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?

New peer review platforms

A quick post this week. I have been thinking of writing about the various companies that have sprung up offering peer review for scientific papers that are independent of journals. But I don’t need to: Jason Priem (@jasonpriem) has done it already.

He has posted a Google document with a list of these services, which anyone can edit. I have added two that I have come across: Sympoze and PaperRater, in addition to the ones already listed (PubUp, The Third Reviewer, Arxiliv, PaperCritic, Peerage of Science,TiNYARM,annotatr, Peer Evaluation and Faculty of 1000).

Jason has also included a list of publishing portals built around post-publication review, which currently includes just F1000 Research and WebMed Central.

Why not have a look at the document, and edit it if you know any more about these services or any similar ones?

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 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.)

Journal news for 20-27 January

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

Datasets International

The open access publisher Hindawi has launced Datasets International, which “aims at helping researchers in all academic disciplines archive, document, and distribute the datasets produced in their research to the entire academic community.” For a processing charge of $300 authors can upload an apparently unlimited amount of data under a Creative Commons CC0 licence (and associated dataset papers under an Attribution licence), according to comments on Scott Edmunds’ Gigablog. The new journals currently associated with this initiative are Dataset Papers in: Cell Biology, Optics, Atmospheric Sciences and Materials Science, though no doubt more will follow. (Heard via @ScottEdmunds.)

Peerage of Science

A company run by three Finnish scientists this week has a new take on improving peer review. Peerage of Science is a community of scientists (‘Peers’), formed initially by invitation, who review each other’s papers anonymously before submission to journals. Reviews are themselves subjected to review, which means that reviewers receive recognition and ratings for their work. The reviews can even be published in a special journal, Proceedings of the Peerage of Science. Journals can offer to publish manuscripts at any point, for a fee – this is how the company aims to make a profit. (Heard via chemistryworldblog, via @adametkin.)

Peer review by curated social media

Science writer Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) reported last week in the New York Times on a recent (open access) study in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA about the generation of multicellular yeast by artificial selection in the lab. He has now posted a follow-up article in his Discovery blog, in which he presents the conversation that followed on Twitter about this paper (using Storify) and invites the author to respond, which the author does. The comments on the latter post continue the conversation, and the author continues to respond. It’s an interesting example of the author of a controversial paper engaging constructively in post-publication peer review. (Heard via @DavidDobbs.)

Research Objects

Tom Scott (@derivadow, who works for Nature Publishing Group) has published a detailed blog post outlining a proposal for a new kind of scientific publication: the Research Object. This would be a collection of material, linked by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), including an article, raw data, protocols, links to news about the research published elsewhere, links to the authors and their institutions, and more. He credits the Force11 (‘Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship’) community for the idea, which is developed in greater detail here (pdf). These elements may or may not be open access, although the sophisticated searches Scott envisages will be difficult if they are not. (Heard via @SpringerPlus.)

Analysis of F1000 Journal Rankings

Phil Davis of The Scholarly Kitchen has done an analysis of the journal ranking system announced by Faculty of 1000 (F1000) in October. The analysis includes nearly 800 journals that were given a provisional F1000 Journal Factor (called FFj by F1000) for 2010. Plotting the FFj of each journal against the number of articles from it that were evaluated by F1000 shows that the two numbers are closely related; in fact, the number of articles evaluated explains over 91% of the variation in FFj. Journals from which only a few articles were evaluated suffer not only from this bias, but also from a bias against interdisciplinary and physical science journals that publish little biology. It seems to me that these biases could easily be addressed by taking into account (a) the number of articles evaluated from each journal and (b) the proportion of biology articles published in it when calculating the FFj. F1000 would be wise to study this useful analysis when reviewing their ranking system, as they plan to do regularly, according to the original announcement. (Heard via @ScholarlyKitchn.)

Choosing a journal IV: peer review procedure

This the fourth post in my series on choosing a journal, following posts on getting your paper published quickly, getting it noticed, and practicalities.

Most journals use the usual procedure for peer review:

• The editors first decide whether to reject the manuscript immediately or send it to peer reviewers
• Unless the manuscript is rejected, the editors send the manuscript to 2-3 reviewers
• The reviewers provide reports on the manuscript
• The editors decide, using the reports, whether to reject or invite revision
• Unless the manuscript is rejected, the authors revise it
• The editors decide whether to send the revised version back to reviewers
• … and so on until final rejection or final acceptance.

A few journals, however, have variations on this, which are worth knowing about before you decide where to submit your paper.

Some examples of different peer review procedures are:

• A small but increasing number of journals have open peer review, in which the reports, sometimes with the reviewers’ names, are published with the paper (e.g. Biology Direct, BMJ Open, medical BMC journals)
• If you are a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, you can ‘contribute’ a paper to PNAS, together with expert reviews by researchers you have chosen
• The newly announced journal SpringerPlus promises that “we will either accept your manuscript for publication or not, our editors will not ask for additional research”.

There are also differences in the questions the reviewers are asked about the paper. Many journals ask whether the research is interesting or important enough for the journal, and consider only those papers whose importance is judged to be over a  certain threshold. A few, however, explicitly do not ask this question and have no such threshold.

The latter journals publish all research that is within the scope of the journal that reviewers find to be scientifically sound, regardless of how important or interesting they judge it to be. Some examples of such journals are:

• PLoS One
• BMC Research Notes
• BMJ Open
• Biology Open
• Springer Plus (accepting submissions, not yet launched)
• Scientific Reports

Your experience

Do you know of other variations on the usual peer review procedure? Has a journal’s peer review process been a factor in choosing to submit your paper to it?

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 I: getting your paper published quickly

So, you’ve got a great result from your experiments or data analysis and are starting to write it up as a paper. Now is the time to think about which journal to submit your paper to. How do you decide?

In this series of posts I will discuss various factors worth considering. In this first post, I will look at differences between journals that can have a big effect on how long it is before your paper is finally published.

Speed of peer review and publication

Many journals publish, on their website, either statistics on their speed of peer review or a statement of their ideal time from submission to first decision. The dates of submission and acceptance on published articles, which are also frequently published with them, aren’t very useful for this: the time between submission and acceptance includes the time the authors took to revise, and you can’t tell how many rounds of peer review took place.

You should also check how long the journal takes to reject papers by the editors without being sent to reviewers, if this information is available. If a journal is going to reject your paper you want this to happen as soon as possible so that you can try elsewhere without a long delay. If you’re not sure whether your paper will be of interest to a journal, check whether they will look at presubmission enquiries; you might be able to get a quick answer by just sending the abstract.

Journals sometimes publish statistics on the speed of publication after acceptance. If they don’t, look at the acceptance and publication dates on papers in recent issues to get an idea. Do they publish the accepted version quickly, with a copyedited, formatted and proofed version going online later, or do they wait until the final version is ready before publishing? If you can’t find out this information from the journal’s website, email the editors to check or ask colleagues who have published there.

Cascading peer review

The bigger publishers have a system whereby if a paper is rejected from one of their journals, the reviewers’ reports can be passed to another journal within the same publisher. This means that you don’t have to start from scratch after a rejection, so the process of getting published isn’t delayed.

The following are some examples that I know of:

• Nature passes papers to Nature Genetics, Nature Cell Biology, etc, which in turn may pass them to Nature Communications or Scientific Reports
• BMC Biology, BMC Medicine, Genome Biology and Genome Medicine pass papers to BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Cancer and other BMC series journals
• PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine pass papers to PLoS One

Print/online or online only

Should you choose a journal that has a print issue or one that is online only? Nowadays many prestigious journals do nor produce a print issue, so a print copy is no longer widely considered to be essential for ‘proper’ publication.

But the choice isn’t simply between print/online and online only journals when you are thinking about  getting your paper out as soon as possible. If the journal has a print issue, does it publish papers online soon after acceptance or in batches corresponding to a print issue? If online publication waits for print publication, that slows things down considerably. Fortunately, the journals I know of that used to do this (which will remain nameless) now publish soon after acceptance.

Other factors

Some other things affect speed of publication that may be harder to allow for.

If the journal is very new the editors may not yet be overloaded with papers and might be able to push yours through peer review quickly. On the other hand, they may be too busy telling people that the journal exists.

If the editors are academics themselves, they could be busy with research and teaching, which might take priority over dealing quickly with your paper. On the other hand, in-house editors may also have other tasks that slow things down, such as going to conferences or managing other editors.

Your experience

Do you know of journals or publishers that have particularly short peer review or publication times, or that have processes that speed things up? Are there other factors that can affect speed besides those I’ve listed here? Please do leave a comment.