Submission to first decision time

Having written previously about journal acceptance to publication times, it is high time I looked at the other important time that affects publication speed: submission to first decision time. As I explained in the previous post, the time from submission to publication in a peer reviewed journal can be split into three phases, the two discussed previously and here and also the time needed for the authors to revise, which the journal can’t control.

A survey of submission to first decision times

I have trawled through the instructions to authors pages of the journals in the MRC frequently used journal list, which I have used in several previous posts as a handy list of relatively high-impact and well known biomedical journals. I’ve used the list as downloaded in 2012, and there may be new journals added to it now. I’ve omitted the review journals, which leaves 96.

From these pages I have tried to find any indication of the actual or intended speed to first decision for each journal. For many journals, no information was provided on the journal website about average or promised submission to first decision times. For example, no Nature Publishing Group, Lancet, Springer or Oxford University Press journals in this data set provide any information.

However, of these 96 journals 37 did provide usable information. I have put this information in a spreadsheet on my website.

20 promised a first decision within 28 or 30 days of submission. 12 others promised 20-25 days. Of the rest, two are particularly fast, Circulation Research (13 days in 2012) and Cellular Microbiology (14 days); and one is particularly slow, Molecular and Cellular Biology (4 to 6 weeks, though they may just be more cautious in their promises than other journals). JAMA and Genetics are also relatively slow, with 34 and 35 days, respectively. (Note that the links here are to the page that states the time, which is generally the information for authors.)

A few journals promise a particularly fast for selected (‘expedited’) papers but I have only considered the speed promised for all papers here.

I conclude from this analysis that, for relatively high-impact biomedical journals, a first decision within a month of submission is the norm. Anything faster than 3 weeks is fast, and anything slower than 5 weeks is slow.

Newer journals

But what about the newer journals? PeerJ has recently been boasting on its blog about authors who are happy with their fast decision times. The decision times given on this post are 17, 18 and 19 days. These are not necessarily typical of all PeerJ authors, though, and are likely to be biased towards the shorter times, as those whose decisions took longer won’t have tweeted about it and PeerJ won’t have included them in their post.

PLOS One gives no current information on its website about decision times. However, in a comment on a PLOS One blog post in 2009, the then Publisher Pete Binfield stated that “of the 1,520 papers which received a first decision in the second quarter of 2009 (April – June), the mean time from QC completion to first decision was 33.4 days, the median was 30 days and the SD was 18.” He didn’t say how long it took from submission to ‘QC completion’, which is presumably an initial check; I expect this would be only a few days.

Kent Anderson of the Scholarly Kitchen asked last year “Is PLOS ONE Slowing Down?“. This post only looked at the time between the submission and acceptance dates that are displayed on all published papers, and it included no data on decision dates, so the data tell us nothing about decision times. In a series of comments below the post David Solomon of Michigan State University gives more data, which shows that the submission to acceptance time went up only slightly between early 2010 and September 2011.

The star of journals in terms of decision time is undoubtedly Biology Open. It posts the average decision time in the previous month on its front page, and the figure currently given for February 2013 is 8 days. They say they aim to give a first decision within 10 days, and their tweets seem to bear this out: in June 2012 they tweeted that the average decision time in May 2012 had been 6 days, and similarly the time for April 2012 had been 9 days.

Other megajournals vary similarly to ordinary journals. Open Biology reports an average of 24 days, Cell Reports aims for 21 days, and G3 and Scientific Reports aim for 30 days. Springer Plus, the BMC series, the Frontiers journals, BMJ Open and FEBS Open Bio provided no information, though all boast of being fast.

What affects review speed?

If newer journals are faster, why might that be? One possible reason is that as the number of submitted papers goes up, the number of editors doesn’t always go up quickly enough, so the editors get overworked – whereas when a journal is new the number of papers to handle per editor may be lower.

It is important to remember that the speed of review is mainly down to the reviewers, as Andy Farke pointed out in a recent PLOS blog post. Editors can affect this by setting deadlines and chasing late reviewers, but they only have a limited amount of control over when reviewers send their reports.

But given this limitation, there could be reasons for variations in the average speed of review between journals. Reviewers might be excited by the prospect of reviewing for newer journals, so they are more likely to be fast. This could equally be true for the highest impact journals, of course, and also for open access journals if the reviewer is an open access fan. Enthusiastic reviewers not only mean that the reviewers who have agreed send their reports in more quickly, but also that it will be easier to get someone to agree to review in the first place. As Bob O’Hara pointed out in a comment on Andy Farke’s post, “If lots of people decline, you’re not going to have a short review time”.

A logical conclusion from this might be that the best way in which a journal could speed up its time to first decision would be to cultivate enthusiasm for their journal among the pool of potential reviewers. Building a community around the journal, using social media, conferences,  mascots or even free gifts might help. PeerJ seem to be aiming to build such a community with their membership scheme, not to mention their active Twitter presence and their monkey mascot. Biology Open‘s speed might be related to its sponsorship of meetings and its aim to “reduce reviewer fatigue in the community”.

Another less positive possible reason for shorter review times could be that reviewers are not being careful enough. This hypothesis was tested and refuted by the editors of Acta Neuropathologica in a 2008 editorial. (Incidentally, this journal had an average time from submission to first decision of around 17 days between 2005 and 2007, which is pretty fast.) The editorial says “Because in this journal all reviews are rated from 0 (worst) to 100 (best), we plotted speed versus quality. As reflected in Fig. 1, there is no indication that review time is related to the quality of a review.”

Your experience

I would love to find (or even do) some research into the actual submission to first decision times between different journals. Unfortunately that would mean getting the data from each publisher, and it might be difficult to persuade them to release it. (And I don’t have time to do this, alas.) Does anyone know of any research on this?

And have you experienced particularly fast or slow peer review at a particular journal? Are you a journal editor who can tell us about the actual submission to first decision times in your journal? Or do you have other theories for why some journals are quicker than others in this respect?

SpotOn London session: The journal is dead, long live the journal

I’m co-hosting a workshop at SpotOn London next week on the future of journals.

It’s time to end a long blogging hiatus to tell you about an exciting event coming up on Sunday 11 and Monday 12 November. SpotOn London (formerly called Science Online London) is a community event hosted by Nature Publishing Group for the discussion of how science is carried out and communicated online. There will be workshops on three broad topic areas – science communication and outreach, online tools and digital publishing, and science policy – and I am involved in one of the ‘online tools and digital publishing’ ones. This has the title ‘The journal is dead, long live the journal‘ and it will focus on current and future innovations in journal publishing. If you’re interested in how journals could or should change to better meet the needs of science, this is for you!

In this one-hour session we will have very short introductions from four representatives from different parts of the journal publishing world:

• Matias Piipari (@mz2), part of the team behind Papers software for finding an organising academic papers
• Damian Pattinson (@damianpattinson), Executive Editor of PLOS ONE
• Davina Quarterman, Web Publishing Manager at Wiley-Blackwell
• Ethan Perlstein (@eperlste) of Princeton University

We will then open the floor to contributions from participants, both in the room and online. We hope to cover three themes:

1. Megajournals; their impact on the journal and on how papers are going to be organised into journals. Will megajournals lead to a two tier marketplace of high end journals and a few megajournals, with mid-tier journals disappearing from the market altogether?
2. How do we find the papers of interest, in a world where journal brand doesn’t help? In a world where issues disappear, and researchers’ main point of contact with the literature is through aggregation points such as Google Scholar and Pubmed, what are the signifiers that we can build or support that will enable researchers to find the content that they need?
3. Once you get down to the paper, are there any innovations that we should be using now, at the individual paper level, and what are the barriers to us doing this?

Science Online events have a tradition of being more than just conferences – they aim to involve lots of people outside the room via the SpotOn website and Twitter as well as those in the room. So although the conference itself is sold out (though there is a waiting list for tickets), you can still follow along and get involved before, during and after the event itself. This session is at 4.30pm on Sunday 11 November, so look out on the Twitter hashtag #solo12journals around then. Beforehand, you can comment on co-host Ian Mulvany’s blog post introducing the session, look at the Google Doc that shows the thought processes the organisers went through in planning the session, check for tweets on the hashtag, and follow me (@sharmanedit), Ian (@ianmulvany) and co-host Bob O’Hara (@bobohara) and/or the speakers on Twitter for updates.

One the day, comments from Twitter will be moderated and introduced into the discussion in the room by Bob, who will be doing this remotely from Germany. The whole session (and all other SpotOn London session) will be live-streamed (probably here) and the video will be available afterwards; there will also be a Storify page collecting tweets using the #solo12journals hashtag.

This interaction with those outside the room is important because with only an hour there is a limit to the depth with which we will be able to cover the range of issues around journals. With online discussion as well we hope that more points can be discussed in more detail than would otherwise be possible. It might get a little confusing! I am new to this format, so I am slightly apprehensive but also excited about the possibilities.

Thoughts on megajournals

I am particularly interested in the aspect of the session on megajournals and how they are changing journal publishing. By megajournals we mean all the journals that have been set up to publish papers after peer review that assesses whether the research is sound but doesn’t attempt to second-guess the potential impact of the work. Some, like PLOS ONE, are truly mega – they published over 13,000 papers in 2011. Others, like the BMC series from BioMed Central, probably publish a similar number of papers but divided into many journals in different subject areas. Others have been set up to be sister journals to better known selective journals – for example, Scientific Reports from Nature Publishing Group and BioOpen from The Company of Biologists. All are open access and online only.

Some of these journals are now showing themselves not to be the dumping ground for boring, incremental research that they might have been expected. When PLOS ONE’s first impact factor was revealed to be over 4, there was surprise among many commentators. The question is now whether papers that are unlikely to be accepted by the top journals (roughly speaking, those with impact factors over about 10, though I know that impact factor is a flawed measure) will gradually be submitted not to specialist journals but to megajournals. The opportunity to get your paper seen by many people, which open access publishing provides, could often outweigh the benefits of publishing in a journal specific to your specialist community where your paper will be seen by only that community. I will be very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this issue raised by this session.

Get involved

So do comment using one of the channels mentioned above. Have you recently made a decision about where to send a paper that you knew wasn’t one for the top-flight journals, and did you decide on a specialist journal, a megajournal or some other route to publication? Regarding the other two themes of the session, how do you find papers in your field, and what do you want research papers to look like?

Crowdsourcing information about journals

Crowdsourced surveys of the experience of authors with journals are useful, but I have found only a few. For now, I propose a simpler survey of information gleaned from journal websites.

I was recently alerted by @melchivers (via @thesiswhisperer) to the existence of a blog by SUNY philosopher Andrew Cullison (@andycullison) that includes a set of journal surveys for the field. As Cullison explains in an overview post, the surveys consist of Google Docs spreadsheets, one for each journal, and a form interface that academics fill in with data on their experience of submitting to that journal. The information requested includes:

• the time taken for initial review
• the initial verdict of the journal (acceptance, rejection, revise and resubmit, conditional acceptance, withdrawn)
• the number of reviewers whose comments were provided
• an assessment of the quality of the reviewers’ comments
• the final verdict if the paper was revised
• the time from acceptance to publication
• an overall rating of the experience with the editors
• Some basic demographic data

This survey covers 180 journals in philosophy. The data is collated and various statistics are calculated, such as the average review time and acceptance to publication time and the average acceptance rate. Here are couple of examples: the British Journal of Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Science.

This kind of survey could be a valuable resource for authors in a particular field who are trying to choose a journal. They are crowdsourced, so they do not rely on only one or a few people to gather data. They also provide real data on how fast journals are in practice, which might differ from the statistics or promises provided on journal websites. However, they have limitations: as pointed out in comments below one of Cullison’s posts, they suffer from reporting bias. This is important given that for many of the journals surveyed there are fewer than ten responses.

I haven’t seen any surveys like this in any other field of academia, and certainly none in biology or medicine. I would be very interested to hear if others have seen any. In biology a similar survey would probably only be useful if divided up into smaller fields, such as plant cell biology or cardiovascular medicine. Or it could focus only on the general journals that cover large areas of science, biology or medicine.

A simpler journal survey

Alternatively, or as a first step towards full surveys of journals in biomedicine, a crowdsourced survey of the information presented on journal websites could be useful. This could include information such as the promised submission to first decision time and acceptance to publication time, licensing details (copyright, Creative Commons and so on), charges, article types and length limits. This would involve only one small dataset per journal, which could fit on a single line of a spreadsheet rather than data for individual papers, so would be more manageable than Cullison’s surveys.

I have made a start on such a survey, and you can find it on Google Docs here. I have used the same set of 98 journals, derived from the UK Medical Research Council  list of journals popular with MRC authors, that I used for my open access charges spreadsheet. For every journal, the spreadsheet now contains the name of the publisher, the main journal URL, the URL for the instructions for authors, whether the entire journal is open access or not, and whether there is an open access option. There are also columns for the following information: what the website says about acceptance to publication time; whether the accepted, non-edited manuscript is published online, and what the website says about submission to first decision time. I have filled in some of these fields but haven’t yet checked all the websites for all this information.

The spreadsheet is editable by anyone. I realise that this risks someone messing up the data or adding spam text. For the columns that I don’t want you to change, I have included a partial safeguard: these columns are pulled in from a hidden, locked sheet of the spreadsheet. Please try not to delete data in any cells – just add data in empty cells. If you have any other suggestions for how to allow information to be added but not deleted, or otherwise to avoid problems, please add a comment below.

Now it’s your turn

Would you like to contribute information to this survey? If so, please go ahead and edit the spreadsheet.

If you could publicise it that would be great too.

And do you have any comments on this process, suggestions for improvement and so on?

Other questions

Have you used Cullison’s surveys and found them useful (or less useful)? Have you come across any surveys like the philosophy one for other fields? Or like my survey?

A comparison of open access publication charges

Having covered submission fees and other charges, it is about time I covered the main event, isn’t it? I’m talking about open access publication fees, also known as author publishing charges (APCs) and many other names. This is a fee for making your article free for readers to read, and usually for them to download, distribute and do whatever they like with as well.

What do you get for your money?

Before agreeing to pay a fee to make your article open access, make sure you check the licence. True open access (as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative) means that it should be equivalent to the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC:BY), which allows others to copy, distribute and make derivative works, including for commercial purposes, as long as they attribute it to you. Some publishers have a similar licence but with a non-commercial clause (CC:BY-NC) – there is debate about whether the NC clause stops something being open access. Others allow reading for free but restrict other uses, which really can’t be called open access at all. If the rights of readers and re-users are restricted, you are getting less open access for your APC than if there is a CC:BY licence.

Surveys of APCs

To find journal open access charges you usually need to look on the website of the individual journal. However, several organisations have usefully put together summaries of licences and charges. The Wellcome Trust and the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) both have mandates that all research they fund must be made freely available within 6 months of publication, and they both have lists on their websites of journals that do and don’t comply with this mandate. The following lists are available:

• The MRC has a downloadable spreadsheet listing licences and charges of the most popular couple of hundred journals in which their authors publish
• The Wellcome Trust has a list of the top 200 journals used by their authors showing which are compliant with their mandate, but not including charges
• BioMed Central has a page comparing their APCs and licence with those of other publishers
• The University of California, Berkeley library collections have a similar comparison page covering many subject areas
• The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides information on charges, but this doesn’t seem to be searchable
• SHERPA/RoMEO has a list of charges by publisher

I have taken the MRC spreadsheet, converted the currencies and calculated some statistics, and the result is in a Google Docs spreadsheet here. Some journals have two different fees depending on whether the author is a member of the society that runs the journal (or has a discount for some other reason). Of the 209 journals that allowed open access publication of some kind (ie gold open access, not just allowing deposition in a repository, which is called green open access), the mean fee was US$2845.08 (£1793.60) for members or US$2881.93 (£1816.21) for non-members. The standard deviation of the fee was $729.17 (£459.71) for members or $687.09 (£438.60) for non-members. The median is $3000 (£1891.33).

Some notes on these figures. Firstly, they are from the MRC document last updated April 2011, with currencies converted using xe.com on 23 March 2012. Secondly, they cover journals in medicine and related fields, particularly biology. Thirdly, they include 8 BioMed Central journals, 10 BMJ journals, 52 Elsevier journals (including 11 Cell Press journals), 14 Nature Publishing Group journals, 17 OUP journals, 4 PLoS journals, 12 Springer journals and 48 Wiley/Wiley-Blackwell journals. The median charge is $3000 because non-Cell-Press Elsevier journals charge this amount and there are lots of Elsevier journals in the list.

The MRC list also includes journals in the Lancet stable (The Lancet, The Lancet Neurology and The Lancet Oncology, published by Elsevier ), which charge £400 ($634.47) per page. I’m not sure how many pages the average research paper is, but at 6 pages this would be £2400 ($3808.46) and at 10 pages it would be £4000 ($6344.70).

Waivers

These fees may seem very high to some. Don’t forget that many publishers have waivers for those who cannot afford to pay the APC. PLoS offers a waiver for anyone who does not have funds to cover the fee (and I’ve heard informally that they ask no questions). BioMed Central gives an automatic waiver to authors from a WHO list of developing countries, and also considers waivers and discounts on a case by case basis. I haven’t researched all publishers to find out their policy on waivers – perhaps that’s for a future post! If you can’t afford the APC for a journal to which you would like to submit your paper, I suggest explaining this when you submit and asking for a waiver or discount.

Your experience

Do you know of other sources of information on APCs for different journals or on average APCs? Have you spotted any errors in my spreadsheet?

Journal submission fees: why are they so rare?

In a previous post I discussed fees that journals charge for colour printing, per page or for supplementary material. All those fees are charged only to authors whose papers are accepted. Here I’ll look at fees that are charged to the authors of all submissions, included those that are rejected.

In 2010 a report on submission fees by Mark Ware was published by the Knowledge Exchange, a collaboration of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) with similar organisations in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. This followed a study investigating whether submission fees could play a role in a business model for open access journals. They concluded that for journals with a high rejection rate in particular, submission fees can help to make the open access publication fee more reasonable and could thus make the transition to open access easier.

Although the report focuses on submission fees in the transition to open access, they also noted:

In certain disciplines, notably economic and finance journals and in some areas of the experimental life sciences, submission fees are already common.

Which journals charge a submission fee?

The Knowledge Exchange report includes a table of journals that already charge a submission fee. For biology journals, these fees are listed as mostly being around US$50-75.

I’ve checked on the journal websites for a selection of those listed in this report, and some seem to no longer charge for submission – in particular, the US$400 submission fee that Ideas in Ecology & Evolution charged when it launched in 2008 seems to have now been dropped, and I can’t find any mention of submission fees on the websites of Journal of Biological Chemistry or FASEB Journal.

The journals that I could verify as charging submission fees are:

• Journal of Neuroscience (Society for Neuroscience) has a submission fee of US$125 (as well as the page charges and colour printing charges mentioned in the previous post)
• Hereditas (an open access Wiley-Blackwell journal) charges 100 euros (US$133)
• Stem Cells (Wiley-Blackwell, with an open access option) charges $90
• Journal of Clinical Investigation (American Society for Clinical Investigation) and Cancer Research (American Association for Cancer Research) charge US$75
• several other journals mentioned in the Knowledge Exchange report charge around US$50.

Elsevier say in their FAQ that you need to look in each journal’s guide to authors to find out if they charge submission fees (as with other charges).

All the above except Hereditas are subscription journals.

Why submission fees, or why not?

The Knowledge Exchange report interviewed publishers about the pros and cons of submission fees. Unfortunately, they don’t give any details of who was interviewed, except that they were ‘stakeholders including publishers, libraries, research funders, research institutions and individual researchers’, or the text of the interviews, so it is difficult to interpret the results. However, from these interviews the report identified the following advantages:

• The costs of publication are spread over more authors
• The fee may put off authors from submitting ‘on spec’ to a journal where they know their paper has only a tiny chance of getting accepted, thus saving work for the journal.

The disadvantages mentioned included:

• The fee might put off authors and thus make the journal less competitive
• It was unclear whether funders would cover the charge (though interviews with funders for the study suggested that they would)
• It would require administration.

Given the findings of this report, I’m surprised that more journals don’t charge a submission fee. I would be surprised if it put off speculative submissions (the time it takes for a paper to be reviewed is surely a bigger cost to the authors than a charge at the level of US$50-100). But for  open access journals with high rejection rates, as the report says, it seems particularly appropriate. Is the risk of seeming uncompetitive with other journals the only reason why these fees aren’t being widely tried?

This is interesting in the context of the statements by Nature Publishing Group that Nature couldn’t go open access because they would have to charge a very high publication fee. I’ve heard this most recently from Alison Mitchell at the debate ‘Evolution of Science’ in Oxford in February: she said that the publication fee would need to be about £10,000 (US$15,850) for Nature research journals and £30,000 (US$47,550) for Nature (see the video of the debate – this statement is at 17 minutes 30 seconds).

A conversation on Twitter with Heather Piwowar (@researchremix, a postdoc with Dryad studying data use among researchers) and Ethan Perlstein (@eperlste, an evolutionary pharmacologist at Princeton University) about this NPG statement led me to Jan Velterop (@Villavelius, a director of Aqcknowledge.com and a former colleague of mine at BioMed Central), who has written on submission fees several times on his blog. He kindly emailed me with further thoughts.

Jan’s most recent blog post summarises his reasons for liking submission fees:

The basic reason I am in favour of submission fees is that it makes scientific publishing really the service industry that it is, its main task nowadays having nothing to do with publishing per se, but mainly with arranging peer review and quality assurance of one sort or another.

Of course, this might not be what publishers want their main task to be…

Another argument for them that he lists is:

It removes the suspicion that OA journals might be tempted to accept more than they should just because of the money that accepted articles bring

And what about the disadvantages? Jan tells me that journal publishers are wary of introducing new fees that other journals don’t charge (see the ‘competitiveness’ point above). They are particularly wary because of a bit of history I didn’t know about:

One of the reasons why commercial journals dominate STM these days is the fact that society journals, still mostly independent in the 1960′s, charged page charges. Commercial journals made much of the fact that (then) they didn’t, and so attracted a growing percentage of authors, who could publish with them for free…

Among the reasons publishers are not too keen are:

1) The risk that authors ‘defect’ to journals without charges. After all, that happened before.

I can see that given this history, journals might be more cautious than otherwise.

Jan goes on to mention a reason I hadn’t heard before:

2) The risk that authors might expect transparency with regard to the speed, peer-review, and acceptance/rejection procedure. If you only have to pay when accepted (as is the case for the current author-side payment OA journals), you may not care too much about the speed, quality of the peer review, and acceptance processes, but if you have to pay even if you are rejected, then that becomes a very different story. Publishers know that they cannot guarantee any quality in that regard – with a few exceptions, perhaps – and fear the pressure of quality requirements on them if they were to move in that direction.

This is a very good point. It is certainly difficult to give guarantees about the speed or quality of peer review, which relies on voluntary work by researchers. It is related to a disadvantage listed in Jan’s recent blog post:

The need to be able to justify rejections properly, particularly if challenged (after all, submitters have paid for an assessment)

Jan also gives a third reason that intrigues me: that the level of submission fees might reveal information about a journal’s rejection rate that they would rather be kept quiet:

if they reject only about a tenth of the submissions, then obviously the submission charge cannot be very much lower than 9/10th of the publication charge for the same revenue to be achieved

So a journal might want to be seen as very selective, rejecting a high proportion of submitted articles, but they might actually have a lot lower rejection rate than this. For example say a journal with a rejection rate of 90% was considering a submission fee of $50 and a publication fee of $1000 (and all authors pay the submission fee, whether accepted or not). Then for every 9 articles accepted, the journal would receive $9000 in publication fees, plus $4500 for the 90 articles submitted, making $13500. But if the same fees were applied to a journal that rejects only about 10%, then for every 9 articles accepted, they would get only $9000 plus $500 for the 10 submitted articles ($9500). The number of articles accepted is public, whereas the number rejected isn’t. To get the level of fees they would receive if they had a 90% rejection rate they would need to charge a submission fee of ($13500 – $9000)/10 = $450. This level of submission fee is unlikely to be acceptable to authors.

(My calculation comes out with a submission fee half what Jan estimates, which I think is because I am assuming both a submission fee and a publication fee are charged, whereas he is assuming only a submission fee.)

In conclusion, the main advantage of submission fees is also their main advantage in other circumstances: that they would reduce the number of submissions. So if a journal has a high rejection rate, it makes sense to charge a submission fee, but otherwise it doesn’t. This actually applies to subscription and open access journals equally – in both cases a submission fee provides extra revenue, which could be used to reduce other charges, included subscriptions, page charges or publication fees (or to increase profits of course). The main reason why high-rejection-rate journals aren’t currently charging submission fees seems to be because it would make them less competitive, but given that these journals are by definition the place that people want to be published, this doesn’t seem a very strong argument. I wouldn’t be surprised if one journal tries submission fees and other then followed suit in the next few years.

Your experience

Have you paid a submission fee to a journal? Would you consider it if it meant a lower level of other charges, such as page charges or fees for open access publication?

Journal editors: has your journal considered a submission fee? If you don’t have one, why not? If you do, why?

Journal news for February

News related to scientific journal publishing since 4 February.

Elsevier withdraws support for the Research Works Act

Since I covered this infamous draft US law and the associated boycott of Elsevier by academics (here and in news here) the flood of blog posts on the topic has continued, and I won’t attempt to summarise them here. But the pressure seems to have had an effect: on 27 February Elsevier announced that it is no longer supporting the act, although they ‘continue to oppose government mandates in this area’.

Meanwhile, a new act has been proposed, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which would mandate that all research funded by every federal funder with a budget over $100 million should be made open access 6 months after publication.

Industry group ‘threatens’ journals to delay publications

The Lancet has reported (pdf) that the Mining Awareness Resource Group (MARG) has written to several scientific journals advises journals not to  publish papers from a US government study of diesel exhaust and lung cancer until a court case and congressional directives are ‘resolved’. The editor of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Dana Loomis, is quoted as saying ‘It is vague and threatening. This has a chilling effect on scientific communications—a matter of grave concern.’

New open access journal

The open access journal Biology Open has been launched by the Company of Biologists. The journal aims to provide the research community with ‘an opportunity to publish valid and well-conducted experimental work that is otherwise robbed of timeliness and impact by the delays inherent in submission to established journals with more restrictive selection criteria. ‘

Twitter and paper citations

An arXiv preprint has found a correlation between mentions of a paper on Twitter and its later citations.

Criteria for the UK Research Excellence Framework 2014 announced

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has announced the criteria and working methods that the panels for the assessment of research using the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) will use. REF will use citations as part of assessment but not impact factors or other bibliometrics (see page 25 of the full report for the statement regarding citations in the biology and medicine panel). Researchers at English universities will no doubt be scrutinizing the guidelines carefully.

* * * *

I’m sorry there hasn’t been a weekly Journal News recently, as I had hoped, and that this update is rather brief. I hope that the usefulness of these news updates depends more on their content than their regularity. If you want (much) more frequent updates from the world of journals and scientific publication, do follow me on Twitter!

Journal news 28 January to 3 February

Your journal-related news for the week.

F1000Research

Faculty of 1000 (F1000), the well established post-publication peer review service, has announced a new service that will publish original research papers. According to the initial announcement, this will differ from traditional journals in that all papers will be published immediately, before peer review (as long as they pass a ‘sanity check’), and peer review will happen openly after that. Publication of datasets will also be encouraged. Fees are still under discussion. Retraction Watch discussed the proposal and received many comments, including from two members of F1000 staff, Rebecca Lawrence and Sarah Greene, who thanked commenters for helping them to develop the idea further. This looks like an experiment worth watching – if it takes off it could herald a big change in publication of peer-reviewed papers. (Via @F1000Research.)

Arsenic Life (or not) in arXiv

Microbiologist Rosie Redfield has been trying to replicate the experiments presented by Felisa Wolfe-Simon et al. in late 2010 about a bacterium (called GFAJ-1) that could apparently grow using arsenic instead of phosphorus. Redfield has now submitted a manuscript to Science and at the same time uploaded it to the preprint server arXiv. She has found that there is no arsenate in the DNA of arsenate-grown GFAJ-1 cells. She is inviting comments on the manuscript on her blog, as an experiment in open peer review. (Via @RosieRedfield.)

More on the boycott of Elsevier

See my post earlier this week for the background on this. The list of researchers who have pledged not to support Elsevier journals has now reached over 3800. An article by Josh Fischman in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Tuesday included responses from Elsevier (Alicia Wise and Tom Reller). Kent Anderson of the Scholarly Kitchen criticised the boycott, saying that other publishers have prices as high as Elsevier, bundling of journal subscriptions is useful rather than being wrong, and other publishers also support the Research Works Act. Elsevier also put their case in this blog post by Chrysanne Lowe. Meanwhile, Michael Eisen, one of the founders of the Public Library of Science, gives some historical context in his blog. (Various sources.)

Launch of Cell Reports

In an announcement that got rather lost in the furore about the boycott, Cell Press (part of Elsevier) launched a new open access journal, Cell Reports. According to its information for authors (pdf), it publishes ‘thought-provoking, cutting-edge research, with a focus on a shorter single-point story… in addition to a longer article format’ and also ‘significant technical advances’ and ‘major informational data sets’. Authors can choose between two Creative Commons licences for their papers: Attribution (CC BY) and Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works (CC BY-NC). Are there now any major scientific publishers left that don’t have any open access journals? Possibly not. (Via @WiseAlic.)

Gyrations in Life

A controversial paper was published this week in the little known open access journal Life, apparently after peer review, that claims to explain just about everything using a simple geometric figure, the gyre. It has been taken to pieces by John Timmer in Ars Technica and PZ Myers in Pharyngula. Following these and other criticisms, the editor has now responded, saying that peer review was thorough, and Retraction Watch has discussed the response. (Via @tdechant and @leonidkruglyak.)

Mind your Editorial Board

Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen pointed out something not quite right about the biography of an editorial board member on a journal called Molecular Biology, published by OMICS Publishing Group. The expert in ‘oximological microbiology, non-linear submorphological endosaccharomorphosis, applied endoplutomomics’ turned out to be a fictional creation of the German satirical magazine Titanic. How the journal administrators could take him seriously when his biography says that he ‘has successfully completed his Administrative responsibilities as vice president of the universe for scientific publication ethics and spamology’, we may never know. His name is still on the editorial board page as I write. It may be relevant that OMICS has been described as a ‘predatory open access publisher‘. (Via @phylogenomics.)

The Research Works Act, open access and publisher boycotts

The open access movement has been around for decades, gradually building up, but this month there seems to have been an acceleration in the pace of change. I will try in this post to summarise the current situation as I see it.

The initial driver of this recent change was theResearch Works Act (RWA), a draft law proposed in the US that would prohibit federal bodies from mandating that taxpayer-funded research be made freely accessible online (as the NIH currently does). The two Representatives who are sponsoring the RWA, Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney, have received considerable amounts of money from the publisher Elsevier, which publishes many journals and is against open access (as reported on Michael Eisen’s blog).

The second important event was the decision of Cambridge mathematics professor and Fields Medal winner Timothy Gowers to publish a blog post on 21 January entitled ‘Elsevier — my part in its downfall‘ (after the late Spike Milligan’s book ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall‘. (Gowers was the initiator of the Polymath Project, an experiment in open collaboration online between thousands of mathematicians, which Michael Nielsen lauded highly in his TED talk on open science.) Gowers summarised the criticisms of Elsevier:

1. Their very high prices
2. Their practice of ‘bundling’ journals into collections that libraries have to subscribe to together
3. Their ‘ruthless’ negotiation tactics with libraries
4. Their support of the RWA, and of the related acts SOPA and PIPA (both now postponed).

He was already quietly avoiding publishing in Elsevier journals and avoiding reviewing for them. But he decided that this quiet approach wasn’t enough: he called for coordinated action by academics. He comments that ‘Elsevier is not the only publisher to behave in an objectionable way. However, it seems to be the worst’.

This led mathematician Tyler Neylon to set up ‘The cost of knowledge‘, a page where researchers could publicly declare that they ‘will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate’. As of writing, this has over 2300 signatures.

In the past week the usual trickle of blog posts about open access and Elsevier has turned into a flood. I’ll pick out a few here:

• Aram Harrow, a US  researcher working on the mathematics of quantum mechanics and a co-blogger at ‘The Quantum Pontiff‘, asked ‘Why boycott Elsevier?‘, suggesting that a boycott was not enough – the system needs to change so that journals don’t hold copyright (though he didn’t make any concrete proposals).
• On the Guardian‘s online comment pages, Mike Taylor, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol, UK, claimed that ‘Academic publishers have become the enemies of science‘.
• Joshua Gans on the economics blog Digitopoly said that ‘Elsevier’s economic case is lacking‘.
• Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London, UK, explained ‘Why I chose to decline an invitation to review by Elsevier‘.
• Danny Kingsley gave an Australian view: ‘A small bill in the US, a giant impact for research worldwide‘.
• DrugMonkey (the blog of a US NIH-funded researcher) asked: ‘Who will shelter the “shitasse” society journals?‘; that is, he suggested that researchers could demand that the journals published by their scientific societies stop working with publishers such as Elsevier.
• UCSF biologist Benoit Bruneau wrote a guest post on Stephen Curry’s blog considering what scholarly societies should do if their journals are published by Elsevier.

Elsevier and their allies have responded:

• Graham Taylor of the UK Publishers Association in the Guardian: ‘Branding academic publishers ‘enemies of science’ is offensive and wrong‘
• Tom Reller, Vice President Global Corporate Relations at Elsevier, commented on Mike Eisen’s blog

But The Lancet, which is published by Elsevier, has said it ‘strongly opposes‘ the RWA, saying: ‘This short and hastily put together legislation is not in the interests of either science or the public’.

and others have criticised these responses (e.g. Mike Eisen, Drug Monkey).

The coverage is now reaching the mainstream:

• David Dobbs listed some of the scientists supporting the boycott in Wired magazine (Testify: The Open-Science Movement Catches Fire)
• Forbes (‘Elsevier’s Publishing Model Might be About to Go Up in Smoke)
• Chronicle of Higher Education (Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics)

It will be interesting to see what Elsevier says in a statement that was expected today, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

*  *  *  *

So, where do I stand? I am a freelance editor, working directly or indirectly for scientists and for publishers, on both open access and closed access journals. I worked for two years for Elsevier and then five years for BioMed Central, one of the leading open access publishers, and part of my job at BMC was to advocate for open access. I’m not a great fan of Elsevier, partly for the reasons that others give as described above, and partly because I think they (like many other publishers) are too keen on cutting costs and not keen enough on ensuring quality in their publications.

All this means that I am sympathetic to the open access movement but am not an active advocate of it. I’m not currently in a position to refuse to work for closed access publishers, nor would that have much effect on their policies. When helping scientists choose where to submit their papers, I try to dispassionately present the arguments for different types of journals and encourage them to investigate open-access options, but the decision is up to them.

What I’d like to do is think through what effect a boycott would have on each affected journal. The first people to suffer will be the editors who handle manuscripts. Usually they have to ask several people before they get two reviewers to agree to look at a paper – with the boycott, they will get more noes before they get enough yeses.  If the editors are in-house staff, will this filter up to their managers, and to their managers’ managers, up to the top of the company? Maybe, but only if the proportion of people saying no to reviewing for the journal is big enough. And in the mean time the editors, who have no say in the policies of their company, will be having a hard time.

One way the boycott could perhaps be more effective would be if it focused on a few journals in well-defined, small fields where there is a limited pool of potential reviewers. In a small field, it might be possible for a sizeable proportion of researchers to refuse to review for a particular journal, so this would have a bigger effect.

I would hope that those refusing make their reasons clear (as in this example letter) so that in-house staff aren’t left wondering what is going on. The boycotters will also need to make it clear to the staff that it is their employers they have a problem with, not the editors and editorial assistants themselves. Extreme politeness and chocolate might go down well!

I hope everyone will also remember that there are many researchers who need to publish to keep their jobs or get funding and tenure. Not everyone has a free choice of where to submit their paper. Those who do not join the boycott should not be assumed to be enemies of it.

So if you are boycotting any particular publisher, spare a thought for both the in-house staff who have to put up with it and for the researchers who can’t join in.

Journal News

A brief summary of recent news related to journals and scientific publishing.

Journal of Errology

A new venture came to my notice this week that aims to provide “an experimental online research repository that enables sharing and discussions on those unpublished futile hypothesis, errors, iterations, negative results, false starts and other original stumbles that are part of a larger successful research in biological sciences.” It is not clear whether the Journal of Errology will succeed, but it is an interesting development that might fill a gap that journals are currently neglecting.

Figshare

Another place to send your miscellaneous data is figshare, which relaunched this week. This “allows researchers to publish all of their research outputs in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner”. They are encouraging researchers to upload negative data, supplementary material that is too large for journal limits, and miscellaneous figures that aren’t likely to get written up as a paper.

The Research Works Act

You’ll probably have heard about the Research Works Act (RWA) being proposed in the US, which would prohibit the NIH or other federal bodies from mandating (as the NIH currently does) that taxpayer-funded research should be freely accessible online.  A summary for UK readers by Mike Taylor (@SauropodMike) is here. The act is supported by the American Publishers Association, and Twitter has been full of scientists lobbying journal publishers to come out against it. So far, the AAAS (publisher of Science) and Nature Publishing Group have been among the journal publishers opposing the RWA.

An open peer review experiment

AJ Cann (@AJCann) is inviting comments on a research paper (entitled “An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment”) on his blog, as a form of open peer review. He’s received several reviews so far, as well as comments on the process.

A journal using WordPress

Andrés Guadamuz, the technical editor of SCRIPTed, the open access journal of Law and Technology, has written a blog post “Confessions of an open access editor” that mentions that the journal is now one of the few hosted by WordPress. Given the recent launch of Annotum, the WordPress add-on for authoring scholarly publications, it looks like WordPress is going to become more important as a platform in the future.

A survey on attitudes to open access

The International Journal of Clinical Practice (IJCP), published by Wiley, has launched a survey on what authors think about the idea of the journal going completely open access (rather than having it as an option as at present). They will be asking all submitting authors for the next six months and are also inviting others to write a Letter to the Editor with their thoughts. They seem to be genuinely interested in authors’ views and not pushing either for or against open access.

The ‘academic dollar’ altmetric

A post by Sabine Hossenfelder on the BackReaction blog (which I heard about via @ScholarlyKitchn) discusses a 2010 paper entitled “An Auction Market for Journal Articles” that suggests an ‘academic dollar’ “that would be traded among editors, authors, and reviewers and create incentives for each involved party to improve the quality of articles”. They are scathing about this proposal, describing it as an example of “Verschlimmbesserung”, defined by Urban Dictionary as “an attempted improvement that makes things worse than they already were”. Altmetrics may be on the rise, but it looks like this one won’t be taking off.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2012/01/academic-dollar.html

Choosing a journal II: getting your paper noticed

This is the second in a series of posts on factors to consider when choosing which journal to submit your paper to. Here, I will look at how your choice of journal can affect the extent to which your work is noticed.

Part one of the series, on getting your paper published quickly, is here.

How well known is the journal?

It goes without saying that papers in very well known journals like Nature, Science, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA and Cell will be seen by more people than those in other journals. The more specialist journals may, however, be the ones that are seen by the people in your field, who you mainly want to reach.

How well they do they publicise their papers?

Most journals send out their tables of contents to interested readers by email. This is really a minimum, and any journal that does not doesn’t deserve your paper. But there are other ways that journals can publicise papers as well.

• Press releases – do they have an active press office that writes attractive press releases and sends them to relevant media together with the embargoed article before publication? Do they also send press releases to bloggers (who are often more interested in science news than are the mainstream media)?
• Do they have a blog highlighting recent papers?
• Do they have a Twitter account with plenty of followers?
• Do they have a Facebook page ‘liked’ by plenty of people?
• Do they give awards for top papers of the year or similar?

Do they publish articles highlighting research papers?

Nature, for example, publishes News and Views articles, which are short pieces highlighting the most interesting research papers in the current issue. Many other journals publish similar ‘minireviews’ about recent papers.

Some journals have an editorial in each issue summarising the papers in that issue (such as in the current issue of Gut).

Some have news sections in print or online (e.g. Science) where more accessible pieces about recent papers from that journal or elsewhere can reach a general readership.

Open access versus subscription

There is some evidence that open access articles are cited more than those in subscription journals; there is also some evidence against a citation advantage. It is certainly worth considering whether you want your paper to be read just by potential readers in an institute that subscribes to the journal, or also by independent researchers, those in less well funded institutes, journalists and members of the public.

If you don’t go for a full open access journal (called ‘gold’ open access), will the journal allow you post a version on your own website or in a repository (‘green’ open access; definitions here)? Does the paper become free to read online 6 months or 12 months after publication, or never? Journals vary a lot in their restrictions on how an author can distribute their paper (see the SHERPA ROMEO directory for details).

Is the journal indexed by indexing services?

When a journal is set up it takes a while for it to be indexed by services such as PubMed, ISI Web of Science and AGRICOLA. New journals will therefore not yet be indexed, so articles won’t be findable in searches of these databases. This makes it slightly more risky to publish in very new journals.

Your experience

Have you had a published paper promoted in any of these ways, or others? Did you choose open access to get your paper seen by more people? What difference do you think these choices made?