13 ways to get your manuscript rejected

I've seen a couple of good guides to getting your work published in a peer reviewed journal. But how to ensure that you get it rejected?

1. Don't write in clear English. Hell, forget clear English, don't even write in English. Editors who insist on good English are probably just pining for the days of the Empire. The more incomprehensible the better. Ignore simple grammatical rules like the use of articles, and don't run a spell check. Spell check is for losers. Certainly don't get it copyedited - good lord, that'd just be throwing good money after bad.

2. Never cite prior work. Be like this correspondent to a physics journal*, who gaily admits that "The only time I access previous articles is when the referee forces me to". Oh joy.

3. Try and try again. So your work has been rejected several times over? Play the lottery of peer review, and eventually you'll slip it past the reviewers! Reviewers love it when they see an article for the fourth time, with none of their advice acted on. No, really, they do**. ***

4. Argue. Argue. Argue. The reviewers hate you; you hate the reviewers. Don't be diplomatic: let loose the vitriol. The editor won't mind, they'll obviously take your side. After all, who the hell do the reviewers think they are? Oh, you mean the editor picked them because they think that they're experts in the field? Then the editor's an idiot too!

5. Do you know who I am?! Editors are always delighted when an author points out their eminent qualifications in a rebuttal, while ignoring all scientific substance for the reasons for rejection**.

6. Use Word Art to brighten up your article**. It shows your playful side.

7. Go completely off the wall. Five dimensional alien brains?** Bring it on.

A typical day in the editorial office.
Image credit Shira Golding on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0

8. Ethics committee? What ethics committee? Oh, yeah, right, we've got an, er, ethics committee. What do you mean, it can't just be me, my dog, and my next door neighbour?!** You mean we actually had to ask the patients before we experimented on them!?!**

9. You're a hero. Patients adore you as their saviour and the scientific community are all paid lap-dogs of big pharma. You know what results you want, so what's a little data misrepresentation between friends?**

10. ID. The reviewers and editors won't mind if you slip just a little bit of Creationist terminology into the scientific peer-reviewed literature...**

11. Photoshop rules!!! Pesky band in the way? Just photoshop it! Transformation failed? Just photoshop it!**

12. Copy. Has someone else said it better than you ever could? Copy! Copy! Has someone else done the experiments better than you ever could? Definitely copy!

13. Don't support your conclusions. Who needs to spend hours preparing supporting data? Loser! It just takes a few quick keystrokes to write "Data not shown".

Be sure to also check out Horacio Plotkin's sage advice.

* Thanks to the Blog of the "Editor's Bookshelf" for helping me to find that letter again.
** Any resemblance of this blog post to real events or persons is, um, entirely coincidental.
*** Stop messing about and submit it to Biology Direct!

Not being clear about authorship is lying

That blunt statement is the start of the title of an editorial in the March/April issue of the National Medical Journal of India, "Not being clear about authorship is lying and damages the scientific record" by Charlotte England, Matt Hodgkinson and Pritpal Tamber. Yes, that's right, I'm published. Very exciting.

The online version isn't available yet; I'll see if I can get permission to reproduce the text here. I forgot to speak to Pritt about an 'Authors' addendum' when he submitted it, so the journal retains copyright and their permissions policy is that "The published manuscript may not be reproduced elsewhere, wholly or in part, without the prior written permission of the Journal".

I can, however, post an early version that I drafted with Charlotte, which formed the skeleton for the finished editorial. It bears little resemblance to the final version, so I'm in no danger of breaching copyright.

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Misattribution of authorship is corrupting the scientific and medical literature. Those who do not deserve to be included within the byline of research articles can be found listed despite this, the recipients of ‘gift’ authorship. The efforts of others go unrecognised by readers of articles since they have vanished to become ‘ghost’ authors. Why this abuse of the scientific record happens may be the same as why much corruption occurs – the opportunity for reward without effort, and the influence of money. Transparency can counter the temptation to misattribute authorship, but this requires the cooperation of journal editors, authors, and the authors’ institutions.

Authorship criteria

Authorship is intended to give credit to those who conducted the published work, as well as to highlight those who should take responsibility for the content of the published article. In order to make clear who deserves to be an author, criteria for authorship have been drafted, the most widely known being those of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). These classify an author as someone who has substantially contributed to a published study and suggest that authorship credit should be given when an individual meets each of three criteria: 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising critically for intellectual content; 3) final approval of the version to be published [1]. Many journals have since adopted these guidelines in their instructions for authors.

Policies on declaration of authorship often vary between journals. For example, the BMJ asks that authors explain their contribution in their own words [8], while JAMA has a checklist [9]. Research by the Croatian Medical Journal has shown that the structure of author contribution forms can significantly alter the number of contributions reported for each author, and therefore declared contributions should not always be taken at face value [Marusic et al., 2006].

Rising numbers of authors

Since the ICJME guidelines were first published in 1979, there has been a steady rise in the number of listed authors. The most significant aspect of this increase has been the inclusion of senior researchers such as department chairs or professors as either first or last authors [2]. This trend towards increasing numbers of authors is not exclusive to international journals such as the BMJ, as the Indian Journal of Pathology and Microbiology has also seen a 10-15% increase over two decades in the number of articles that have five or more authors [3]. However, this trend is not universal, since the number of authors of articles published in Indian Pediatrics has remained stable over the years [4]. It is not clear whether the increase in the number of authors can be attributed to an increase in the number of scientists being active in research or whether the inclusion of senior scientists as an author is due to the laboratory hierarchy, in other words whether a senior author has been ’gifted’ authorship solely due to their position.

Gift authorship

Honorary or gift authorship is known to frequently occur in biomedical publishing – one study in a French university suggested that up to 60% of senior researchers have received gift authorship by failing to meet all three of the ICJME criteria [5]. The prevalence of gift authorship has been seen to range from 0.5% of research papers in JAMA [6] to 39% of Cochrane systematic reviews [7]. Failure to meet ICJME criteria for authorship can be attributed to several possibilities. Due to the way in which the reviews are compiled, Cochrane authors may not be involved in the original draft or the ongoing revisions, thereby failing to meet all three criteria [7]. It is seen worldwide that the head of a department may insist on being listed as an author on any article issuing from their department, regardless of their own input [5], but in particular it has been acknowledged that authors listed on Indian research papers have a tendency to follow a traditional hierarchal order, where the most senior individual is listed first, followed in descending order by everyone else involved in the study [3]. The tendency to bow to authority has been criticised by Inder Verma, who has argued that “Science is best carried out in an irreverent environment, where the status quo is challenged, often at the risk of offending superiors. But the Indian scientific enterprise frowns on questioning authority and rewards obedience. Senior scientists are too often selected by seniority and rank, rather than their ability and achievements” [18].

Ghost authorship

Further issues arise with the concept of ghost authorship, where individuals do not receive acknowledgement of their contributions to a manuscript. This failure to disclose contributions is generally regarded as an unethical practice because of the potential conflicts of interest that may be present, such as resulting from the use of a professional medical writer by pharmaceutical or communication companies. The prevalence of ghost writing is not as great as that of gift authorship, with around 10% of manuscripts being written by ‘ghosts’ [7, 12]. However, there is a danger that pharmaceutical company-employed writers can ensure that the medical intervention in question is shown in the best possible light, and editors and readers will be unaware of the potential bias. There have even been reported cases where a medical communications company working on behalf of a pharmaceutical company will send potential “authors” a draft article, complete with a title page containing their name [13]. Provided the involvement of a professional writer in a manuscript is made as transparent as possible by acknowledging their contribution, their involvement can serve to improve the quality of articles [14]. The best way to deal with the potential issues surrounding the use of ghost writers is to ensure that not only is their involvement made plain, either within the byline if they meet the criteria for authorship, or in an acknowledgments section, but their competing interests, such as their employment by the sponsoring company, should also be stated. The present rapid growth in clinical trials in India run by foreign pharmaceutical companies makes this issue of increasing importance to Indian researchers [19].

Why authorship criteria matter

The reasons why authorship criteria should be adhered to and declared can be as mundane as making life easier for editors who are trying to find appropriate peer reviewers! Frequent gift authorship can make someone with little knowledge of a subject appear to be an expert, and lead to them being inappropriately invited to review. As has been discussed, ghost authors or unacknowledged contributors may have links to pharmaceutical companies, introducing a competing interest that will remain hidden. However, the issue of the ethics of authorship and contributorship is not only of interest to journal editors. Medical professionals have an obligation to behave ethically, and under the Medical Council of India Code of Ethics Regulations [15] they should “expose, without fear or favour, incompetent or corrupt, dishonest or unethical conduct”. The code specifically states in regard to signing professional certificates, reports and other documents that “Any registered practitioner who is shown to have signed or given under his name and authority any such certificate, notification, report or document of a similar character which is untrue, misleading or improper, is liable to have his name deleted from the Register”. Handing out a gift authorship or knowingly suppressing the involvement of a ghost could well fall within these regulations.

A further hazard of accepting undeserved authorship is highlighted by a case of fraud involving the University of California, San Diego. As Harold Sox and Drummond Rennie recount, “Slutsky had published 137 papers with 93 different coauthors when someone noticed anomalies in a few of his publications. The university's response was exemplary. [They] contacted Slutsky's coauthors and held them responsible for defending the integrity of every published paper”. They rightly conclude that “the guilty scientist's coauthors bear primary responsibility for publicly validating or retracting their joint publications” [10].

It is important that credit is given when credit is due because authors need to be accountable for the work they publish. This is especially important in cases where one of the authors is found to have produced fraudulent data, thereby affecting research that cites this data. Once there is suspicion that one research article contains fraudulent data, all other manuscripts from that group of authors need to be called into doubt [10, 11]. These matters are incredibly serious and co-authors should be involved in raising doubts about data as well as employers and journals. As an author, they should accept responsibility for that manuscript, even if their actions were not at fault.

Junior researchers who find themselves locked in a dispute over authorship can turn to the guidelines of the Committee on Publications ethics [17]. These guidelines advise that researchers start discussing authorship when they plan the research project. This is sage advice. The failure to agree authorship of a research project has previously seen researchers resort to legal action [16].

Conclusions

The corruption of the hard-won right to be recognised as an author of a scientific article can be countered by requiring authorship contribution declarations on all manuscripts, and requiring acknowledgment of anyone else who contributed. Despite the existence of journal policies on authorship, it is difficult for editors to enforce these policies. Editors do not have full knowledge of who contributed; only the authors and contributors can themselves say for sure. To avoid disputes, researchers should follow journal guidelines, and as COPE recommends collaborators should discuss authorship at the inception of a research project. As journals rely on authors’ institutions to arbitrate disputes between authors, institutions should have their own code of conduct for authorship, and be prepared to follow up on cases of authorship misconduct, be it gift or ghost authorship.

References

1. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication. Updated February 2006 [http://www.icmje.org/#author]

2. Drenth JP: Multiple authorship: the contribution of senior authors. JAMA 1998 Jul 15;280(3):219-21.

3. Kakkar N: Authorship trends in the Indian Journal of Pathology and Microbiology: going the global way? J Clin Pathol 2004 Jun;57(6):670.

4. Sohi I, Kakkar N: Author numbers in Indian Pediatrics--going against the tide! Indian Pediatr 2004 Dec;41(12):1286-7.

5. Pignatelli B, Maisonneuve H, Chapuis F: Authorship ignorance: views of researchers in French clinical settings. J Med Ethics 2005, 31(10):578-81

6. Bates T, Anic A, Marusic M, Marusic A: Authorship criteria and disclosure of contributions: comparison of 3 general medical journals with different author contribution forms.JAMA 2004, 292(1):86-8

7. Mowatt G, Shirran L, Grimshaw JM, Rennie D, Flanagin A, Yank V, MacLennan G, Gotzsche PC, Bero LA: Prevalence of honorary and ghost authorship in Cochrane reviews. JAMA 2002, 287(21):2769-71.

8. http://www.bmj.com/advice/article_submission.shtml#author

9. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/data/295/1/103/DC1/1

10. Sox HC, Rennie D: Research misconduct, retraction, and cleansing the medical literature: lessons from the Poehlman case. Ann Intern Med 2006 Apr 18;144(8):609-13.

11. Flanagin A, Carey LA, Fontanarosa PB, Phillips SG, Pace BP, Lundberg GD, Rennie D: Prevalence of articles with honorary authors and ghost authors in peer-reviewed medical journals. JAMA 1998 Jul 15;280(3):222-4.

12. Fugh-Berman A: The corporate coauthor. J Gen Intern Med 2005 Jun;20(6):546-8.

13. Jacobs A, Carpenter J, Donnelly J, Klapproth JF, Gertel A, Hall G, Jones AH, Laing S, Lang T, Langdon-Neuner E, Wager L, Whittington R; European Medical Writers Association's Ghostwriting Task Force: The involvement of professional medical writers in medical publications: results of a Delphi study. Curr Med Res Opin 2005, 21(2):311-6

14. Jacobs A, Wager E: European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) guidelines on the role of medical writers in developing peer-reviewed publications. Curr Med Res Opin 2005, 21(2), 317–321 http://www.emwa.org/Mum/EMWAguidelines.pdf

15. Medical Council of India Code of Ethics Regulations, 2002 (Published in Part III, Section 4 of the Gazette of India, dated 6^th April,2002) http://www.mciindia.org/know/rules/ethics.htm

16. Abbott A: Dispute over first authorship lands researchers in dock. Nature 2002, 419(6902):4.

17. Tim Albert, Elizabeth Wager: How to handle authorship disputes: a guide for new researchers. COPE Report 2003. http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/reports/2003/2003pdf12.pdf

18. Verma I: Then and now. Nature 2005 Jul 28;436(7050):478-9. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7050/full/436478a.html

19. Srinivasan S, Loff B: Medical research in India. Lancet 2006 Jun 17;367(9527):1962-4.

Open Choice takes a beating

I've been impressed with the way that publishers have begun the shift to open access with schemes such as Springer's Open Choice, offering authors the choice to have their article made open access in an otherwise subscription journal, depending on the payment of a fee ($3000 for Springer).

Stevan Harnad has criticised Open Choice, arguing against double payment (readers and authors in effect paying for the same article), and what Stevan sees as the way that paying for open access publication is a distraction from self-archiving.

Now, Open Choice is being criticised from another front: researchers such as Peter Murray-Rust who are keen on open access publication, but who find that Open Choice does not quite meet the usual standards they expect of open access.

Peter Murray-Rust has resigned from the editorial board of a Springer journal in protest at the way that Open Choice is working. In particular, he is concerned at the lack of visibility or explanation of Open Choice, other than just a small logo
as well as the way that Springer retains copyright to the articles (Open Choice articles seem to be © Springer, although information on the Springer site states that "if authors choose open access in the Springer Open Choice program, they will not be required to transfer their copyright to Springer"). One of his real concerns is about the transparency of permissions to reuse the work, a criticism that has also recently been raised about self-archiving with the battle cry, 'Free is not open!' (it is unusual to see Stevan and Jan Velterop, Springer's open access champion on the same side of an argument). Jan has responded to Peter, to which Peter has replied, clarifying his worries.

One thing that Peter noted really did surprise me. Although readers can access Open Choice articles without charge, on the page there is a link that invites readers to 'Add to shopping cart'. There is also a 'Request Permissions' link, which if you follow tells you that "To request reuse of content from this Springer Science+Business Media journal, please e-mail Springer Rights & Permissions directly at permissions.heidelberg@springer.com for assistance". No mention of Open Choice.


Click the link to 'Add to shopping cart', and you are told that you can purchase it (for $32 in this case). I thought that it was unlikely that a reader would really be able to proceed with the purchase of an article that is actually open access, but I got all the way to being asked for my credit card details with no warning that I was about to pay for something that was free! This problem of people paying for articles that they could access for free elsewhere is an issue with self-archiving, but it really shouldn't be possible when the publisher has already been paid by the author!



As if criticisms of double payment weren't bad enough, this appears to be triple payment (subscribers to the journal, authors, and readers of the individual article who purchase it without realising it is open access). I wonder how many readers have made this mistake, if any? I take no delight in highlighting this criticism of Springer, as the blind spots in their implementation of open access are surprising considering Jan Velterop's genuine dedication to the cause of open access (his blog is called The Parachute, because 'it only works when it is open'). I'm sure that Jan will be working to fix these glitches in Open Choice.

Journalology roundup #9

Mentors of tomorrow. "Everyone knows bad peer review when they come across it — but too few are nurturing good referees".

Physicians and researchers have different needs. "Alex Williamson is publishing director at the BMJ Group, the publishing arm of the British Medical Association (BMA). We ask her about the role of journals in clinical medicine". A pity to see the BMJ Group being ambivalent about open access, especially as the BMJ is a good example of a high-profile medical journal publishing open access research.

Is physics the new biomedicine? "A new set of physics and maths journals are planned for BioMed Central. Siân Harris finds out why this open-access publisher is branching out from biomedical sciences". All about the launch of Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central.

Researcher accused of breaching research ethics faces GMC. "A former senior lecturer at the UK Institute of Psychiatry repeatedly breached research ethics guidelines and lied to study sponsors while building an international reputation as a leading researcher, according to charges laid by the General Medical Council. The GMC's fitness to practise committee heard that Tonmoy Sharma, who left the Institute of Psychiatry as a clinical senior lecturer in 2001, falsely claimed to have sought and received approval from ethics committees for several studies. He is also accused of recruiting patients by telephone without informing their carers; offering financial inducements to research subjects; breaching agreed research protocols; lying in a job application; posing as a professor; and in one case threatening a patient with withdrawal of treatment if she left a study".

PLoS journal retracts phylogenetics paper. "Computational Biology journal pulls paper about estimating the accuracy of phylogenetic trees, in what colleagues deem an exemplary process".

New site pits 'published' vs. 'posted'. "Nature Precedings raises questions over the value of sharing findings before submitting to peer review".

Search skills needed for new Web world. "Consumers now regularly go to the Web to look for medical information or to gain from the experience of people with similar ailments. They also take that information to their doctors, who have to contend with this new found influence on their patient relationships (whether they actually appreciate it or not!). And now even doctors are using Web searches more, sometimes for fairly sophisticated diagnostic reasons. However, all of this makes several basic assumptions: that people basically know what they want, even if they don't know the details, and that they basically know how to go about getting it from the Web. Au contraire, at least according to a couple of recent articles in the online journal BMC Medicine. One points to a study of Swiss people -- generally considered a very literate and knowledgeable lot -- that concluded there is a "consistent and dramatic" lack of knowledge in the general public about medical matters. The other is about a project that examined the search skills of people trying to get medical information from the Web, and found them lacking".

Copyright and research: an academic publisher’s perspective. "As a publisher working on the legal and rights’ side of the business at present, but who used to be a Commissioning Editor responsible for research books in the Humanities, the author finds himself sympathetic to the needs of academic authors and keen to find ways of ensuring that their copyright interests are adequately protected"... "A full-scale tilt into unrestricted Open Access would be too big a shift. Someone has to pay, and it can be argued that the current mildly regulated framework which ‘publisher-controlled’ copyright represents does the job quite well: of keeping the economics in equilibrium". Peter Suber has commented.

Retrovirology editorial compares impact factors and H-factors.

Reviewing Reviewers. "This weekend I have been poring over statistics provided by a journal for which I do some editorial work. In addition to data related to how the journal is doing (impact factor, ranking among journals in related fields etc.), there are also lists of reviewers: who did reviews, how many each has done, and how long the reviews took. It's amazing to contemplate these lists, first of all because they are a testament to the huge amount of work reviewers do in the name of 'professional service'. I have done my share of complaining about reviews of my own manuscripts, so it's good to be reminded from time to time that, despite some unethical and rude reviewers, the system of peer review is an impressive thing in terms of its scope and time involved".

Do scientists really believe in open science? "I am writing this post as a collection of the current status and opinions of “Open Science”. The main reason being I have a new audience; I am working for the CARMEN e-Neuroscience project. This has exposed me, first hand, to a domain of the life-sciences to which data sharing and publicly exposing methodologies has not been readily adopted, largely it is claimed due to the size of the data in question and sensitive privacy issues".

Clinical trial results often overstate benefits of treatment. "Failings in the way that clinical trials are designed and presented may lead doctors to overstate the benefit of treatments, experts warned last week. The conference on clinical trials, organised by the James Lind Alliance and the Lancet and held at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, also heard that key groups of participants were often excluded from clinical studies and as a result were denied the benefits of evidence based medicine. Stephen Holgate, professor of immunopharmacology at Southampton University, said that children and elderly people were "especially neglected" in this area".

For free or for fee? Dilemma of small scientific journals. "Biomedical publishing is becoming increasingly dominated by multinational companies, advertising research articles at the international market, presenting them electronically through web-based services, and distributing them to readers-consumers. It seems that they will soon become the sole publishers for the majority of biomedical journals. In the past decade, however, we witnessed a quiet revolution in the whole structure of scientific communication, influenced by new technologies and initiatives such as Open Access, PubMedCentral, PLoS, and BioMedCentral. The Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) has recently been approached by two major publishing companies and offered to become one of the journals in their group. The editorial decision was to join neither of the publishers".

Journal of Biology celebrates its fifth anniversary. Hidden away in a table in this editorial is the calculation of the 'unofficial impact factor' for J Biol for 2005 - 20.1. Not bad, if I say so myself...

Free is not open. The CMAJ congratulated its former editors for the launch of Open Medicine - and got the response that, thanks all the same, but you're not open access.

Free medical textbooks. The 'Flying Publisher' describes their project to publish free medical textbooks.

Biomedical Journals and Global Poverty: Is HINARI a Step Backwards? "Our experience in Peru with the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), an initiative managed by the World Health Organization that helps promote access to scientific information by providing free (or low cost) online access to major science journals, is not as accessible as hoped for and, in fact, is getting worse".

Science hype it up

"First genome transplant turns one species into another".

Wow! Really? That sounds amazing!!

"Scientists have converted an organism into an entirely different species by performing the world's first genome transplant, a breakthrough that paves the way for the creation of synthetic forms of life".

No kidding! "An entirely different species"?! What was it, turning a whale into a petunia!?!

And it's a paper in Science!?

This must be big!!!!!

Wait for it....

Here it is..........

"In the experiment, researchers extracted the whole genetic code from a simple bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides. They squirted the DNA into a test tube containing a related species, Mycoplasma capricolum. They found that some of the bacteria absorbed the new genome and ditched their own. These microbes grew and behaved exactly like the donor".

Oh.

Can I piss on their fire now?

These mycoplasma are very closely related:

"The members of the M. mycoides cluster are very closely related, as judged from biochemical, physiological, serological, and 16S rRNA sequence data, but cause different diseases in various animals. M. capricolum subsp. capripneumoniae has a property unique among members of the M. mycoides cluster in that it has an unusually large number of polymorphisms in the two 16S rRNA genes. There are, in fact, more sequence differences between the rrnA and rrnB operons of M. capricolum subsp. capripneumoniae than between the 16S rRNA genes of homologous operons of different species within the M. mycoides cluster. This characteristic can possibly be explained by more rapid evolution due to a relatively recent change to a host to which this mycoplasma has not completely adapted".

Note: "relatively recent change". And M. capricolum is more diverse than M. mycoides, so you might expect these cells to be able to take up M. mycoides genomes. They're practically the same species. Bacteria are quite fuzzy about species anyway.

It is an interesting experiment, but this has been hyped up beyond a joke.

Open peer review & community peer review

There has been a lot of discussion about 'open peer review' lately - this letter to Nature is just the latest example. With all these opinions and hypotheses about peer review flying around, I think that it is useful to make some distinctions between the different types of 'open' review, so here goes.

Traditional peer review. Anonymous reports received pre-publication. Letters to the editor are considered by many journals, but especially in paper journals relatively few are published. All the BioMed Central journals accept signed comments from readers.

Open peer review. Named, pre-publication review, which is how the BMC-series medical journals work, and the BMJ too. The difference lies in that the reviews are available for readers to see in the BMC-series medical journals, but the BMJ never made this move. Comments can also be posted by readers: the BMJ's Rapid Responses should be envied by any journal. It is controversial as some reviewers don't wish to be named, and it can make finding peer reviewers harder, but to anyone who doubts the open peer review works I can point out that the BMJ has published hundreds of peer reviewed articles since it introduced open peer review, and the medical journals in the BMC series have published thousands of peer reviewed articles since they launched in 2000. Open peer review can work.

Open and permissive peer review. This is Biology Direct's approach. Articles are published if they receive reviews solicited by the author from at least 3 members of the reviewing board (aside from pseudoscience, which the editors will veto), with the comments included at the end of the article, unless the author withdraw the manuscript. More here, and I discussed their approach in a previous post. Comments can be posted by readers, as with the other BioMed Central journals.

Community peer review. The idea of community peer review is to avoid peer review being the domain of a biased subset of the scientific community, and it has a powerful philosophy that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". It can be either anonymous or named, and still happens before formal publication, but the difference is that reviewers volunteer rather than being selected by the editors. The manuscript is public while under review, but explicitly is not 'published' at that point. This was how Nature's experiment worked (or didn't work), but it was alongside the usual anonymous editorially selected reviews, and the comments don't seem to have been treated as 'proper' reviews by the editors.

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics uses a similar approach, apparently with much more success than Nature. The editors refuse articles that don't meet minimal scientific standards, then post the remaining articles for 8 weeks of Interactive Public Discussion (named or anonymous), then publish the final version. There doesn't appear to be any mention of rejecting articles after the initial public posting, so this permissive peer review resembles a community version of Biology Direct.

The Journal of Interactive Media in Education uses named reports, and invites review from the community. The two-step process involves private, named review by invited reviewers, followed by publication of a preliminary version that is reviewed further by the community before final, formal publication.

Permissive peer review, post-publication commentary. This is PLoS ONE's approach. They have minimal peer review, with the expectation that the scientific community will then comment on and annotate the articles. I was already a bit skeptical of the merits of minimal peer review, as are others, and now a Nature news story, among others, has attacked the publication of a study on HIV and circumcision in PLoS ONE, arguing that peer review failed in this case. Sending out an unbalanced press release written by the author seems to have compounded the problem, and wasn't very responsible. A lengthy response has been posted to the article, showing that post-publication review can work, but plenty of journals have the option to post comments, and the horse has already bolted.

No peer review, post-publication commentary. This is how Philica works, and now Nature Preceedings, part pre-print, part repository for preliminary work. I don't think that Philica is working; Nature Preceedings will probably fare better. An essential difference is that while Philica is clogged with pseudoscience, Nature Preceedings explictly won't post pseudoscience, and it has the Nature brand name to help it gather interest and comments. I found an optimistically titled Web 2.0 Peer Reviewed Science Journal, which has a website but no articles. "This page that you are reading now is a review site, and I (Philip Dorrell) am the intended reviewer. If you, as an author of a scientific paper, are interested in having me review your paper, all you have to do is publish your paper as a web page, and then send an email". Hmm... sorry Philip, but peer review involves more than just your opinion on articles. Web 2.0 requires users and content.

BioMed Central is open access, PLoS is open access, the BMJ is open access, Nature Preceedings is open access, and they are all experimenting with peer review. Matthew Falagas has commented in Open Medicine (the open access journal that arose out of the editorial dispute at the CMAJ), after spotting this pattern of a link between experimenting with peer review and open access. I think it is worth stating that despite this trend, open access and open peer review don't necessarily go together. The biology journals in the BMC-series still have anonymous review, as do the PLoS journals. The problem of access to an article is at a tangent to the problem of reviewing it - but, of course, community peer review can't work if not enough people have access to the article.

I think that if there is doubt in the integrity of peer review (and there is more and more doubt), this increases the imperative for exposing pre-publication review processes. Journals can't just be paternalistic or secretive about peer review, and readers shouldn't take it on trust that an article labelled as 'peer reviewed' has been rigorously critiqued by experts in the field. PLoS ONE is encouraging its reviewers to make their reviews public on the published article, which is a great step. Requiring reviewers to opt-out would be even stronger, but PLoS Medicine recently backed away from this policy.

If journals really want community peer review to work, we cannot just sit back and wait for comments to come in. Pre-publication peer review takes a massive effort on the part of editors to find qualified reviewers, and the chances of enough qualified reviewers stumbling across an article and feeling obliged to leave comments to make post-publication review viable and vibrant are low. Ways to solicit comments are essential, using email alerts for example. In a definite step in the right direction, PLoS ONE is organising virtual 'journal clubs'. Remember that anyone who has had a face-to-face journal club at their institute about a BioMed Central article, or a BMJ article, or a PLoS article, can and should post the results of the discussion as a comment on the article.

I think that open peer review and community peer review are the future of assessing scientific articles. It doesn't stop there - I've not even mentioned wikis!

omg web 2.0 is kewl

I'm not going to try any sort of systematic assessment of 'Web 2.0' and science, or even bother with a definition. This is just a stream-of-consciousness post, prompted by my wide-eyed wonder at the explosion of social networking and 'user generated content'.


Nature have completely bought into all this Web 2.0 malarkey - they've got umpteen blogs, Nature Network, Connotea, a new aggregator thingy called Scintilla, Postgenomic... they've even got a group on the "social notworking" site Facebook and an island in Second Life.

Social networking is a huge part of Web 2.0. Myspace is a mess, Facebook is more for play than for work, but The Scientist recently profiled the use of the 'Facebook for professionals' site, LinkedIn, by scientists. Another site that I've yet to look at properly is SciLink.

Social bookmarking is quite the thing. As well as Connotea, there's citeulike, another shared record of articles people came across and liked (hence the name). All the BioMed Central journals have feeds on citeulike, and we're collaborating with them.

A hybrid of social networking and social bookmarking is Stumbleupon. This is a brilliant way to find random websites that might of interest - each user can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to every website they visit, and write a review of it.


You specify the topics you're interested in (music, film, science), and then hit the 'Stumble' button, and a page in that area appears. It is tuned by the sites you've said you like or dislike. As well as 'stumbling', you can also view the sites a user has rated and reviewed, which acts as a kind of blog of their browsing. This is a glorious way to waste time, but the same functionality applied specifically to scientific literature would give a great way to serendipitously browse the literature.

Another great 'overlay' to the web is WOT, or the Web of Trust. Very simply, you rate how trustworthy a site appears, generally speaking or specifically as a business partner, in keeping personal information, and as a safe site for children. A little icon appears by hyperlinks, green for OK or red if warning you that you are about to visit a site others have deemed untrustworthy or unsafe. Genius.

JournalReview gets around the barrier of some publishers not taking comments and having restrictions on letters by letting anyone comment on any article in PubMed. It's got a bit of a medicine bias, could still be more user friendly, and could really develop into a mature post-publication review process if it insisted on named reviews (or at least pseudanonymous reviews), and used trust metrics. And could someone use Greasemonkey to reveal comments from Journalreview when viewing PubMed abstracts, or even publisher sites? David Rothman has profiled a plethora of similar sites, in a great series of posts titled 'Digg for the medical literature'. Another good aggregator of information about scientific articles is the brilliantly simple PublicationsList - researchers can use it to, well, list their publications. They're going to need a name disambiguator pretty soon though. ScientificCommons is doing much the same, and I like their layout more.

One of the most notable Web 2.0 pages is Youtube, the video sharing site. In a wonderful example of circularity, an anthropology professor, Michael Wesch, has posted a 5 minute video guide to Web 2.0, The Machine is Us/ing Us - I've had it embedded at the bottom of my blog for a while now. You can also find out why the banana is the atheist's nightmare. Youtube doesn't seem to be of much practical use to scientists, but there is a 'Youtube for science', the Journal of Visual Experiments, or JoVE.

Anyone can now get involved in scientific research without being a guinea pig in a drug trial. Distributed computing first came into the public consciousness with SETI@Home, and now similar applications are popping up in biology. I've got Folding@Home running on my laptop; it's helping to calculate the folding of supervillin at the moment.


No mention of Web 2.0 would be complete without referring to Wikis. Wikipedia is the best known and biggest - the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The accuracy of Wikipedia, or rather the lack of accuracy, has received quite a lot of flak, in particular the entries about science. I'm almost left speechless by these criticisms. If you spot an error in Wikipedia, and it exercises you so much that you complain about it in public - just edit it! You don't even need to register! Sheesh. Another criticism is that it can be written by experts to be impenetrable to the outsider. As someone noted on that blog post, "don’t bitch when your encyclopedia gives you too much information. That’s its freakin job". Knowing something about serpins, I checked out the entry, and it's frankly excellent. The entry for antitrypsin is not so great, so I gave it a quick edit and flagged it as needing more references.

Of course, blogs are now reviewing articles post-publication. There is a Greasemonkey script from Pedro Beltrao that adds trackbacks to posts from Postgenomic to articles on Nature. I just tweaked it very simply to also be active on www.biomedcentral.com/* , and it works on our sites too. Cool. And now I see that Noel O'Blog has extended it to automatically work on PLoS, PNAS and BioMed Central. Thanks Pedro and Noel! Once you have it installed (which takes seconds if you have Greasemonkey), you can see it in action. Doesn't it look pretty?

By the way, the ungrammatical title of this post owes a debt to Ratcatcher's blog (which itself owes a debt to this Wondermark cartoon) and is reminiscent of a recent (and entirely useless) example of user generated content: lolcats. In case this craze has passed you by, it involves pictures of cats, with deliberately poorly written and humorous captions in bold text. Otherwise sensible linguists on Language Log have been led astray by this 'meme', and there's even a programming language based on the unique grammatical style of lolcats, lolcode. The web doesn't have much to top this.

Well done, Reed Elsevier

As has been reported in many places, Reed Elsevier will stop their involvement in defence exhibitions this year. It's an impressive example of how protest can give results. Congratulations to Reed Elsevier for listening to the calls for them to do this.

The perils of editing

The editor of Fertility and Sterility has apologized to authors he accused of plagiarism and lying in The Scientist. Without getting into the rights and wrongs of this particular case, the legal threats flying back and forth serve to highlight why you need to tred carefully when accusing authors of misconduct!

Brian Deer in the BMJ recently reported on the controversy surrounding Mark Geier, a brave move for the journal's editors considering Dr Geier's familiarity with litigation, and also considering that they had recently apologised and paid £100,000 to Matthias Rath, another controversial doctor who they had accused of fraud.

It is fortunately not too often that journals receive threats of legal action, but I remember one author saying that he would sue us for rejecting his article; I remember, as I had handled that manuscript. Peter Newmark, our Editor-in-Chief at the time, gave this pretty short shrift, and sent the authors a response that put quite plainly his dim view of them threatening one of his editors like that. They didn't sue.

Journalology roundup #8

Sean Eddy Celebrates Open Access in Franklin Speech. "Sean Eddy [editorial board member of BMC Bioinformatics] accepted the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award and then proceeded to poke a few good-natured holes in Franklin’s sterling open access reputation".
I blogged about this in my first post on the official BioMed Central blog.

Peer review in open access scientific journals. "Open access publications should be at the forefront in experimenting with strategies to foster what might be called an increasingly open science. As the open access movement blossoms, its supporters should continue to critically evaluate the parallel development of openness and transparency in the peer review process. We need to ensure that a commitment to high-quality peer review is maintained... Open access journals are in an ideal position to test the merits of open, unblinded, peer review". Although BioMed Central is open access and our medical journals have open peer review, there's no necessary connection between the two. However, I was surprised to see no mention of us at all in Matthew Falagas' article, considering that we have been consistently running full open peer review on more journals and for longer than any other publisher I know of.

Open journals' records to give reviewers their due. "I ... propose that journals' records should be made publicly available after an adequate lapse of time, including the names of reviewers and the confidential comments exchanged between editors and reviewers".

Diverse journal requirements for data sharing. "Conclusions: kudos to Nature and Science. I’m surprised that the policies of other journals are so lax". Point taken - BMC Bioinformatics was included in this comparison, and although we didn't fare too badly, we'll take another look at our policies

Hwang case review committee misses the mark. "The Hwang committee's report indicates that it is becoming unacceptable for journal editors to hide behind the veil of peer review".

Factors Associated with Findings of Published Trials of Drug-Drug Comparisons: Why Some Statins Appear More Efficacious than Others. "This study examined associations between research funding source, study design characteristics aimed at reducing bias, and other factors that potentially influence results and conclusions in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of statin-drug comparisons....RCTs of head-to-head comparisons of statins with other drugs are more likely to report results and conclusions favoring the sponsor's product compared to the comparator drug".

Modellers seek reason for low retraction rates. How scientific literature is shaped by withdrawn manuscripts.

Clinical trial registration: looking back and moving ahead. "Three years ago, trials registration was the exception; now it is the rule. Registration facilitates the dissemination of information among clinicians, researchers, and patients, and it helps to assure trial participants that the information that accrues as a result of their altruism will become part of the public record". Take your pick where to read it!

Stem cell figure retracted by Nature. Stem cell research seems dogged by errors and misconduct!

Science, being Green, and the precautionary principle

I'm feeling the conflict between being involved in science and being in the Green Party. A lot of members of the Green Party are instinctively opposed to many modern technologies and scientific practices, such as animal research, GM and lately, mobile phone and WiFi radiation. This attitude often rests on the precautionary principle, the idea that if something might cause harm it is better to act as though it does cause harm rather than to hope that it won't. I'm not opposed to this principle, but I despair at the tendency of the green movement (and newspaper weekend supplements) to succumb to hype and scaremongering. A prime example is Julia Stephenson, who is the Kensington and Chelsea Green candidate, and is a columnist for the Independent. She wrote a column recently, titled "My war on electrosmog", describing her efforts to rid her life of electromagnetic radiation after having her feelings of fatigue 'diagnosed' by her naturopath (not her GP, mind) as due to 'electrosmog'. Sigh. Particularly infuriating is the advertisement at the end of the article of "Magnetic field protection boxes" (start at £235!), "Q-Link Pendants", "Anti-radiation mobile phone headsets" etc. at the bottom of the article. If anyone is interested, for a few pence I can fashion a tin-foil hat, which I can guarantee will be as effective. Luckily, Bad Science has come to the rescue, so I don't need to tackle this in exhaustive detail, but as I have responded to others in the Green Party on this issue before, I thought I might share my thoughts on the matter. Julia has responded to the outpouring of scorn from scientists, but her response that "Disconnecting my Wi-Fi made me feel better. End of. I don't need a degree in physics to work out if I feel well or ill" exactly highlights the problems with assessing public health issues or medical treatments on the basis of personal experience or anecdote.

One thing to highlight (as Julia has correctly noted) is that with all the research in this area, skepticism is a virtue. Experience of the biases prevalent in the reporting of industry-sponsored pharmaceutical trials teaches us this, and the arena of electromagnetic radiation is no exception. A recent systematic review by Matthias Egger (who knows a thing or two about systematic reviews) found that studies sponsored by the telecomms industry are less likely to report significant effects of electromagnetic radiation. So don't take any of the conclusions of research in this area at face value!

My opinion is that some people might be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation from mobile phone masts or WiFi - but if it were a ubiquitous problem, then many more people would have reported problems. Anecdotally, I have Wireless broadband at home and I never get headaches or joint pain. I also regularly walk through WiFi hotspots with no noticeable symptoms. The problem with symptoms like headache, nausea etc. is that they are very non-specific, and can be psychological. An underlying condition may exist that causes migraine, but the symptoms may be misattributed to an external factor that happens to be present at the onset of the symptoms. I'd advise anyone experiencing a sudden onset of such symptoms to visit their GP (and not a naturopath).

There's a fair amount of evidence that strongly suggests that the symptoms experienced by those who believe that they are sensitive to electromagnetic radiation are not caused by that radiation. A systematic review by Simon Wessely (an editorial board member of BMC Psychiatry) found that "The symptoms described by "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" sufferers can be severe and are sometimes disabling. However, it has proved difficult to show under blind conditions that exposure to EMF can trigger these symptoms. This suggests that "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" is unrelated to the presence of EMF, although more research into this phenomenon is required". A randomized provocation trial by the same authors (comparing those reporting EMR sensitivity to controls, and exposing some to mobile phone radiation, some to a carrier wave, and some to a sham exposure) found that "No evidence was found to indicate that people with self reported sensitivity to mobile phone signals are able to detect such signals or that they react to them with increased symptom severity. As sham exposure was sufficient to trigger severe symptoms in some participants, psychological factors may have an important role in causing this condition". Another systematic review by Prof Wessely and colleagues suggested that cognitive behaviour therapy may be useful for those reporting sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation.

As the experience of symptoms that patients associate with electromagnetic radiation exposure is likely to be psychological, this has possible implications for the precautionary principle. It has been argued that the precautionary principle, if coupled with overhyped warnings of risk, is potentially damaging: "Evidence is emerging that prior beliefs about the risks from modern technology are an important predictor of symptoms from perceived exposures. Thus, by distorting perceptions of risk, disproportionate precaution might paradoxically lead to illness that would not otherwise occur".

All this talk of electromagnetic radiation risks is very reminiscent of the fake documentary programme Brass Eye, and their take on 'Science'. This featured 'heavy electricity' caused by "particle accelerators sending huge jolts of power into domestic power lines... the devastating result is that huge masses of heavy electricity start randomly falling out of wires, and crashing on to anything below... Basically it is like getting hit by a ton of invisible lead soup". That pseudoscientific babble was read out (and believed) by the actor Richard Briers. If people will believe that, unfortunately they will believe anything.