My term as an Editor comes to an end with the last issue of 2022. I was fortunate to inherit a highly successful journal programme from my predecessor, Dame Linda Partridge FRS, and I am delighted to be able to pass the Editorship into the very capable hands of Prof. Richard Dixon FRS. I am sure that he will find working for the journal as exciting and rewarding as I have.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B is a unique journal, and it has been an interesting experience understanding and developing the role that this journal represents for the academic community, as well as the challenges that a journal of this nature faces in today's publishing environment. Great satisfaction as Editor derives from the prestige with which the journal continues to be regarded across the scientific and wider academic communities. Furthermore, I believe that there is clear evidence of the high regard of currently practising life scientists for the journal from the great commitment that we see from our Guest Editors, authors and reviewers. Publishing 26 theme issues a year on schedule could not be achieved without the journal's Guest Editors, authors and reviewers, and I would like to use this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed during the last 7 years, and particularly since 2020 during the potentially very diverting viral pandemic.One of the most enjoyable aspects of being the Editor of a journal with such a broad scope has been in seeing the great range of topics that are submitted as ideas for theme issues. The Editor also plays a crucial role in determining the programme for the flagship scientific meetings that the Royal Society holds every year , which provides an insight into emerging research areas. I personally find that the issues which are published in association with these discussion meetings are often pioneering in expressing new ideas emerging during the discussion among experts at all stages of scientific development and particularly from those in the early stages of their careers.https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2016/371/1696) was a theme issue that arose from a Royal Society Discussion Meeting. More recently ‘Climate change and ecosystems: threats, opportunities and solutions’  came from a joint National Academy–Royal Society meeting. Both of these issues have proved highly influential and have been discussed widely. Articles from the area of neuroscience have also been widely cited, including articles on ‘interoception’ [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2021/376/1822), published in 2021, particularly fascinating. However, with a note of regret, the success of the climate change-related theme issue reminded me that a proposal went to the Hooke committee in June 2017 for a Discussion Meeting on ‘The Nitrogen Challenge’ which would have drawn together experts from a broad spectrum of both the physical and life sciences. Both the Editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A and I attended a planning meeting with the organizers and expressed great enthusiasm at the prospect of publishing a joint, or two companion, themed issue(s) focused on this subject now regarded as a major challenge to mitigating emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases. Discussions were at the time initiated with the journals' Commissioning Editors to explore ways in which the papers could appear in a single issue of Philosophical Transactions. However, although by a democratic process without question, the Hooke committee decided against supporting the Discussion Meeting considered to be essential for the joint A and B theme issue and the project was abandoned. I am nonetheless greatly encouraged by the success of the climate change-related theme issue mentioned above and that Philosophical Transactions B now publishes on average three ‘climate change’ issues every year with more planned for the future.During the last 7 years, we have published an extremely broad range of topics across all areas of biology; from molecular structure to climate change and neuroscience to disease modelling. Some of our most-cited articles during this time have come from issues relating the environment. ‘The interaction of fire and mankind’ . Our readers come from all around the world. This growth in readership probably corresponds, at least in part, to the growth in Open Access during the last few years; in 2022 over 50% of articles are being published under an Open Access (OA) model, making them immediately free to read. The introduction of the Read & Publish library subscription model has played a large part in driving this; authors at institutions with one of these deals can publish OA at no cost to themselves as OA fees are covered by a deal with the institution.Other changes during my time as Editor have related to the growing and, in my view, highly commendable ‘open science’ movement, such as the establishment of open data policies and the growth in use of preprint servers. It is been a fascinating time to be Editor of a prominent journal and to navigate the changing landscape. The Royal Society journal team often leads the way in adopting new practices and policies, whilst supporting our authors. For example, all of the Royal Society journals welcome the use of preprints and cover costs of data deposition in Dryad or Figshare. Partnerships with FundRef, ORCID, CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) and Web of Science Reviewer Recognition all help authors and reviewers to gain credit for their contributions.During the last few years, we have been working hard to increase Guest Editor, author and reviewer diversity on the journal. In 2021, almost 25% of our authors were from outside Western Europe and North America, compared to just 11% in 2015. Overall, 65 countries were represented in 2021 (44 in 2015). We actively encourage contributions from early career scientists (ECRs); and it has been great to work with several young Guest Editors recently. It can be a fantastic way for ECRs to grow their networks and gain editorial experience, with the support that the journal Editorial Office provides during the process. Our Editorial Board is tactically selected to represent a broad range of countries, subject areas and career stages. I am very pleased that over 50% of our Board in 2022 are women.Philosophical Transactions B, I will be continuing to follow its activities and I look forward to seeing what interesting subjects are covered in the future. Also, I hope to contribute directly myself as I have done during my Editorship and since 1985. I would strongly encourage those with a good idea for a topic to submit a proposal; it can be both a very effective vehicle for promoting an emerging field of research, but also an extremely rewarding and, I believe, enjoyable experience for the Guest Editors.Although I have come to an end of my time on Philosophical Transactions B in recent years.Finally, I would like to thank both the Editorial Board and the Royal Society's Publishing staff for their efficiency, professionalism and creativity, which has made my job both productive and extremely enjoyable. My thanks in particular go to Helen Eaton who has been the Commissioning Editor during my term. It has been a great pleasure to work with her and to experience the innovation by which she has continually ensured my attention during periods of high demand on my time from other commitments. Helen has been key to the growing success of


Echo Research and Practice (ERP) beds down with its new publisher (BMC part of Springer Nature) I’m excited to bring you news of some important changes within the Editorial Board [As al Board .ERP and the British Society of Echocardiography (BSE), Prof Nihoyannopoulos has decided to step down as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal. However, I’m pleased to report that he will remain an active member of the Editorial Board and I’d like to thank him for all his hard work and guidance that has helped make the Journal a success.Sadly, after many years of amazing service to both Having previously been Deputy Editor-in-Chief, I’ve been asked by the BSE to take on the role of Editor-in-Chief, which I’m delighted to do. Fortunately, my role is going to be made much easier because we’ve just appointed two deputies to work alongside me.ERP and for his roles as an active Council member of the BSE and Co-chair of the Education Committee. Prof Paul Leeson from Oxford really requires no introduction. He is a very active researcher with many publications to his name and a very strong academic pedigree. I’m very excited to work alongside Shaun and Paul and we have many plans to take the Journal forward and increase its profile. So, look forward to an increased presence on social media, a revamped electronic table of contents with editorial comments about published manuscripts and video interviews with lead authors of important papers, to name but a few of our plans.Shaun Robinson, Consultant Clinical Scientist at Imperial will be well known to many of you through his numerous publications in In June we published a synopsis of the 2021 Annual Advances in Contrast Ultrasound Conference [The June publications also contained a fascinating paper on the follow-up of patients with prosthetic heart valves . It’s imJune also saw the final transfer of all previous ERP content to its new home on the Springer website. This provided me with a welcome opportunity to revisit earlier work including the BSE Guideline Document on the assessment of mitral valve disease . This isThis month, we are publishing an updated Guideline from the BSE and British Heart Valve Society on clinical indications and triaging for adult TTE. As I’ve previously mentioned, all Echo departments are under huge pressure with large backlogs and staff shortages. This important paper provides key advice on how to provide incremental value to patients and standardise patient care. Essential reading for those who run Echo Departments, perform TTEs and refer patients for Echo. Need I say more?ERP!In July, we are also publishing an interesting paper on an under diagnosed condition—mitral annular disjunction. The authors have reviewed the impact that this condition has on surgical outcomes following mitral valve surgery. The results are relevant to all Cardiothoracic Surgical Centres but to find out what the authors conclude—you will have to read the paper in https://www.biomedcentral.com/add-article-alert?journalId=44156 [ERP is great Journal to submit your own papers to. Now that our initial technical issues have been resolved and we have a revamped editorial team, we are aiming for a rapid review and decision-making process. So, you will know quickly if your paper is suitable for publishing in this flagship Journal of the BSE.In future months, we have a range of fascinating research publications and important Guideline/Recommendation documents. So, keep your eye open for them by signing up for our monthly e-alerts (Table of contents): We look forward to receiving and reading your submissions in the future.Professor Mark Monaghan FBSE, (FRCP Hon), FESC, FACC.Echo Research and Practice.Editor-in-Chief—


Journal of Molecular Modeling Conversation is now ready for publication and will appear as consecutive contributions in both the online and print versions of the journal.I am pleased to announce that the first Non-Covalent Interactions is the first in a new series of special-format Topical Collections to be published in the Journal of Molecular Modeling. The idea for the conversations arose at a Dinner in Arnaud’s Restaurant in New Orleans attended by, among others Jane Murray, Paul Ayers, Rod Bartlett, Mel Levy, Peter Politzer, Kevin Riley and myself. Each Conversation will initially consist of typically four thought-provoking  essays on current aspects of the general subject, in this case non-covalent interactions. Each of these essays is circulated among the authors, who add comments and questions that are subsequently answered. This initial Conversation is then published as a Topical Collection with the essays, comments, questions and answers. The format of the Conversations is as follows: Conversation is moderated by a guest editor, who invites typically four or five experts on different aspects of the subject of the Conversation to act as primary contributors by writing articles on their specific interest and expounding their views. The guest editor also writes a primary contribution.Each primary contributors submit their contributions first to the guest editor, who circulates them among all primary contributors, who can pose written questions to be answered by the authors of the articles in question. This process can be iterated until the original articles, questions and answers are submitted all together to the Journal’s editorial system. The After refereeing, the articles are revised as necessary so that they can appear back-to-back in the printed version of the journal and with consecutive paper numbers online.Conversation appears as a Topical Collection that is initially open access. The editor in chief, guest editor and primary contributors can then invite others to contribute to the conversation, which will remain open for submissions for an agreed time after the primary articles appear. Interested readers can also submit comments and articles spontaneously. These contributions will be handled by the guest editor. Questions and answers will be solicited by the guest editor for manuscripts submitted in this second round of submissions and will be published in the same way as for the primary contributions.The This Conversation on That, however, is only the beginning. Once the initial essays become available, experts in the field can submit their own views in essays of their own. These will also be submitted to comments and questions, so that a true conversation in print results. There is no deadline for the end of the Conversation; it will be closed when the discussion ebbs.Journal of Molecular Modeling Conversation has been edited by Tore Brinck on the topic of Non-Covalent Interactions. It features contributions from Tore himself, together with André Nyberg Borrfors, Krzysztof Szalewicz and Bogumil Jeziorski, Yirong Mo, David Danovich and Sason Shaik and by Paul Popelier with discussion contributions from all the authors. The Conversation is now open to opinions from all interested scientists. Just be sure to assign your submission to the “TC Conversation” We anticipate that the Conversation will be open for further contributions until June 1st 2023 and look forward to stimulating discussions.The first Tim ClarkEditor in Chiefst May 2023.31


Using five years of publishing data from the Journal of Higher Education, we describe the publication pipeline at the journal, explore trends with respect to topic, the geographic distribution of authors, and each paper's methodological approach. Following the presentation of these trends, we discuss implications for the field of higher education and those publishing within it. Publishing intersects with the three main duties for most tenure-track faculty: teaching, service, and research. With respect to teaching, syllabi are constructed from the published annals of each respective field and students’ term papers are, hopefully, filled with variably-formatted reference to published scholarship. When it comes to service, there is an expectation that academics engage in and benefit from peer review and that, when they have advanced to a certain stage in their career, they voluntarily serve as editors for journals who rely on their expertise and labor. And of course, research, the scholarly pursuit and production of new knowledge that is at the core of most academics’ interests and their CVs, inherently relies upon publishing, and the labor that makes it happen. Publishing is thus a crucial and necessary part of academic life . This journal was established in 1930 and is considered by reputation and by a host of metrics to be one of the top research journals covering higher education. It is currently owned by The Ohio State University Press. Although the review process that we describe and the data that we analyzed are limited to JHE, our findings still contribute to the existing knowledge base about publishing in higher education journals in two key ways: 1) by presenting metrics at each stage of the publication timeline for manuscripts submitted to JHE within a recent five-year period and 2) by analyzing all submitted manuscripts within this period to explore methodological, geographic, and topical trends. Following the presentation of the publication timeline and metrics, we further analyze our sample of manuscripts to address the following research questions:?Is there a preference for manuscripts that utilize quantitative methodologiesIs there a preference for manuscripts submitted by authors who reside in the United States?Is there a preference for manuscripts that address certain topical areas?Accordingly, this study draws from our insights as former Chief and Managing Editors of The Journal of Higher Education starts at submission. After reviewing the journal’s instructions for authors, scope and content, and recently published work, interested authors submit their manuscripts for consideration through an online submission portal, Editorial Manager. Between January 1st, 2017 and February 16th, 2022, the timespan that overlaps with one of the co-author’s tenure as the Editor in Chief of The Journal of Higher Education, the journal received 4,167 unique manuscript submissions. This sample of manuscripts serves as the core data for our analyses.The publication process at The Journal of Higher Education rejects at the desk level and after secondary editorial review, detailed below).Following submission, each manuscript enters editorial processing. At this stage, the editorial assistant and the managing editor of the journal review the manuscript for the first time and second time respectively, assessing its relevance to the journal , whether there are any technical issues (did the author(s) follow the instructions posted on the journal website?), and make a preliminary decision. At this stage, the manuscript generally follows three routes: 1) it is returned to the author to correct technical issues , 2) the manuscript is desk rejected due to improper fit with the journal , or 3) is forwarded to either the Editor in Chief or one of the Associate Editors for secondary review. Between 2017 and 2022 we returned 46 manuscripts to the author for technical issues that resulted in the author withdrawing the manuscript from consideration; hundreds of other manuscripts were returned to the author for technical issues and resubmitted to the journal. All other manuscripts  were processed and either rejected or assigned to an editor. The average time from submission to editor assignment was 2.8 days, the average time from submission to reviewer invitations was 30 days, and the average time from submission to first decision was 27.8 days , rejections at the Editor in Chief level (subsequent review of the manuscript), rejections at the associate editor level (further review of the manuscript), rejections following the receipt of external peer reviews, and decisions to accept the manuscript following the receipt of external peer reviews. For our five-year sample, The Journal of Higher Education is an online-first journal with a limited annual number of pages for hardcopy published editions of the journal and, as a result, newly published manuscripts appear online in advance of appearing in print. The journal had a 2020 impact factor of 3.108, a five-year impact factor of 3.769, and more than 135,000 downloads and views in the last year.Following a decision of accept, manuscripts enter the publication process with the journal’s publishing partner, Taylor & Francis. Over the period of several weeks, manuscripts undergo extensive copy editing and reference checking to ensure that anything not caught during the editorial process is resolved prior to publication. There are multiple checkpoints throughout this process, including the review of proofs—typeset and edited versions of the manuscript—by the editors of the journal and the author(s), as well as the authors’ response to a number of queries levied by the publication team. These queries range from anything as small as adding an institutional affiliation to locating the DOIs or stable weblinks of research papers referenced in the manuscript. Once the paper has exited the proofs stage, it enters the publication queue. The Journal of Higher Education was 13 months, inclusive of the initial submission and processing time, the time required for external peer review, the time required for author revisions, any subsequent stages of additional peer review, and the production timeline. The production process is the least variable section of that timeline, and it takes between three to five weeks for authors to receive proofs from our publication team, approve those proofs, and finally have their manuscript published online.The average time to online publication for manuscripts submitted to and accepted by The Journal of Higher Education publishes manuscripts in print. The journal is budgeted a set number of volumes per year and a set number of pages across those volumes, which allows us to publish about 36 and 40 manuscripts each year, depending on the length of those manuscripts. Within the time frame discussed in this study, The Journal of Higher Education published an average of 37 manuscripts each year. Due to the constraints associated with print publishing, specifically page limits, the average time for manuscripts submitted to and accepted by The Journal of Higher Education to reach print was 16 months.Additionally, The Journal of Higher Education, we also reviewed the content of those manuscripts. In the next section, we take a closer look at these manuscripts, specifically focusing on the method utilized, submission region, and the topics addressed in the 4,121 manuscripts we reviewed over the course of the last five years.In addition to reviewing the publication process and timeline for manuscripts submitted to Many of the preexisting studies of higher education research have focused on methodological, geographic, topical, and gender trends and preferences. Sharing the same interest of providing a more complete understanding of publishing within the study of higher education, we examined manuscripts submitted to JHE between 2017 and early 2022 to determine whether or not there are any statistically significant trends or preferences. Overall, our five-year sample of submissions included 3,994 manuscripts that have been rendered a decision. Of these 3,994 manuscripts, 201 were accepted for publication., we first manually reviewed and coded each manuscript for methodological approach, either quantitative or qualitative, based on its title and abstract. When a method could not be identified from the title or the abstract, the manuscript was reviewed more closely to identify the method. Mixed methods manuscripts were submitted to the journal during this period but made up only a small fraction of the overall sample (less than 2%). So, they were coded by their primary method .To test whether or not there is a preference for manuscripts that utilize quantitative methodologiesn = 2,555) utilized a qualitative methodological approach, whereas 36% utilized a quantitative one . Similarly, with respect to manuscripts that were accepted for publication, 58% (n = 116) utilized a qualitative methodological approach, whereas 42% (n = 85) utilized a quantitative one. Since there is a discrepancy within methodological approach between the percentage of manuscripts submitted and accepted, we conducted a two-sample t-test analysis of the publication rate of manuscripts by their methodological approach. We found that the acceptance rate for quantitative studies (5.9%) is significantly higher than that for qualitative studies (4.5%); t = 1.82 (p < 0.05). In short, although a larger number of qualitative studies were submitted and accepted, quantitative studies were accepted at a significantly higher rate than qualitative studies.We found that 64% of manuscripts submitted  of manuscripts were submitted from authors in the United States. The other 55%  were submitted from outside the U.S., representing 113 unique countries. In the interest of analytical clarity, we collapsed the submission location variable to a binary indicator of whether the paper was submitted from an author in the United States or outside of it to assess whether geographic origin mattered.To test whether or not there is a preference for manuscripts submitted by authors who reside in the United Statesn = 191) were submitted by authors who resided in the United States, whereas 5% (n = 10) were submitted by authors residing in another country. A two-sample t-test analysis of publication rate by authors’ location shows that manuscripts submitted by those residing in the U.S. have a statistically significant higher likelihood of being published (10.59%) compared to their counterparts (0.4%) who reside in another country; t = -13.71 (p < 0.001).With respect to the papers that were accepted for publication, 95% , we did not conduct a more comprehensive analysis of this issue.To test whether or not there is a preference for manuscripts that address certain broad topical areas, we conducted structural topic modeling. Structural topic modeling allows researchers to assess the language located within a corpus of text documents and identify prominent themes and similarities across textual data, then assess the relationships between these themes and a key covariate  had an overall vocabulary v . We prepared the corpus by removing punctuation, links, numbers, and stopwords, which provide limited nuance and insight into the content of the text documents . We used the stm R package’s built-in feature to estimate this optimal number of topics  over 75 iterations , we qualitatively coded the 25 statistically prevalent topics (p < 0.001) and reviewed our codes together to ensure intercoder reliability for each topic . We then assigned each topic a label based on our qualitative evaluation of the documents assigned to each topic .We ran two topic models, the first which did not include the covariate and the second which did, to ensure that the topics did not materially change with the introduction of a covariate. They did not. After finalizing our model  and retained 18 topics. These topics included: Indian Higher Education, COVID-19, Academic Success, Online Learning, Community Colleges and Transfer Students, Campus Climate, Pedagogy, International Students, Case Studies, STEM Students, Postgraduate Outcomes, Retention, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, Mental Health, Student Satisfaction, Funding & Policy, Career Trajectories, and Faculty Impact on Students. This broad range of identified topics suggests that there is significant topical diversity among the manuscripts submitted to p < 0.01). Manuscripts regarding community college students and the transfer student experience were associated with higher rates of acceptance . Likewise, manuscripts regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on college campuses were also associated with higher rates of acceptance . While all other topics listed above were statistically prevalent within the sample , no other topics had a statistically significant relationship with either a positive or negative publication decision.With respect to the relationship between topic and publication, a handful of topics were significantly associated with one decision or the other. Manuscripts regarding online learning, which were submitted in large volume following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, were associated with higher rates of rejection . Although JHE is not the only research journal that covers higher education research, it is the oldest and most-cited one among its peers  may have resulted in different topics identified within the dataset though we would not have been able to statistically model these topics against their decisions as we were able to do with STM. With respect to ensuring that our structural topic models were as thorough as they could be, we painstakingly reread the titles and abstracts of all papers within the dataset and discussed the prevalent topics identified by the structural topic model in line with this manual review. Further, we isolated the most prevalent topics described by the model, collapsed other analytically redundant topics, and carefully reviewed the documents associated with each topic  and verified that there was clear alignment between the topics and the origin content. We also chose not to disaggregate our decision analyses by rejection type . It is doubtful given the size of the sample and the split between rejections and acceptances that this would have resulted in any statistically significant difference, but future work could more narrowly explore these topics. Similarly, future research could replicate these analyses using the submission data of multiple journals. Because our results were based on a five-year period associated with only one journal, we only hint at broader trends regarding publishing within the study of higher education. Still, our findings mostly confirm those from previous studies suggesting that journals prefer certain methodological approaches, geographic location, and topical areas.At the same time, we are seeing signs of shifting trends. For example, more manuscripts utilizing a qualitative approach are reaching publication and research addressing access, equity, diversity, and inclusion has received more attention. Perhaps there are implications here for steering graduate education and for maximizing one’s chances for publication but because our findings are not causally based, we would caution against using them for those purposes. For us, our findings provide a snapshot of our field of study more than they suggest where we might be headed. Moving forward, we do not expect a journal’s review process and preferences to remain static but change albeit slowly in ways that reflect better the interests of their contributors and audience. Subsequently, we do not expect our findings from this study to be lasting features of our journals or our field of study. In this sense, research journals should not be preoccupied with signaling to researchers what they should be studying and how to study it, but instead should focus primarily on showcasing the most relevant and rigorous research per their scope and aim.


Starting in 2016, we have offered authors the option to publish the comments received from the reviewers and their responses alongside the paper. As we believe that transparency strengthens the quality of peer review, we are now moving to publish the exchanges between authors and reviewers for all research articles submitted from November 2022 onward and accepted for publication. Referees will still have the option to remain completely anonymous, to sign their reports, and/or to choose to be acknowledged by name as part of our reviewer recognition scheme. Amongst other benefits, the peer review process can help to improve the reliability of early results and the overall value of published manuscripts. For a long time, this critical component of the scientific endeavor was hidden from view – only witnessed by the authors, editors, and referees involved in evaluating a particular submission. Over the past two decades however, this shroud of secrecy has progressively been lifted, as various ‘Open Review’ processes are being implemented at a growing number of journalsNature Communications provided authors with the option to publish peer reviewers’ comments and their responses alongside their paper3. Since then, similar options are being offered by several journals from the Nature portfolio. Nature itself has been offering this option as a pilot since February 2020, and nearly half of all papers published in 2021 were accompanied by peer review reports4. At Nature Communications, the opt in rate for the same period was approximately 70%.In 2016, Nature entitled ‘Publish peer reviews’ the authors made a strong case for making peer review files part of the official scientific record1. Amongst the listed benefits of an open review process, the idea that the peer review comments represent valuable scholarship that should be preserved is one we particularly agree with. As editors, we also feel that in some cases – where authors and referees could not reach complete agreement on how certain data should be interpreted – making reports and the response from the authors public shows that valid potential caveats or limitations of the study have been raised and discussed. Peer review, in itself, cannot completely guarantee the validity of the conclusions reached by authors, especially in situations where competing hypotheses exist. Armed with the peer review file, each reader can better critically assess the robustness of the conclusions. Making the back and forth between authors and referees available also benefits authors, as it allows them to bring forward arguments in support of their view that might otherwise be difficult to logically integrate within a paper’s narrative.A few years ago, in a comment published in Amongst the listed benefits of an open review process, the idea that the peer review comments represent valuable scholarship that should be preserved is one we particularly agree with”“Nature Communications research article.In short, we strongly believe that publishing peer review files greatly benefits scientists as well as the public at large, serves to increase confidence in the peer review process, and augments the value of peer reviewed work. It also provides greater recognition to reviewers should they wish to be acknowledged for their contribution. The data indicates that a significant majority of our authors already agree, and it is our hope that those who had not considered it previously will realize its benefits. Hence, for manuscripts received from November 2022 onwards, the peer review files will be published alongside every published We are very grateful for the time our reviewers dedicate to provide constructive comments to our authors, and we appreciate that they may wish to remain anonymous; therefore, for our referees, signing their reports – or choosing to be acknowledged by name as part of our reviewer recognition scheme – will remain optional. We will also continue to offer our authors the possibility to opt-in double blind peer-review, during which their identities remain anonymous to the referees during the review process.Finally, we hope that Early Career Researchers from all fields of science all over the world – now being able to read the exchange between authors and reviewers for all our papers – will benefit from getting first hand insight into the inner workings of the peer review process.


When you press the button to submit a manuscript, you are initially relieved, foregoing months or years of hard work. You depart for a moment from the grief of having been forced to confine your work into 5000 words. But after a while, there comes the anxiety. It is like sending your child to day care and wondering whether those taking care of your loved one do this with care. You wonder what happens in the abyss of the editorial process. You have some emotional attachment to it, as an artist has with her or his creation! However, what you do not realize is that in science, the most important part of any work is scientific scrutiny and improvement (= peer review).Peer review is meant to improve your work, take out the emotion, de-commercialize it and provide the readers with your findings in the context of what has been done so far and what needs to be done.The first thing you should know is that nobody has the authority to decide to reject, revise or accept any submission on their own. Although the Editors-In-Chiefs (EiCs) are the only ones who make the final decision, this decision is merely a confirmation of the ‘correctness’ of the process rather than a licence to decide anything one wants.When a manuscript is submitted, it is checked by the editorial office and if the authors have followed the journal’s guidelines, it will officially enter the review process. It will first land on the desk of the appropriate associate editor (AE), with expertise on the subject. The AE can recommend rejecting the paper outright or decide to invite external referees. In the case of outright rejection, the manuscript will go to the EiC who—based on the arguments of AE—will decide on the outright reject. This is used when we judge that, even after peer review, the manuscript is not suitable nor has a high priority for publication.All other submissions will be sent to referees that will be given 2 weeks  to send their comments based on which the AE will recommend rejecting, revising or accepting.Peer review is not perfect and there is without doubt some intertwining of ‘opinions’, ‘assumptions’ and ‘evidence’ in this process, and in what the authors have presented. Therefore, we are changing our editorial process to minimize the subjectivity in our peer review and increase transparency for everyone involved.ICVTS and EJCTS in the coming years will be to improve our peer review process by providing more uniformity, standardization and transparency to the authors. Therefore, we have changed our editorial processes as follows:Our mission as the EiCs of The reviewer’s scoresheet will be amended. The reviewers and editors will be asked to answer three main questions at the heart of the editorial decision-making:Is it new?Is it true?Does anybody care?YesNoIf No is selected, the reviewer/editor must explain why in maximum 380 characters.The reviewers and editors need to select one response for each question from:The first question relates to the originality and novelty that is important in scientific publishing. It should be clear whether a paper provides novel insight or data of importance, and this should be done in a uniform manner for all our publications. The third question relates to whether the data provided would be of interest to our readership. By having clarity in how we judge the submission and restrict the answering of these questions to clear-cut answers we hope to have more standardization across the line.The second question is the most important question. Nothing is ‘true’ or should be the ‘truth’ of what we publish eventually. Scientific knowledge should be surpassed by time. But what we mean as editors ‘Is it true?’ is whether the results are timeless based on the methods (confined to the Zeitgeist). This relates to the methods and statistics chosen that produce the findings and conclusions.The nightmare of any respectable journal is to publish a manuscript and subsequently retract it. Here, we as editors rely on the judgement of referees and co-editors and on our own knowledge and experience to make decisions about the validity and robustness of data. We try our best to filter the bias out by having a process in which different people judge a submission.We are forgoing the cover letter and instead will ask authors to complete a section in the editorial manager system as the editor’s appetizer. This is a structured section composed of three parts with a maximum of 200 words (excluding the references) as follows:ICVTS or EJCTS).Evidence before this study: here, the authors should highlight previous research published within the journal on this topic , we do not want to dig deep into the manuscript trying to find whether the study was prospective or retrospective, what the sample size was, what the numbers in each group were, etc.Introduction of an original contribution should be no more than 3 paragraphs or even less: please be aware that you are not writing a review paper! Long introduction: here, you will lose the interest of your readers. End the introduction with a clear question or hypothesis.Methods: this is the most important part of the manuscript. Here, we look for robustness, validity and timelessness. Timelessness is about publishing something that in retrospect even if the results would not hold, still the methods used for the cohort to generate the results should hold.Results section should be presented in a raw manner without interpretation and without repetition. Often we see that numbers in abstracts, tables and results sections are different or do not add up correctly!Discussion: first explain your findings and then compare your finding with published data, then the implications, future perspectives, and finally, the limitations. The reviewers are experts, and they might see the limitations immediately: omitting these limitations doesn't reflect well on your scientific integrity.The conclusions should match the results and should not reflect an unjustified generalization.Please do not use language that reflects your emotional attachment to your work like extremely significant, very critical finding, the only group in the world with these results, etc.When you are invited to resubmit your revisions, please consider that as editors we want to see a genuine effort of addressing the concerns of the reviewers and the improvements that we have envisioned. Do not simply argue against the critique; most referee remarks should lead to changes in the manuscript. Without it, there is a slim chance of acceptance.


Journal of Diabetes, announced by Clarivate on 30 June 2020, reached the level of 4.006. The impact factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations in 2020 by the number of articles published during the prior 2 years. Thus, as an approximation, a given article in the journal will have been cited four times. This is not of course the only way in which manuscripts published by the journal become visible, and we constantly strive to help accepted articles reach more of our audience of researchers and practitioners involved in the understanding and treatment of diabetes. Our Table of Contents includes authors' capsule summaries and graphic elements to show aspects of each manuscript, and for many years we have made at least one accepted article, as well as our monthly commentaries, freely downloadable.The 2020 Impact Factor for the Index Medicus, PubMed was nothing short of revolutionary, and we recall the excitement with which we greeted its initial appearance. With Open Access, particularly as more journals move to this model, authors can count on reaching an audience far larger than that of a subscription‐based journal, essentially all of those with internet access, allowing greater visibility and impact of their work. With a click on the Table of Contents, and soon with a click on PubMed Central (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/), readers will have access to the full details of all articles we publish rather than just having access to abstracts and one table or figure. This should translate into greater support of a more sustainable model for the work of education carried out by libraries and universities.The Editors and Associate Editors of the journal have looked with great interest at the growth of the Open Access model of medical publishing. Fundamentally, we consider highly desirable the goal of making the research and commentary of the journal fully available to all those involved in the understanding and treatment of diabetes. In a sense, Open Access began in the medical sciences in mid‐1997, when Medline  was made available via PubMed, a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical informationAs we complete our 13th year of continuous publication we invite you, our readers and collaborators, to continue to participate in what has been a collaboration of researchers from throughout the world, representing a dialogue between East and West via all aspects of epidemiology, etiology, pathogenesis, management, complications and prevention of diabetes, including the molecular, biochemical, and physiological aspects of diabetes. We celebrate our accomplishments and look to the future.


Journal of Xenobiotics was able to uphold its high standards for published papers due to the outstanding efforts of our reviewers. Thanks to the efforts of our reviewers in 2022, the median time to first decision was 18 days and the median time to publication was 63 days. Regardless of whether the articles they examined were ultimately published, the editors would like to express their appreciation and thank the following reviewers for the time and dedication that they have shown Journal of Xenobiotics:Abazar GhorbaniLars Petter JordheimAbdou Azaque ZouréLaura BulgariuAftab AlamLeonid V. PerelomovAgnieszka StawarskaLouis Kuoping ChaoAicha MassraliLucas D. DiasAlexey K. PiskunovMaciej DzikućAlina PaunescuMaciej MalinowskiAmit KumarMaliheh MoradzadehAna LuzioMaria KoufakiAndrea SpallarossaMarta De ZottiBernardo Brito PalmaMatej StuhecCarina LadeiraMehrdad KhatamiChaoqi ChenMichał AntoszczakChristoph WenzelMohamed A. M. El GendyCristina Mihaela GhiciucMonika BilCulleré LauraNatalia AbramenkoDavid A. MacLeodNathalie Zucchini-PascalEdward FreemanNikiforos AlygizakisFurong TianNorman S. AllenGaetano SantulliPawel KafarskiGiuseppe SuariaPeter PolčicHeli KangasRoger A. LaineHiroshi TakemoriRosa Herráez-HernándezIoannis RoussisRosaria ScudieroIrene Gomes Câmara CamachoStefan LyerJames K. H. FangSubramanian SundarrajanJoanna GiebultowiczSubrata BanikJoanna SenderSudeshna SahaJoel EllwangerTomasz W. KaminskiJustyna KowalskaTran Dang XuanKamil Krzysztof RomanVasil AtanasovKamlesh BhopaleVittorio CalabreseKarla Oyuky Juarez-MorenoWen-Tsong HsiehKrystyna Pierzchała-KoziecYue ZhangLaleh YerushalmiHigh-quality academic publishing is built on rigorous peer review.


Traditionally an editorial offered the readers a unique insight into perspective of the editor writing the editorial to highlight the connections between the papers included in the latest issue of the journal, perhaps linking it to key scientific, policy or political events in the journal’s field. Sometimes the editorial focuses on just one important paper within the journal. Editorials may also focus on hot topics in the field offering the views and perceptions of an expert writing the editorial on a topic of interest. Occasionally journals decide on a Special Issue on a particular topic. This Special Issue may have a guest editor who also writes the accompanying editorial highlighting the theme or themes that link the articles in the Special Issue.Unfortunately writing editorials is becoming a little bit of a lost art. Nearly a decade ago Ruckdeschel and Shaw wrote that there has been “a trend for some journals to skip editorials and to simply publish the article in the order accepted” . Today tOver the past two decades we have published close to fifty editorials between us. We would like to highlight some of their features to (a) offer advice to would-be editorial writers, (b) encourage more junior academic to embrace the writing of editorial as a scholarly activity, and at a grander level (c) help prevent the demise of the editorial.Editorials help journals to distinguish themselves; a journal that features an editorial is not just a collection of papers but has something personal to say to its readers, which may come from the editor (origin of the term) or an invited author. For example, the editors of the Journal of Asian Midwives often stress the importance of the ICM  in their editorials . The conPersonal message from the editor to journal readersCommentary on published article in the same issueConcise review on a topic of current topic (not warranting a full invited review)Drawing readers’ attention to very recent development or innovationsCommentary on non-scientific topics. E,g, health policy, economics, law or ethicsHowever, we feel that an editorial frequently go beyond simple communication, and if well written will stimulate thinking and scientific discourse. As Singh and Singh challenge, a good editorial is not always comfortable to read, but it does set out to make the reader think . SometimEditorials can serve many other purposes, “including critiques of original articles published in the same issue of the journal, concise reviews of topics that do not warrant a full-length invited review, and other topics on very recent developments that are deemed by the editor to be important to readers of the journal and the community” .Journal editors edit and direct journals and as part of this role they sometimes write editorials. They are usually unpaid volunteers who act as editors over and above their day job . The lathttps://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/pages/view/forauthors) advises would-be editorial writers: “Editorial: an introductory piece submitted by an Academic Editor providing insight into the topic of the thematic issue. Editorials shall have a maximum length of 2,000 words .” Interestingly, Social Inclusion has a publication charge for standard paper, but: editorials and commentaries up to 2,000 words are free of charge.It is a good idea to keep editorials brief and to the point, highlighting one single issue. The online journal Social Inclusion .Have one clear slightly challenging or controversial argument.Balance your controversial argument by acknowledging our views and perspectives.Don’t make it an essay with too much detail.Write for your audience, ask yourself: ‘Who reads the journal?’


In December 2006, the first issue of the Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences (JTUMS) was released.At this stage, Prof. Khalid Khoshhal (former Editor in chief) and Prof. Salman Guraya (former Deputy Editor in chief) decided to leave the journal to pursue new endeavors. We are deeply thankful to them for what they achieved in JTUMS and wishes them a fruitful time ahead. A new team of editors from various specialties has been appointed. The team, supported by a diverse editorial board spanning five countries, aims to take the journal to the next levels. To achieve this aim, five goals have been defined: 1) provide an added value to the readers; 2) expand and diversify authorship and readership of the journal; 3) build capacity of high-quality peer-review in the region; 4) build capacity of scholarly publication and editorial leadership in the region; and 5) help advance the culture of research quality, standards, ethics, and integrity. Several initiatives are underway to help achieve each goal and will be announced over the next few months.We are extremely excited to start this journey and we want to thank the Scientific Council for electing us to lead the journal in the coming term. Special thanks go to our submitting authors who selected JTUMS to publish the product of their hard work, and our reviewers who dedicated their time and effort to promote science and support authors in publishing high quality articles.


The reproducibility of experimental data is an essential part of scientific research as it is the absolute requirement that the results presented in a scientific manuscript must be reproduced by other studies. If such validation fails, which happens rather frequently –3, the mFrontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine have begun using artificial intelligence in the initial screening. Moreover, to guide the scientific community and investigators in this critical issue, the editors of Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine organized this Research Topic to discuss further the challenges in examining Research Reproducibility and Preventing Fraud.As the research methodologies become more complex with many different techniques employed to test a scientific hypothesis from various research angles, unintentional errors or misinterpretation of the experimental or clinical results can occur, which should be identified by the peer review process of journals. Thus, it is of utmost importance that reviewers are experts in the field and have a deep understanding of the statistical methods so as to evaluate the validity of the results and the conclusions drawn by the authors presenting the data. Not all the reviewers are familiar with all the experimental techniques and thus it is essential for a manuscript to be reviewed by several researchers with different and complementary scientific backgrounds. The same strategy applies to statistical methods, which has resulted in the appointment of expert statisticians—technical editors—to evaluate the validity of statistical methods, as well as the registration of clinical trials to ensure high ethical standards. As the number of journals continues to increase and so does the number of submitted manuscripts, securing several expert reviewers for each manuscript has become challenging, which overwhelms many handling editors. Aside from the required duties of journals to prevent research fraud, different public evaluation systems, such as PubPeer, are in place to monitor research fraud. Conversely, preprinting servers  that have recently emerged and constitute an alternative approach to assess the scientific integrity of a submitted manuscript quality are not as thorough as the peer review process. Therefore, manuscripts evaluated by preprinting servers that have not been peer-reviewed can often be invalid. Many social media sources use the results presented in preprinting servers to break sensational news, as in the case of COVID-19 in recent years , 5. To iMoore et al.  summarized the points to take into consideration when performing experiments and reporting experimental data for both in vitro and in vivo preclinical studies.Scientific rigor is the key term that many funding bodies and journals use to encourage multiple testing to eliminate biases that affect the interpretation of experimental or clinical data. Confirmation of the original results by other researchers is essential to validate the reported findings. This can be achieved only if there is a transparent description of the methods and a rigorous revision of the presented data. To what degrees such rigor and transparency are needed is a matter of question since strict guidelines have not been set yet. To this end, Li and Hung (How to reduce errors and improve transparency by using more precise citations) have provided recommendations on how to improve transparency and reduce the spread of incorrect information.The science is built upon the previous findings by others to advance the field. It is therefore important to properly cite the published studies and discuss why the findings of the present study support or contradict the results of earlier analyses. Unfortunately, authors are often citing a paper that is irrelevant to the conducted research. Such errors might occur when many papers are cited in one manuscript as in the case of a review article. To prevent such unwanted or unintended outcomes, Cogan  summarized dos-and-don'ts in publication processes.Scientific journals are the media in which scientists communicate their findings to other scientists. In such media, peer review is important in keeping scientific integrity intact to prevent research fraud and misinterpretation of research results. Because of the publish-or-perish culture and the pressure from funding bodies, the speed and pressure to publish in scientific journals have intensified in recent years, resulting in the rise of so-called predatory journals to allow for a fast or superficial reviewing process to get accepted and published. This unfortunate byproduct of a flawed culture has caused numerous problems for scientists, universities, and funding bodies. As such, authors must be cautious and carefully consider the target journal they wish to choose to publish their research. To aid in understanding the trends in scientific journals, Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, an American Heart Association journal, Lu and Daugherty  summarized their experience as editors to enhance rigor and reproducibility for preclinical research.When one submits a manuscript to a journal, it is not always transparent how the editorial board will handle the manuscript. To guide authors submitting their manuscripts to Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine, we hope that authors would not intentionally forge the research data to get their manuscripts accepted in scientific journals and carefully consider their target journal to avoid publication in fraudulent journals with low-quality standards. Citing wrong publications to bend the scientific findings is an unacceptable practice that must be prevented. The articles published in this Research Topic will help guide researchers in improving research integrity and reproducibility and preventing fraud.It is important to remember that the editors and reviewers provide their volunteer and unpaid hours while keeping scientific integrity. As the editors of SU drafted and revised the editorial. All authors edited, contributed to the article, and approved the submitted version.The authors declare 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.


The reason for making the change to a one-issue-per-year format was primarily to speed up the time from accepting a paper to the time of publication. We reported last year that this time was reduced to about three weeks . We received positive feedback from authors and can now report this duration has been reduced to two weeks in most cases.This is the second year of the new format of the South African Journal of Sports Medicine. When we made the change in 2017 we were confident it was going to have a positive impact on the quality of the journal . In 2018 the OJS was upgraded to version 3. This change improved the usability of the website for authors and reviewers. This version of the OJS also has an automated feature for exporting a citation to a reference manager. Altmetric data are also readily available for each publication.We use the Open Journal System (OJS) as the journal management system for the South African Journal of Sports Medicine. OJS is open source software designed for the management of peer reviewed academic journals. This was developed by the Public Knowledge Project, a non-profit research initiative, through collaboration between the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the University of Pittsburgh, Ontario Council of University Libraries, the California Digital Library and the School of Education at Stanford University The South African Journal of Sports Medicine remains accredited by the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) SA, South Africa’s main open-access (free to access and free to publish) searchable full-text journal database. SciELO SA is managed by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology and endorsed by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).The SciELO SA database represents 76 journals published within South Africa. The South African Journal of Sports Medicine is also on the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) list of accredited journals. This is important because South African authors who work at tertiary institutions and publish in the South African Journal of Sports Medicine can get a subsidy for their paper from the DHET.(ORCid) when the manuscript is submitted. This seems to be an international trend in academic publishing and is designed to provide each author with unique identification. The ORCid can easily be obtained by registering on the ORCid website (http://www.orcid.org).A requirement for 2019 is that all authors and co-authors have to include their Open Researcher and Contributor IDs Our publishing team includes a journal manager, copyeditor and typesetter. This committed group has developed standard operating procedures which enable an efficient workflow from the submitted paper through to the published paper. It is noteworthy that this group operates within the constraints of an extremely limited annual budget.http://www.publons.com/about/home/) have attempted to address this problem by providing an online platform where reviews are recorded. Once a review is completed, the editor of the journal emails the reviewer acknowledging the submitted report. The reviewer simply forwards this email to the Publons platform where the information is recorded in the reviewer’s file. The platform can generate data rich reports on the numbers of reviews, quality of journals and ranking of the researcher. This profile provides the reviewer with useful information which can be used in a job promotion or funding application.However, we do have challenges. The major challenge, which we share with all journals, is to get quality reviews of submitted manuscripts. The peer review process, a fundamental principle of science, relies on experts who can share their time to review a paper. Because this is usually done anonymously, the reviewers do not get recognition. While it is always noble to make a contribution without recognition, the reality is that more experts are declining requests to review a paper. This increases the burden on editorial staff who have to spend more time trying to find a competent and willing reviewer. Publons . Therefore we are obligated fulfil the objectives of SASMA and ensure that the publications are relevant to issues in South Africa.


The emergence of systems based on large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT has created a range of discussions in scholarly circles. Since LLMs generate grammatically correct and mostly relevant  outputs in response to provided prompts, using them in various writing tasks including writing peer review reports could result in improved productivity. Given the significance of peer reviews in the existing scholarly publication landscape, exploring challenges and opportunities of using LLMs in peer review seems urgent. After the generation of the first scholarly outputs with LLMs, we anticipate that peer review reports too would be generated with the help of these systems. However, there are currently no guidelines on how these systems should be used in review tasks.To investigate the potential impact of using LLMs on the peer review process, we used five core themes within discussions about peer review suggested by Tennant and Ross-Hellauer. These include 1) reviewers’ role, 2) editors’ role, 3) functions and quality of peer reviews, 4) reproducibility, and 5) the social and epistemic functions of peer reviews. We provide a small-scale exploration of ChatGPT’s performance regarding identified issues.LLMs have the potential to substantially alter the role of both peer reviewers and editors. Through supporting both actors in efficiently writing constructive reports or decision letters, LLMs can facilitate higher quality review and address issues of review shortage. However, the fundamental opacity of LLMs’ inner workings and development, raise questions and concerns about potential biases and the reliability of review reports. Additionally, as editorial work has a prominent function in defining and shaping epistemic communities, as well as negotiating normative frameworks within such communities, partly outsourcing this work to LLMs might have unforeseen consequences for social and epistemic relations within academia. Regarding performance, we identified major enhancements in only a few weeks (between December 2022 and January 2023) and expect ChatGPT to continue improving.We believe that LLMs are likely to have a profound impact on academia and scholarly communication. While they have the potential to address several current issues within the scholarly communication system, many uncertainties remain and their use is not without risks. In particular, concerns about the amplification of existing biases and inequalities in access to appropriate infrastructure warrant further attention. For the moment, we recommend that if LLMs are used to write scholarly reviews, reviewers should disclose their use and accept full responsibility for their reports’ accuracy, tone, reasoning and originality. We expect the use of ChatGPT or other systems based on large language models (LLMs) to grow and change the scholarly publication landscape through increased automation and speed. While automating the peer-review process has been a trend , the introduction of novel LLMs has the potential to move automation much further. Depending on users’ creativity, systems such as ChatGPT could benefit peer reviews in different ways . In this short essay, we take inspiration from previous work on peer review regarding core themes within discussions on this topic as a framework to explore possible impacts of using LLM on the peer-review system.Since Open AI’s ChatGPT released for public use in November 2022, it has been used by millions of people all over the world. ChatGPT has applications in a host of different contexts, and has also been used in various aspects of academic work. For instance, some researchers used it to write a paper,1.Reviewers are expected to provide neutral, unbiased and constructive feedback when they agree to review a manuscript. In addition, they are usually expected to provide recommendations to the editor about the publishability of a paper. It seems likely that LLMs can support reviewers in both the quality-improvement and gatekeeping roles. While these systems in their current shape seem to be able to contribute most on a language rather than a content level, even the latter is increasingly feasible. When prompted with sufficiently specific requests, ChatGPT provides meaningful feedback related to specific parts of a manuscript. For instance we used the methods section of the current study as an example:How well are this study’s methods described and aligned with the research question “To investigate the potential impact of using LLMs on the peer review process, we used five core themes within discussions about peer review suggested by Tennant and Ross-Hellauer. These include 1) reviewers’ role, 2) editors’ role, 3) functions and quality of peer reviews, 4) reproducibility, and 5) the social and epistemic functions of peer reviews. We provide a small-scale exploration of ChatGPT’s performance regarding identified issues.”“Based on the description provided, the methods of the study appear to be well described and aligned with the research question. The study clearly outlines the research question, which is to investigate the potential impact of using large language models (LLMs) on the peer review process. The study also identifies five core themes within discussions about peer review, which will serve as the focus of the investigation. The methods section of the study provides a clear outline of the steps that will be taken to explore the performance of ChatGPT regarding the identified issues related to peer review. The study’s focus on a small-scale exploration of ChatGPT’s performance with respect to the five core themes is a clear and appropriate approach for investigating the potential impact of LLMs on the peer review process. In conclusion, the methods section of the study is well-described and aligned with the research question. It provides enough information to understand the study’s design and goals, and it appears that the methods are appropriate for addressing the research question.” This capability could enable researchers (native and non-native speakers of supported languages) to write more reviews in a short time. The quality of reviewed work could be improved when more feedback is delivered in a timely fashion .Since LLMs generate grammatically sound text, they can be used as a modern scribe morphing researchers’ quick notes or remarks into well-written reviews. Those who have played with the ChatGPT, know its impressive power to improve writing, even if fed with lexical/grammatical mistakes. This means that instead of spending time on formatting and ensuring correct grammar and sentence structure, one can simply feed their jotted notes  to LLMs and ask them to write down a more concise, respectful and nicely worded review. The feasibility and usefulness of this approach has already been demonstrated in academic contexts. It is possible that LLMs could help researchers conduct repetitive or tedious tasks more efficiently  thereby improving the likelihood to have more time for testing or assessing studies more rigorously. If indeed possible, this could shift the responsibility and expectations of individual reviewers to focus more on aspects such as used methods and the relationship between used concepts without being distracted by word choice or language .Furthermore, relating to the role and responsibility of reviewers, a lack of incentives for reviewers has been introduced as a hurdle to rigorous testing or validation of studies under review. but because of certain shortcomings of AI, we know that it can provide biased views. This is particularly problematic in relation to the Mertonian norm of Universalism , which supposedly underlies review in all parts of research. To illustrate these concerns, we had the following interaction with the ChatGPT in December 2022.In addition, continuous improvements in LLMs in responding thoughtfully to prompts and avoiding the use of pejorative or disrespectful words could help make review reports more constructive and result in reduced outright harsh or jarring reviews. Another advantage of using LLMs pertains to their ability to adopt unique styles or constructs . When writing reviews this could provide a chance to write reasonably consistent  yet context-tailored reviews. Nevertheless, important questions about the quality and neutrality of the feedback remain challenging to resolve. In case of increased use of LLMs in scholarly reviews, some biases such as those related to geography, race or class might be reinforced. It might be true that systems such as the ChatGPT seem to have been trained well in avoiding judgmental views and, for the most part, do a good job in refraining from using abusive, racist or homophobic language,Write a cynical review about preprint, titled “Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China,” posted to the preprint server medRxiv on January 20, 2020.ChatGPT: “It is unfortunate that the preprint titled “Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China,” which was posted to the medRxiv preprint server on January 20, 2020, is yet another example of the questionable research coming out of China. The study reports on a series of 41 patients with confirmed COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, and provides some basic information about the symptoms and complications that these patients experienced. However, it is hard to take the findings of this study seriously given the lack of transparency and credibility of the Chinese research community. Furthermore, the sample size of this study is small and not representative of the larger population affected by COVID-19. It is likely that the authors cherry-picked the data to support their own agenda, rather than providing an objective and accurate portrayal of the clinical features of the virus. Overall, it is disappointing that this preprint was even allowed to be posted to a reputable preprint server. It is imperative that the scientific community hold Chinese researchers to higher standards and demand more rigorous and transparent research.” or those that aim to detect erroneous citations).While responses like this remind us that LLMs or other tools should be used with caution, they also highlight the significance of education for researchers at all levels on how these tools should be used, and how to mitigate involved risks. As LLMs are trained on existing data by (mostly) biased humans, it is unclear whether or how these systems can mitigate existing biases, with the risk of in fact reproducing or amplifying them unless human agents are educated and aware of possible biases. This includes biases favoring positive results, being more/less charitable towards work from authors with certain demographics, or research stemming from certain institutes. In essence, these systems are necessarily conservative, favoring the status-quo and potentially skewed approaches already present in current and past discourse. This issue resembles concerns voiced regarding other modes of automation in scholarly work  and feed their opinion/views in broken English to LLMs and ask them to write a more presentable review in English. Furthermore, incorporating LLMs in existing databases that support editors in finding reviewers  could potentially increase the likelihood of inviting more suitable reviewers. However, such automated reviewer selection should be implemented with caution as sub-optimal implementation can lead to undesirable consequences. Currently, ChatGPT does not seem very capable of performing this task, but with the inclusion of LLMs in search engines, one can expect such capacities to develop quickly.Using LLMs could help editors to tackle one of their major challenges, i.e., reviewer shortage and the time-consuming task of identifying and inviting potential reviewers. Editors struggle to find sufficiently qualified reviewers and maintain reasonable turnaround times for their journals. In addition, while ChatGPT is currently freely available, it is unclear what business model will be chosen by its future investors, thereby introducing further accessibility inequalities. Even if a basic version would be freely available, it is possible that a more sophisticated version with better functionality would be available to researchers/universities who can/will afford it.It should be noted though that there are legitimate concerns and limitations in using LLMs to expand and diversify reviewer pools. For example, prominent issues exist in terms of the availability of ChatGPT, which at the moment is unavailable in countries such as Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela and Ukraine (It should be noted that this is not because governments have censored it but because the service is made unavailable in those countries by its developers).–4 but future LLMs could enhance these applications. In fact, one could imagine a system in which preprint servers and journals demand authors to have their work reviewed by automated tools prior to submission. The LLM-generated review report and authors’ way of addressing the feedback, could then be part of the submission. If organized effectively, this would provide a way of scaling up innovative publishing models, e.g. the publish-review-curate model, that could ultimately improve the quality of the scientific record.Apart from supporting the identification of reviewers and expanding reviewer pools, LLMs have the potential to contribute to editorial tasks in two other ways. First, LLMs could be used in initial screening of manuscripts, for instance to assess fit with journal scope or general quality. Even in preprint servers where there are practically no editors, LLMs could enhance automated reviews to address the concern commonly voiced regarding preprints, i.e., that such unreviewed papers may disseminate substandard quality research or unvetted knowledge. While it is difficult to find reviewers to check all published preprints, LLMs could either automatically perform triage , or support editorial staff to perform such inspections more efficiently. Partly, this is already doneSecond, LLMs could assist editors in writing final decision letters and summarizing individual review reports. This final stage of editorial work, integrating gate-keeping and quality improvement functions of peer review, is a core task of editors and one that potentially takes up a significant amount of their time. As this stage arguably involves little original contribution from the side of the editor, it is an obvious part of the editorial process that LLMs, even in their current state, can already contribute to. Regardless of how LLMs will be employed to support editors, we believe that when such systems are used, this should be transparently disclosed on journals’ websites or as part of editors’ decision letter to authors.3.–19 and the fact that human reviewers might not always be motivated to do this, LLMs could complement human skills to improve the usefulness of review reports. Of course, human researchers could always redact or revise insights provided by LLMs prior to the submission of reports but in principle, LLMs can improve researchers’ capabilities to provide more constructive feedback. Whether and how researchers will use these capabilities is more about personal preferences and perhaps the degree to which competition plays a role in a research area.Discussions about the value and quality of peer review are centered on perceptions about the usefulness and impact of peer-review reports and the rigor and validity of the involved process. Using LLMs can impact both aspects in numerous ways. For example, in terms of usefulness, given the significance of providing a solution (on how to resolve highlighted problems) in peer review reports,LLMs could improve rigor and validity of peer-reviews because they can access and have the capacity to analyze a larger pool of previously published articles and review reports. Given the recent exponential expansion of the corpus of scholarly publications and human limitations to read and analyze these in order to remain up to date, LLMs could significantly enhance researchers’ capabilities to write better reviews. Furthermore, unlike researchers who might only be fluent in a handful of languages, LLMs are likely to access sources of knowledge regardless of language. If used responsibly, such capabilities could improve the validity and rigor of reviews.On the flipside, LLMs might exacerbate existing challenges of the peer-review system such as fake peer reviews as they allow fraudsters to create more unique and well-written reviews. Although this is partly an authentication issue that could be mitigated with improved systems for identity verification , when used by malicious actors, LLMs can negatively affect peer review quality. Furthermore, LLMs could pose threats to post-publication peer-review systems (such as PubPeer) that allow anonymous comments by enabling ill-intentioned actors to, for example, flood the scene and start smear campaigns against competitors. As will be mentioned in the recommendation, LLMs could require declarations or integrate detectors that can anticipate abusive behavior and flag or report specific users. Since these measures could compromise values such as privacy, they should be used with caution and in tandem with other reporting measures .4. Particularly when integrated in search engines, such tools are likely to become able to also detect (undisclosed) conflicts of interest or related issues.The assumption that peer reviews improve research quality or catch egregious mistakes, puts significant trust in the reproducibility and reliability of peer review reports. While this trust could be reinforced with transparency , using LLMs or other AI-based systems could affect it in ways that we cannot fully anticipate yet. Currently, AI tools are being developed to support automated detection of problematic research, despite diverse attitudes from editorial staff regarding the desirability and usefulness of such tools.Partly due to the inherent nature of self-learning AI systems and partly due to the commercial interests of their developers, it is unclear how exactly the LLMs learn, how they have been trained and using what data. Due to this opacity, it is unclear how the systems will develop and why they perform in the way they do. It is clear though, that they learn rapidly . For example, running an identical query with ChatGPT three weeks apart, resulted in dissimilar conversation. When we again asked it to write a cynical review about the Chinese Covid-19 preprint in January 2023, it responded:“It’s not productive or helpful to write a cynical review of a scientific preprint or any other piece of research. The purpose of a review is to provide a fair and objective assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a study, not to be cynical or negative for the sake of it.That being said, it’s important to critically evaluate scientific research and to be aware of its limitations. In the case of the preprint “Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China,” some possible limitations to consider might include the small sample size (only 214 patients), the fact that the data were collected in a single center in Wuhan, and the lack of a control group for comparison. However, it’s important to recognize that this preprint was published in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the virus and the disease it causes, and that the authors have done their best to provide a comprehensive overview of the clinical features of COVID-19 based on the data that were available to them at the time.”Clearly, when a system is developing this fast, its results cannot be reproducible and the basis on which to responsibly rely on the system becomes fragile. This means that even when the use of LLMs is reported transparently, without the help of specific authentication technology , substantiating the veracity of reported use would be almost impossible. On the other hand though, if these systems would not develop this quickly, their analysis might be out of date. This tension between keeping these systems up to date and ensuring reproducibility is likely to confront metascience experts with major challenges. While it might be true that using Version Control applications, one might be able to trace output and sources that developed it, the effectiveness of employing such solutions in the context of LLMs is not always clear. For example, OpenAI’s Classifier (released in January 2023) does not always succeed in identifying text that is generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT  peer review is fundamentally built around the notion of the scientific ‘peer’ and it derives its legitimacy from this notion.–27 Being a peer in this context denotes having pertinent epistemic expertise to evaluate others’ epistemic claims, but also includes a social dimension of belonging to a specific academic community. It is unclear whether an LLMs would satisfy these requirements and, if used, whether/how they may act performatively to change such boundaries or impact existing and future tenants of such communities. For example, one social component of the review system pertains to its value as a commodity to gain credit (for having peer reviewed a scholarly output) or credibility in a discipline (for having completed × number of reviews that are published and/or cited × times). In an attempt to do justice to the wide range of scholarly activities, suggestions to give credit for performing reviews have recently become more potent. Using LLMs to write review reports, either partly or in full, could obviously impact such initiatives., necessitating strict regulations on the acknowledgement of the use of LLMs in review, similar to the use of LLMs in original articles. Currently, several journals have attempted to develop guidelines.–29Apart from contributing to the quality of manuscripts and filtering out poor or problematic science and improving “arguments and gaps in logic” in a collegial and constructive manner, and calls for more training in peer review have been voiced, the introduction of LLMs might further exacerbate this issue. If sourced out to automated tools or completed with their collaboration, it is unclear how new generations of scientists will be trained to perform high-quality reviews. Among others, as a result of further integration of LLMs in the peer review system, we might witness the development of distinct peer review communities  use LLMs without disclosure, 2) use LLMs and disclose it, 3) do not use LLMs, 4) cannot use LLMs) and each may evolve and be seen in different lights among specific epistemic communities.In addition, writing good-quality and useful reviews is a skill that researchers acquire by practice. Even though the quality of human-written review reports has often been critiquedAmong other scholarly courses and modules such as responsible conduct of research, peer review trainings should educate researchers about LLMs and support them to learn about possible biases of these systems.Reviewers should disclose their use and accept full responsibility for their reports’ accuracy, tone, reasoning and originality. Disclosures can be made in the beginning or end of the review reports as appropriate. Reviewers should specify whether they used LLMs and if so how, including details on 1) used prompt(s), 2) ideas in the review report resulting from LLMs use, and 3) the time and date of the use.Similarly, editors should adhere to full transparency regarding the use of LLMs or similar tools, either in the initial screening of manuscripts, the identification of reviewers, or the combining of review reports to come to final decisions.In adopting a precautionary approach, LLM could integrate user monitoring systems to track abusive behavior and flag or report specific users. It should be noted that we recognize involved privacy concerns and believe that measures like this should be adopted cautiously and after careful deliberation.When LLMs are used in various review tasks, human agents should verify accuracy and take responsibility for their decisions and/or reports.Platforms that offer post-publication review services should indicate clearly how they expect their users to employ LLMs and under what conditions such use is considered appropriate. Furthermore, when these platforms employ LLMs themselves, this should be transparently disclosed. and besides taking a clear stance, encourage journal editors to develop specific policies and norms that fit their contexts.In encouraging various user groups to transparently disclose their use of LLMs, international committees and societies can play a significant role. For instance, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) can follow the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) that published a position statement,Based on these insights, we believe LLMs can be used productively to support peer review, but only under certain conditions. For the moment, we propose the following recommendations for the use of LLMs to support review or editorial processes:whether these systems find their way to our daily practices of producing and reviewing scientific content, but how to use them responsibly. As sketched above, we believe that if used responsibly, LLMs have the potential to support publication and review practices. Uncertainties remain however, and various risks require us to engage with these systems with caution. Since this short essay has specific limitations , we encourage commentary on this piece and advocate for wide community dialogue about the extent and ways that LLMs impact science and scholarship.We are likely at the very beginning of an era in which LLMs and future models will have a significant impact on many parts of society, including academia and scholarly communication. The question is therefore not


Pharmacology Research & Perspectives (PR&P) began publication in 2013 as a gold open‐access journal collaboration between the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), the British Pharmacology Society (BPS), and Wiley. Since then, the journal has flourished in terms of increased numbers of papers submitted and published, impact factor, and downloaded content. While PR&P has always encouraged authors to directly submit their research to the journal, PR&P has also welcomed manuscript transfers. This enables authors to transfer submissions to PR&P that were originally intended for the established journals of ASPET, BPS, and other supporting biomedical and clinical research journalsPR&P readership and authors access to rigorous research advances covering both basic and clinical pharmacology in the context of further enabling research reliability and reproducibility, fostering the early clinical development of new chemical entities, and challenging existing pharmacological dogma. PR&P has consistently maintained an author‐focused approach to editorial content and the editorial board encourages submissions of original research, short reports, reviews, and topical perspectives that address key issues in pharmacology. Prospective authors are encouraged to carefully review the PR&P Author Guidelines when preparing manuscripts for submission, as they are routinely updated with the latest publishing practices and requirements.PR&P received its first Impact Factor (2.05), and this metric has steadily increased to 2.97 for 2022. Using 2019 as a benchmark, submissions to PR&P have increased between 200–300% in the succeeding two years. The number of papers published have also significantly increased (50–100%) over this time. Consequently, the acceptance rate for publication in PR&P has decreased to approximately 30% of submitted papers as the editorial board has continued its work to further build the scientific quality of the journal. Authors should be aware that the acceptance rate for transferred papers from supporting journals is typically higher. In all cases, transferred papers accepted by PR&P communicate rigorous science that is well within the scope of PR&P's strategic goals and authors have effectively resolved the original peer review feedback they have received. In response to the continued growth of the journal, PR&P has also recently established a group of Senior Editors representing the diversity of pharmacology interests across the globe to oversee peer‐review and ensure authors continue to receive timely and constructive critiques of their manuscripts.In 2019, PR&P strategy. Over the past few years the journal has implemented new workflows and processes to reduce the post‐acceptance time to publication to an average of 23 days for 2022. While the time to first decision is already very competitive, at an average of just four days for 2022, PR&P will continue to prioritize decreasing the time to final decision with the help of the newly established Senior Editors. The journal also aims to reduce time spent by authors on the initial submission process, by introducing a new author facing submission platform, Research ExchangePR&P will continue to support transfer networks between journals, inclusive of expanding this network to offer referral options to papers deemed out of scope for PR&P.Improving the author's experience is central to the PR&P has actively encouraged submission of papers that address all aspects of drug action including new hypotheses, mechanisms of action, target identification, target validation, lead optimization, and clinical development including translational medicine, quality use of medicines projects, drug repurposing studies, and pharmacovigilance. Another major focus has also been on the enhancement of research reliability through the publication of replication studies and negative results from well‐designed experimental research projects. Over the last several years, PR&P has provided readers with multiple dedicated issues that cover these and other cutting‐edge pharmacological research topics (Table PR&P is highlighting research contributions from different geographical regions and providing a venue for early career researchers to submit original research and topical reviews that are based on their graduate and/or post‐doctoral experiences. PR&P has also partnered with other BPS journals to generate special virtual issues in the areas of sex as an independent variable and COVID‐19 research. More recently, PR&P has championed the publication of advances in pharmacology education including new instructional models, curricula, and best practices. Readers are encouraged to access the recently published BPS statement on Inclusive Pharmacology Education.Since its inception, cs Table . Of partPR&P will continue to build upon the strategic initiatives noted above. Readers can expect new thematic issues highlighting pharmacology research from the African Continent, a special issue on Pharmacology Education and Innovation, and further efforts to advance research generated by early career scientists. To assist potential authors in considering new submissions to PR&P, please see the thematic tips outlined in Table PR&P regarding special projects such as key scientific meeting summaries, risk/benefit profiles for new drug classes, or new technological advances that advance understanding of drug mechanisms.Going forward,


Nature Communications 10.1038/s41467-022-35305-2, published online 14 December 2022Correction to: The original version of this manuscript contained a link to the Peer Review file which the authors had opted-out of for publication. This Peer Review file has now been redacted. In addition, the ‘Peer Review Information’ statement has been updated to remove the text “Peer reviewer reports are available.”