Communications Medicine published its first articles. Here, we reflect on how far the journal has come, and share the goals that we will work towards in coming years.We are celebrating a year since  It is time to celebrate the achievements of the last twelve months, and to thank our authors, reviewers, readers, editorial board members, and all other colleagues for their trust and support during our early days as a journal.We launched in June 2021 with the aim of becoming an inclusive open-access journal for high-quality research, reviews, and commentary of interest to specialist audiences across all clinical, translational, and public health research fields. In the last year, we have received over 500 submissions from authors in 47 different countries, and published over 100 articles, both research and commentary, across many areas of our broad scope. These have already accrued more than 200 citations and have been downloaded over 300000 times, which is testament to how well the communities we work with have responded to this new journal.“During this year we remained adaptable, innovative, and true to the ethos presented at launch—to be an inclusive open-access medical journal that aims to facilitate and disseminate discovery that will promote health for all and improve the lives of those experiencing or living with disease.”collection of article highlights that showcases some of the fascinating work we’ve published since launch.Our first year has been undoubtedly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a unique time to launch a journal covering medicine and public health, and a privilege to contribute to the topical discussions and shared knowledge on SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19. As a sign of the times, many of our articles focus on SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, from novel ways to detect SARS-CoV-2, to understanding the clinical pathology of COVID-19 and assessing prognosis, to forecasting how the pandemic might evolve in different scenarios, or identifying factors that influence vaccine hesitancy. We have also published on other topics of interest for public health and epidemiology, such as antimicrobial resistance, and in many areas of clinical and translational research, such as oncology, digital pathology, and neurology. Our editors and editorial board members have put together a editorial board, 11 countries are now represented in our board and we have achieved an almost even gender balance.Speaking of editors, our editorial team has grown over the year. We welcomed two new in-house editors and our editorial board went from 9 members at launch to 27 (and growing), who now cover a broader range of research fields and medical specialties. In keeping with our aim to be an inclusive journal with a diverse Viewpoint, to facilitate our aim of fostering discussion and collaboration between fields and giving a voice to all stakeholders; you can read more about it here. We have published our first Q&As during Pride month to give voice to important health-related topics for the LGBTQ + community. We have also started to consider Registered Reports, an article format that is peer reviewed before and after the analyses have been performed. Acceptance is not dependent on the results obtained, so this article has the potential to not only ensure a more robust study design, but also to minimise publication and research bias. We have also joined a pilot Registered Reports Funding Partnership with Cancer Research UK (CRUK), alongside 12 other journals and supported by researchers at the University of Bristol; you can find more about this pilot here.During this year we remained adaptable, innovative, and true to the ethos presented at launch—to be an inclusive open-access medical journal that aims to facilitate and disseminate discovery that will promote health for all and improve the lives of those experiencing or living with disease. We’ve introduced a new article type, the Looking forward, our goals are threefold. First, to become a trusted open access journal for all communities across the breadth of our scope for work with appeal to a specialist audience. Second, to contribute to building trust in medical research, by supporting public and patient participation, and by setting a high standard for research reporting, transparency and reproducibility. Third, to continue fostering dialogue across the different communities in our scope, while keeping diversity, equity, and inclusion at the centre of what we do. We will collaborate closely with our editorial board and we will use every opportunity to innovate in ways that advance these goals.Communications Medicine call for papers for a guest-edited collection—watch this space! We will also be partnering with other Nature Portfolio journals in their calls for papers, the first example of which is being part of the Nature Medicinecall for papers on clinical cancer research alongside Nature Communications.In the near future, we will focus on learning from the communities that we already work with, and on expanding to work with new communities. To support this, we will surface important areas of discussion in our commentary articles, and we will launch the first Communications Medicine as a potential venue to publish your research, please do get in touch. You can request a ‘Meet the Editors’ session, email one of us, or find us on Twitter (@CommsMedicine).We are very interested in hearing from all clinicians and scientists working in areas under our broad scope, with a special emphasis on work that is aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), SDG3 and SDG5 in particular, that we are committed to help facilitate. If you would like to learn more about Our first year has been a thrilling journey, and we cannot wait to see what the second one has in store!


GigaScience and others. Although still nascent, this practice lays important groundwork for citation types that can cover non-traditional scholarly output, such as software tools and key reagents; giving authors of various types of tools scholarly credit for their contributions.Research resource identifiers (RRIDs) are persistent unique identifiers for scientific resources used to conduct studies such as reagents and tools. Inclusion of these identifiers into the scientific literature has been demonstrated to improve the reproducibility of papers because resources, like antibodies, are easier to find, making methods easier to reproduce. RRIDs also dramatically reduce the use of problematic resources, such as contaminated cell lines. The addition of RRIDs into a manuscript means that authors have to look up information that they may have previously omitted or confront information about problems that may have been reported about their resources. The use of RRIDs is primarily driven by champion journals, such as  RRIDs were intended to be used in the methods sections of manuscripts or materials tables, since these were considered to be the least disruptive sections for authors to update.RRIDs are not for citing ideas or data since well-developed citation systems already exist for that. Instead, RRID numbers are created by repositories that distribute the research resource, such as Addgene for plasmids, or the National Xenopus Resource for transgenic frogs. RRIDs can also come from registries that govern a resource type, such as the RRIDs for organisms are largely based on the stock center codes that authors already use to order animals or other resources. Stock centers and other shared facilities are usually supported by grants and need accurate and complete information about the stocks and services they provide for continued grant support. The use of RRID numbers for organisms enables stock centers to track the organisms they distribute a little more easily because journals remind authors to use RRIDs. RRIDs also function as a quick check for authors to ensure that the information in the manuscript matches the information from the stock center.RRIDs can also be generated by the model organism databases (MODs), which in many cases are the epicenters of the organism community. The MODs tend to focus their efforts on gathering key information about genetics, linking genotypes to phenotypes, and on standardizing  the naming conventions for organism literature, in order to improve our understanding of health and disease. MOD identifiers are omnipresent in the scientific literature, but these are generally not RRIDs for stocks, which has been a source of some confusion, so authors are asked to consult the RRID portal to determine the appropriate identifier for their organism; so, they do not inadvertently identify a transgenic insertion instead of the organism itself. Ideally, MOD-approved organism names, with links to key genomic and phenomic features would be consistently listed by all stock centers as well as all commercial organism suppliers, giving authors of manuscripts the same information across multiple platforms reducing author confusion as they report on their findings.At its surface, the question of which resource was used is so basic that it should take no time to answer; unfortunately in practice, this very simple question is difficult to answer because authors tend to refer to research resources with less than sufficient information . In caseAntibodies appear especially vulnerable as companies remove catalog listings when stocks have run out , have been discontinued, or fail some validation test. While many antibody reagents last in deep freezers for decades, the companies that created them may be long gone. Indeed, one of the first antibodies that was ever cited with an RRID in a 2014 paper was a Chemicon antibody, a company that was acquired by Millipore in 2006; but according to google scholar (April 2022), Chemicon continues to be cited in hundreds of recent papers. It should be noted that the name of the company that offered these products has changed at least 6 times through mergers and acquisitions over the last decade. Many of the original Chemicon antibodies are distributed by Merck under the Millipore Sigma brand. In the absence of an extant company with a policy about maintaining sunset records, it is unknowable which antibody was used in a paper.Antibody problems have long been opprobriated as a major driver of irreproducibility  and manyincf.org), where 25 journal editors discussed resource-related problems at the Society for Neuroscience conference in New Orleans in 2012. Editors were in disbelief that resources were being cited without sufficient information. The second meeting was a two day workshop at the National Institutes of Health, thanks to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), where consensus was reached that, at least, antibodies were problematic and a rough agreement was reached for what should be done (asking authors for RRIDs). In the fall of 2013, during the Society for Neuroscience conference, a smaller group met thanks to Wiley, which established a timeline and goals for the three month pilot project. And in February of 2014, 25 journals started asking authors to provide RRIDs. However, editors did not want to add instructions to 25 different databases, so RRIDs had to be available via a single web portal that authors could be sent to and the process should not put undue stress on the authors. Although there was also no dedicated funding for the project, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney (NIDDK) information network funded the creation of the SciCrunch portal (https://scicrunch.org/) and data sources, including the antibody and tools registry. The organism stock centers were already available via the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF). The goal of the pilot project was to see whether authors could put RRIDs into manuscripts and whether the information was correct.RRIDs came into existence as a three month pilot project started by a group of journal editors, program officers from the National Institutes of Health, and a small number of informaticists. The  first meeting was funded by the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility . One of the last journals to come on board from the original 25 was Neuron, yet the journal [In February of 2014 two journals began asking authors to add RRIDs into their manuscripts. Other journals came on board later after some cajoling, staggering the start time for the 3 month pilot project. The first 100 papers with RRIDs were published within a few months of the pilot starting, and the results showed a dramatic shift in the ability to identify research resources . At that journal  spearheahttps://web.expasy.org/cellosaurus/). This came at the request of Cell editors and our NIH  program officer, who knew that problematic cell lines littered the literature, and hoped that one way to combat the issue would be to confront authors with validation information before they published. In 2016, Cellosaurus joined the RRID initiative - adding this important resource to the RRID umbrella. After the first ∼500 papers with cell line RRIDs were published, Babic et al. [https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biosamples/docs/faq#_why_are_some_biosamples_linked_to_rrids). Unlike the initial sources, the additions to the RRID project included social media campaigns, and both the authority for the resource and the RRID portal updated their websites in close collaboration, asking authors to cite the resources consistently.RRIDs have also expanded beyond the original data scope, initially with the addition of the Cellosaurus database , ABRF Core Marketplace and the libraries of Florida State University, who cataloged and aligned the names of the ABRF core-listed instruments . Demonstrating that the utilization of core facilities is important to their continued support as it is with stock centers. Therefore, many cores have become RRID champions, asking core users to acknowledge their facilities using the RRID via the core website, within instrument scheduling systems such as StratoCore, in protocols, and even in the core leaders email signature.  In the first year, we have already found >400 RRID citations for these Core Facilities, about a third of which are in journals that do not routinely include RRIDs, suggesting that many authors are doing this without being asked by journals.GigaScience, are the reason that the project has been successful, without the hard working editors who go after authors, the project would be far behind. Interestingly, the fastidious use of RRIDs has enabled the refinement of at least two machine learning algorithms. The SciScore tool can suggest to authors that a tool, such as SPSS, has a certain RRID . This is based on a large training dataset of ∼10K sentences that specify the tool with no ambiguity [GigaScience and eLife staff who have verified these identifiers. The other unexpected result was that Hsu et al. [Champions of RRIDs, including mbiguity . This trCurrently, the RRID website has been accessed by over a million users , and there have been three million page views, rising steadily from ∼9K to ∼60K per month (2014 to 2022). Most users (44%) find the portal using search “RRID” and “SciCrunch” as the most common search terms, while referral traffic (21%) comes from eLife, Editorial Manager, Oxford University Press, and Wiley most commonly, suggesting that authors or reachers are coming from the publishers. Direct traffic (33%) rounds out 98% of the total traffic sources to the RRID portal. Some of the referral traffic is coming through the resolver services suggesting that authors are clicking on the linked RRIDs in journals, perhaps to find out more information about the antibody or organism they are interested in.RRIDs.org is a California nonprofit organization; the main asset being the ownership of the RRIDs themselves - keeping them free to reuse by anyone  who wishes to improve their journal or the scientific literature. The information about the use of reagents, that a particular paper used a particular resource is delivered daily to the public Hypothes.is group (https://hypothes.is/users/SciBot) and is being made available via the CrossRef Event database (https://www.crossref.org/categories/event-data/). While there is a long path to full adoption of RRIDs in the scientific literature, the number of papers and the number RRIDs is rising rapidly demonstrating that authors can add these to their manuscripts via SciCrunch. Each RRID is associated with the currently detected RRIDs, example https://hypothes.is/users/SciBotvia the Hypothes.is front end and well documented API; this is updated daily;  https://www.crossref.org/services/event-data/via CrossRef's event database, example https://twitter.com/robotrriddata from 2021 can also be obtained via the twitter AB is a co-founder and CEO of SciCrunch Inc.We would like to acknowledge the following grants for funding part of this work: R43 OD024432/OD/NIH HHS/United States, R44 MH119094/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United States; U24 DA039832/DA/NIDA NIH HHS/United States; U24 DK097771/DK/NIDDK NIH HHS/United States.Dr. Bandrowski was a founding member of the original RRID initiative and currently runs the project. She is a biologist by training but has been working with data for most of her career. As of 2016, Dr. Bandrowski is co-founder and president of the board of SciCrunch Inc, a company that is devoted to improving the scientific literature.This commentary is part of a series to celebrate a Decade of GigaScience, to coincide with the 10th anniversary of our launch in July 2012. These papers take a look back at 10 years of advances in large-scale research as open science has become mainstream.GigaScience manuscript was for a cell-line in April 2017, but the use really took off with the registration of software tools, and more recently scientific instruments like sequencers, which are much more of an area of focus for the journal. This has initially been a manual process by the Editors, but submitters of software are now asked to register their new tools, and it has been encouraging seeing more and more authors adding these PIDs into the papers themselves to make our papers more reproducible and usable by our human and machine readers.The first RRID integrated into a


This study aimed to evaluate the publication delays and correlative factors of peer-reviewed ophthalmology journals.The ophthalmology journals listed in the Journal Citation Report 2020 were retrieved from the Web of Science database. The first original research article of each journal issue from January to December 2020 was extracted, and its submission, final revision, acceptance, and publication dates were obtained. Information on impact factors, advance online publication (AOP) status, open access (OA) rate and acceptance rate in 2020 was also collected. The correlations between publication delays and potential associated factors were analyzed.P < 0.05). There was a positive correlation between acceptance rates and publication delays . Forty-seven (81.03%) journals provided AOP. There was no statistically significant difference for impact factors and publication delays between journal with and without AOP . No correlation between OA rate and publication delays or impact factors was detected .A total of 58 ophthalmology journals were included and information on 685 articles was collected. The median times from submission to acceptance, from acceptance to publication, and from submission to publication were 118.0  days, 31.0  days, and 161.0  days, respectively. A higher impact factor was correlated with shorter delays of acceptance and publication (Journals with higher impact factors and lower acceptance rates tend to have quicker publication processes. No significant associations were detected between publication delays and AOP or OA rate. Scholarly communication in science, technology, and medicine has always been organized around journal publishing . The pubIn recent years, research on factors affecting journal publication speed and impact factors has attracted more and more attention . An incrLittle research has been conducted on the impact of these models on publication times and impact factors. Few studies have investigated the publication times and associated factors of ophthalmology journals . The mosTherefore, this study aims to evaluate the publication delays of ophthalmology journals in 2020 and the relationships between publication delays, impact factors, AOP, OA rate, and acceptance rate, hoping to help authors select appropriate journals for article submission.https://jcr.clarivate.com/jcr/browse-journals; accessed October 4, 2021). Review-only journals were excluded. Only original research articles were included. Review articles, editorials, correspondence, meta-analysis and case reports were excluded. The first article of each issue or each month between January and December 2020 was selected as representative of each journal. Supplementary issues were excluded. For journals with a certain number of issues published per year like Ophthalmology, we chose the first article published in each issue as representative articles of the journal. For journals which did not publish a certain number of issues per year, the first article published each month was chosen as representative. Twelve articles were eventually included in each journal. Information on the submission, final revision, acceptance, and publication dates was obtained from the full text of each article published in print or online only. Submission date indicates the time when an article was submitted for consideration for publication in a journal. Acceptance date indicates the time of communication of final decision to the corresponding author of an article. AOP date means the time of publication of the article online in advance while print publication date means the time when the article was actually printed or the date in which final pagination or bibliometric details were added to the article. The data were extracted independently by two investigators. Any discrepancies between the two investigators were resolved through discussion with a third investigator. The interval times from submission to acceptance (SA), from acceptance to online publication of journals with AOP or print publication of that without AOP (AP), and from submission to online publication of journals with AOP or print publication of that without AOP (SP) were calculated for each article. As for journals with AOP, the interval between acceptance and print publication (APP) was also measured. Information on the OA rate of each journal was obtained from the Journal Citation Report 2020 retrieved from the Web of Science and the acceptance rate was obtained from the webpage of each journal. The study was conformed to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki and performed under institutional review board approval.The ophthalmology journals listed in the Journal Citation Report 2020 were retrieved from the Web of Science  was used for the statistical analysis.The medians and interquartile ranges  of SA, AP and SP were calculated. The Wilcoxon test or the Mann–Whitney A total of 58 journals were included in the analysis. Among them, seven (12.1%), 35 (60.3%), and six (10.3%) journals did not indicate submission, revision, and acceptance dates, respectively .r = −0.007, P = 0.962). Negative correlations were observed between the impact factor and AP  and between the impact factor and SP . No correlation was found between SA and AP . After excluding the outliers, the two journals with the highest impact factors , the correlations between the impact factor and SA , AP , and SP  did not change significantly   provided AOP. As shown in vs. median, 2.240 ; P = 0.677). Moreover, as shown in P = 0.606) (shown in P < 0.001) (shown in P < 0.001) . No correlations were observed between OA rate and AP  and between OA rate and SP . Moreover, no correlation was found between OA rate and the impact factor .r = 0.193, P = 0.549). No correlation was found between acceptance rate and AP . Positive correlation was observed between acceptance rate and SP .This study evaluated the article publication speeds of peer-reviewed ophthalmology journals in 2020 and explored the relationships between publication delays, impact factors, and AOP and OA status. The median times of SA, AP and SP of all ophthalmology journals were 118.0  days, 31.0  days, and 161.0  days, respectively. Negative correlations were observed between the impact factor and AP and SP. The acceptance rate was positively correlated with the publication delay. Besides, no correlations were found between AOP and the impact factor or AP and no correlations were observed between the OA rate and publication speed or the impact factor.vs. 2010: 118.0  vs. 133  days; median AP in 2020 vs. 2010: 31.0  vs. 100  days). This may have resulted from early editorial manuscript screening that reduce the burden on reviewers  than in 2010 . Vision Research had shorter publication times than in 2010, but it had reduced its issues from 24 to 12 per year. These examples suggest that journals’ publication speed and issue frequency may affect their impact factors.In this study, the individual median peer review times of ophthalmology journals varied widely (49.0–251.5 days), and the range of individual median AP was ever wider (2.0–322.0 days), with a cumulative median time of 31.0 days. The publication process can be divided into two stages: the peer review time and the time from acceptance to publication. The publication delays of ophthalmology journals may be influenced by following factors. First, the peer review stage is mainly affected by the speed at which journal editors forward the submitted articles to peer reviewers, the time it takes peer reviewers to complete the reviews, and the time it takes authors to make revisions . Second,We also found negative correlations between the impact factor and AP and SP. This phenomenon may be explained by that publication delays may reduce impact factors through disturbing literature citation and that high impact journals may have more efficient publication processes and more active reviewers. Based on the transfer function model of the literature citing process, research has proved an inverse relationship between a scientific field’s average publication delay and journal impact factors and suggested that if a journal’s publication delay increases, impact factors or journal rankings of other journals that refer to articles of this journal will decrease, and then the delay further transfer to self-citing process leading to a greater decline in the impact factor of this journal . There aWe found no significant difference in impact factors between ophthalmology journals with and without AOPs in 2020. This differs from In this study, the OA rate did not correlate with the impact factor in ophthalmology journals, which may be resulting from several reasons. First, the extensive web links provide easy access to articles besides OA publishing. With some authors upload their articles to subject or institutional repositories, which is called “green OA” , the potThere is no correlation between publication delays and OA rates, contrary to the popular belief that OA journals have faster publication times, which may because of the small size of ophthalmology journals with high OA rate. Research on the relationship between OA and publication speed is scarce. The positive correlation of the acceptance rate and SP may be partly explained by journal impact. For high-impact journals with a lower acceptance rate, most unsuitable manuscripts could be quickly rejected during the editors’ screening, which can reduce burdens of reviewers . MoreoveCertain limitations of this study should also be mentioned. First, although publication dates of most included articles were available, there were seven (12.1%) and six (10.3%) journals did not indicate submission and acceptance dates, respectively, leading to missing data of publication delays that may influence the evaluation of publication speed in ophthalmology journals. Second, we did not evaluate the impact of other bibliometric indicators, such as immediate indexing and cited half-life, nor did we assess the impacts of study designs and reported results on the publication speed. Third, we analyzed data only from 2020, which did not allow an investigation of longitudinal trends in publication delays. Future research focus on longitudinal trends in ophthalmology journals are warranted.In conclusion, our findings show that publication delays of ophthalmology journals have been shortened in 2020 than that in 2010, indicating the overall peer review and publication processes have been accelerated. Our results also indicate negative correlations between impact factors and AP and SP, which may be the result of the publication delay effect on impact factors and efficient peer review processes in high impact journals. Journals with a lower acceptance rate are more likely to have shorter publication delays. AOP and OA seem to make no difference in the impact factors or publication speeds of ophthalmology journals.10.7717/peerj.14331/supp-1Supplemental Information 1r = −0.033, P = 0.824), (B) Correlation between the impact factor and AP , (C) Correlation between the impact factor and SP . (D) Correlation between SA and AP .Scatterplots showing correlation statistics after two journals with the highest impact factors were excluded. (A) Correlation between the impact factor and SA (Click here for additional data file.10.7717/peerj.14331/supp-2Supplemental Information 2Availability of online advance publication and print publication is indicated.Click here for additional data file.10.7717/peerj.14331/supp-3Supplemental Information 3The peer review and publication delays of ophthalmology journals.Click here for additional data file.


Seventy-nine submissions were received during the year with 37 submissions getting accepted for publication after review. This is a record. The 53% rejection rate may seem harsh, but not when compared to the top journal in the field  which has a rejection rate of 78%. The SAJSM’s abstracts were viewed 8746 times, and 5064 PDFs were downloaded during the year. The highlight of the year was receiving the news that the journal passed the National Library of Medicine’s scientific quality review. The journal’s papers from 2019 onwards will be included in the NCBI’s PubMed Central database. A full listing of the other databases which cover the SAJSM is described in the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). Their management team was superb in maintaining the publication’s platform and responding to queries. This had a major impact on the growth of the journal and is aligned with their goal of ‘growing the peer-reviewed open access scholarly journals in South Africa’. A third factor contributing to this journal’s growth is the expanding pool of reviewers. Many reviewers were drawn from the membership of the South African Sports Medicine Association, which reflects the maturity of the organisation. Reviewers from overseas institutions were also recruited. In the majority of cases the quality of reviews was high. Reviewing is a time-consuming job for which there is no public recognition. Without these high-quality reviews it is not possible to raise the standard of the published work. It is for this reason that much gratitude is extended to all the reviewers of 2021.The growth of the journal can be attributed to several factors. Firstly, the small but dedicated support staff working tirelessly to maintain the workflow from the time a paper enters the review process. Secondly, the stable platform from which to host the journal. This was provided by the Another pleasing aspect of 2021 was that the publications represented eleven institutions from around the country . This shows the discipline of Sports Medicine has spread throughout the country and is not the domain of a few universities as it was a decade ago. Papers were also received from institutions in Zimbabwe, Mauritius, Kenya, England and Ireland.There are still challenges ahead. During the COVID pandemic the “scientific process” has been stress-tested. Political influence has crept into a few high level medical journals. This has been divisive and destructive to the scientific process. Politics and science have to remain separate. Mixing the two creates a murky environment to the detriment of both. Journals have a role to play in maintaining the integrity of the scientific process. They can do this by ensuring that the review process is fair and rigorous. A rigorous review considers the research question and design of the study. Are the results believable? Do the conclusions match the results? Are any biases acknowledged? There should be no influence from outside sources with a preferred outcome of the study. These include advertisers, policy makers, and scientists invested in a particular finding. Failure of journals to uphold these basic principles of the review will contribute to the further contamination of the scientific process. Accelerometers, gyroscopes and real-time position detectors are also included in some devices. These sensors can measure heart rate, ECG, EMG, tissue oxygenation, lactate, temperature, distribution of plantar pressure, acceleration of body segments, and speed while exercising. As the sensors have become more sophisticated, the potential for greater data collection has increased. This opens opportunities for studies using machine learning and artificial intelligence. This has provided an opportunity to use big data mining analytics to answer specific questions that could not be answered in the same way previously. For example, the Fitbit company has patented an algorithm which identifies depression and predicts bipolar conditions using data  measured with the Fitbit.  The accuracy of the prediction is unknown, but it indicates the potential to use a variety of measurements from wearable devices for clinical purposes.As mentioned earlier, the discipline of sport and exercise medicine has matured. But fundamental questions remain important. For example; what is the best training approach to reduce the risk of injury? What impact does injury during competition have on the athlete’s quality of life after they have retired? What are the positive effects of regular exercise on quality of life? Researchers have tried to answer these questions using measurements available at the time of the research. As new measurement techniques become available further insight into these questions are possible. The health and fitness industry has been flooded with new wearable technology with a variety of sensors . Data scientists with expertise in artificial intelligence will be attracted to innovative applications of wearable technology using big data. There are many opportunities to revisit some of the fundamental questions and answer them using more sophisticated measurements. There is still much work to be done!


Many authors of well controlled and properly documented studies are disappointed when they receive editorial rejection letters, advising them to submit their manuscript to ’a more specialized journal’. Although sometimes this reflects the fact that the submission has gone to the wrong place, it is a phrase that is often used disingenuously. For, in the next paragraph, authors are typically invited to consider transferring their manuscript to the publisher’s own beta or gamma journal, which turns out to be even less specialized than the one from which it is being rejected.might be due to a perceived lack of conceptual novelty in the work, which could be a justifiable reason, at least in the case of the top-ranked broad-interest journals. There is, after all, a great deal of competition for space. But, more often, authors suspect that there are other reasons. These might include, for example, whether other papers of that author have been widely cited, which may not be the case for a relatively junior scientist, or one who has recently switched topics. Papers authored by a perceived leader of the field are much more likely to be cited, since other authors will trawl in the literature using that person’s name as a search term, or will consider their work more trustworthy than that of an unknown newcomer. Part of that is the well-known postcode effect: the fact that the work of authors located outside of major centres, both in terms of geography and scientific repute, are often and unfairly considered inferior to manuscripts emerging from a top institution. Finally, there are considerations relating to the actual subject of the work, which those working on Drosophila will surely recognize. The huge emphasis on medical or other societal relevance as a mark of citability means that work of basic biologists, and especially those using a non-mammalian model organism, tends to be considered less interesting and important than, say, equivalent work using a human cell-line, however non-physiological its properties.The recommendation is thus revealed to be a thinly disguised judgement of the editor that there is only a low chance of the paper, once it has gone through peer-review, being frequently cited. This https://sfdora.org/). Editors are victims of this system as much as authors. And publishers too, since IF is not just the currency of scientific publication, but also equates to real money. If a journal’s IF falls below a certain threshold, its financial viability is threatened. Even if such commercial judgements might seem inappropriate in the realm of scholarship, a journal that loses money simply cannot survive for long. Even if the whole of scientific publishing were reorganized on non-profit lines, there are real costs that would still need to be covered, for the system to function.In the end these boil down to the fact that there is often an explicit or implicit pressure on editors to maximize the short-term citability of accepted articles, which ultimately determines the journal’s impact factor (IF). Obsession with IF is not confined to scientists who believe that their job prospects are dependent on publishing in ‘high-impact’ journals, despite the progress that has been made by the DORA initiative (Drosophila rather than the malaria parasite. The decision as to how significant it is in the history of the world need not be taken by an editor. Commentaries by peers and others should suffice. And even the opinion of students, both today and in the far future.As someone who has been involved, on the editorial side, with different kinds of scientific journals, I nevertheless strive to take a different position. To me, a scientifically sound finding is worthy of publication, and the criteria for acceptance are the same in any journal. If the controls have been properly implemented, the statistical analysis is robust and the authors’ interpretation is reasonable, then it deserves to be in the public domain. Even if it advances the field only modestly, has been executed in a location few could place on a world map, or is about Fly I am proud to be at the helm of a journal that loudly proclaims itself as a specialized journal: specialized in reporting work conducted on Drosophila, on winged hexapods in general, and on anything else in science that has been inspired by, or relates to, prior work thereon. Even if, within that ambit, are included neuroscience, developmental biology, ecology, evolution and many other ‘disciplines’ which together make it in some ways not specialized at all.As current editor of I look forward to a day when all academic journals – if journals, as such, even continue to exist – will be of this type: collections of articles that unify one ‘angle’, even though they are not the be all and end all of scientific knowledge even of the limited field for which they serve as a beacon. Publishing will still not be free of charge, and editors will still have to exercise judgements based on peer-review. But I hope and even expect that the era of high-end journals that decide what is impactful and what isn’t will eventually come to an end, simply because such judgements are manifestly arbitrary and unreliable, and in the end will not even be financially justifiable.Fly, I hope we can continue to attract papers that are interesting. But that is something that the community should judge, not me.As for As already implied, I suspect that we might one day have only ‘the peer-validated literature’: I can even hear a latter-day scientific John Lennon proclaiming ‘Imagine there’s no journals, it’s easy if you try’. But in such a world, I would hope there would still be room for overlapping research communities to gather together and promote the findings they regard as relevant and appealing. Until then, let’s continue to value our ‘more specialized journals’, as a counterweight to spurious judgements of what is or is not sexy science.


Our peer review programme was launched in 2020 to support Early Career Researchers in building confidence to participate in peer review. The initiative has proved very successful and popular with both ECRs and editors and we are pleased to invite applicants to apply to our 2022 programme. Too frequently, Early Career Researchers (ECRs) are not provided appropriate training for peer review nor do they receive acknowledgement for their contributions to peer review—often, they are not involved in the process at all. As peer review is one of the pillars of scientific communication and contributes to ensuring that high-quality, rigorous studies are published, we launched an initiative to introduce peer review to ECRs in 2020. We are now launching the third iteration of this programme to continue training and supporting this community, who represents the future of scientific research.“86% of the ECRs reported that the experience increased their confidence to review and 91% said that it was helpful for their career development”.Recently-appointed principal investigators sometimes reach their position with limited direct exposure to the peer review process. Such exposure is necessary not only to adequately evaluate the work of colleagues, but also to understand how one’s own research will be assessed. If PhD students and post-doctoral researchers rarely engage in direct interaction with editors, they may not gain experience of what a constructive peer review exchange with authors should be. Reviewers need to appreciate the authors’ arguments and consider that a manuscript should be seen as a defined entity in which the data support the main conclusions but do not need to address all the open questions in the field.With this initiative, we aim to not only support ECRs through the peer review process, but also to provide insights into each of its steps. The programme begins with a webinar focused on the editorial peer review process and the guiding principles of assessing a manuscript and writing a quality peer review report. Participating ECRs are then paired with an editor based on their academic background and research expertise to assess and write a report on a manuscript that had been submitted to the journal. The editors guide the participants during the programme and provide feedback on their reports. As the process happens in parallel to the normal peer review of the manuscript, ECRs can also benefit from reading the reports of the other reviewers.2020 pilot programme was carried out in partnership with Voice of Young Science—a branch of the UK based charity Sense about Science—and was a great success. It raised considerable interest within the broader ECRs community. Therefore, in 2021, we decided to widen this initiative and offer ECRs from all over the world the opportunity to participate through an open call. We also recruited editors from additional journals within Nature Portfolio as well as from BMC journals. Over 1500 ECRs applied to the programme and we received applications from diverse regions . We prioritized applicants at earlier stages of their research careers (mostly senior PhD students and post-docs) who previously had little or no experience in peer review, a selection process that allowed us to maintain the regional distribution of the participants. Around 450 ECRs were invited to the webinar and 110 ECRs who attended the webinar were selected to participate in the second phase of the programme and paired with 95 editors, who mentored their ECR through the assessment of a manuscript submitted to their journal. The questions asked during the two past webinars showcase the enthusiasm of the participants, and we compiled our answers in a guide for reviewers in the hope that they may be helpful to others. At the end of the programme, we collected feedback from both ECRs and editors. In 2021, 86% of the ECRs reported that the experience increased their confidence to review and 91% said that it was helpful for their career development; the editors reported that the comments received helped them reach an informed decision for 83% of the papers sent to the ECRs and in 91% of the cases they would consider inviting the ECR to review further manuscripts. Beyond supporting ECRs in reviewing the manuscript, the programme also offers recognition for the work done through our reviewer acknowledgement statement, should the ECR wish to be named.The open until 10th of July. This year, we are aiming to increase the number of participating ECRs from geographical areas that are historically under-represented within the scientific community and from which we received a limited number of applications last year, such as Africa, South America and Asia. The candidates will be supported by our editors at the Open Access journals, Nature Communications, the Communications journals and the BMC journals. Spread the word, our editors are looking forward to meeting you!Recruitment for the 2022 ECRs programme is now


Nature masterclass) that a university or department can freely host or buy, where editors organize workshops on all aspects of manuscript preparation. Second, publishing houses, whether non-for-profit or commercial, have embraced a catalog logic, where the journals are not necessarily in competition and have an assumed place and hierarchy. At Nature Research, editors-in-chief head business units inscribed in the company's organization. Despite standardized processes imposed by the procedural chain, there is still room to maneuver in these relatively autonomous structures that are ultimately evaluated on their results . On the other hand, ACS is seen as a vessel whose course cannot easily be deviated. The conclusion calls for extending this type of investigation to other contexts or types of journals.The article unpacks the publishing practices and focuses on the curating work carried out by the editors of chemistry journals. Based on a qualitative analysis of multiple sources in two publishing houses , it first shows that the role of editor-in-chief covers a wide range of realities and is far from being limited to that of a gatekeeper (the most common metaphor in the literature). In journals that are part of the Nature Research portfolio, in-house editors, who are no longer active scientists, work full time for the journals. The article describes the professional trajectories and skills required to join the publishing house. Interviews highlight collective identity-based actions, attention to the growth and the flow of manuscripts, but also specific epistemic properties of outputs in chemistry. Besides tasks that editors outline “as really the same as they were 100 years ago,” as they spend most of their time handling manuscripts and providing quality assurance, they also travel to conferences to support journals and encourage submissions, visit labs where researchers pitch their work or ask questions about journals, and “educate the actors themselves” about new fields. In both cases studied, the publishing houses partner with institutions to offer events (ACS on Campus programme,  One of the most common narratives in the scientific literature, whether in information science, sociology, or management, positions the scholarly editor as a gatekeeper. This metaphor, which refers broadly to the process of controlling information as it moves through a gate or filter, has influenced the perception of the potential role of editors, both in journalism and in scientific publishing. In her critical review, Barzilai-Nahon  defines Many scientometric studies have described the scholarly communication landscape from the perspective of editorial gatekeepers. As Cabanac  has poinThe question underlying this article is: what is lost when editorship is reduced to gatekeeping? This metaphor creates distance between editors and academics. Positioning editors as a group notably distinct from colleagues or friends in academia, it categorizes them as administrators allowing for privileged access to publishing platforms, thus maintaining academic power structures.Although academics are quite talkative about their editorial work Stang, , there iCentaurus  and elsewhere, and account for just over 4% of federal R&D spending in the United States. In the elite universities where I carried out my research , the chemistry workforce accounts for about 10% of the total faculty. Journal articles are, with patents, the main type of publication in chemistry. These journals are purchased by university libraries and public and private R&D centers. There are therefore several thousand credit-worthy buyers—an important market for these publications.Chemistry is a good example of how modern research is organized in an impressive array of sub-disciplines and hybrid-discipline formations , of which it is the “flagship” journal, is a periodical that produces more than 19,000 articles a year. In 2021, the editorial team of Chemistry of Materials announced that it has succeeded to manage up to 20,000 articles over their entire time of service , which is not a commercial corporation. ACS journals are embedded within communities. Unlike the (British) Royal Society Fyfe, , the ACSIn the past decades, digitization has been attended by commercialization, with an increasingly concentrated journal market led by a handful of large, for-profit publishing houses . Considering that this branding strategy extended to all publishers has been pursued particularly aggressively over the past 5 years, they argue that “the dynamic of the competition in the scientific field is now responding more to the logic of market than to that of a community.” For these authors, the publishing field is a field of forces that publishers try to turn to their advantage to derive the monetary or symbolic benefits associated with it. They use Bourdieu's model of capital conversion, claiming that publishers turn a specific form of capital, namely the symbolic capital of their high-profile publications, into economic capital. Khelfaoui and Gingras argue that the newly created journals benefit from the name recognition and reputation of the originals after which they are named. Plus, through a manuscript routing mechanism, the publishers redirect papers refused by the prestigious journals to the less prestigious ones of the brand  or to one of the lower-impact journals on their list, which may require an article processing charge for publication (a model where the authors/institutions pay fees to have the electronic versions of their articles in open access).. Bourdieu's relational sociology heavily emphasizes the domination and power relations, notably symbolic.Khelfaoui and Gingras , 2021 deIn the same vein, many arguments in the literature underline a convergence across countries, disciplines, institutions, and so on: globalization as the top-down diffusion of global templates, the rise of new modes of measuring and evaluating academic work, etc. But they neglect the ways in which academic actors themselves are involved in publishing situations. Moreover, equating a firm and a learned society (that Khelfaoui and Gingras labeled a “private non-profit organization”) overlooks the fact that scholarly societies are an integral part of academic research and teaching institutions  and a social organization that creates that object. Like other cultural goods or professional services, the academic journal is part of an economy of singularities Karpik, . SingulaNature Asia, database of author affiliation information such as Nature Index, etc.) and so on. I also introduce the recent debates on the future of chemistry journals: emerging of the figure of curator , attention paid to the inclusion of young researchers in decision-making bodies, distancing of metrics and indicators. In the discussion part, I broaden the scope of the previous results by looking at the general mechanisms at play between chemistry journals that operate within disciplinary-oriented organizational and identity logics.The remainder of this article is structured as follows: in the section “Editors' key tasks, respective role and relationships with other,” I first present the professional trajectories and skills of editors-in-chief required to join the publishing houses. I then look at the modalities of work and organization of the editorial process in both working environments. The next section “Hierarchies and dependencies within publishing houses” illustrate that editors are aware of hierarchies and dependencies within the respective publishing houses, carry out their activities under production and deadlines constraints and have to navigate between different types of request that come from authors or other publishers' organizational units  , society-owned academic journals, and a range of open access journals, including Scientific Reports and Nature Communications.Nature Research's flagship publication is  Baldwin . Nature  Baldwin , Nature Science, as well as by journals in medicine, biology and chemistry.As illustrated with the creation of the titles above, in 1983, Nature Research pioneered a commercial strategy to capitalize on the brand names of it most prestigious scientific journals. This has since been repeated by the competing generalist journal Nature Communications has been a pioneer within the “Nature family” in many ways. Launched in 2010 as the 17th Nature-branded research title, it was the first to publish content online only . It was also the first “hybrid” Nature-branded journal, offering an Open Access option to authors, before flipping to fully Open Access in 2016. One founding principle was to offer a platform for multidisciplinary works, given that the number of multidisciplinary primary research journals was very small at that time. As shown in Nature Communications has taken in the general strategy and the development of the Nature Research journals portfolio.For the past 10 years, The ACS is a learned society founded in 1876 in New York by a group of 35 chemists. It is a 501 (c) non-profit organization that, as such, is exempt from federal income tax. It was incorporated 60 years later in Washington DC. The promotion of scientific interests through publications is one of the missions described in the charter of the society, which codifies the main operating principles of the ACS.Today the ACS has about 160,000 members in all areas of chemistry and chemical engineering. It is not only the largest scholarly society in chemistry but also the richest in the world. The ACS is the sole publisher of the Chemical Abstracts database, which is its largest source of income under the name of SciFinder, and one of the top ten science publishers worldwide.The ACS relies on a collegial governance with multiple bodies , and has a considerable number of bylaws and regulations that organize the life of the society. In other words, the ACS is a huge, well-oiled machine. As early as 1908, it organized itself into technical divisions, to enable interaction between scientists who worked or had a common professional interest in a particular topic. The society is currently organized into 32 technical divisions that cover almost all the major sub-disciplines or fields of chemistry, and 186 autonomous local sections. The life of the society is punctuated by two annual meetings  organized in spring and autumn of each year, and that afford an opportunity for all governance or journal editorial bodies to meet regularly.Noel,  offers aIn 2006, the ACS launched its first ACS-branded journal, ACS Chemical Biology. Since then, around 30 other ACS-branded journals have followed, at a pace of approximately three new journals per year since 2014. From a chemistry perspective, ACS-branded journals explore various scientific and technological “fields” , the outcome of which can be considered as a composite thesis  to contextualize quotes, while protecting the individual's anonymity. As stated in a tweet issued by the ACS Publisher Center in August 2020Face-to-face interviews with editors at Nature Research were obtained in London at two different times (2013 and 2018). Each interview consisted in three main parts: a biographical narrative, questions about the nature and evolution of their work since entering the publishing industry, and a focus on their practices and how they manage a constantly changing environment. I had a hard time securing the interviews and it was not possible to spend time with the editorial teams. In exchange for this access, the anonymity of the interviewees was guaranteed, which prevents me from giving further details about the editors and the names of their journals. For example, I may not divulge the exact age of the respondents, but I have been able to show a general demographic distribution. I also provide generic job titles and the name of journals , to give me an idea of the job market, working conditions, salaries, and so on in the STM publishing industry. They were the managing director and publisher recruitment consultant, respectively, at a small company (11 people) specializing in publishing jobs at all levels. Interviews lasted for 60 min and were fully transcribed and anonymized.Nature X written in 2013, one editorial of Communications Y written in 2018) and on their websites (2013–2019), as well as the min of a webinar (held in 2020) celebrating the departure of the editor-in-chief (EiC) of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) and introducing the new JACS editorial team.Besides interviews, a document analysis  has been performed. Since the number of interviews was small, I was careful to supplement the analysis with information collected in Nature Research journals  and CVs, as well as tweets collected at different periods. In processing this collection of texts, videos, images, etc. made available on digital mediums (including the web) and attempting to make sense of the meanings portrayed by these texts or graphical representations, I borrow from the methods of digital ethnography Hine, .Organic Letters and Analytical Chemistry), by a managing editor of ACS journals (on copyright and ethics in scholarly publishing), a career pathway panel including patent examiners and representatives of Swiss chemical industries, and SciFinder training sessions with a regional marketing manager at ACS International Ltd. representing Chemical Abstracts Services, CAS (a division of the ACS).Finally, I observed an ACS on Campus event  jointly organized by the Information CenterNature X to join other journals). One interviewee moved up the hierarchy of editorial positions before being offered the position of editor-in-chief.As the consultant working for a recruitment agency explained, half of the people within scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing have science degrees. This makes STM a particular case in the publishing industry, since elsewhere experience counts more than academic qualifications. Careers are attractive and every advertised editorial position attracts hundreds of applications (more than 10 resumes received on the day of the interview). Entry-level salaries are considered fair  and can rise much higher quickly. After finding a job, candidates are back on the market 2 or 3 years later, as is common in the cultural industries. Within companies, the turnover is high internally  because of many opportunities within Nature Research . All have a PhD and postdoctoral experience in European universities . For both Martin and Evan, a career in publishing was more of a default choice: they had limited motivation for editorship, which is consistent with the perception of this occupation  in academia.I've always kind of known publishing is a career but I wouldn't say when I was training as a scientist, my dream was not necessarily to work in publishing, I think like probably most people in this building actually.” (Evan)“At Nature Research, the hiring procedure includes an interview, a reading and writing test, and a kind of role play. Ten years apart, the hiring process was the same for Evan and for Martin: the recruiter tested the candidate's ability to write quickly and under pressure.We look for people who can get to the bottom of a paper quite quickly even if they don't necessarily understand it and, to some extent, we look for people that can cope under pressure because this is a relatively high pressure job, you can't control the workflow so, you know, if 30 people decide to submit 30 papers in your area in one week, I mean, that's an extreme example, but you know just before Christmas, just before Chinese New Year, lots of work comes in because every, all the authors submit before they go on holiday.” (Evan)“As the manuscripts submitted during the test do not present any particular problematic issues, candidates are expected to be flexible (neither arrogant nor naïve) as there is no single answer at this stage of the process, to be able to put themselves in the position of an editor and not an author as they were before, to take a critical look at the reviewers' reports, and so forth. These skills are tested to see if the person is capable of developing arguments. All these skills are action-oriented; they test sound decision making.You know, because you don't really know how to be an editor until you start being one, but some people have perhaps slightly more inherent skills that make them more suitable for the job or you know, they just develop them by an inventive approach.” (Evan)“Again, it's looking at whether or not they can assess reviewers' reports like an editor, rather than like an author. You know, can they understand what's important about the reviewers' reports and see what the reviewers are either clearly saying or saying between the lines? And make sensible decisions.” (Evan)“In terms of identity, these excerpts attest to the necessary transition from “being an author” to “being an editor” and the inventive approaches that may underlie this latter posture. As a member of the professional group of editors, Evan describes the foundations of his legitimacy, and thus his autonomy, by drawing on values such as “a high pressure job,” which doesn't stop between Christmas and New Year's Eve and validates the work of the reviewers in a dialogue with them.Editors' social skills do not consist only of their ability to assess but also to attract potential manuscripts. They are also closely linked to community building, as we will see next.Nature X, Martin leads a small team  of senior or associate editors covering topics in their field of expertise . The team is cohesive (“we know each other well”) and they meet every 2 days.At In terms of supervision, “the journal is in a way a direct extension of the laboratory, where newcomers gradually gain in autonomy through contact with the most experienced” (Evan). Martin's team handles around 250 manuscripts per month, or an average of 12 manuscripts per week and per editor, for which a report is written. Forty percentage of the manuscripts are rejected outright, 20% are sent to reviewers. The journal receives “many, even too many papers. They come to us.” At the time of the interview, Martin had been asking for another person for 3 years, “maybe I'll get him/her this year.”Nature X, the range of fields covered is wide: “some of the articles published are in very fundamental physics or fundamental biology.” Martin is committed to respecting diversity and finding a balance between all areas across the journal's cover spectrum. He quotes the example of an article published in a subfield that he finds “old-fashioned but where interesting things happen.”At Communications Y. As the scope of the discipline is broad, the journal is open to all research that may be at the cutting edge of chemistry.This is also the case at We've been relatively flexible, as a journal, about what we consider to be sort of the edge of chemistry. So our philosophy really is: if authors have decided to submit to us and we can imagine that maybe some chemists can be interested in this paper for a reason that has to do with chemistry, that's kind of enough in terms of scope.” (Evan)“Nature Communications (2012–2017). He described a considerable change in 5 years, where the journal had become a very large structure with more than a 100 editors. Again, it is helpful here to think in terms of the journal as an extension of the laboratory and as “a collective workshop,” to use Shapin's (1994: 367) words, a site at which labor is increasingly finely divided.One informant detailed the organization at When I joined, it was a small structure. There was a chief editor and then some editors. And now they have like a hundred full-time editors. So within that there is a management structure. So I was a team manager. So there was the chief editor, the chief of physical sciences and then me and I was running a team of editors, they were covering basically my area plus inorganic, physical, materials, nano, energy, catalysis. And I had editors in Shanghai, New York and London, and that was just because that was where the editors with that expertise were based.” (anonymous informant)“Evan estimates that tasks of all kinds around the manuscript  account for about 80% of his total working time:In terms of how you spend the day, it's largely handling manuscripts. That's the sort of major task of an editor. So all the kind of processes of the lifecycle of a manuscript, it varies slightly depending on how selective the journal is.” (Evan)“In terms of work sequences, the first is triage: deciding whether or not the manuscript is sent to reviewers. This involves knowing the literature covered in the paper, which means keeping up with articles in the field. Martin also insists on the importance of the state of the art .While the synoptic diagram shows the key phases of editorial decision making “At the ACS, key phases are all deeply embedded in the society; even if their editorial policies differ, the ACS journals share the “issue publication information,”ACS Z, he stresses the need to enforce the communication between associate editors  and proposes that the meetings take place during the ACS National Meetings.In terms of peer reviewing, what As Evan sees it, the proposed paper has to satisfy the criterion “enough or sufficient advances beyond the state of the art,” which is at the discretion of the editor, as illustrated here:They are two fundamental tasks I would say. So, manuscripts come in, and you decide whether or not they're going to go out for review for that journal. […] So looking at the other kind of relevant recent articles in the field, deciding where the state of the art is, and then deciding whether the manuscript makes enough or sufficient advances beyond the state of the art that is of interest to the readership of that journal.” (Evan)“Nature Communications, “the advance doesn't necessarily need to be enormous, it's quite a selective journal, but yeah it's not super difficult to get into,” whereas for Nature Y “[the authors] might need to say ‘new chemistry.” (Evan)This criterion “enough or sufficient advances beyond the state of the art” also depends on the journal. For Both Martin and Evan are keen to affirm the separation of scientific and commercial functions within the Nature Research group. “Priority goes to the articles we publish.” (Martin). “All the editors here just assess the science.” (Evan)Then you manage the manuscript all through the review process, so this thing like chasing reviewers is all automated. The reviews go out, the reviews come back in, you make a decision for the manuscript, being rejected or accepted.” (Evan)“Traditional ways of organizing the editorial process still prevail, despite evidence of flaws in old practices and the proposed advantages of new ones “As head of the journal, the goal of the EiC is to create the conditions that will enable publication of high-quality papers: “Our objective is to maintain quality” (Martin). This is crucial for the survival in the competitive space of Nature Research's journals.My personal feeling is a journal operating in this space will kind of live or die on the quality of its research content.” (Evan)“Key criteria concern novelty (“we judge novelty“) and completeness of the work, even if it means (sometimes) “losing” the paper. Martin distinguishes two categories of papers: “the papers that are good and the ones that are exceptional.”I want the most comprehensive works.” […] “It's nice when the papers come back to us after a year and a half with the answers to the questions.” […] “Sometimes the papers go somewhere else, as a result.” (Martin)“It is also a matter of guaranteeing the frequency of publication and ensuring that a minimum number of manuscripts are being processed. For instance, Evan does not want to commit to writing editorials in the launch phase of the journal; he is almost sure he would not be able to keep up, which would throw his entire team's workload off balance.Communications Y that he is proud of, he takes the example of a paper describing a molecule with special properties that was voted “molecule of the week” at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center (CCDC) and is featured in C&EN, the official organ of the ACS. From Evan's point of view, the article is a finished product, the ideal trajectory of which is to end up in a textbook  on TwitterCommunications Y, the team tries to amplify the content on Twitter, especially if one of the authors is active on that medium. Within the Nature Research chemistry community, there is an outward-facing website group , which many authors join to write what is called a “Behind the paper.As soon as papers are published in So it's kind of a... I don't even think it's got a DOI like a blog post but it's given sort of the story of how [the authors] did the research or why they've approached a particular research question or topic, you know, we retweet and link to things like that as well. So, just trying to add value to the papers where we can.” (Evan)“Communications X, and he also wanted a press release for his own results in Communications Y. We are far from the gatekeeper exerting considerable control on the scientific discourse; this exchange resembles the kind of reciprocal gift-giving described by Mauss , where researchers can pitch their work or ask questions. Editors also attend international conferences to advertise journals and encourage submissions:So we attend conferences, very big conferences like the ACS and Springer Nature will have a booth, you know, in this sort of expo we'll spend some time at the booth, people come and see us. We'll try and attend some talks just to get a flavor of you know, what is the most exciting field.” (Evan)“In both set-ups, publishers partner with institutions to offer events that a university or department or lab group can host free of charge or can purchase, with workshops covering all aspects of manuscript preparation. Nature Masterclasses consist of a 1- or 2-day workshop, attended by two journal editors from Nature Research, with an audience of about 25-30 researchers in each workshop. The (paid) service includes one-to-one interaction with editors and an opportunity for abstract review.ACS on Campus programmes range from 90-min webinars to full-day eventsI have represented [ACS journals] several times at ACS Campus events and always got good feedback. The more authors/readers know about us, the more transparent our handling of articles becomes.” (Andreas)“Communications Y, there is also an endeavor to work collaboratively with Editorial Board members on some of the papers. I will detail this point in the next section.At Communications Y is described as “a particular publishing space” which does not compete with Nature Communications.In both publishing houses, the periodicals are locked into a catalog logic where the journals are not necessarily competitors and have an assumed place and hierarchy. While there is some conversation between Nature Communications and my journal, Nature Communications is a more selective journal, you know, we exist because they are more selective. So my aim isn't really to like get a higher impact factor than Nature Communications. It's to sort of give the authors that come to me the best possible service, to try and publish the best papers that I can in this particular publishing space.” (Evan)“Nature Communications whose authors did not aim high enough and which he kept for “his” journal.Relations seem to be fairly peaceful within the vertical chemical “silo” (with its asserted hierarchy) at Nature Research, but a form of “friendly” competition nevertheless exists between editors of chemistry journals at Nature Research. Evan describes the case of manuscripts sent to I've had some papers come to me when I was at Nature Communications for example, and I thought: oh, if the authors had tried, this could maybe have got into Nature Y! But your job is to publish the best you can for the journal and to give the authors the best service you can, so I've always kept the papers myself.” (Evan)“The hierarchy within the group is also reflected in the availability of human resources to write important pieces: editorials.publishes at least 2-3 editorials every week because it has staff who do this, Nature Y they publish one a month because they have kind of staff resources, Nature Communications for a long time didn't publish because they were too busy. Now, they finally kind of, they've got the appropriate number of editors and a little bit more time, and the journals are more stable. So they are writing more editorials.” (Evan)“Nature We have lots of kinds of guided transfers […] so all those journals have chemistry editors. So the chemists get together once a month and we discuss things like: chemistry policy, reproducibility issues, but also the respective bars of each of the journals. So hopefully if Nature Y are rejecting a paper they'll have a good idea about whether it will be a good potential fit for us or for Nature Communications and I can recommend the authors […]. And this is a thing that like the ACS, the RSC, most publishers do this.” (Evan)“As these two interview excerpts show, being an editor also means writing regular editorials in the journalistic sense, i.e., producing a discourse comprising norms, values and worldviews that define what is appropriate for an individual to be considered a competent and recognized member of this professional community.All EiCs have competing or partner publishing houses as reference points. For instance, Evan knows how editors are recruited at the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), whose offices are based in Cambridge (UK), because he took the tests himself. He also knows the salary range of his competitors.When I interviewed at the RSC, for example, the test was very different, I was given a reading comprehension task. I was asked to do some copy … it's quite a different way of approaching [here].” (Evan)“Martin finds that the competition is more internal to Nature Research than with the outside world. It is rather toward its sister and brother journals that he looks. But he admits that working in a big publishing set-up like ACS or the American Physical Society (APS) does not appeal to him (“it's too large”).ACS Z), Andreas expresses the need for clear guidelines. According to him, formats are a simple way to differentiate journals. By specifying what is expected in terms of format , the journal can better orient the authors on what is expected of them.Because there is a clear overlap concerning topics covered by different ACS journals  for almost 20 years (2002–2020), his successor recalls the editorial innovations of all kinds implemented during his tenure:On the occasion of the departure of Peter J. Stang who was the editor-in-chief of the Graphical abstracts (2002)Virtual issues (2008)Facebook (2008)Twitter (2009)Cover art (2009)Perspectives (2009)Mobiles (2010)Spotlights (2012)Communications Y is relatively recent, the journal is trying to get into a space where there are many other “good chemistry journals.” Paying for papers with reasonable APC serves as a proxy for ascertaining what is truth and valuable.Finally, insofar as At Communications Y, we're trying to operate in a space which isn't really particularly well served by Springer Nature at the moment but it's where lots of other good chemistry journals operate, you know, like [name of a journal] that is [amount of the Open Access fee in pounds]. I think what we're publishing is more selective than [name of a journal]. So, you know, the more selective a journal is, kind of the higher the APC has to be, because you're paying for all the rejected papers. I think the author service that my team and I are adding is comparable actually to what [name of a journal] are adding and with half the price.” (Evan)“As editor, Andreas projects himself in the role of a curator of reviewing more than “the sole gatekeeper to publication,” claiming that the worst scenario that can happen to journals is when authors and readers consider them to be controlled by a “mafia-type” organization.ACS Z should focus on being a ‘society journal' from scientists for other scientists, different than commercial publishers.” Again, the reference is the other, without knowing very well what the term “commercial” covers. Actually, all Associate Editors have a work contract with ACS, which is also the case at the RSC. Since some editors review a lot of manuscripts and others not so much, Andreas suggests that the number of handled manuscripts should be taken into account in regard of the paid compensation.According to him, “Communications Y, as with all the Communications journal series, is that of a shared editorial model with in-house editors working alongside an Editorial Board model consisting of active researchers. The collaborative Editorial Board is conceived of here as an intermediation authority between science and decision making and, above all, a way not to be disconnected from academic research. At the time of the interview, “Editorial Board members haven't really pushed many papers through the season:”The approach taken at We were hoping the people that we worked with would actually have time to do some editorial work and to benefit from it. So they'd learn how selective journals handle papers. You know, hopefully that would feed back into their own submission to other selective journals and it's a chance to sort of, you know, almost like have a peek behind the curtain of how stuff works here, to work with people that have, you know, working in kind of a Nature environment. We thought maybe it would be attractive to some researchers.” (Evan)“A strong wish of all EiCs is to include young scholars in the editorial process. For Andreas, it is really essential to attract junior editors into the Editorial Board. That means training them, letting them see what is “behind the curtain,” without which the loss of confidence among young researchers will be total.Angewandte Chemie International Edition discussing factors influencing the progress of organic synthesis over the past 25 years in a way that many found offensive, considering offensive opinions about women and other underrepresented groups in science were being expressed, and that the Chinese research community was being unfairly denigrated. Following a deluge of criticism on social media, the article was withdrawn and completely deleted from the Angewandte publication records by the editor-in-chief. The editors themselves acknowledged a “breakdown in editorial decision-making” and two of them were suspended. In protest against the publication, several members of the International Advisory Board resigned while some authors publicly announced that they would no longer publish in the journal. In an editorial, a group of six chemists expressed their deep concern “that the appearance of this Essay has harmed the trust of the scientific community in the journal's procedures to select essays of the highest scientific standard without bias”  that goes on about launching, and Nature Research doesn't really launch journals that fail .Like all forms of competition, competition among chemistry journals relies on classifications of all sorts . With one exception, Impact Factors were not mentioned in the interviews. This is consistent with a general observation about chemists' (non)use of impact factors in interviews. The market agencement of “elite” chemistry journals is relatively circumscribed; as exemplified in the empirical material, actors know their competitors perfectly.The entry through the challenger organizations is a dynamic framework which, coupled with the study of professional trajectories, allows us to define the social skills  allows for a more complex description of their functions. A term like “gatekeeping” places too much focus on the editorial process often reduced to peer reviewing, which means that we lose an understanding of the social and technical complexities that come with the editorial role. Depending on their degree of involvement in one or the other activity , editors may be seen as planners, brokers or facilitators, curators, gatekeepers… or something of everything at the same time.versus non-commercial).While a commercial strategy exists at the ACS (and is effectively translated into a manuscript transfer system), in practice it is deployed with multiple decision-making paths that also involve humans , technical devices, classification algorithms and so on. The purpose of the article was to highlight similarities between publishing houses. The interviews underline the feeling or need to belong to a “family,” whether disciplinary or corporate. In what seems to be a race to create and differentiate more and more journals, the actors observe each other and try to distinguish themselves through formats. The strength of the organizations described lies in their long history of experimentation and failure, even if the latter is not emphasized in the editors' narratives.The article is based on original documentation and attempts to parallel publishing spaces that are generally considered opposable  for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.MN: conception and design, data collection, analysis of the results, and writing.Part of research reported in the article was funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-09-SOC-011). This work has also received traveling support from the Institut Francilien Recherche Innovation Société (IFRIS).The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


A recent shift in public attention to racism, racial disparities, and health equity have resulted in an abundance of calls for relevant papers and publications in academic journals. Peer-review for such articles may be susceptible to bias, as subject matter expertise in the evaluation of social constructs, like race, is variable. From the perspective of researchers focused on neonatal health equity, we share our positive and negative experiences in peer-review, provide relevant publicly available data regarding addressing bias in peer-review from 12 neonatology-focused journals, and give recommendations to address bias and knowledge gaps in the peer review process of health equity research. In response to the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd there has been a shift in public and academic attention to address racism, racial disparities, and health equity. Health equity is achieved when every person has the ability to attain their health potential. One of many major barriers to health equity include racism, or discrimination on the basis of one’s racial group. Racism can be individualized, internalized, and systemic and all forms contribute to racial disparities in health outcomes. Systemic racism is a form of racism that is embedded in laws, policies, and institutions, including academic medicine, that has resulted in a disparate distribution of goods, services, and opportunities for racial groups . DespiteIn addition to knowledge gaps by reviewers regarding the evaluation of social variables like race, explicit or implicit bias can occur in the manuscript review process , 6, whicAs health equity researchers in academic neonatology, we offer . Our own“After submitting a study for peer review that tracked hospital practices by race/ethnicity and language, a reviewer argued there was no rationale as to why such disparities in hospital practices could exist and questioned why we chose to examine this. Denial of disparities in care quality by this reviewer suggested a significant knowledge gap of long-standing literature. I alerted my concern to the editor who omitted this review and sent it out to a different reviewer.”“When exploring the experience of traditionally marginalized communities in a qualitative study, a reviewer suggested that to increase the validity of the study, we should compare the experience to the majority’s experience. Centering whiteness and white normativity was problematic in a study designed to center at the margins . Followi12 Upon re-review, the editor agreed and sent me a positive reply acknowledging the ‘teaching moment’ for the authors.”“As a peer reviewer I suggested capitalizing the ‘b’ in Black when identifying race and to not use ‘Blacks’ when referring to Black persons. The authors responded that they preferred not to edit for readability, despite the possibility of offensive interpretation and accepted terminology.“I revealed my identity in a commentary and received an inappropriate comment during the review process. I did not know where to anonymously report my experience of discrimination to avoid worrying about my future relationship with the journal.”To better understand the extent that journals serving the academic neonatology audience have guidance regarding evaluation of social variables, like race and ethnicity, in articles and processes to address bias in peer-review, we examined the websites of 12 major academic journals that publish in neonatology. Journals were chosen by combining our searches of academic journals with high frequency of neonatal-perinatal material based on a PubMed query , anWe summarize findings in Table Our anecdotal experience and review of publicly available data from journal websites suggest that there is room for improvement to address knowledge gaps in peer-review of neonatology articles focused on health equity, which often utilize social variables like race and ethnicity in their methodology and therefore may increase potential for bias in the peer-review process. With heightened national attention on the role of race, racism, and other social factors on health outcomes, we anticipate that research in this area will continue to grow. Therefore, journal guidelines for authors and reviewers are needed to educate the neonatal research community and set standards on use of race and racism in research. While our experiences focus primarily on the social construct of race and ethnicity, we believe that our experiences and our recommendations may impact those doing research in other domains that also utilize social variables such as income, primary language, and immigration status.Researchers also must be protected from discrimination and bias in the peer-review process. Few journals have made transparent efforts to diversify staff or develop mechanisms for providing anonymous feedback in the setting of perceived racism and discrimination in the review process. In our review, many journals have statements demonstrating commitment to adhere to COPE guidelines, which recently organized a Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) committee that has provided resources and a commitment to addressing ethics and DEI for journals . A few jWe consider the diversification of reviewer, editorial boards, and editors to be of particular importance for the health equity publication process in neonatology journals. Not only does the inclusion of perspectives of lived experience and participation in scholarly health equity activities advance the quality of work in our field, it also begins to address historical exclusion of minoritized individuals from scientific discourse , 10. In Our review was limited to information readily available on journal websites. This may not fully encompass efforts made by academic journals to support health equity research and address bias in the peer-review process. The journal processes evaluated were designed by authors and thus are not previously validated and may not sufficiently evaluate the performance of journals. Our perspective piece does not compare the performance of neonatology journals, which tend to be clinically focused, to social science or public health focused journals. Performance in neonatology journals may be different from journals dedicated specifically to health equity. Regardless we see importance in addressing bias and knowledge gaps within our field while understanding challenges may be different or similar to other fields.A standard of proficiency of reviewers in evaluation of social variables and constructs, including race and racism. While there are a few resources available that address this topic –15, 24, Transparency of current demographics of authors, reviewers, editorial boards, and editors. Although lack of diversity in academia is a widely known problem and we suspect it is no different in neonatology, the demographics of the participants in the peer-review process was not explicitly stated in the journals reviewed. Transparency offers a route towards accountability.Diversification of reviewers, editorial boards, and editors with transparent, publicly announced target dates and goals.Transparency, evaluation, and equal opportunity of editorial board selection process to facilitate diversification.Recruitment and appropriate compensation for subject matter experts for time. We are not aware of any current resources or guidelines that define subject matter expertise prior to review. In the case of health equity research, lived experience should be recognized as a form of subject matter expertise. Similarly, we are not aware of resources to guide overall reviewer recruitment nor compensation for reviewers by journals. If compensation for peer review is not provided by journals, institutions should consider ways in which to support faculty and trainees who participate in the peer-review process through financial incentives, promotion, or other forms of meaningful recognition.Standardized and robust training on an antiracism and the measurement and evaluation of social constructs in academic medicine and biomedical research that begins early and continues throughout professional careers.Anonymous reporting mechanism for authors to report racism and/or other types of bias in the peer-review processWe offer the following recommendations to improve the peer-review process: