mandatesAuthors retain copyrightCitation tracking and inclusion in bibliographic databases — including Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index, Scopus, PubMed Central, among othersTargeted email marketing5% of all open access Article Processing Charges (APCs) are donated to the charity of your choice from the following five charities: UNICEF, National Medical Association, The Humane Society International, Nature Conservancy, and Doctors without Borders.Benefits of publishing with All articles in the Journal are rapidly reviewed and published online within 4 weeks of acceptance, and publish under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license to ensure broad dissemination and participation.www.liebertpub.com/heq to view our Information for Authors.Please visit our website at Editorial or technical questions?Contact Taylor Bowen (heq_eo@liebertpub.com)Visit the Instructions for Authors:www.liebertpub.com/heqSubmit your paper for peer review online:https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/heq


The amount and value of researchers’ peer review work is critical for academia and journal publishing. However, this labor is under-recognized, its magnitude is unknown, and alternative ways of organizing peer review labor are rarely considered.Using publicly available data, we provide an estimate of researchers’ time and the salary-based contribution to the journal peer review system.We found that the total time reviewers globally worked on peer reviews was over 100 million hours in 2020, equivalent to over 15 thousand years. The estimated monetary value of the time US-based reviewers spent on reviews was over 1.5 billion USD in 2020. For China-based reviewers, the estimate is over 600 million USD, and for UK-based, close to 400 million USD.By design, our results are very likely to be under-estimates as they reflect only a portion of the total number of journals worldwide. The numbers highlight the enormous amount of work and time that researchers provide to the publication system, and the importance of considering alternative ways of structuring, and paying for, peer review. We foster this process by discussing some alternative models that aim to boost the benefits of peer review, thus improving its cost-benefit ratio. One of the main products of the academic publication system, the journal article, is a co-production of researchers and publishers. Researchers provide value not only by doing the research and writing up the results as a manuscript, but also by serving as peer reviewers. Publishers provide services of selection, screening, and dissemination of articles, including ensuring (proper) meta-data indexing in databases. Although several careful estimates are available regarding the cost of academic publishing e.g., , one aspIn their peer reviewer role, scientists and other researchers provide comments to improve other researchers’ manuscripts and judge their quality. They offer their time and highly specialized knowledge to provide a detailed evaluation and suggestions for improvement of manuscripts. On average, a reviewer completes 4.73 reviews per year,A manuscript typically receives multiple rounds of reviews before acceptance, and each round typically involves two or more researchers as peer reviewers. Peer review work is rarely formally recognized or directly financially compensated in the journal system . Most universities seem to expect academics to do review work as part of their research or scholarly service mission, although we know of none with an explicit policy about how much time they should spend on it.While peer review work is a critical element of academic publishing, we found only a single estimate of its financial value, which was from 2007. Then, when the global number of published articles was not even half of the present volume, rough estimates indicated that if reviewers were paid for their time, the bill would be on the order of £1.9bn .As a facet of the research process that currently requires labor by multiple human experts, reviewing contributes to a cost disease situation for science. “Cost disease”  refers tThe fairness and efficiency of the traditional peer review system has recently become a highly-debated topic , 7. In tTo estimate the time and the salary-based monetary value of the peer review conducted for journals in a single year, we had to estimate the number of peer reviews per year, the average time spent per review, and the hourly labor cost of academics. In case of uncertainty, we used conservative estimates for our parameters, therefore, the true values are likely to be higher.https://www.dimensions.ai/) which collects and collected articles from 87,000 scholarly journals, much more than Scopus  or Web of Science  [The total number of articles is obviously a critical input for our calculation. Unfortunately, there appears to be no database available that includes all the academic articles published in the entire world. Ulrich’s Periodicals Database may list the largest number of journals - querying their database for “journals” or “conference proceedings” and “Refereed / Peer-reviewed” yielded 99,753 entries. However, Ulrich’s does not indicate the number of articles that these entities publish. Out of the available databases that do report the number of articles, we chose to use Dimensions’ dataset  are ultimately accepted. That is, the articles published represent 55% of all reviewed submissions, indicating that 45% of submissions that were reviewed were rejected. These values are undoubtedly speculative, but they are consistent with Publons’ estimates.Therefore, to estimate the number of peer reviews per year, we used Publons’  formula:www.dimensions.ai). The free version as well as the subscription version of Dimensions currently provide separate numbers for articles, chapters, proceedings, preprints, monographs, and edited books. For the sake of simplicity, our estimate is confined to articles.To obtain these values, we had to estimate the number of peer reviews performed for articles in 2020. For that, we used the numbers provided by the Dimensions portal  are estimated to be globally 4,701,988/55*45 = 3,847,081. Based on these calculations, the total number of peer reviews for submitted articles in 2020 is 4,701,988*3 + 3,847,081*2 = 21,800,126.Publons.com), which as of 6 Aug 2021 indicated that the average length of reviews in their database across all fields is approximately 390 words. This highlights that the average review likely has substantive content beyond a yes/no verdict, but this cannot be converted to a time estimate. A 2009 survey responded to by 3597 randomly selected reviewers indicated that the reported average time spent on the last review was 6 h [Several reports exist for the average time a reviewer spends when reviewing a manuscript. All of these are unfortunately based on subjective reports by reviewers rather than an objective measure. The only thing resembling an objective indication we found was in the Publons dashboard  .Without major reforms, it seems unlikely that reviewing will become more economical, relative to other costs associated with publishing. One reason is that while technology improvements may automate or partially automate some aspects of publishing, peer review likely cannot be automated as easily. However, reducing details that reviewers should check might soon become automated  solicits reviews of preprints that can then be used by journals, including over 70 that have indicated they will consider such reviews.Some savings of this kind have already begun. Several publishers or journals share reviews across their own journals , which A decline in the amount of research conducted, or the number of manuscripts this research results in, would reduce the amount of peer review labor needed. The number of articles being published has been growing rapidly for many decades , 29. SomJournal editors disproportionately request reviews from senior researchers, whose time is arguably the most valuable. One reason for this is that senior researchers on average show up more often in literature searches, and also editors favor people they are familiar with, and younger researchers have had less time to become familiar to editors . With thwww.equator-network.org). This provides a way to divide up the reviewing labor and have some aspects where even students, after some training, can vet aspects of manuscripts. Thus, we are hopeful that after more meta-research on what is desired from peer review for particular research areas, parts of peer review can be done by people who are not experts in the very specific topic of a manuscript but can nonetheless be very capable at evaluating particular aspects of a manuscript .A more substantial increase in efficiency might come from soliciting contributions to peer review from individuals with less expertise than traditionally has been expected. Journal editors traditionally look for world experts on a topic, whose labor is particularly costly in addition to being in short supply and in high demand. But perhaps contributions to peer review shouldn’t be confined only to those highly expert in a field. Evaluating a manuscript means considering multiple dimensions of the work and how it is presented. For some research areas, detailed checklists have been developed regarding all the information that should be reported in a manuscript . It wilIn some cases, performing a peer review can actually benefit the reviewer. In Publons’ 2018 reviewer survey, 33% of respondents indicated that one reason (they could choose two from a list of nine) they agreed to review manuscripts was to “Keep up-to-date with the latest research trends in my field.” (p12 9). If more of such people can be matched with a manuscript, reviewing becomes more of a “win-win”, with greater benefits accruing to the reviewer than may be typical in the current system. Better matching, then, would mean an increased return on the portion of an employer’s payment of a researcher’s salary that pays for peer review. The initiatives that broaden the reviewer pool beyond the usual senior researchers that editors are most likely to think of may have this effect.A limitation of the present study is that it does not quantify academic editors’ labor, which is typically funded by universities, research institutes or publishers and is integral to the peer review process. At prestige journals with high rejection rates, a substantial proportion of (associate) editors’ time is spent desk-rejecting articles, which could be considered wasteful, as rejected articles are eventually published somewhere else. Which also requires additional work from authors to prepare the manuscripts and navigate different submission systems.Additionally, our study’s limitations come from the poverty of the available data. For example, today, no available database covers all scholarly journals and their articles. The rates of acceptance and rejections we used are approximate estimates. The average time spent on reviews likely strongly depends on fields and length of manuscript and we do not know how representative the number we used is of all academia. We could not calculate the cost of review for journal articles and conference papers separately, although they might differ in this regard. The nationality and salary of the reviewers are not published either, therefore, our calculations need to be treated with caution as they have to rely on broad assumptions. Nevertheless, the aim of this study was to estimate only the magnitude of the cost of peer review without the ambition to arrive at precise figures. We encourage publishers and other stakeholders to explore and openly share more information about peer review activities to foster a fairer and more efficient academic world.


Collaboration and diversity are increasingly promoted in science. Yet how collaborations influence academic career progression, and whether this differs by gender, remains largely unknown. Here, we use co-authorship ego networks to quantify collaboration behaviour and career progression of a cohort of contributors to biennial International Society of Behavioral Ecology meetings . Among this cohort, women were slower and less likely to become a principal investigator  and published fewer papers over fewer years (i.e. had shorter academic careers) than men. After adjusting for publication number, women also had fewer collaborators (lower adjusted network size) and published fewer times with each co-author (lower adjusted tie strength), albeit more often with the same group of collaborators (higher adjusted clustering coefficient). Authors with stronger networks were more likely to become a PI, and those with less clustered networks did so more quickly. Women, however, showed a stronger positive relationship with adjusted network size (increased career length) and adjusted tie strength (increased likelihood to become a PI). Finally, early-career network characteristics correlated with career length. Our results suggest that large and varied collaboration networks are positively correlated with career progression, especially for women. At thh-index, have been demonstrated previously across academic disciplines [Positive associations between collaboration and academic research metrics, such as citation impact and ciplines –16. Haviciplines ,17, whilciplines . Furtherciplines ). By shaciplines ,21. Collciplines  (but seeciplines ) and morciplines , publishciplines , and pubciplines ,22 overaciplines ,14,23 buciplines ).Here we borrow concepts from studies testing how sociality relates to fitness and survival in non-human animals to investigate how collaboration patterns may influence career progression. For many species, interacting with peers is a crucial component of lifetime fitness ,27 and lh-index, while collaborating with scientists that themselves were more connected decreased citation impact [Our cohort consisted of contributors to any of three consecutive biennial conferences of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology (ISBE) held in the 1990s. This cohort was ideal because: (i) the field includes researchers working on a diverse range of topics in ecology and evolutionary biology; (ii) multi-authored papers, necessary for the construction of egocentric networks, are the norm ; (iii) nn impact . Howevern impact ), or hav. 2 (a)www.behavecol.com). We chose these three conferences because: (i) they spanned three continents, maximizing the geographical coverage of our sampling; (ii) ISBE conferences at this time attracted most of the active researchers in behavioural ecology and related fields ; and (iii) three decades should allow sufficient time for participants starting their career in the early 1990s to reach PI status (should they have wanted to and been successful in doing so).Our subjects  were contributors to any of the ISBE biennial meetings in 1992 , 1994  and 1996 . ISBE conferences attract researchers in the fields of animal behaviour, evolutionary biology, population biology, physiology and molecular biology (www.scopus.com) as of September 2018. We manually excluded duplicated records and included only contributors who had published at least one paper on a subject relevant to an ISBE conference . Using the ‘bibliometrix’ package [www.api.elsevier.com; see the electronic supplementary material, S2), we downloaded the author list, title, publication year and journal of all publications for all remaining contributors in our dataset. Finally, we applied a series of further restrictions to this dataset to account for variation in publishing practices over time and to allow the construction of meaningful social networks based on a homogeneous cohort . None of our restrictions disproportionately excluded women or men from our final dataset . Lastly, we used the ‘asnipe’ [After inferring the gender (wo/man) of conference contributors from their first name and/or online profile, and recording the continent that they were associated with at the time of their first conference registration, we used R v. 3.5.0  for all  package  in conju‘asnipe’ , ‘igraph‘asnipe’ , ‘interg‘asnipe’  and ‘net‘asnipe’  packages (b)without the focal author). A clustering coefficient could only be calculated for focal authors with more than one unique co-author, but this excluded only five focal authors (two women and three men) from the dataset.For each focal author, we constructed egocentric social networks  based onn = 935 focal authors, gender: estimate ± s.e. = −0.02 ± 0.02, z = −0.91, p = 0.36; first publication year: estimate ± s.e. = −0.02 ± 0.002, z = −8.87, p < 0.001). Therefore, we did not include authorship position in our further analyses.If the author position on papers in our dataset varied by gender , then itR2 > 0.39 and p < 0.001; electronic supplementary material, figure S5.1). To account for these strong and gender-biased relationships between publication number and collaboration behaviour metrics, we regressed each metric in a non-hierarchical model including a main effect of number of publications and its interaction with the focal authors' gender , and then used the mean-centred, standardized model residuals as measures of collaboration behaviour adjusted for publication number (henceforth referred to as ‘adjusted’ metrics) in all further analyses. For example, a focal author with a positive ‘adjusted network size’ score would have more unique co-authors than expected, given their number of publications. Note that this residual regression approach [As expected, productivity differed according to gender (see Results), and all three metrics of collaboration behaviour were significantly correlated with the number of publications We measured the career progression of focal authors in terms of their PI status and career length. The last authorship position usually denotes senior leadership of an independent project in our field , so we cOur definition of career length relied on correctly identifying publications of focal authors, which can become complicated if an author changed their publishing name during their career (e.g. owing to marriage). Unfortunately, there is little published work on how name changes affect indexing services and citation accuracy (but see ), so we  (d) (i)Metrics derived from egocentric networks can suffer from non-independence if individuals occur repeatedly across multiple networks . We dete (ii)We used GLMs (‘lme4’ package ) using tWe then used parametric accelerated failure time (AFT) survival models using the functions survreg  and flen = 708), we ran a further AFT analysis to see how achieving PI status affected future career length  and whether this differed between genders. We assigned a dummy value of 0.5 to eighteen focal authors (eight women and 10 men) that left science in the same year that they became a PI. Excluding these 18 authors from the analysis did not alter conclusions.In (i) , we excluded 163 subjects who left science—i.e. had stopped publishing two or more years before the end of the study period—without ever becoming a PI, and thus had no future prospect of achieving this status . In (i), the event was being a PI, and 64 of 772 focal authors  were censored because they were still in science at the end of the study period yet did not become a PI during this time. One focal individual that achieved PI status in the same year as their first publication was assigned a dummy value of 0.5, as survival models ignore zero values. In (ii) , the event was cessation of publishing, and 642 of 935 focal authors  were censored because they were still publishing within 2 years of the end of the study period. A 2-year cut-off was chosen because the majority (80%) of publication gaps (i.e. years when no papers were published) were shorter than 2 years . For the subset of focal authors that did become a PI ( (iii)n = 935 focal authors), and whether this was dependent on gender. We included gender and its interaction with the metric of interest in these GLMs, and when the interaction was significant, we ran models for each gender separately. When not significant, we re-ran GLMs without the interaction term to derive estimates for the main effects.Given that all three metrics of collaboration behaviour were significantly correlated with one another , we used separate GLMs with a binomial error distribution  to deterUsing AFT models as described above, we then tested whether these metrics correlated with (i) time to become a PI and (ii) career length. We included gender and its interaction with the metric of interest in all AFT models. If the interaction was significant, we re-ran AFT models for each gender separately. When not significant, we re-ran AFT models without the interaction term to derive estimates for the main effects.We investigated the effects of our censoring decisions for all survival analyses. Excluding 93 focal authors  who were classified as PIs according to our definition, but who had a gap between their first and third last-author papers of longer than 10 years , did not qualitatively change results. Considering focal authors to still be active if their last publication was 4 or 6 years before the end of our sampling period, or ignoring publication gaps of up to 6 years, yielded highly comparable results  to our main analysis, where a 2-year publication gap was used as our cut-off for assuming a focal author had stopped publishing. (iv)n = 390 authors; 40% women; 4821 publications), a period of time that encompasses the median time to become a PI for both genders. We used GLMs to test for gender differences in adjusted measures of early-career collaboration behaviour and used AFT models to test how collaboration behaviour metrics, gender and their interaction related to career length, as described above.Lastly, we conducted an analysis to investigate whether a focal authors' collaboration behaviour in their early career was related to their overall academic career length. To produce as consistent a cohort as possible, we only included focal authors who published their first paper within 1 year of first participating at an ISBE conference and calculated collaboration behaviour metrics using papers published during the first 10 years after their first publication [. 3 (a)a). Female focal authors had significantly fewer co-authors , published with their co-authors less frequently , and published with co-authors in more connected groups , compared to male focal authors (table 1b). These differences persisted once we adjusted for gender differences in productivity (table 1c): when compared to male co-authors and given their number of publications, female focal authors had significantly fewer co-authors , published with the same co-authors less frequently  and had more connected co-authors .Publication number and patterns of collaboration differed significantly according to gender . Female table 1n = 935 focal authors, estimate ± s.e. = −0.98 ± 0.16, z = −6.21, p < 0.001; figure 1a): in total 708 focal authors became PI; 63% of women (n = 187) and 82% of men (n = 521). Those female focal authors that did become PIs took 27% more time to do so than did their male counterparts (table 1d and figure 1b). Overall, female focal authors were almost half as likely to remain in academic science as were male focal authors (table 1d and figure 1c) and even after becoming a PI were still more likely to leave academic science than were male PIs (table 1d). Of the 708 focal authors that became PI, 130 subsequently stopped publishing before the end of our study period; 24% of women (n = 44) and 17% of men (n = 86).Gender differences were also apparent in all measures of career progression. Female focal authors were significantly less likely to be a PI than were men  (i)a and figure 2a). Female focal authors were also more likely to be a PI if they had published with the same co-authors more frequently (i.e. higher adjusted tie strength). However, this relationship was non-significant for men (table 2a and figure 2a). Focal authors were more likely to be a PI if they had less connected co-authors (i.e. lower adjusted clustering coefficient), but this relationship was not significantly different between genders (table 2a and figure 2a).Focal authors were more likely to be a PI if they had more co-authors (i.e. higher adjusted network size), but this relationship was not significantly different between genders (table 2 (ii)b and figure 2b; electronic supplementary material, figure S9.1A,B). However, focal authors who published more frequently with the same co-authors took significantly less time to become a PI, although the effect size was again not significantly different between genders . An increase of one unit in adjusted tie strength score decreased the time to become a PI by approximately 18%. Having more connected co-authors increased the time taken to reach PI status for both genders . An increase of one unit in the adjusted clustering coefficient score increased the time to become a PI by approximately 6%.There was no significant relationship between the number of co-authors a focal author had and how long they took to become a PI for either gender c and figure 2c; electronic supplementary material, figure S9.2A,B), with the effect size being 62% larger for women compared to men. Publishing with the same co-authors more frequently significantly decreased career length , but the effect size was not significantly different between genders. An increase of one unit in adjusted tie strength decreased career length by 17%. Having many co-authors repeatedly appear together on a focal author's papers also significantly shortened career length and was also not significantly different between the genders . An increase of one unit in the adjusted clustering coefficient score decreased the chance of continuing to publish by approximately 23%.All three measures of collaboration behaviour significantly correlated with career length, but in different ways. Focal authors with more co-authors were more likely to continue publishing than focal authors with fewer co-authors d). Publishing with more unique co-authors, with the same co-authors more frequently, and with less connected co-authors in early career all corresponded with a longer career overall. However, unlike in the complete dataset, there were no gender differences in either the collaboration behaviour metrics , or in their relationship with career length (d).When we recalculated the collaboration behaviour metrics of a subset of focal authors based only on publications from the first 10 years of their career, we found very similar patterns between collaboration behaviour metrics and career length d. Publisr length d.. 4It is now well established that collaboration behaviour correlates with scientific impact and funding success –15,59, iIf collaborative behaviours have causal effects on academic career trajectories, why might the effects be stronger for women than men? One explanation may be that collaborators represent a more important resource for female researchers than they do for male researchers. Women can often be judged more than men on the basis of whom they work with , and whiA second explanation is that large, strong co-authorship networks with low connectedness may allow at least some projects to continue during periods of hardship for individual team members , and theOur study was, by necessity, correlational and it is possible that collaboration behaviour and career progression are not linked causally. For example, putative causes of gender differences in collaboration behaviour may also explain differences in career progression. Women can have less confidence or self-esteem than male academics , which cAlthough collaboration has been suggested to have only minor benefits for citation impact in ecology compared to the physical sciences ( but see The gender-biased challenges of transitioning to mid-career are now receiving increasing attention as the ‘leaky pipeline’ continues to leak in biology . Indeed,Click here for additional data file.