In 1961, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began to circulate biological preprints in a forgotten experiment called the Information Exchange Groups (IEGs). This system eventually attracted over 3,600 participants and saw the production of over 2,500 different documents, but by 1967, it was effectively shut down following the refusal of journals to accept articles that had been circulated as preprints. This article charts the rise and fall of the IEGs and explores the parallels with the 1990s and the biomedical preprint movement of today. Since 1991, physicists and mathematicians have been using the arXiv preprint repository to circulate articles and ideas, to the envy of many biologists. After a number of failed attempts, including ClinMed Netprints (1999–2005) and Nature Precedings (2007–2012), 2 biology preprint servers were launched in 2013—PeerJ Preprints and bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory). Many journals will now consider an article that has appeared on a preprint server, and grant-awarding bodies on both sides of the Atlantic allow preprints to be cited in grant and fellowship applications—some, such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, insist that their investigators deposit their papers as preprints. [This is widely seen as an example of biology finally catching up with physics , 3—it seThis article outlines the rise and fall of the IEGs and tells the cautionary tale of the ability of scientific publishers and entrenched interests within the academic community to restrict the sharing of knowledge.In 1961, Francis Crick received a letter from Errett C. Albritton, a 70-year-old administrator at the NIH Figs  and 2, iThe IEG concept had been dreamt up in January 1961 by Albritton, along with 2 biochemists—David Green  of the UDrosophila Information Service [At one level, there was nothing new about circulating unrefereed documents or preprints. Previous systems were generally linked to specific institutions, such as the MIT Research Laboratory in Electronics that began producing unrefereed technical reports in 1946 . Other s Service . The sca Service .The first IEG was focused on oxidative phosphorylation and terminal electron transport. It initially had only 32 members but grew to 386 within 4 years . Other aIn October 1963, Albritton began soliciting suggestions for more IEGs and approached Sydney Brenner, Jacques Monod, and many others . Like CrOverall, about 80% of the IEG memos were articles. Around one-third of these were circulated after acceptance by a journal but before publication; the remainder were submitted to the IEG before peer review and would be what we would now classify as preprints. There were also technical notes and—occasionally—debates. Over one-third of IEG members were from outside the US , and over 90% of the memos were in English [The 1960s marked a period of substantial growth in scientific publishing, in particular through the activities of Pergamon Press, set up by the British businessman Robert Maxwell. The number of journal titles published by Pergamon rose from 40 in 1959 to 150 in 1965; while some were created as money-spinners, others were learned society journals that Pergamon took over . The finBulletin of the Atomic Scientists argued that scientists in all fields should set up IEGs [Physics Today, PIE was not completely analogous to the IEGs but was close enough that ‘some comfort can be gathered from the success IEG has encountered among biologists’ [At this time, there were repeated discussions in the scientific community about the slowness of publication and the need for more informal and automated methods of communication , includi up IEGs . For sev up IEGs . Within logists’ . PIE woulogists’ -37.The Journal of Immunology, and it clearly felt threatened by the creation of IEG5 (Immunopathology) [The growth of preprint circulation in all fields of science led some journal publishers—both commercial companies and learned societies—to feel that their prestige in the scientific community and their finances could be menaced. The counteroffensive began in April 1966 at a meeting of the American Association of Immunologists (AAI). Since 1916, the AAI had published thology) , which hthology) . The AAIthology) .Nature to wade into the debate. It was not that journal’s finest hour. In a series of articles and editorials in July and August 1966, including the unapproved reproduction of one of Albritton’s documents [Nature attacked the growth of the IEGs and the PIE proposal in sometimes sarcastic terms [Nature’s first target was PIE—a proposal the journal considered to be ‘so offensive’ that it hoped it would be ‘stillborn’. The opening of one editorial, particularly condescending and alarmist, revealed the concern of the commercial publishers: ‘Next to downright villainy, misguided zeal is one of the most dangerous forces in society,’ they wrote [The massive growth in IEG membership  and the ocuments , Nature ic terms ,41. Natuey wrote .Nature’s sights were the IEGs, which a few weeks later were attacked by the journal as ‘suspect’ and a waste of money, as well as for being ‘in the publication business’ no matter what the NIH might claim. The defects of preprints, thundered the journal, included ‘inaccessibility, impermanence, illiteracy, uneven quality, and lack of considered judgment’ [Next in udgment’ . The traNature’s criticism, as was the issue of priority. Nature was particularly irked by the fact that IEG members agreed to treat the memos as priority-laden. As Albritton put it: ‘a paper sent through the IEG is better protected than one published without prior circulation through the IEG’ [Nature, should be devoted to ‘helping the journals become more efficient’. The for-profit journal was suggesting that the NIH should keep out of ‘the publication business’ and instead use that money to help commercial journals. The editorial closed with the same tone it had used throughout its coverage: ‘If the National Institutes of Health are as well-disposed towards the cause of effective publication as they seem to be, they could do a lot to help. The energy they choose to dissipate in Dr Allbritton’s print shop will be a lot less valuable’ [This claim that journals act as guarantors of scientific quality was a key part of the IEG’ . Inevitaaluable’ .Science. Philip H. Abelson suggested the products of the IEGs could be seen as ‘government-subsidised shoddy merchandise’ and concluded that, while there was an understandable frustration with ‘the inefficiency of many publications’, the IEGs also revealed ‘a desire on the part of some scientists to avoid a discipline essential to the integrity of science’ [A similarly aggressive attitude was adopted by the editor of science’ .Journal of Chemical Biology and the Journal of Molecular Biology [The fate of the IEGs was sealed not by the leading gatekeepers of scientific publishing but by a group of specialist journal editors. In September 1966, editors of leading biochemical journals met in Vienna to discuss the widespread circulation of preprints by the IEGs. There were 13 journals represented at the meeting, including the  Biology . Like th Biology —that no Nature—an editorial crowed ‘Preprints made outlaws’ and praised the ‘firm…lethal steps’ the Vienna meeting of journal editors had taken against the IEG system [This decision was soon leaked to G system . The ediG system . AlbrittG system , and groG system ,45.Science [Nature [Science, Philip Siekevitz, a cell biologist at Rockefeller University, claimed that the IEGs were ‘a dangerous nuisance’, while Nature pointed out in a note that although it had received 7 letters in support of the IEGs and only 1 against, Theodore Spaet, the Chair of IEG2, had encouraged its members to write in.Meanwhile, the letters pages of Science  and Natu [Nature ,48 beganNature produced a slightly more considered editorial entitled ‘Secret colleges end’ [New England Journal of Medicine followed suit, going so far as to praise the ‘morally sensitive scientists’ who had opposed the IEGs before finishing on a contradictory note by calling for the IEG idea to be taken up again once the lessons had been learned [After the IEGs had been killed off, ges end’ . The jou learned . The jou learned . Strict  learned .The Physical Review, who described the project as ‘a great disservice’ [Physical Review Letters, joined in, producing a series of editorials in which he described a centralized register of preprints as ‘highly undesirable, as it would raise the unrefereed and unedited preprint to virtually the same status as a formal publication’ [The PIE proposals met a similar fate. They were vigorously opposed by Simon Pasternack, the editor of service’ . Pasternication’ , emphasiication’ , and argication’ .Nature wished, but it was instead launched for a trial year, functioning primarily as an announcement service of new preprints and discussion documents that was circulated to a mailing list; anyone interested had to request the document directly from the author.PIE was not stillborn as Pasternack and Journal of Molecular Biology and the Journal of Biological Chemistry), peaceful coexistence with traditional journals would be possible [Science and Nature and the financial strain on the NIH, stopped the IEGs in their tracks. Only IEG6 decided to keep going, after a 93% positive vote of its members. The 250-strong group continued to circulate material until at least the late 1970s under the title Interferon Scientific Memorandum. To reduce costs, their memos were restricted to 8 pages and distributed as reduced-size photos, with the support of the American Institute of Biological Sciences [After minor pushback  and somepossible . This tuSciences .Nature for its ‘timid’ attitude; he found his membership of IEG5 to be of ‘enormous value’ and was ‘most delighted’ with reading and writing memos [The perception of the IEGs by those who had been involved was overwhelmingly positive. Professor Michael Woodruff of the University of Edinburgh chided ng memos . Surveysng memos . HoweverScience and Nature , Green explained why the IEGs had really been killed off:Unbowed, Albritton’s colleagues at the NIH continued to emphasize the value of preprints . In an uIt is my opinion that the stated reasons are not the real reason. Rather, the stated reasons merely hide the fact that the editors were apprehensive that the status and prestige of the journals would be downgraded if another agency (IEG) were distributing to its members, from 6 months to a year earlier than the journals, the very papers which would eventually appear in the journals, though not necessarily in the same final form.Nature’s final statement on the affair, made in February 1967, suggested that preprints should be renamed ‘impersonal communication’ or ‘postal circular’ and reiterated the ‘offense’ the IEGs had given to the established journals because of the claimed potential of duplicate publications. However, the editorialist was also keen to turn his article into an advert, reassuring his readers that the rapid circulation that was so attractive a feature of the IEGs would soon be found at Nature, which in a few months would ‘be operating consistently with a time lag of a few weeks’. The aim was for Nature to ‘beat the IEG at their own game’ [wn game’ .Debate about how to enable more rapid communication of scientific discoveries in all fields continued into the 1970s ,62. The Over the next 2 decades, publishing was transformed as rapid progress in information technology enabled the development of increasingly rich and cost-effective schemes for circulating information. In 1991, Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory created an automated email server for distributing preprints, a system that eventually became known as arXiv . In subsLife science researchers, who had either forgotten the IEG affair or never knew of it, could not help but notice the growth of arXiv. In 1999, Harold Varmus, in his final months as head of the NIH, became what he later described as a ‘radical proponent’ of new ways of circulating scientific information . After iNew England Journal of Medicine warned of ‘a potential threat to the evaluation and orderly dissemination of new clinical studies’—the journal was concerned that potentially incorrect clinical papers would gain the imprimatur of the NIH’s authority and could have significant negative consequences for patient health and well-being  [An editorial in the eprints) . But theeprints) .Within 4 months, the project was dead in the water. Varmus accepted that his vision could not be fully realized in the face of such opposition and focused instead on open access provision of accepted manuscripts through PubMed Central. This development, together with the legacy of the e-Biomed initiative, played a role in the development of the open access movement and the launching of PLOS by Varmus, Pat Brown, and Michael Eisen . NeverthA third attempt in over 50 years to introduce preprints into biology occurred in 2013 with the launch of PeerJ Preprints and bioRxiv, following a series of initiatives by Ron Vale and others [This apparent change in attitude has yet to be systematically analysed, but here are some potential explanations, which are not mutually exclusive:The interval from submission to the first journal to final publication  can be of the order of many months, similar to that in the 1960s. Coupled with the short duration of postdoctoral posts and the increasingly rapid development of technology, this has led to growing frustration with the ‘glacial pace’ of publication and a determination on the part of researchers to find a better solution .The new biological preprint servers have made clear that they are not encroaching on journal territory or finances but simply decoupling first dissemination of knowledge from the ‘certification’ that is represented by peer review.The widespread adoption of open access publishing and the free circulation of data and ideas may make opposing preprints simply look churlish in the age of the Internet and the success of arXiv.Finally, despite initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment , many keWhatever the case, on the third attempt, it appears that a culture of preprints has been established in the biosciences, although not yet in medicine. The fate of the IEGs should warn us of the power of commercial publishers and of vested academic interests to restrict the free circulation of knowledge.The digital culture we now live in is far beyond the dreams of Errett C. Albritton and his printed and stapled IEG memos, individually sent out in the mail to eager subscribers. But he envisioned the importance of the open circulation of knowledge and debate over half a century ago. His name and his ambitions may have been forgotten, but he would recognize our world.


With the advent of a new year, the Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM) editorial team would like to share with you our reflections on the past year and our plans for the year ahead.Interviews section. We've also launched an outstanding paper prize, to inspire young researchers. Starting with new submissions in 2018, DMM will award a prize ($1000) to the junior author(s) of the paper that is judged  to be the most outstanding publication in the journal that year. A short profile of the winner will be published in the journal. So, keep an eye out this time next year, when we will announce the inaugural winner of the prize.As a community journal, DMM is keen to support the next generation of biomedical scientists. During 2017, we launched ‘First person’ – a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in DMM. We hope this helps early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers; you can see some of those we featured in our Travelling Fellowships of up to £2500 to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers wishing to make collaborative visits to other laboratories. We've also been providing Conference Travel Grants since 2016. Following the huge success of this initiative, DMM will be doubling the funding available for this programme for 2018. These travel grants are aimed at early-career researchers wanting to attend scientific meetings, conferences, workshops and courses relating to the areas of research covered by the journal. Why not see whether you are eligible to apply?As part of its financial support of early-career researchers, DMM has long offered As a community journal, DMM will continue to support conferences and workshops worldwide, in areas covered by the journal. In 2017, we supported the 8th Aquatic Animal Models of Human Disease Conference, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute 10th Anniversary Symposium, AACR Annual Conference, Bay Area Worm Meeting, Advances in Transgenic Animal Models and Techniques meeting, 24th Edition of the International Student Congress of (bio)Medical Sciences (ISCOMS), 15th Annual Meeting of the Complex Trait Community in collaboration with the Rat Genomics Community, Beatson Conference: Feeding the Beast, ZDM – 10th Annual Zebrafish Disease Models Conference, International Cell Competition Meeting (Japan), ISTT – 14th Transgenic Technology Meeting, EMBL Conference – Mammalian Genetics and Genomics, and the ‘A Revised Theory of Cancer’ symposium. We are still finalising our plans for 2018 – do get in touch if you think your meeting or symposium is an ideal fit for sponsorship from DMM.DMM devotes time listening to its community, through surveys, social media, and at conferences and company workshops, as well as everyday interaction. We use what we've learned to then improve the journal, evaluating, amongst other aspects, its aims and scope, policies, processes, and the features and functionality we offer.DMM aims to make life as easy as possible for our authors. To avoid lengthy submissions processes, authors can now submit a paper to DMM in any format . We will only ask for what is absolutely necessary at submission. As part of this change, and recognising the importance of comprehensive Materials and Methods sections to aid transparency and reproducibility, we are also removing the Materials and Methods section from our length limit for an article. Importantly, the word limit itself will remain the same. The aim is to allow authors the space they need to describe their methods in sufficient detail for readers to fully understand and replicate the experiments conducted. We hope that this is making submission easier for all DMM authors, but it could have particular appeal for those authors who might have submitted their article elsewhere first – there is no need to reformat the article before submission to DMM. In addition, DMM will consider peer review reports from this previous submission to other journals. This new policy does mean that other requirements, such as file formats and sizes, our submission checklist, and provision of funding information, will move to the revision stage – at which point over 95% of papers will be accepted for publication.Another factor that is important to our authors is speed from acceptance to publication. As part of this, DMM posts accepted author manuscripts soon after acceptance. And from issue 1 2018, DMM will be quicker to publish the final version, through the introduction of continuous publication. This ‘version of record’ will have been enhanced by expert in-house copyediting of text and figures, proofreading, typesetting and article layout, and conversion to printable PDF format and a fully linked full-text version. As soon as each article is ready, it will be immediately published online, rather than waiting for other articles in the issue to be completed. Authors and readers should primarily notice that the final version of the article is published more quickly, but behind the scenes, unpicking the implications of moving away from issue-based publishing has been a huge challenge.http://dmm.biologists.org/alerts. Given the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation  by the European Union (see http://www.biologists.com/what-is-gdpr/ for more details), we also encourage members of the DMM community to sign up for news alerts at http://www.biologists.com/subscribe/ to ensure they are kept up to date on other journal news, such as calls for papers, upcoming special issues, grant application deadlines and journal meetings.New for 2018: preLights – the new preprint highlights service run by the biological community and supported by The Company of Biologists. A team of scientists regularly review, highlight and comment on preprints they feel are of interest to DMM and the wider biological community.Readers of DMM should certainly consider reviewing their DMM alert options, to ensure that they are receiving the alerts they need, when they need them. Alert preferences can be updated at You might also notice a new feature of the DMM web site – movies now ‘play in place’. If you are reading the full text of an article, you can click on a movie and rather than opening in a new window, the movie simply plays in that view. Movies are often vital to understanding a paper and this functionality makes it easier for readers to navigate articles.Supplementary Material for a full list of all those who completed a review for DMM in 2017).In 2018, DMM plans to focus on the peer review process. Although DMM continually makes effort to hone and improve the experience of our peer reviewers, we strongly feel that more needs to be done, including the issue of reward and recognition. The Editors-in-Chief of all The Company of Biologists' journals met in February to begin discussions. In the meantime, DMM offers a huge thank you to all those who so generously give their time to review articles for DMM and who play such a fundamental role in the continuing success of DMM (see


Dear microbial biotechnologists and other friends,2016 was an exciting year for Microbial Biotechnology. As you may have seen, the IF‐2015 of MBT was almost 30% higher than its IF‐2014, advancing from 3.08 to 3.99 and thereby leapfrogged over those of its peers. While IFs can be somewhat ephemeral, the second bit of news we wish to share with you, namely that MBT experienced a 60% increase in submissions in 2016 vis‐a‐vis 2015, encouraged the Editors to raise the originality–significance threshold for acceptance, so we are optimistic that the IF can be pushed ever higher.One of the major reasons why MBT has been able to position itself ahead of the pack of journals publishing primary research papers in applied microbiology is the outstanding scientists of the Editorial Board, who submit some of their best papers to the Journal, provide rigorous and fair reviews of submitted papers and act as beacons that attract excellent work from others in the field. It is with great pleasure that we express here our deep gratitude to the Editorial Board for its dedication, loyalty and hard work.The vision of the MBT Editor Team is not only for the Journal to be the premier vehicle for very best work in microbial biotechnology, but also to actively promote new, pioneering and game‐changing topics that will have a major impact on, and determine the future trajectory of, the field. One exercise we undertook in 2016 was the publication of a Special Issue designated ‘Microbial Biotechnology‐2020’, whose brief was, in the framework of grand challenges, to define where we want to be in 2020, articulate the obstacles to getting there and propose a road map for dealing with the obstacles and arriving at the goal(s). These articles are, we think, outstanding and stimulating, and we hope you enjoyed reading them. Related to this, but different, is the biennial Crystal Ball feature which appears in this issue, in which authors speculate on the nature of new developments that may bring about a step change in progress in the field. As always, these CBs will be one of the most enjoyed features of the Journal.inter alia Jack Gilbert, Harald Bruessow, Victor de Lorenzo and Braj Singh. The first of these, on microbiome transplants, by van der Lelie, Taghavi, Henry and Gilbert, appears in this issue, is inspiring and eloquently testifies to the new commercial opportunities of this paradigm change in our perception of what we are.One of the most exciting developments in recent years has been the realization that we and other beings on the planet are not only covered by microbes, but that they contribute in a pivotal manner to our physiology and metabolism: while it may be true that ‘we are what we eat’, we are also what our microbiome determines. While the early days of microbiome research largely involved figuring out who our microbial partners are and what they do, the field is now beginning to discover, envision and develop novel and ingenious microbiome applications. This will inevitably lead to the creation of start‐ups and new divisions within established commercial enterprises, and resulting opportunities for employment of young microbiome scientists. MBT aims to be a primary vehicle for publications reporting microbiome applications. As part of this new initiative, this year we will regularly feature Editorials on the topic of potential areas of business opportunities–job creation emerging from microbiome research. Contributors will include There were changes in the Editor Team in 2016: Auxiliadora Prieto replaced Marty Rosenberg, who cycled off , and Antoine Danchin became Editor of our Genomics Update Feature. Both are exceptional leaders in their respective fields and bring valued experience and skills that substantively enrich the team.Finally, we reiterate something we have stated before: the MBT Editor Team is inclusive in its philosophy and welcomes ideas and suggestions for improvement from its readership. If you do have a suggestion, please communicate it to one of us and we will consider it.On that note, we wish you all a happy and healthy year 2017, with important successes that you report in our favourite Journal!


Open Biology . They are leading scientists from the USA, Canada and China who we hope will be champions for the journal in these countries and beyond. We are truly delighted to have these scientists join us.The New Year is an excellent time to welcome the 38 new members to the editorial board of Open Biology as an open access journal edited by practising scientists to ensure fair and rapid review without the need for unnecessary rounds of revision. Our success is measured by the growing numbers of submissions and the quality of the papers we publish. The first is an easy metric, the second rather more difficult to assess. Most would agree that assessment of quality through the commonly used impact factors has been a contributory factor to the groundswell of dissatisfaction towards publishing felt by many biologists. This largely reflects the disproportionate influence of impact factors upon funding and careers. We accept that impact factors are most probably here to stay, but we do try and provide as many alternative means as we can for assessing publications .It is also timely to evaluate our progress in establishing https://royalsociety.org/journals/ethics-policies/media-embargo/). It remains to be seen how these will be embraced by biologists and indeed it could be argued that with fair review and rapid publication, they would be redundant.Open access was a first step towards making scientific findings quickly and widely accessible. A second step suggested by a growing populist movement in biology has been to use preprint servers. Indeed, the Society has long embraced the use of preprint servers and we encourage their use in biology in the hope that they will provide similar openness of communication as they have for many years to our colleagues in the physical sciences (Academies such as the Royal Society, the National Academy of the USA and EMBO continue to play an important role in publishing together with charitable bodies, such as the Company of Biologists and the many scientific societies who run their own journals. Together these provide an existing route to a fair publishing system that involves practising scientists. They continue a tradition established now over 350 years ago at a time when the Royal Society published its first journal. Then, as now, science was an international endeavour and a time when the Royal Society provided Mr van Leeuwenhoek the means of publishing his 190 or so letters. This necessitated that Henry Oldenberg learn Dutch to be able to translate the works into Latin or English. We still aspire to provide such a high level of editorial service!We now live in a very different world, even to the one of a few decades ago, but we hope to go against the emerging trend for increased political isolationism and we continue to welcome authors to a truly international forum for scientific exchange. Let us all wish for a highly productive 2017 that meets our needs for free and open cooperation in science.


Scientists, public servants, and patient advocates alike increasingly question the validity of published scientific results, endangering the public’s acceptance of science. Here, I argue that emerging flaws in the integrity of the peer review system are largely responsible. Distortions in peer review are driven by economic forces and enabled by a lack of accountability of journals, editors, and authors. One approach to restoring trust in the validity of published results may be to establish basic rules that render peer review more transparent, such as publishing the reviews  and monitoring not only the track records of authors but also of editors and journals. In this Perspective, Thomas C. Südhof describes some of the current challenges to the peer review system that have endangered public acceptance of science and discusses possible avenues to addressing these challenges. As scientists, we are part of society. Thus, it may be expected that questions about reproducibility of published studies, which are, in effect, questions about the truthfulness of these studies, are fair game ,2. AfterBut scientists, unlike politicians, are supposed to be guided by facts. Scientists should be insulated from the patent disregard of facts in public discourse. Why, then, are increasing numbers of scientific studies becoming suspect? In my personal view, we as scientists must accept at least part of the blame for failing to ensure that studies report facts and not fantasy. The increasingly severe problem here stems not from outright fraud, which continues to be rare. Instead, the problem is due to biased interpretations of experimental results. These interpretations lead to exaggerated statements of fact (a.k.a. conclusions), which not infrequently are only distantly related to the actual data in a paper.As a concrete example, the last decade witnessed hundreds of neuroscience papers in which an animal’s behavior is analyzed after defined populations of neurons were excited or inhibited using optogenetic methods. These papers provide valuable information, but commonly conclude that the manipulated neurons physiologically perform the studied behaviors, which change during the manipulations. However, these manipulations induce massive changes in neuronal activity that do not replicate the normal operation of the affected neurons. Moreover, the large activity changes that are induced propagate throughout the brain and thus likely induce myriads of downstream effects. As a result, conclusions from such experiments about the normal functions of the manipulated neurons are difficult to sustain without complementary, independent evidence . Indeed,Two checkpoints are meant to safeguard scientific truth and to prevent unjustified conclusions: peer review and reproducibility. Peer review examines the validity of the experiments and conclusions as presented, and reproducibility ensures that the experimental results and conclusions can be replicated. Both checkpoints are under threat primarily due to economic factors.Peer review of scientific results occurs at multiple levels, among which the review of scientific manuscripts is arguably the most important because published papers provide the reference point for all other types of peer review . Given the vast amount of data produced, journals serve a valuable role in identifying results and conclusions that merit attention—nobody can possibly read all papers in a field! In recent times, the role of journals in selecting studies has become all-powerful. At some journals, editors who direct the selection process have become akin to high priests and priestesses of science, and here a whiff of ancient Egypt with pharaohs controlling access to wisdom can permeate the review process.As a result, three problems have emerged in peer review that have corrupted the process, decreasing its value. First, journals and their peer reviewers often have a conflict of interest that is hidden. Journal profits depend on the broadness of the readership and on advertisers, leading to geographical biases  and content biases (articles on trendy subjects are selected), while reviewers may have other agendas . Sometimes journals and reviewers may not even be aware of the corrupting influence of commercial interests. Attacking this problem will require more than just declaring consulting and ownership relationships. In an ideal world, a journal should not be funded by advertisers or subscribers but by authors’ fees, and reviewers should recuse themselves in cases of commercial and personal conflicts. As argued below, at a minimum, journals should be held accountable not only by their owners for the money they make but also by the public for the value they provide—just as a drug company cannot simply sell any drug but has to show that the drug is safe and effective, a journal should not be allowed to “sell” its products without being accountable for its content.This brings me to the second problem related to peer review: there is little accountability for journals and reviewers. If a journal repeatedly publishes papers that draw untenable conclusions, eventually the authors of the papers may be blamed, but editors and reviewers who are arguably responsible for gross negligence are not held responsible. There are insufficient checks and balances in the publishing system; when high-ranked journals repeatedly publish papers that are later considered unreliable or even retracted, the journals seem to face no consequences—their premier status remains untouched.The third peer review problem, finally, is that there is no real competition between journals as the conduit for communicating science. Capitalism thrives and depends on competition. Just like in many other commercial domains nowadays, however, authors have no true choice between journals. The majority of high-profile journals are run by a few companies with significant profits, and it is very hard for newcomers to break into this system. The lack of journal competition means that authors have limited choices in selecting journals with better peer review, decreasing the economic pressure on journals to invest in high-quality peer review.The other pillar of scientific truth, reproducibility, means that another scientist can repeat an experiment and arrive at the same results or, conversely, show that the results are not reproducible. Just as for peer review, multiple problems increasingly imperil reproducibility. For example, it’s not uncommon for an initial high-profile study to report amazing results with a stunning conclusion. Then, when the experiments are repeated, only trends toward the same conclusion are observed with increasingly smaller effect sizes. This outcome neither contradicts nor confirms the original study but is a dead end, and the original paper is slowly forgotten. As discussed above, the problem is not that the initial paper is fraudulent, but that the results were “tweaked” or selected, or represented a statistical outlier, leading to a misleading conclusion.A second emerging reproducibility problem is that many experiments are by design impossible to repeat. As formalized by Karl Popper , scientiA third reproducibility problem is validation of reagents and methods. Too often, papers in premier journals are published without sufficient experimental controls—they take up too much space in precious journal real estate!—or with reagents that have not been vetted after they were acquired. Added to these reproducibility problems is the near impossibility of actually publishing negative results, owing to the reluctance of journals—largely motivated by economic pressures—to devote precious space to such papers, and to the reluctance of authors to acknowledge mistakes.Thus, we as the scientific community face major problems in ensuring the legitimacy of science. Although correcting these problems will not be trivial, simple steps could increase scientific truthfulness. In my personal view, there is no alternative to journals—we need journals as a filter, now more than ever, and journals need to be economically sustainable. However, given the robust profit margins of many journals, I feel that it is reasonable to insist that scientific journals adhere to a minimum set of rules. For example, reviews should be published, not hidden. Editors should be named as part of the published reviews and should be held accountable if papers fail to meet basic quality and reproducibility standards. Papers should be evaluated historically, not by citations (which can be misleading), but by tracking the follow-up to these papers. At least, the more prominent journals should systematically monitor subsequent work (or lack thereof) emerging from important studies. Submitted papers should be assessed by a checklist that ensures that proper controls and reagent validations are present, and such validations should be required for the supplementary materials. It is amazing how many prominent papers show immunoblots in which the supposed target proteins have the wrong size! Editors need to have the qualifications for judging the overall technical validity of experiments even if they cannot assess specific details (which is the job of the reviewers). Moreover, editors need to have the time to carefully read the papers and to understand the methods and experiments, and they should be paid better for the vast amount of work they are asked to do. Most importantly, as reviewers, we should emphasize less how exciting a result is even though it may not be true and focus more on whether a result is actually solid .A more demanding but possibly necessary change to ensure scientific truthfulness is to demonstrate immediate reproducibility. A conclusion should not be based on a single type of measurement, but on multiple parallel approaches. Ideally, scientists should recruit other groups to independently reproduce key results. Most pressing, however, in ensuring validity of scientific studies may be what I would call the common sense rule: the more a paper arouses amazement because it appears to contravene common sense and/or because it arrives at conclusions that diametrically differ from previous studies , the more evidence should be required. Occasionally, studies that most challenge credulity are published with the least actual experimental support because such studies exude excitement—however, these are the studies that require the most experimental support!Many of these ideas have been expressed multiple times before. Never, however, has the need for action been more urgent than now, when our entire society is increasingly threatened by untruthfulness, with science being only a tiny part of it. Because the driving factors behind the threats to scientific practice are economic and political, we should speak up and express our concerns. As “voluntary” action seems unlikely, we should demand rules that inject accountability into the system, as capitalism without rules appears to become self-destructive and leads to self-sustaining and self-serving monopolies that impede progress.


Most, if not all, academic librarians are by now familiar with the term “predatory publishing.” Beall in 2012 defined predatory publishers as “those that unprofessionally exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit,” often taking advantage of junior faculty and graduate students  as of 20On an almost daily basis, many academics now receive invitations to publish in journals that Beall correctly identifies as suspect and very probably corrupt. Beall’s open access and alphabetized list makes it extraordinarily easy to investigate and evaluate journals involved in such practices , 3. Of cAnother rather obvious warning sign is often the clumsy, poor, or just plain incorrect English grammar that is used in such communications. The following are two examples that the author recently received:“Being impressed by your quality work, we are contacting you to know if you can associate with us by submitting your upcoming research.”“Our reputed journal, aspire to deliver high quality research work in the field of health care as Open Access to the globe.”Based on reflection on the issues of predatory publishing and mindful of current events globally and nationally, it is in relation to this final point that I felt an ethical obligation to write this cautionary piece. Surely there is something wrong when poor English grammar in an email evokes such immediate suspicion.Before continuing, it is important to note that in 2016 Dictionary.com announced that its word of the year was “xenophobia”:At Dictionary.com we aim to pick a Word of the Year that embodies a major theme resonating deeply in the cultural consciousness over the prior 12 months. This year, some of the most prominent news stories have centered around fear of the “other.” Fear is an adaptive part of human evolutionary history and often influences behaviors and perceptions on a subconscious level. However, this particular year saw fear rise to the surface of cultural discourse. Because our users’ interest in this overarching theme emerges so starkly for one specific word in our trending lookup data, xenophobia is Dictionary.com’s 2016 Word of the Year. [It is important, therefore, to ensure that concerns over predatory publishing, which may be evoked by something as incidental as poor English, do not develop into a more widespread emotion-heated xenophobia. As White recently noted in response to populist election outcomes globally: “Facts are irrelevant. Emotion and prejudice rule” .Beall’s pioneering work in developing awareness of predatory publishing and in continuing to devote time and energy to this subject is to be admired. However, it is important that whole populations are not indiscriminately written off. Beall’s Scholarly Open Access website contains the following statements in a blog post, titled “Hyderabad, India — City of Corruption,” which are perhaps a cause for concern:Hyderabad, India is one of the most corrupt cities on earth, I think. It is home to countless predatory open-access publishers and conference organizers, and new, open-access publishing companies and brands are being created there every day. All institutions of higher education, all funders, governments, and researchers should be especially wary of any business based in Hyderabad.The tacit rule of thumb of Hyderabad-based businesses is: Use the internet to generate revenue any way you can.There are numerous internet-based businesses in this over-crowded city, many located in a special enterprise zone called HITEC City, which some refer to as “Cyberabad.” American Journal of So-and-So”).Evidence of this potentially prejudiced appraisal of foreign publications can ironically now be seen in more recent strategies adopted by predatory publishers, including using a “fake” US mailing address and assuming a title falsely indicating that it is a US journal  [The Guardian notes, “The relationship between big pharma and publishers is perilous” [However, we must, of course, acknowledge that high-quality non-English-language health and medical journal publications do exist and make a valuable addition to the health sciences. Our ethical duty is to keep an open mind and resist succumbing to ethnocentric prejudice and racism. It is important to remember that it is not only in industrializing nations that publishers have been noted to engage in dubious practices. Even high-status established and reputable academic publishers in the West have been found to be in breach of expected academic norms. Perhaps one of the best examples was the decision by Elsevier Australia to publish six “academic journals” sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Merck  . As Ben erilous” , clearlyElsevier Australia went the whole hog, giving Merck an entire publication which resembled an academic journal, although in fact it only contained reprinted articles, or summaries, of other articles. In issue 2, for example, nine of the 29 articles concerned Vioxx, and a dozen of the remainder were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions. Some were bizarre: such as a review article containing just two references. Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients [Elsevier has condemned this practice , but thePatients .Predatory publishing undoubtedly represents a clear and present danger to the integrity of academic publishing. To date, little has been done to curb the excesses in this field, although some recent action by the US government has been noted . It is i


The open access movement initiated in the late 1990s aimed to eliminate economic and copyrights barriers in accessing and disseminating knowledge. Motivated by the abusive increase in journals subscriptions by international publishers who dominated - and still do so to some extent - the global publishing market, open access (OA) is made feasible through the World Wide Web and information and communication technologies. This business model has been asserting itself throughout the world as the preferred form of publication of research results, especially those financed with public resources. Its widespread adoption, however, has not yet been fully achieved because researchers are not entirely sure that the reward and evaluation mechanisms of science recognize this modality at the same level as mainstream subscription journals.OA has been consolidated through successive mandates from institutions, funding agencies and governments around the world. Today, it is estimated that between 35 and 60% of peer-reviewed articles - a number that increases by 2% a year - are published in open access, depending on the platform where they are indexedOA has drastically altered the paradigm of scientific publications leading to the elimination of the print version of most journals. The costs were, thus, greatly reduced, enabling the emergence of journals supported by scientific societies, research institutions and funding agencies, such as the SciELO Program created in 1998, financed mainly by FAPESP. SciELO offers a platform that creates scale for indexing, publishing and interoperability of journals, always following the state-of-the-art of publishing methodologies and technologies. Therefore, SciELO provides the journals a common saving of resources while minimizing costs and maximizing their visibility, impact, and international presence. Next came up BioMed Central, the first OA commercial publisher, and the Public Library of Science, which started to require an article processing charge (APC) to make articles freely available to readers. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)Studies show that the resources employed by libraries to pay for journal subscriptions would be more than sufficient to finance the open access model through APCsThe scenario of OA publishing today differs from that projected at the beginning of the movement. The initial perspective was to finance publication fees to favor the business model, which would go down "and will continue to do so, asymptotically approaching zero" in the conception of PLoS co-founder Michael Eisen) organized by the European Commission in 2015. The meeting showed that innovative ideas and technologies are key to ensuring the sustainability of OA globally. Partnerships between academia, editors, libraries, and publishers allow creating non-commercial initiatives for OA publishing, such as the Open Research Network, Open Library of Humanities, and Horizon2020. Coupling OA publishing and research data sharing (open data) strengthens this business model, enables its preservation and promotes wide use and citation of data, maximizing the return of research investmentThe future and sustainability of OA was the theme of the recent workshop AlterOAThe scenario of open access publishing in Brazil and Latin America is one of the most favorable worldwide. The characteristics of its business models - small non-for-profit publishers funded by educational and research institutions and funding agencies not only ensure the region's very low index of predatory journals, but also enable countries in the region to adopt the fastest growing form of publication in the world. The SciELO Program, since 1998, has played a major role in promoting the integrated governance of journals of the collection and facilitating open access. Subbiah Arunachalam, a longtime advocate of the OA movement, stresses the role of SciELO in the region by stating that "with these efforts, Latin America has become a model for affordable OA journal publishing" and believes that when India and China adopt this model "that would have a great impact on making science open, not only in these regions but around the world"


FEBS Open Bio is starting a section devoted to original and valuable publications in biochemical and molecular life sciences education. We have been entrusted with the task of coordinating this new Section.Following a proposal initiated by the FEBS Education Committee, The overall aim of this initiative is, in the spirit of FEBS and its Education Committee, to foster good educational practices, stimulate the development of innovative teaching methods, and disseminate advice on educational techniques and resources.We are seeking to receive contributions in the form of research articles dealing with educational issues, with a clear structure of hypothesis, methods, and validation of results. Among the topics of manuscripts we encourage are those dealing with best practice, innovative methods, teaching bioinformatics, and use of technology in education. In addition, articles more specifically aimed at internationalization, training or career planning will also be welcome. The main focus, in line with the mission of FEBS, is on biochemistry and other molecular life sciences, but the scope of the section widens to include molecular and cellular sciences in general.FEBS Open Bio.The FEBS Education Committee recognizes that there are other educational materials – such as practical papers on teaching methods, reports on education experiences, reviews of educational resources – that will not fit the format or requirements of a journal paper. Plans are underway to provide an online forum for discussion and sharing of such materials later in 2017. This initiative will complement the Education Section in https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/febsopen. These articles will be sent out for peer review, as for other regular submissions to the journal. However, authors of accepted articles will be exempt from the article publication fee, and all publication costs will be covered by FEBS. Articles will be published in the monthly issues of the journal and will also be available as a Virtual Issue on Education.Authors wishing to contribute to the Education Section of the journal should submit their articles to We look forward to receiving your contributions.


PlosOne as a case study, our analysis is based on a data set of more than 100,000 articles published between 2007 and 2015. Using available data on handling editor, submission and acceptance time of manuscripts, we study the question whether co-authorship relations between authors and the handling editor affect the manuscript handling time, i.e. the time taken between the submission and acceptance of a manuscript. Our analysis reveals (1) that editors handle papers co-authored by previous collaborators significantly more often than expected at random, and (2) that such prior co-author relations are significantly related to faster manuscript handling. Addressing the question whether these shorter manuscript handling times can be explained by the quality of publications, we study the number of citations and downloads which accepted papers eventually accumulate. Moreover, we consider the influence of additional  factors, such as the editor’s experience, the topical similarity between authors and editors, as well as reciprocal citation relations between authors and editors. Our findings show that, even when correcting for other factors like time, experience, and performance, prior co-authorship relations have a large and significant influence on manuscript handling times, speeding up the editorial decision on average by 19 days.In this article we study to what extent the academic peer review process is influenced by social relations between the authors of a manuscript and the editor handling the manuscript. Taking the open access journal  This view acknowledges the role of reviewers, but it typically neglects a second, equally important component in the process, namely the role of the handling editor. In the following, we thus provide a complementary view on the peer review process which emphasizes the important role of the handling editor in the fair and unbiased evaluation of scholarly manuscripts.While peer review is undoubtedly a major component in the evaluation of scientific publications, there are different views on the processes that determine which papers are being published, and thus, enter the canon of scientific knowledge. The desk rejected, the initial editorial decision to consider a manuscript for further review has become a major hurdle in the publication process. Only after passing this entry barrier, the handling editor decides about the reviewers to be contacted. Moreover, a common experience across scientific journals is that many, if not most, reviewer invitations are either not answered at all or declined because of the overwhelming load of review assignments. Thus, finding reviewers that are (1) willing to accept to review a paper, and (2) also deliver their report  has become a considerable challenge. Also here, handling editors play an important role. It is their scientific authority and their close ties to the scientific community which help to choose and acquire competent reviewers. However, this choice of reviewers can also possibly bias the outcome of the peer review process. Important sources for such a bias are (a) the level of expertise of the chosen reviewer in the topic of the manuscript, (b) potential social relations between reviewers and authors, or (c) the presence of known competing factions in a field that may jeopardize an unbiased evaluation. Developing a (semi-)automated detection of such potential biases that could assist handling editors in the assignment of reviewers and that facilitates a fair and transparent peer review process remains an open challenge. It is thus still the core competence of the handling editor to be aware of these issues during the assignment reviewers, or to detect them when assessing the submitted review reports. In summary, it is clear that it is not solely the reviewers who decide about acceptance or rejection of a manuscript. The handling editor who is able to judge, and to interpret, the review reports and the proposed decisions is—at least—equally important.Prior to the actual peer review process, the editor handling a submission makes a first assessment of (a) its quality, and (b) its suitability for the journal. At a time when more than 50% of submissions to major journals are performance and motivation of editors, rather than on their fundamental role to guarantee a fair and unbiased peer review process.In this article we shift the focus from reviewers to handling editors, studying how the latter influence peer review processes. In the following, we summarize some recent works in this area. Given the importance of the handling editor outlined above, it is quite surprising that the current literature about peer review mostly reflects upon the Citation benefits for editors considering potential factors that influence the decision to become an editor, Zsindely et al.  dimensions: (1) the ability of editors to attract manuscripts which are later highly cited, which contributes to the journal’s impact, (2) increases in publication volume which, in particular for open access journals, affects the journal’s revenue, (3) the editors’ ability to handle submissions in a fast, fair and consistent manner, which can improve the journal’s reputation, and (4) their contribution to advertise the journal in their scientific community, which increases the journal’s popularity. In the following, we highlight works addressing different dimensions of performance of editors.Another line of research has addressed the Quality control by editors: Besancenot et al.  and false negatives (type II errors) in peer review  the data set used for this empirical study, and (2) our method to construct time-stamped co-authorship networks based on this data set.PlosOne. This data set has been collected based on HTTP requests issued to the web servers of PlosOne with low frequency throughout the month of September 2015.PlosOne makes transparent both the identity of the handling editor of all published manuscripts, as well as the exact times (in daily resolution) when they were submitted and accepted. The data set obtained by the procedure outlined above, provided us with data on a total of 137,536 articles. For 113,335 of those articles, we were able to extract all of the meta-data indicated above. For those 113,335 articles, we additionally applied disambiguation heuristics to uniquely identify editors based on their names and affiliation information. Based on the output of this procedure, we removed 79 publications for which the editor could not be unambiguously identified. As a result, we obtained a data set which comprises 389,960 unique authors and 8110 unique handling editors that we use to construct an empirical co-authorship network as explained below. The starting point of our study is to investigate relations between authors and editors of PlosOne in terms of co-authorships. Due to the data set used in this work, we can only infer such co-authorship relations based on co-authored articles published in PlosOne, which implies that an editor needs to have published at least one article as author in PlosOne. In our data set, this is the case for 4657 editors and in our study we only focus on those papers that have been handled by those editors.Our study is based on a large collection of meta-data on more than 100,000 scholarly articles that were published in the multidisciplinary open access journal PlosOne publication, i.e. there exists an article As a result, this leaves us with a total of 82,742 article meta-data, which serve as the basis for the study of author–editor relations. Each of these published articles time-evolving co-authorship network in which nodes represent authors of PlosOne publications, while time-stamped and undirected links represent co-authored articles published at a given point in time between January 2007 and July 2015. More precisely, we construct time-stamped undirected links  for any pair of authors u, v that have coauthored an article which was submitted at time t, i.e. where an article u and v are in The procedure outlined above provides us with a time-stamped data set which can be used to construct a cumulative networks, where the cumulative network at time T consist of all nodes and links  whose time stamp t is smaller or equal than T. With the term cumulative network we explicitly distinguish our construction from aggregated networks, which are often constructed by using all links irrespective of their time stamps. In contrast, our construction respects the temporal sequence of link appearances and the cumulative coauthorship network at time T only contains those collaborations that have occurred until time T. To illustrate our approach, Fig. Finally, our analysis is based on time-evolving co-authorship network, in our study we also empirically quantify performance. In line with the general discussion in the “handling time of accepted submissions, which impacts the journal’s reputation, (2) the number of citations of published papers, which reflects the journal’s impact, and (3) the number of downloads of published papers, which can be seen as a proxy for the journal’s popularity.In addition to data that allow us to reconstruct the handling timedays) between the date of acceptance citationsdownloadst, and can only increase or stay constant. For both quantities, we used data available from the web page for each PlosOne publication page at the day of its retrieval in September 2015. In our study including performance measures, we finally consider the number of citations and downloads of articles, however we restrict our analysis to those 48,482 articles that were published between August 2009 and August 2013. As our data set covers PlosOne publications until July 2015, this ensures that for each article we have at least 2 years of citation and download data. This allows us to approximate the scientific impact of an article i in terms of the citations We quantify the u and v as the minimal number of links that need to be traversed to reach node v starting from node u in the cumulative network up to time t. If u and v are neighbors, i.e. a direct link between u and v exists, their shortest path distance is one. If u and v are not directly connected at time t but have one neighbor in common, their shortest path distance is two, etc.Based on the time-dependent co-authorship network constructed above, we can calculate the shortest path distance PlosOne, while they have not directly co-authored any article in our data set.Using this simple network-based distance metric, we define the distance no path between the handling editor and any of the authors. This can happen in two cases: (1) the handling editor has not co-authored any paper in PlosOneprior to the submission time i,PlosOne before disconnected components, i.e. there is no path between authors and handling editor.While entclass1pt{minimaPlosOne papers). We specifically compare these instances with cases where PlosOne corpus) exists between the handling editor and any of the authors. In our data set, we identified four publications with a network distance of zero, i.e. cases where the handling editor was at the same time one of the authors of the article. Moreover, we identified 1067 publications where the distance is one, while for the remaining 81,671 publications we obtain distances larger than one.In our study, we are particularly interested in the case PlosOne publications, i.e. we necessarily neglect co-authorship relations between authors and handling editors which are due to articles published in other journals. Accounting for such external co-authorship relations turned out to be not feasible for this study, due to the complexities involved to unambiguously match author identities across different bibliographic databases. As such, the co-authorship relations inferred based on our corpus of PlosOne publications provide us with an upper bound for the distances At this point it is important to highlight that our data set only includes information on G, emerging at the final time stamp of our analysis. We then consider two random reshuffling models. In the first model, we randomly shuffle handling editors among the publications while preserving all of the co-authorship links of our network G. As an additional boundary condition, we shuffle editors in such a way that each handling editor as assigned the same number of (possibly different) articles as in the empirical data set. As a result, we obtain a network topology with the same link structure, but where the identities of nodes have been swapped. We denote a random realization k of this randomized editor network as k of this randomized co-authorship network as The reader may argue that the number of publications for which the distance between handling editor and authors is one by itself does not allow us to argue about the reasons underlying these editorial assignments. Precisely, even based on a random assignment of handling editors to publications, we can already expect some papers to be assigned to prior co-authors. To study whether the observed number of distance one publications is likely to be based on chance, we compare the empirical network against different randomized versions. For this, we use the final cumulative co-authorship network k of the randomized editor network as k of the randomized co-authorship network as k, thus obtaining a distribution of distances based on the union of distance values across all simulations. We finally compare the empirical frequency of distances We can now calculate the minimal distance between handling editor and authors for each publication The results of this analysis are shown in Fig. avoid cases where editors handle submissions of previous collaborators. The absence of such a strategy can give rise to potential conflicts of interests and social biases in the handling of manuscript. The list of competing interests for editors in PlosOne includes “published with an author during the past 5 years”.On the one hand, one could argue that the higher frequency of publications with cannot investigate whether handling editors are more likely to accept submissions from previous co-authors than from other authors. This is due to the fact that we do not have data on rejected manuscripts. However, we can investigate whether handling editors accept submissions from previous co-authors faster than those from other authors. In this section, we study this question by comparing the distribution of manuscript handling times for publications j with Unfortunately, using the publicly available data introduced above, we i. Precisely, we denote as D the random variable representing editor–author distances, and as W the random variable representing handling times for a publication. With P(W) we further denote the (rather broad) distribution of handling times. With this, we can address our research question by calculating the conditional distribution As we consider the distribution of manuscript handling times red) and blue). Here, in line with our hypothesis, we visually notice that the distribution Wilcoxon rank sum test. This test yields a significant difference of 19 days between the medians of both distributions . To disentangle the contribution of article performance from the editor–author distance, in the following we fit two extended log-linear regression models. These two models explain the handling time as a combination of editor–author distance and the two performance metrics individually. However, before defining these models, we need to test for correlations between editor–author distance and the two performance metrics. The reason for this is that, if such a correlation exists, we must account for it in our model. In Table entclass1pt{minimaall publications. Moreover, we include an interaction coefficient additional effect that citations have on the handling time of those manuscripts with editor–author distance Equation  models tTable mentclass2pt{minimW predicted by the model depends on (1) the number of downloads S and (2) the number of citations C of an article. The predicted handling times are shown in Fig. We complement our study of how performance measures and editor distances influence manuscript handling times by taking a different perspective on the fitted parameters of Model 3. For this, we use the fitted model coefficients for the two cases quality (as indicated by the future number of downloads and citations). Secondly, both for the number of downloads in Fig. throughout the whole range of article performance metrics, both in terms of downloads and citations. A natural interpretation of this finding is that—independent of the quality of a manuscript—those manuscripts with an editor–author distance of one are always handled faster than those manuscript where the distance is larger. Finally the fitted interaction coefficient This visualization of the fitted coefficients highlights several interesting findings of our analysis: first, both in Fig. To verify the adequacy of our regression models, we have performed a diagnostic analysis and the results of this analysis are shown in Figs. We tested the possible role of confounding factors in our results in an additional regression model taking into account various control variables, including editor experience, topic similarity, and amount of coauthors. We found that the effect of ols see “” sectionSo far we have considered relationships between editors and authors which are based on co-authorship relations. However, we can think of other social relationships which are not based on coauthorships. As an example, editors could have reciprocal relationships in which one editor handles publications authored by the other and vice versa. Such reciprocal relationships can occur even if these editors have not previously coauthored an article.reciprocating publication, while we call the older one the preceding publication  already controls whether a submission is subject for peer review or gets desk rejected, (2) selects the reviewers and thus potentially creates a bias toward acceptance or rejection, and (3) interprets the reports of reviewers to identify conflicts between reviewers and authors or problems with the reviewers. Constituting an admittedly extreme example the challenges that handling editors face, a number of scientists have recently been found to use forged online identities of scientists to provide favorable reviews of their own submissions  discussed below. The quality of a submission is proxied by two variables that refer to the performance of the manuscript after publication. Our assumption is that the handling editor is able to estimate this quality when handling the manuscript, which is then confirmed by the later success of the publication. Article performance is proxied by the number of downloads and the number of citations of the respective publication, which of course are rather crude proxies of quality.Thirdly, the social and quality factors have to be The case that editors handle a submission of previous co-authors  previous co-authors/previous handling editors and (b) high quality submissions, relates to editor and journal performance. In the “impact, as measured by the number of citations, and popularity, as measured by the number of downloads. Shorter handling times also positively influence reputation, as long as they indicate a fast and reliable manuscript handling.With these considerations in mind, we now summarize our findings, to put them into perspective regarding publication practice afterwards.revenue of the journal, testing whether the journal could economically benefit from an incentive scheme in which only some submissions are processed faster.There is, however, a potential risk to reputation as previous co-authors and previous handling editors might be seen as receiving preferential treatment and thus general reputation can decrease. It is left to evaluate the impact of all these effects on the editors are humans, and as such they are subject to introduce a social bias in the functioning of the scientific community at large. Combining the transparent and open policy of PlosOne with large data processing techniques, we have been able to detect and diagnose the existence of relationships between the handling time of articles and author–editor relations. Our approach thus offers a mechanism for journals and regulators to monitor such undesirable differences, motivating future data-driven editorial policies that can ensure a fair, transparent, and unbiased handling of submissions.The results of this study remind us that


Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) needs to compete with many other biomedical journals, mostly belonging to the big commercial publishers. With the 2016 impact factor of 1.619, the CMJ seems to fare very well in this competition, positioning itself in the second quartile of its group. The CMJ is currently 25 years old and has a solid reputation among biomedical researchers – one can speak about a success story in what was achieved.Being a small independent scholarly journal owned by 3 Croatian universities, the CMJ contribute to this success story. Among them, I would like to highlight the fair relationship to the biomedical research community, reflected in its Diamond Open Access. Being Diamond means that the journal does not earn money from the business, which is an immediate distinction from the commercial publishers , the sustainability of our journal actually relies on the same financial resources (agency grants) being payed directly to the journal. If a grant is given directly to the journal, it makes it significantly more efficient than if it was distributed as an individual article processing fee. Moreover, it offers a way to avoid the substantial profit margins present in the commercial publishing industry at the expense of the research community. Subsequently, we argue that the commercial publishers need to share their income with their reviewers (if they want to charge and earn money during publishing process). Otherwise, if the above is not the case, the only fair approach is a Diamond Open Access, to which the CMJ adheres.Several characteristics of the blishers . We at tifficult . In my oCMJ is the vast scope of biomedical research it covers. At the first glance, this may be viewed as a disadvantage because we do not have a dedicated research community in the specialized filed, which would recognize the journal as an expert meeting point for emerging issues. Today’s digital environment and enormous advances in almost every medical field, particularly in pre-clinical research, regrettably make the concept of the safe harbor for the subspecialized experts where they would discuss their scientific interests not valid any more. The preclinical and clinical medicine nowadays intermingle, new approaches in one field influence another, and public health interventions need to be based on the wide understanding of medicine and society (CMJ is that it offers room for inter-field and interdisciplinary communication, allowing for the articles cutting across different medical fields to be evaluated by reviewers of different expertise and to be visible to the readers of the different professional backgrounds. This has been exemplified in the Knowledge Landscapes column, where the question of empowering patients to find innovative medical knowledge has connected those working not only in the field of medicine, but also in the fields of philosophy, social science, law, and economy (Another advantage of the  society . The str economy . The seaCMJ relies on its firm standpoint on research integrity, as emphasized in the recent Sarajevo Declaration (CMJ uses innovative strategies to contribute to the advancement of the scholarly publishing and biomedical research. These currently include the Diamond Open Access, as an example of a fair operational model for a scholarly journal, and interdisciplinarity, as the major challenge in the biomedical research.The future of the laration , and its


Out of the 90 journals indexed in this database in the Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine category, JAOS is ranked at the 56th place and the 3rd quartile. Among all the Brazilian journals indexed in JCR, JAOS is the 11th out of 111 journals and presents the greatest impact factor of dental journals.On June 14ad hoc reviewers; important changes were made in the peer review guidelines; and set of recommendations accepted worldwide for manuscript presentation and reference format were adopted by the JAOS . Moreover, JAOS was indexed in the SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), an electronic library covering a selected collection of Brazilian scientific journals, which allows free access to full manuscripts. Dr. Ricardo Marins de Carvalho, the Editor-in-Chief of the JAOS between 2005 and 2006, substantially increased the participation of foreign reviewers in the journal.JAOS' ascension trajectory is the result of hard work, initiated by former Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors, with the collaboration of the technical team and unrestricted support of current and previous Deans of FOB-USP since its foundation. In 2003, the Revista da Faculdade de Odontologia de Bauru, under the scientific coordination of Dr. José Mauro Granjeiro, was renamed as the JAOS, with publication of English-language manuscripts only. Then, the editorial board was reformulated in order to broaden the geographic distribution of the ® and the online version Sci Search®. As a result, JAOS was able to achieve a first impact factor in JCR in 2009 (0.386). Dr. Santos also introduced several changes in the journal's editorial management, mainly with the implementation of an online submission and editorial system in 2007, which increased the participation of foreign peer-reviewers and contributors. These changes as well the increased number of Associate Editors in 2010 automatically speeded up the review process and improved the impact factor to 0.797 in 2012. Dr. Gustavo Pompermaier Garlet was appointed as Co-Editor-in-Chief in 2013, and made an important contribution to the increase in the quality of manuscripts published in JAOS as well the improvement of the journal's peer-review system, which resulted in an impact factor of. 0.923. This success was subsequently maintained by Dr. Garlet and Dr. Karin Hermana Neppelenbroek, appointed as Editor-in-Chief and Co-Editor-in-Chief, respectively, between 2014 and 2016. Their administration focused on providing a fast turnaround time for manuscripts, and because of many changes and improvements that have been made and with the support of the whole editorial team, the average turnaround time for authors from manuscript submission to first decision was drastically reduced. The lower turnaround time for authors significantly contributed for the impact factor to have jumped to 1.117 in 2015.Part of the tremendous success that JAOS achieves today is attributed to the serious work begun with Dr. Carlos Ferreira Santos, who took over as the Editor-in-Chief of the JAOS from 2006 to 2014, focusing his administration mainly on journal indexation in international electronic databases. Between 2006 and 2007, JAOS was indexed in the following databases: SCOPUS, the world's largest abstract and citation multidisciplinary database of peer-reviewed literature and web sources, comprehending the fields of Life Sciences, Health Sciences , Physical and Social Sciences; Cochrane Library, an electronic database consisting of updated medical information sources based on evidence and systematic reviews; and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), published by Thomson Scientific, which qualified JAOS as an international publication since very few dental journals are indexed in this database, thus demonstrating its highly selective inclusion criteria and procedures for acceptance in the collection, available through Web of ScienceSince last year, Dr. Neppelenbroek and Dr. Vanessa Soares Lara serve JAOS as Editor-in-Chief and Co-Editor-in-Chief, respectively, and a new panel of Associate Editors was formed, which includes colleagues from foreign institutions in order to meet recent criteria established by SciELO. Our management continues with the goal of further reducing the average response time to authors by providing detailed and quality reviews. We also keep the mission of increasing the international visibility of the JAOS.We attribute the achievements of JAOS not only to the editorial board, but also to the important role of the authors for the submission of quality papers with high citation potential and the reviewers for performing a voluntary review work. We cannot forget to mention the unconditional support that JAOS receives from the Deans of FOB-USP, currently headed by Dr. Maria Aparecida de Andrade Moreira Machado and Vice-Dean Dr. Carlos Ferreira Santos as well the commitment and professionalism of our employees Valéria Cristina Trindade Ferraz, José Roberto Plácido Amadei, Deborah Schmidt Capella Junqueira, Sônia Cláudia Antonelli Pirola, Neimar Vitor Pavarini, Rubens Kazuo Kato, Camila Medina, Allan Rodrigo Dias and Zelma Batista Borges. Lastly, another major reason for JAOS’s success is the financial support provided over the last years by the Rectory of USP and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).The progressive increase of the impact factor produced a positive response, resulting in the submission of manuscripts that meet the standards of quality as well as in the establishment of more selective criteria and assessment strategies, which apply both for authors and for reviewers. Finally, this approach provided the required support and balance for the analysis of papers in the different areas of dental research. We look forward to continuing to receive excellent publications and high-quality reviews in fast turnaround time so that we have even more success rates in JAOS.Yours sincerely,Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Applied Oral ScienceVanessa Soares LaraCo-Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Applied Oral ScienceKarin Hermana Neppelenbroek


It is commonly reported by editors that it has become harder to recruit reviewers for peer review and that this is because individuals are being asked to review too often and are experiencing reviewer fatigue. However, evidence supporting these arguments is largely anecdotal.We examine responses of individuals to review invitations for six journals in ecology and evolution. The proportion of invitations that lead to a submitted review has been decreasing steadily over 13 years (2003–2015) for four of the six journals examined, with a cumulative effect that has been quite substantial (average decline from 56% of review invitations generating a review in 2003 to just 37% in 2015). The likelihood that an invitee agrees to review declines significantly with the number of invitations they receive in a year. However, the average number of invitations being sent to prospective reviewers and the proportion of individuals being invited more than once per year has not changed much over these 13 years, despite substantial increases in the total number of review invitations being sent by these journals—the reviewer base has expanded concomitant with this growth in review requests.The proportion of review invitations that lead to a review being submitted has been declining steadily for four of the six journals examined here, but reviewer fatigue is not likely the primary explanation for this decline. The process of peer review serves two primary purposes—reviewers advise editors on which papers to include in their journal and provide constructive feedback to authors to improve the quality of their research and paper. Success of the peer review system relies on the willingness of the research community to review manuscripts, which is usually unpaid. The research community depends on individuals who volunteer their time for peer review, but few direct rewards exist at the individual level to encourage reviewing . Given tIn a recent analysis of peer review at five ecology journals, Albert et al.  examinedEvolution and Methods in Ecology and Evolution; 2015 impact factors are >4.0 for all six journals). Also, unknown to Albert et al. [Here, we extend the analyses of Albert et al.  to additt et al. , the datt et al. , 9 contaFunctional Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology, Journal of Applied Ecology, and Journal of Ecology), the decline is large and fairly consistent over the entire 13 years , from an average  of 56% of review invitations generating a review in 2003 to just 37% in 2015  in the frequency of review invitations that led to a review being submitted  is driven primarily by a decline in the proportion of invitees agreeing to review when they respond to the invitation . For the four journals with the steepest declines, we see a drop from 66% of respondents agreeing to review in 2003 to just 46% agreeing in 2015 . Also contributing is a small decline in the proportion of invitees who responded to the invitation email  but not the others  .The decline in reviews received per invitation sent for these four journals , and J Ecology and Evolution have the least diverse reviewer pools (28.3 and 27.5% of their invitees are invited more than once). On average, individual journals invite only 21% of individuals more than once per year, 5.5% more than twice, 1.2% more than three times, and 0.6% more than four times. Across the five journals of the British Ecological Society, which share a common reviewer database , most reviewers are invited only one time  in any given year—only 32% of reviewers are invited more than once within any calendar year, 12.8% more than twice, 5.7% more than three times, and 2.6% more than four times.However, the means and the patterns in Fig. Functional Ecology, for example, avoids inviting individuals who have reviewed for the journal too recently (within the past 2–3 months) as long as alternative individuals with similar expertise are available to invite. Regardless of the explanation, the negative relationship between the probability that an individual agrees to review and number of invitations does not explain the patterns in Fig. Despite the lack of an overall increase in the average number of invitations sent to each unique reviewer and the lack of a change over time in the proportion of reviewers invited more than once, we do find evidence of reviewer fatigue at the individual reviewer level—the probability that a reviewer agreed to review for a journal was negatively correlated with the number of review invitations they received from that journal that year Fig. . IndividFunctional Ecology between their re-analysis of data from Fox et al. . This double counting had little effect on most results presented in Albert et al. [Lastly, Albert et al.  highligh et al.  estimatEvolution and Methods in Ecology and Evolution), plus a third journal examined by Albert et al. [Molecular Ecology), have not experienced a similar decline, are unclear. It could be due to differences in editorial practices at these journals; e.g., although editors select the reviewers to be invited, three of the journals with the most significant declines in the proportion of reviewers agreeing to review—Functional Ecology, Journal of Ecology, and Journal of Applied Ecology —have editorial assistants who contact prospective reviewers on behalf of editors, whereas editors themselves send the reviewer invitations for both journals that showed no significant decline, Methods in Ecology and Evolution and Evolution. Alternatively, it could be due to differences in the communities they serve—those that have experienced consistent reviewer response rates over time publish more evolutionarily and genetically focused research, whereas those that have shown substantial declines are more ecological in scope. We also find, like Vines et al. [In summary, we find that the proportion of invitees who submit a review has been decreasing slowly but steadily for four of the six journals examined here and that the cumulative effect over 13 years has been quite substantial for these journals. Why two of these journals .Taken together, the data presented here and in Albert et al.  suggest


Annals. After two years of rapid changes in staff and implementation of our electronic manuscript handling, this year we had time and people to consolidate. Authors in particular will have noticed the hard work of Kim Lewry, our Editorial Assistant, who has tracked down papers that were stuck in the system and has made a substantial contribution to the reduced times for processing submissions. We have also benefitted from the steady hand of Matthew Whitaker, Publications Manager, who has ensured that our systems meet the needs of editors and authors. During this year, Matthew has overhauled the OJS manuscript handling system and we hope that contributors are seeing the benefits. Our team of section editors and the Editorial Board have all helped ensure the speedy and thorough assessment of submitted papers.2013 has been a year of relative stability at the Annals is affiliated to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which publishes guidance for journals, editors and authors. Prospective authors should read and adhere to the principles expressed in the COPE document on international standards for authors .A major issue for the editors this year has been publication ethics. We take very seriously our obligation to maintain the highest possible standards. The Readers will recall that earlier in 2013 we detected (before publication) a case of attempted dual publication. The relevant deanery was informed of the actions of the UK trainees concerned. In this issue we have announced retraction of a paper that seems to be unreliable. We have informed the relevant registration authorities.How to Write a Surgical Paper, which we have established over the last year, working with Professor Derek Alderson, Council Member and Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Surgery (BJS). Based on the successful BJS course, this one-day course gives guidance and practical training in scientific writing, and has proved popular. The next course runs in March 2014.Publication ethics is discussed in the new College course Annals continues to receive increasing numbers of submissions. In 2010 we received 196 original research papers and accepted 57 (29%). In the 12 months to October 2013 we received 367 submissions and have accepted 60. Some of the papers still in review will also be accepted but the final acceptance rate for 2013 will be lower than previously. This has been achieved with a substantial reduction in the mean time taken to review, from 68 days in 2010 to 38 days in 2013. I am grateful to all our reviewers (and to Kim Lewry) for this tremendous improvement in the service we offer to authors. We hope that this will help to attract more high quality papers.The Annals will be a hybrid open access journal. This means that authors will have the option to have their article made freely available to all immediately on publication, on both our own platform and on PubMed, by payment of an article processing charge (‘gold’ open access). All other Annals papers will be published under a ‘green’ open access model, meaning that the papers will be made freely available to all after an embargo period of one year. Our policies are compliant with current Research Councils UK and Wellcome Trust guidelines on open access, and are part of the College’s ongoing commitment to extending the frontiers of surgery through clinical research. A summary of our open access policy appears on page v and you can read more, including details about licensing and pricing, on our website: http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/publications/open-access.In order to promote access to our published papers, and to meet the requirements of UK and other funders, from January 2014 the Looking forward, I am not making specific predictions for 2014. However, I am confident that digital publishing will reach us all in the near future. The publishing paradigm has changed because of improved technology and the wide availability of handheld reading devices. Paper journals have always been seen as convenient, transportable, delivered to the doormat or desk and available at any time. A digital resource on a publisher’s website  always seemed too cumbersome for day-to-day use. It is the difference between reading the current issue between cases in theatre and going to the library to look up a specific topic.I believe we are now at a tipping point, with most of us able to receive electronic content on a Kindle, iPad® or other device. Content is delivered without effort on our part and is then carried easily, to be accessible when we want to read it. I can look at the Sunday paper before I get out of bed, then read some more over coffee in the beach café. I can go back to finish an interesting article later in the week. I now have no use for a printed newspaper (except for lighting the fire!). Surgical journals are also moving towards this digital delivery format and because this is more convenient, it will rapidly make paper redundant for many of our readers.Annals, will depend in some measure on the responses we receive to surveys of authors and readers, the latter of which is live now (http://bit.ly/rcsreadersurvey). Your views are important – please respond as fully as you can. Our main aim will always be to provide an interesting clinical journal, relevant to the work of Fellows, Members and other surgeons, in every surgical discipline and any country. We welcome your contributions and hope for your continuing support.How quickly we move to digital delivery, and what other changes may be made to the content and format of the