A dear friend of mine sent me a link to this page, which shows the "h indices" of what the author of the page refers to the "best Spanish scientists". The page is a bit difficult to navigate if you don't know Spanish, but it doesn't matter; I'm sure that if you have the time and inclination, you will find a similar page in your language and for the nationality of your choice.

The reason for bringing it up has to do with the raison d'etre of the h index -- to quantify an individual's scientific research output. The h index was originally introduced by J. E. Hirsch, from UCSD, in this paper and, briefly, his proposal was that a scientist has an index of h if h of his/her papers have at least h citations each, and the rest of his/her papers have no more than h citations each. In his paper, Hirsch argues why this measure is preferable to other criteria, and ends up suggesting that "this index may provide a useful yardstick to compare different individuals competing for the same resource when an important evaluation criterion is scientific achievement, in an unbiased way".

I don't know how many people have bought into this index, but needless to say, as any of these metrics, it has limitations. For example, if you're the technician of a lab that has a bunch of highly cited papers and you're always including in the middle of a long list of authors, does your massive h index turn you into one of those "best scientists"?

In any case, its limitations notwithstanding, I thought I would share it in order to stimulate our unsatiable appetite for ways to measure the quality of what we publish. Ready to go check if yours is larger than your neighbor's?

Image by Brett L.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Time to return to the issue I brought up the other day regarding the open-access debate. Some people think that publishing firms rip people off by taking scientific information from the community and selling it back to the very providers of this information. This ignores, of course, that some journals such as the Nature titles, Science and the Cell Press stable add value to the content they publish by filtering scientific information in such a way that their imprimatur is (in most cases) guarantee of quality. Ironically, as these journals have professional editors, who are the public face of the titles, they tend to receive most of the negative feedback regarding our business model.

But, fine, let's play along and ignore the fact that we at the Nature journals add value to what we publish. The purpose of this post is to illustrate that, even though we charge for our content, our publications are very cost-effective for our readers.

Take a look at this figure from an independent study by Credit Suisse/First Boston. It shows how much the University of California system (a very important user in terms of sheer volume) had to pay every time a member of their community used our journals online, and it compares this cost across different publishing companies.

As you can see, whereas the cost of using our journals is approximately one nickel per use, other publisher's products cost well over an order of magnitude more (almost two orders of magnitude in one case).

I'm sorry that I had to blank out the name of the other publishers; I didn't feel comfortable fully disclosing them. In any case, I'm sure you suspect who they might be.

So, next time you think that the Nature journals rip you off, think about this graph. Do the Nature journals really deserve all the flak they receive, or do we actually give people their money's worth?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The 'News and Views' section of Nature Medicine has a new look!

This month you’ll see we’ve introduced three new columns: Bedside to Bench, Bench to Bedside, and Community Corner. These columns are available this month without a subscription.

Cancer researchers Daniele Krause and Richard Van Etten anchor the new section with a 'Bedside to Bench' column examining how recent clinical trials hint at how to kill the cancer stem cell in certain blood disorders; eliminating this source of tumor cells has the potential to lead to improved cancer treatment. Their analysis exemplifies the goal of the new column: to examine the basic research implications of a recent clinical finding.

So far the response from the community has been positive about the ‘Bedside to Bench’ column. One of our readers, Evan Snyder, a physician-scientist at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, said he has initiated a seminar series with this same intent, examining how to develop testable hypotheses about basic science from clinical observations. We’d love to hear if others in the community have similar programs, or how they feel about this approach to asking the right scientific questions.

The other new column, ‘Bench to Bedside’ takes the more familiar route of examining the clinical implications of a basic research study. This month, Neil Shah complements Van Etten and Krause's column by highlighting how resistance to chemotherapy develops in tumors deficient in the well-known cancer genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Shah takes the assignment to heart, examining in depth how patient treatment might change given this greater mechanistic understanding.

Our third column, ‘Community Corner’, scans a small segment of the research community for their response to a recent biomedical study—in this case two reports suggesting how environmental toxins might affect the development of autoimmunity. Experts with three different backgrounds each found something unique about the study.

To make room for the changes we have largely discontinued news and views on papers published outside of Nature Medicine. I’ve been wondering what to do with this format ever since, to my dismay, finding that Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology and Nature had all published a news and views on the same paper. A speaker at a conference—rightly, to my mind—mocked such excess. Since the launch of Nature Medicine more than ten years ago many other journals have begun to present commentaries on their strongest papers, particularly those with a biomedical slant. Although I like to think I provide superior editorial and screening functions as an editor, that is mostly vanity---basically, with a click on a web browser you can find the commentary you need. In my mind, too much duplication risks redundancy and stretches the editorial resources of the scientific community.

Although we’ve dropped some news and views, we still have a duty to our readers to alert them to the hottest biomedical research in the previous month. So we’ve expanded our research highlights section to two pages, and added a short column highlighting papers within the Nature Publishing Group. One drawback to our process is that we rarely highlight papers that we have rejected, in order to avoid sending mixed signals to researchers who submit their papers. I must admit though, we do sometimes reject some interesting papers—often for reasons unrelated to their overall coolness, but for reasons nonetheless appropriate for our journal, such as a lack of mechanistic insight or poor in vivo data. So, these papers aside, I like to think we provide a quick snapshot in the research highlights section of the papers most relevant to that elusive beast dubbed 'Translational Research.'

Our aim with the research highlights is to provide breadth in our coverage.

Our aim with the three new columns is to provide the depth—exploring the biomedical literature with quality synthesis.

We’d like your help in this venture. If you are a researcher who has formulated a testable, reasonable—and compelling—hypothesis about the mechanistic basis of disease, based on recent clinical findings, consider submitting a proposal for a 'Bedside to Bench' column. And if you get a chance to read the new columns, send us your feedback. This is a work in progress and we hope it develops in a way to best serve the biomedical community.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I was saying yesterday, several people have made comments on the talk I gave in Madrid last month, as well as on the related blog post. Considering that we don't really censor people who write to us and that we are very receptive of feedback, I find it amusing that few of these comments have been posted on our blog, and that people prefer to cut and paste from what I wrote on their own blogs, but so be it.

Most of the comments have centered on what I wrote about the fact that open-access publishing is not the only alternative to scientific publishing, but just one of several models. Some people take strong exception to this idea to the point of feeling violated by the fact that we "sell back" the science they produce. Others acknowledge that we provide a filtering service, but point to the fact that the peer-review process is free. And a third group of critics argue that the problem with scientific publishing can be summarized in three words: Nature, Science and Cell. Each of these criticisms deserve some comment, and I'll start with the concept that peer-review is free.

Last August we published an editorial and a blog post called "Why review?". In them, we went over some of the reasons why people choose to review articles for scientific journals despite the myriad of other things they could do with their time. Particularly relevant to our current discussion is the fact that, although it is true that scientists don't get any money in exchange for their effort, they get enough compensation from the access they gain to privileged information about what their colleagues and their competitors are doing. For many scientists, to exert influence on the direction and standards of their field not only through their own work, but also through the comments they give their colleagues on their research is enough reward to make reviewing papers worth their while.

Now, there is information and there is information. If scientists choose to review papers for a given journal, it is because, a priori, they think that what they're gonna read will be of legitimate interest to them. So, many scientists have different thresholds to agree to review for certain journals. Indeed, I've met scientists who may agree to review for Nature, but nor for Nature Medicine, and others who agree to review for Nature Medicine, but not for more specialized journals. Why? Because, when they receive an invitation to review from us, their initial expectation is that they are likely to read something of broad interest or "otherwise, Nature Medicine would not be considering this paper for possible publication".

A corollary of this is that, if we send too many papers out for review, including some that may not be particularly interesting from the start, then we'll start finding that more and more people turn down our invitations to review manuscripts. In other words, being less selective on what we send out for review will quickly erode the expectation of quality that our reviewers have developed. They'll start feeling that the compensation they get from reviewing for Nature Medicine is not enough, and will find something else to do with their time.

A second corollary is that, in the absence of a certain guarantee that the paper will be of interest to a reviewer, the reviewer will almost certainly not touch it. This, in fact, is one of the reasons why those initiatives to publish papers online to let the community read them and evaluate them have not been successful so far -- many of the most thoughtful reviewers will choose to not spend time on those manuscripts in the absence of some initial screening that separates the wheat from the chaff.

In summary, the peer-review process is free, but only in a most superficial way. Reviewers get compensation from evaluating manuscripts for high-profile journals, provided that an initial screening of manuscripts takes place and truly identifies the contributions that will be of interest to the reviewers. The golden rule that there is no such thing as a free lunch also applies to our trade.

Definitely not Nature Medicine's idea of lunch. (Image by malias.)

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

You may or may not have noticed that I haven't been blogging for over a week; I was in Madrid giving a talk in which I tried to make the point that we don't discriminate against authors on the basis of nationality, language or any other non-scientific aspect. In a previous entry, I had already shared some data to back this statement up, and I used the same and additional data during the talk to drive the point home. It was quite amusing to see that some people still didn't believe me: "sure, I can see that your graphs show that you don't discriminate, but I still don't believe you". What is there left to say?

In any case, I must confess that the talk got a little boring when people started asking me questions about open-access publishing. It was fascinating to see how difficult it was for some people to understand that scientfic publishing costs money, and that there are different models to recover your costs -- the author-pays model, the subscription model, and everything in between. The talk got boring (at least to me) because I have very little patience with this discussion when people stop putting forward compelling arguments in support of their ideas or, as in this case, when people just don't seem to want to get the simple point I was trying to make: as there are different models, publishing groups ought to choose the model that works best for each of them. In our case, the subscription-based model is the only one that seems viable for the time being. How difficult is it to get this point?

Anyway, a funny thing was that there was a lot of press covering the talk, which was part of a larger event organized by our Madrid office to present a new "How to publish in the Nature journals" guide in Spanish (I'll write an entry about the guide some other day). As a result, a couple of newspapers ran stories and interviews with yours truly, and there's even this video I found. Enjoy!

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of my colleagues was telling me the other day that we at the journal have a bias in favor of the USA. She was specifically making this comment with regard to our reviewer pool, which is indeed dominated by US-based scientists. But then again, there are many more scientists here than in any other country in the world.

In terms of authors, though, there doesn't seem to be such bias in favor of the US or against any country in particular. Have a look at this graph, which shows the ratio of published to submitted papers as a function of country.

Each color represents a year -- from 2007 to 2004, top to bottom. Note that this plot includes papers submitted not only to Nat Med, but it's pooled data from NMed, NNeuro, NGenet, NSMB, NCellBio, NImmunol and NBT. I didn't plot the actual number of submitted papers because, of course, we get our largest number of submissions from the US. But this graph clearly shows that we don't favor the US over, say, Italy or Spain. The graph also shows that countries that have invested heavily in science over the past few years, like Australia, show a steady increase in their ratio of successes over failures. Sure, countries like China and India still have some catching up to do, but they'll get there, trust me.

LatAm stands for Latin America. South Pacific includes Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Scandinavia includes Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I'm in the middle of preparing a talk that I'm scheduled to give in Madrid in a few days. The talk is called "Myths and realities of publishing in the Nature journals", and its goal, at least in part, is to dispel the myth that our journals discriminate against, say, Spanish-speaking countries or developing nations, and that we favor countries like the USA and Britain.

Thinking about the comments I've heard from people, this myth can be divided into at least four parts:

1. The fame myth -- "to publish in the Nature journals, you have to be a big name."

2. The friends myth -- "to publish in the Nature journals, you have to be a friend of the journal, and you have to be on first-name terms with everyone in the field so that you always draw positive reviewers."

3. The language myth -- "to publish in the Nature journals, you have to have the Queen's English, or the editors won't even read your paper."

4. The surname myth -- "to publish in the Nature journals, it's better if you are Dr. White and not Dr. Blanco. In fact, if I were to change the names of the authors in my paper to anglosaxon names, I'm sure you would have sent it out for external review at least."

Each of these myths can be rebutted, and part of my talk will consist of data proving that this is not the way we operate. For example, you don't need to be famous to publish in Nature Medicine. Just flicking through the last four issues of the journal (including April 2008), I found that 75% of the articles we published were authored by people I didn't know about before their submission.

That being said, I'm most interested in any evidence you may have in support of the myths. I want to make sure that my perception of the fairness of our processes is a legitimate one. So, if you know of any specific instance of discrimination, please send it over. I may even include it in the talk.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sighs of relief from the whole editorial community were heard this weekend, following a ruling denying Pfizer accces to confidential peer-review documents from the NEJM.

Pfizer is facing a lawsuit over injuries believed to have come from use of their drug Celebrex. So, this January the drug company filed a motion asking for peer-review documents -- including reviewers' names and confidential comments -- that might be relevant to the lawsuit and useful for its defense. (If you want to read all the details about the legal showdown between Pfizer and the NEJM, I would recommend that you read this excellent blog entry in "In the Pipeline".)

This past Friday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ruled that "it is not unreasonable to believe that compelling production of peer review documents would compromise the process". And as Pfizer didn't explained in sufficient detail what they expected to find in the confidential documents, the court decided that "whatever probative value the subpoenaed documents and information may have is outweighed by the burden and harm that would result" to the journals.

I was also delighted by the news, but I'm somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that the decision in favor the journals was shaped in no small measure by Pfizer's inability to produce convincing-enough arguments. I wonder what would happen if a future motion makes a good case for what a company or any other party expects to find in our confidential information. Would the court then rule in favor of the company, setting a devastating precedent?

I must admit that my understanding of all the legal aspects that surround matters of this sort is very limited. But if journalists are protected from identifying their sources in court (what is often referred to as "privilege"), is that the same kind of protection that our "sources" -- our referees -- get when they share confidential information with us and when we promise to protect their anonymity? If this is not the case, why not? And is there something that we, the editors of scientific journals, could do to make sure that we have "privilege"?

The ruling favored us this time, setting some sort of precedent for the protection of confidential information at scientific journals, but the matter is far from closed, and heaven knows what will happen next time.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Have a look at this report from Siri Carpenter that just came out in Science's "Science Careers". It's about how to publish translational research, focusing on what journals look for in the submissions they receive. It features interviews with (and pictures of) several editors, including yours truly.

Not a bad read to kick off the weekend, I reckon.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"How did you get into publishing and how do I pursue a career in that field?" As the cliché goes, I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard that question.

So, lazy as I am, I thought I would write down an answer to the second part of the question (how I specifically got into publishing is too uninteresting to write about), so that next time I get an e-mail asking me for advice on the subject I simply send a link to this post.

There are different ways to get into publishing. Let's start with copy editor. In broad terms, copy editors are in charge of correcting the style and language of the articles we accept prior to publication, as well as making sure that the changes made by the authors when they review their proofs are correctly incorporated. As language is such an important part of the job, employers tend to prefer people whose first language is English. In the case of scientific journals, scientific training is definitely a plus. However, if you have a PhD or postdoctoral experience, this position may not be for you, as you may not find it particularly stimulating from the scientific point of view. Furthermore, employers may find you overqualified for the position.

If you want to stay in closer contact with the science, there are several options.

In journals that have professional editors, such as the Nature journals, titles from the Cell Press stable and Science, research editors read submissions and decide whether something is worth sending out for external review by experts in the field. For this job, a broad understanding of and interest in science is very important. It is also necessary to be able to express your ideas (scientific and otherwise) clearly. And crucially, you must have a very thick skin, as authors don't like it when you send them a rejection letter (which happens most of the time), and they can be very aggressive in their interactions with you. For this position, we normally hire people who have 4-5 years of postdoctoral experience, but there have been cases of people who join us after relatively brief postdocs.

Another class of professional editors are reviews editors, whose job is to think about review ideas, commission articles from suitable authors, developmentally edit the papers and organize the peer-review process. Scientifically, the requirements for the position are similar than those for research editors, although our company has sometimes hired people straight from their PhD with no post-doctoral experience. The reviews editor job can be construed as more creative than the job of a research editor -- you try to develop a useful review article, as opposed to trying to find what's wrong in someone's work as a reason to turn it down. Owing to your need to develop the articles you receive, your command of English and your attention to detail need to be very good, probably more than in the case of a research editor. At Nature Medicine we don't have a reviews editor, but we have a News & Views editor, whose job is similar to what I just described.

For both jobs, it's very useful to be socially skillful, as you need to develop good relationships with the community so that they agree to write review articles, act as referees and/or submit their research to your journal. Last, all of the above jobs (particularly copy editor) require you to have the ability to work to tight deadlines -- the journals need to come out on dates that have been established at least a year in advance, and these deadlines are rather firm.

In none of these jobs appeals to you, some publishing firms recruit other types of editors, which are variously referred to as managing editor, executive editor and so on. These people may or may not make scientific decisions on papers. Instead, they often act as liaisons between authors and the editorial board of the journal -- the scientists who ultimately decide what can be sent out to peer review and choose the referees. Depending on the journal, the managing editor may also be responsible for coordinating the production process of the publication, acting as manager of the copy editors and production staff, interact with the advertising and marketing departments, and other activities that don't necessarily require you to have a PhD. For this kind of position, in fact, it varies a lot whether your scientific background is relevant or not, although I'd say that, more often than not, it is relevant.

Last, but certainly not least, there are science journalists -- people who often work for a newspaper or other periodical, either as member of staff or as freelance writer, and whose job is to report on scientific advances for the readership of the publication. Some of these journalists have a very sophisticated understanding of science, whereas others are generalists who write about science the same way they write about politics or art -- in very broad terms for a very broad audience. The key issue here is that these people tend to be journalists, not scientists. In other words, you need a degree from journalism school to get one of these jobs. That said, if you want to be a freelance writer, you can get away without a journalism degree, provided you can write in a journalistic style. Some of the people who have written in the past for Nature Medicine's News section fall in this category of scientists turned journalists, but our News editor, who is responsible for choosing the stories we'll cover every month and for editing the work of our contributors, is a journalist by training.

In part II of these post, assuming there's interest and that my colleagues in the journal don't veto the idea, I'll tell you a bit about how we go about recruiting someone when there is an opening, in case you ever need to interview for one of these jobs.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A couple of days ago we got a comment from one of our referees, saying that it's unreasonable for us to get more than three reviewers for any given paper that we consider for publication. He stated that having to deal with the comments from more than three referees places an undue burden on authors, which may put the community off from sending us new submissions.

We are certainly familiar with some (unfavorable) comparisons that are made between our journal and other publications that use only two reviewers per paper. I'd like to say, first, that we don't get more than three referees for any given paper as a matter of course. When we do, it's sometimes because one of the referees has not reviewed for our journal before. We aren't therefore sure how his/her comments will compare with what other, more experienced, referees may have to say about the paper -- sometimes new referees are either too tough or what we call "wet". So, as different journals have different standards and criteria, referees often go through a "training period" during which they come to be familiar with the kind of papers a journal looks for.

Second, a good number of submissions to Nature Medicine tend to be multidisciplinary, making it very difiicult for just two people to evaluate the full manuscript. For starters, most of our papers include human and animal data. So, right off the bat we may need one person with technical expertise on the animal experiments and another person to advise us on the potential relevance of the findings to human disease. If you then consider that you may want to have a second opinion about the same points, we're already talking about at least three reviewers and have not even started talking about papers that stretch over two or more disciplines.

Third, when we look at all of the referees' concerns, we don't necessarily ask authors to address every point, particularly if the criticisms bring up points that are clearly part of a subsequent study. So, two referees times two does not necessarily equal four sets of comments.

To finish, I should say that two or three years ago we followed up with people who had published in our journal, some of whom had to go through the "four-referee ordeal". We ask these authors if they felt that the review process had significantly improved their paper. The overwhelming majority of these authors agreed that the referees' criticisms had really made a difference and were frankly appreciative of our peer-review process. I guess you can't please everybody all of the time.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't post much on this blog, but when I do, I'm like the bass drum in an orchestra -- it doesn't sound often, but when it does...

OK, the last entry of the day is about the lively debate between the Journal of Experimental Medicine and Thomson Scientific -- the creators of the Impact Factors (IFs). Have you been following it? In a nutshell, last December the JEM published an Editorial thoroughly criticizing Thomson for their lack of transparency in the way they calculate IFs. Thomson wrote a long rebuttal, to which the JEM subsequently replied.

I find it somewhat amusing that the JEM has started this cruzade against IFs. First, IFs are subject to the same competition rules that affect any other product available to researchers. If the product is useless, you stop using it, the same way that you stop using an antibody that gives you a high background or a journal that publishes bad science. If IFs are still in the market and are still going strong, it's because the alternatives aren't as useful. Why would they want to change the way they do business unless there is pressure from the marketplace?

Second, some of the arguments the JEM uses to criticize the IFs strike me as equally amusing. For example, they suggest that the median, not the mean number of citations would be a more reliable indicator of a journal's impact, and they wonder why IFs include citations to Review and News & Views articles instead of just focusing on primary research. As you can already imagine, if these changes were made, they would lead to a higher IF for the JEM. In fact, I once heard a talk from a member of the JEM staff in which the IFs of several journals (including mine) were recalculated using the median number of citations, taking out cites to Reviews and a couple other cosmetic fixes. Do I even need to tell you that the difference between the JEM and Nature Immunology or Nature Medicine wasn't too large any more?

All of this is well and good but it seems to me that, if we're not satisfied with the IFs, journals are not the right advocates for change, as we have a vested interest in having the highest impact for the communities we serve. In other words, it would be disingenuous for me to start advocating that citations to Reviews must stay in the calculation and suggest new things that will make my journal's IF be higher. To my mind, the scientists should be the ones fighting this battle, assuming they care. Alas, I suspect the care more about figuring out what they need to do to publish in a journal with a high IF as opposed to trying to find a way to level the field across journals.

To me, the situation is quite simple. IFs will carry on being influential until something else outcompetes them in the marketplace. In the meantime, if you want a higher IF and Thomson counts citations to Reviews, then publish more Reviews. And if they choose the mean over the median, then try to publish articles that will give you a higher mean number of citations. Everything else is commentary.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other day I posted something about the ordeal my friend Andy Marshall was going through as a result of something he published about a researcher who works on genetically modified crops.

One of the many interesting comments we got on that entry had to do with the distinction between perceived and actual conflicts of interest. I mentioned at the time that we would discuss this matter at some point in our editorial, and we finally got around to doing it (click here to read it).

I'm sure this will not be sufficient to satisfy everyone, but we will be delighted to hearing your views about this question. We're constantly revising our Conflicts of Interest policy, and your views are certainly important to help us shape it.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaking of blood, my friend Andy Marshall, the editor of Nature Biotechnology, told me the other day that he's been mentioned at the British Parliament, no less.

Unfortunately, the British Commons did not bring him up to praise his contributions to the advancement of science. Instead, this past week they released an Early Day Motion (# 425) to regret "the continuing attempts to silence or misrepresent scientists whose research indicates possible human health problems from GM (genetically modified) crops".

The Motion specifically focuses on the case of Dr Irina Ermakova who, allegedly, "was misled by the editor of Nature Biotechnology into submitting an article to the journal to be published under her name, with the article in fact published under the editor's name with criticisms by four well-known GM supporters not seen by Dr Ermakova prior to publication".

I've spoken to Andy, and this is not exactly what happened. The article is more of a News Feature/Interview, which is why it's authored by Andy. Furthermore, Dr. Ermakova has been given a chance to rebut the comments from the other scientists. Her reply will be published on Friday as part of the December issue of Nature Biotechnology.

I don't want to steal their thunder and would therefore encourage you to read the whole article and the rebuttal once it's available. The only thing I'll mention here is another segment of the Motion, which specifically caught my attention. The Motion "calls on the Government Chief Scientist to protect the integrity and objectivity of science by reasserting the right of scientists to have their views published by journals without underhand interference by journal editors, and for the Chief Scientist to encourage journal editors to withdraw papers they have published which subsequently turn out to be grossly misleading or even fraudulent".

Pretty strong words to use in a case like this one. In any case, I've promised Andy that, if he's sent to prison, I'll make sure to get him cigarettes, the newspaper and, every month, a copy of Nature Biotechnology.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Each year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gets over $28 billion dollars from taxpayers. The vast majority of that money goes to fund about 200,000 researchers who annually publish more than 60,000 articles. But most of those papers are off limits to the people who pay for the research—the public.

To remedy this situation, the NIH began asking researchers in 2005 to voluntarily submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts to a database called Pubmed Central. The plea fell on deaf ears. By 2006, only 4% of the articles eligible for submission had been turned in.

Now the US government is taking action. Language in the House Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill, passed on 20 July, would require investigators to submit their papers to Pubmed Central. Those papers would be made available to the public within a year of publication. Similar language was passed in the Senate on 23 October.

The fight, however, is far from over. The provision must make it through House-Senate negotiations into a combined bill and signed into law by President Bush, who is threatening to veto.

Publishers are concerned that public access will land them in the poor house by driving away subscribers (why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?). But some scientists say that public access will speed innovation by making research readily available. Several journals are already trying the open-access model, but many require the researchers to pay for publication.

What do you think? Should I have the right to curl up with a cup of tea and a free copy of that 2006 paper on restless leg syndrome I’ve been dying to read?

Posted on behalf of Cassandra Willyard, Nature Medicine's news intern.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last Friday, Nature and Science shared the Premio Principe de Asturias for Communication and Humanities.

Considering that the Premios Principe de Asturias are a big deal in Spain and Latin America, I was somewhat surprised to see that the coverage that they got in the international press was somewhat minor. Not even the fact that Al Gore, Bob Dylan and Michael Schumacher were among the winners in other categories made much of a difference. I guess this goes to show that the Spaniards need to do a lot more of brand building around their Premios.

Even here at Nature Publishing Group, as international a company as we are, our awareness of the Premio Principe de Asturias was relatively limited. Rumor has it that the company had to be contacted a couple of times before realizing that the Award was legitimate and not one of those e-mail scams involving African Princes, which I'm sure all of you receive every once in a while.

I don't know, but maybe someone in Spain got wind of that rumor and wanted to equalize the score on the day of the awards. Otherwise, how can one explain that, for a few hours, a picture of Nature's editor Phil Campbell shaking the hand of Prince Felipe published in the newspaper "El Pais" referred to Phil as the Editor of Science? Or is there something we don't know, Phil?

Happily, as soon as our press officer got on the case, things were quickly sorted out, the caption was changed, and Phil could have a peaceful dinner with Spanish Royalty.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every so often, we get letters like the one below:

"Sadly I don't agree with you, the work was already acknowledge by the ... community and got a keystone scholarship. I am working in the field for more then 12 years, I think it is important and novel to so it will get a far review. I think that science and importance has nothing to do with your decision, I am sure that if this work was coming from a different lab, with a different PI sending it it was treated differentially and get a far chance and reviewed. Not surprising, I am not the only scientist that think that reviewing is about politics. Thanks for the time and consideration, I am sure this is the last manuscript I am sending to your Journal."

What can I say? Our internal review process is not about politics. What benefit would we obtain from rejecting a good paper? This is not to say that we don't make mistakes, but I can categorically say that we don't like it when we make them. And if the paper had come from a different lab, the outcome would have been the same. As I hinted in my previous post, we sometimes turn down papers from very accomplished scientists.

Now, if there are scientific arguments to challenge our decisions, we'd love to hear them, as we sometimes do reverse them. But as I said before, angry letters like the one above don't really do much for us.

Now, about this being "the last manuscript", is that a promise?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The other day I was talking to some scientists at a meeting, and one of them told me that some journals take advantage of the announcement of the Nobel Prize to send you an e-mail highlighting the papers from the Laureates that they have had the privilege to publish.

I don't know about you but such a marketing strategy strikes me as somewhat cheeky. I don't think there are plans to do the same here at NPG but, if other publishing firms are currently entertaining a similar strategy, here's an idea to turn it on its head -- send e-mails highlighting the papers from the Laureates that your journal has REJECTED and the name of the publication where they were ultimately published.

Hey! Maybe one could even use this information to develop some sort of journal ranking that could complement the infamous impact factors.

It's a shame that confidentiality issues get in the way of such an idea because, if you were to send such an e-mail, people would surely be talking about your journal...

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ok, now that Apoorva has left, I guess we'll need to blog more to keep Spoonful of Medicine alive. So, let's get things started with a brief mention of this month's Nature Medicine editorial.

In it, we imagine a world in which scientists could publish no more than 20 papers throughout their whole careers as a means to reduce scientific "inflation" -- the huge proliferation of scientific papers and journals, many of which add very little or even nothing to scientific knowledge.

If we adopted this 20-paper rule, many articles reporting incremental advances would no longer be written, and many specialized journals would disappear. And with far fewer papers to read, each one reporting a much more complete piece of research, search committees or funding bodies could directly evaluate the work of a given scientist, instead of leaning on surrogate indicators such as a journal's impact factor or number of citations, "evil" numbers that many of researchers love to hate.

We may not even need journals (and editors) anymore; everything would be published in preprint servers like those used by physicists, and the community would simply evaluate and rank the different contributions as they become available. This way, the whole community could act as reviewers, doing away with the existing peer-review process, another favorite target of many disgruntled scientists.

Of course, the key issue is whether you, as a working scientist, would agree to the 20-paper rule for the sake of cleaning up the scientific literature and improving on the peer-review process. Any takers?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

People often ask me what the best part of editing a journal like Nature Medicine is. Well, let me tell you instead about the worst part -- handling manuscript appeals.

It will come as no surprise to you that we turn down a lot of submissions to the journal; somewhere around 90% or more of the papers we receive go back to their authors -- some after our internal review and some others after peer review. Unfortunately, people don't always agree with our decision and ask us to reconsider it.

I say this is unfortunate on several counts. First, as we cannot give priority to a paper we already evaluated, sometimes people have to wait as long as two months to get a new "no" if their arguments don't persuade us to change our decision.

Second, many appeals arrive immediately after we sent our decision. So, they often come from a very angry author who has not had time to see if our reasons to reject the paper actually make sense and who, to put it simply, just wants to vent. Reading an e-mail from or talking over the phone to someone like that is not a pleasant experience.

Third, we take appeal quite seriously, which means that we need to go back to reading the whole paper and the comments from the referees. Sometimes we even get the referees involved once again to clarify some of their points or to comment on the criticisms from the other reviewers. All of this takes time: editorial time, reviewers' time and author's time. In our experience, this is rarely time well spent, as it often simply duplicates what we already did once.

I think that authors often overlook two things about the way we think about appeals. For starters, we view appeals on manuscripts the same way as judges see appeals in a court of law -- they are successful when there is clear evidence that the original sentence was a miscarriage of justice. So, if an author provides evidence that the reviewers' and/or our own arguments to reject the paper are fundamentally flawed, then we reverse our decision. But if the original decision was difficult, and one could provide sound arguments for rejecting or not rejecting the paper, then the appeal is not likely to prosper, the same way that a judge wouldn't reverse a decision if it could have gone either way on the basis of the evidence at the courtroom.

The second aspect that authors often ignore is the fact that, in addition to our responsibility to you as the author, we also have to keep our readers in mind. So, when deciding on whether to reject or not a paper, we also need to take into account whether the manuscript is something that our readers would expect to see in Nature Medicine. And the fact is that, very often, people's view of the appeal of their own work is very different from what we think our readers should get for their money.

In a way, our job is not too dissimilar from that of editors of, say, The Economist or The New Yorker, whose desks are flooded by submissions and pitches, and must ultimately decide on what would be of interest to their subscribers. In our case, of course, after we made that decision, we then lean on our reviewers to comment on technical and other aspects of the work. But this difference notwithstanding, our sense of ownership of the journal is a very important part of our decision-making process.

Going back to the original question that prompted this blog entry, this sense of ownership of the journal is one of the best parts of being an editor.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’m typing this on a glorious sunny Saturday; the chances are that a few of you are also working in the weekend sunshine, reviewing that manuscript for Cell, or Science, or The Journal of Virology, or perhaps even Nature Medicine.

Unlike your counterparts in other professions, however, you’ll be giving your expert advice for free. In our August editorial, we asked what motivates reviewers to spend large portions of their valuable time critiquing other people’s work. It’s a topic close to our hearts. The number of journals is increasing steadily, and scientists simply do not have the time to review every manuscript they are asked to look at.

What makes you decide which papers to review, and for which journals? Which factors are paramount; is it purely the potential importance of the paper that grabs your interest, its relevance to your specific area of research, or does the journal itself weigh into your decision? And if the latter, what are the factors that make you review for particular journals?

Are there any steps that we can take to encourage you to review for us? At Nature Medicine we recently started sending feedback to our reviewers (the other reviewer reports plus an indication of our decision). Are there any other incentives that might predispose you towards one journal or another?

As we discussed in our editorial, good reviewers for our journal know what is required of a Nature Medicine paper. They are fair, objective and can judge the suitability of an advance for a broad vs. specialised readership. We are lucky to have a large pool of trusted experts upon whom we rely. But we are keen to involve less established principal investigators in the reviewing process. This can benefit both sides; the journal gains exposure to the diversity of ideas in a particular field, and the newer investigators, by receiving reviewer feedback, can gauge what their community expects of a paper in a high-profile journal. So please do recommend your colleagues if you must decline a request to review.

On a closely related topic, good reviewers don’t materialize automatically. Can we as a journal participate in the training process? And if so how? Please do comment and tell us your thoughts.

And now that I’ve finished this, I’m off to get an ice-cream. I hope that you too have nearly finished with that paper you’re reviewing and you can get out and enjoy the sunshine while it lasts…

Uploaded on behalf of Clare Thomas, Senior Editor, Nature Medicine

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

My New Yorker mag arrived Monday with an article about a topic that's all too familiar to us, here at Nature Medicine. Science reporter Michael Specter wrote about AIDS denialists — or dissenters as they like to call themselves — who say either that HIV does not cause AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs do more harm than good, and that most scientists are in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. That last bit may be debatable, but to us and to everyone we consider credible, there's no doubt that HIV causes AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs are safe.

I'm happy the New Yorker gave this urgent and deeply troubling issue some much-needed attention, but I'm a bit disappointed with its tepid tone. If you get through the whole article — and I suppose many of the magazine's readers do — you come away with the feeling that the denialists are certainly wrong. But the first few pages give so much space to Peter Duesberg, the most famous denialist, and to the potential benefits of South Africa's traditional medicines that you might almost be tempted to think these people have a fair point. After all, who among us hasn't thought that scientists can be too harsh on those who don't agree with the reigning hypothesis or that they don't pay enough attention to traditional therapies?

But this is not your average scientific disagreement. There is NO question that HIV causes AIDS and to follow the "he said-she said" school of journalism in this case, strikes me as tame and... well, I'll leave it there. I hope the New Yorker piece goes some way to repairing the damage caused last year by an article in Harper's by dissenter Celia Farber.

For our part, we've covered the resurgence of denialists and the activities, in particular, of one Matthias Rath, who markets multivitamins as a cure for AIDS. Scientists and AIDS activists have sued the South African government and Rath for conducting trials of the so-called vitamin cures.

These denialists like to distort scientists' own statements to support their theories and have even misappropriated sentences from one of our scientific reports, which we explicitly countered in an editorial last year after the Harper's piece appeared. And we hope more of the mainstream press steps up to cover this issue.

Update: We have decided not to accept any more comments on this post, as the discussion between the two camps is not productive. We don't want this blog to perpetuate a discussion that has already received too much attention

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

The Scientist recently published a "Guide to retractions" written by Andrea Gawrylewski.

She makes a good point that there has been a proliferation of terms to create awareness that something's not right about a paper. "Expression of Concern Reaffirmed"? That's one I hadn't heard before.

In our neck of the woods, I'm embarrassed to say that we are rather old fashioned. We only have Addenda, Corrigenda, Errata and Retractions (which, for consistency, we should start calling 'Retracta', I guess).

I suspect that this paucity of terms will be a bit disappointing to some of our readers, particularly to those who write to alert us that someone committed some form of misconduct that invalidates the conclusions of a paper and then discover that we didn't even "express our concern", let alone reaffirm it.

This is not to say that we don't care when someone lets us know that a paper may have fraudulent data. But the reality is that many of the allegations we receive are not documented at all and/or are anonymous. In other words, it's hard to take seriously an e-mail saying:

"Please be aware that the paper by Hornmeister et al. is the result of scientific fraud.

Sincerely yours,

A friend of Nature Medicine"

Sometimes, people accuse colleagues of what one could call 'fraud by proxy':

"Please be aware that the paper by Hornmeister et al. that you are currently considering may be the result of scientific fraud, as he has a paper under investigation at another journal.

Sincerely yours,

Another concerned friend of Nature Medicine"

It's then amusing to discover that, roughly half the time, we are not even considering a paper by Dr. Hornmeister.

Retracting, expressing concerns or writing an editor's warning about a paper is a serious matter, not only for the authors, but also for the journal that published the work. Of course, all of us want to get the scientific record straight, but I don't think that making ill-documented, anonymous accusations is a good beginning. We have previously published in the journal suggestions about what to do when you suspect someone has committed fraud. If I'm not mistaken, throwing the stone and then hiding around the corner was not one of them.

We welcome your "expressions of concern", but please back them up with evidence and be prepared to stand behind them. As long as we continue receiving vague accusations from "friends of Nature Medicine", Dr. Hornmeister can continue to sleep peacefully.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You might have seen the New York Times article yesterday so delightfully called "Of gay sheep, modern science and bad publicity." In case the article has disappeared into the archive by the time you read this, briefly, it was a rather funny cautionary tale about a scientist who set out to study homosexuality in sheep, made one too many comments about the possible implications in people, and ended up getting skewered by the press and the blogosphere, who thought the point of his research was eventually to alter people's sexuality.

I was particularly struck by a comment that the scientist, Charles Roselli made.

Mentioning human implications, he said, is “in the nature of the way we write our grants” and talk to reporters. Scientists who do basic research find themselves in a bind, he said, adding, “We have been forced to draw connections in a way that we can justify our research.”

As a reporter, I'm guilty of this myself. Drawing human conenctions makes the story more accessible and it's an easy, if cheap, way of drawing the reader in. Even in my previous life as a scientist, I had an American Heart Association grant although my thesis, on lipid transport, was classic cell biology and had little to do with heart disease. That's where the money was, and so that's how we wrote the grant.

But all and said done, it is dishonest, isn't it? Is Roselli right? Is the system so warped now that we have to lie about human implications to justify working on important, but obscure, questions in science? Have you done it?

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Mike Rossner, Managing Editor of the Journal of Cell Biology, has published an editorial in which he criticizes the report from a committee convened by Science to investigate their handling of infamous stem cell papers by Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang.

One question that emerged after this instance of fraud was uncovered had to do with the responsibility of scientific journals to screen every image in every figure of the papers they publish in order to ensure that they don't violate standards of data integrity.

The Science committee supported the idea of enforcing these standards, but recommended that special attention be applied to a vaguely defined group of high-profile papers that is most likely to have the largest scientific impact--an idea that Rossner dismisses.

He is also dismissive of the spot checks made by our journals, which randomly select for screening one paper from each issue, referring to the Nature approach as Russian roulette policy.

Rossner concludes by stating that "the progress of science depends on the reliability of the entire published record, and journal editors must do their part to ensure that reliability", and urges editors to "participate in this dialogue with the scientific community, to help devise effective and practical standards that can be applied to the published literature".

I think that Rossner might be worrying a bit too much about the enormous number of papers that are published and no-one will ever read or cite, let alone try to reproduce (which are also part of the entire published record), but he is right to say that "effective and practical standards" to monitor data integrity ought to be devised.

So, let's talk about a couple of practical issues. Checking images in every paper will use human and financial resources, the cost of which will be passed by publishers to subscribers. Is the scientific community ready to foot this bill? And if librarians don't want to pay more money for their journals, can small, society-managed journals afford this extra expense?

What about the "Law of diminishing returns"? If I'm not mistaken, the number of papers that J. Cell Biol. has identified as fraudulent is very small. Of course, it can be argued that it doesn't matter if only one paper per million is the product of misconduct; what matters is that we erradicate this problem once and for all. This may be so, but if we're talking about practical standards, I would also argue that, from the practical perspective, this is not the most effective deployment of a journal's resources. I would very much prefer to have an extra News editor than an image screener.

Don't get me wrong, though. Scientific fraud is a very serious problem that we discussed at length in the journal last May, a lead that Nature followed this week. Our journals have no tolerance for misconduct, and we will continue fighting against it.

At the same time, one wonders whether academic and legal institutions could also do more to counter scientific fraud. In Scandinavia, for example, it is mandatory for PhD students and senior scientists to receive training in good research practice. In the UK, the law protects whistleblowers from victimization or dismissal by an employer. And in Croatia, the science ministry has taken the lead since 1996 by actively teaching topics related to responsible research conduct.

Above and beyond these considerations, I think Rossner's conclusion is correct; there needs to be a dialogue between journals and the community to devise standards for the protection of data integrity. What do you think these standards should be?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hello. I’m the Chief Editor of Nature Medicine and also get to write on our blog. As Charlotte and Apoorva do such a great job writing about science and about politics, I will write mostly about the journal itself and about the editorial world—the kind of things that scientists like to ask journal editors when we visit labs or go to meetings.

To kick things off, I thought I’d write about Web 2.0 and scientific publishing. There is a lot of interest about the impact that a second-generation Internet that emphasizes collaboration and sharing among users may have on scientific journals. We even wrote an editorial about this topic.

One idea is that the community will increasingly do without high-profile journals to decide what an important paper is and what it is not. If many scientists get together to discuss papers in social-networking sites, they may provide visibility to papers published in obscure journals and deprecate articles from more visible titles.

If this becomes the case, and if high-profile journals make enough editorial mistakes while selecting the papers we publish, then the value of those publications will indeed go down. If this happens, then it won’t matter whether you publish in Nature Medicine or in a very specialized journal—if your paper is good, the community will appreciate it.

But wait a minute. First, there are a lot of “if”s in the previous two paragraphs. A lot of events—some more likely than others—need to happen for this scenario to come true. Second, what about the people making decisions about your tenure, about offering you a postdoc position or your first academic job, or about giving you money for your research? Will they be ready to stop looking at the name and impact factor of the journals where you have published and let social-networking sites supply the filtering service that journals currently provide? It’s conceivable, but the fact remains that we don’t really know what the second-generation internet will do to scientific publishing.

What’s your take on this matter? Do you really imagine a time when publishing in Nature or Science will stop being as meaningful as it is now? Or perhaps this question is misplaced and the impact of Web 2.0 on journals will take a totally different form. What kind of Web 2.0–driven changes do you think we need to worry about?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Happy new year, everyone!

Our former intern, Emily Waltz, alerted me to Edge.org, where 160 scientists and thinkers -- including Nature's own news & features editor Oliver Morton -- have answered the question, "What are you optimistic about?" You'd think that a bunch of scientists would have little to say that's uplifting -- especially in areas such as, say, climate change, cancer or population growth -- and a few live up to that expectation, but some of the answers are downright upbeat.

Here's a small sampling:

"I am optimistic that the ascendance of open access postings of articles to the internet will transform scientific and medical publishing." -- Beatrice Golomb, professor of medicine, University of California San Diego

"I am bullish about the mind's ability to unravel the beliefs contained within it—including beliefs about its own nature." -- Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University

"I'm optimistic about the prospects for science to become a much more broadly participatory activity rather than today's largely spectator sport." Neil Gershenfeld, MIT

"The trends in China and India and elsewhere toward educating literally millions of people with scientific, engineering and technical degrees is tremendously positive." -- Nathan Myrhvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures

"I am optimistic about humanity's coming enlightenment." -- Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia

But would it really be a group of scientists if at least one didn't say something along these lines?

"In short, we should neither be too despondent nor too elated at the trajectory of current events." -- Robert Trivers, evolutionary biologist, Rutgers University.

So tell us -- what are you most optimistic about???

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yes, yes, I know, it's not quite over yet. But for us here at Nature Medicine, it already feels like the new year because we're busy putting together our January issue.

December, and with it 2006, is history for us. But to bid the year a proper farewell, we've compiled the year's best, worst and most ridiculous moments. We've given out awards in the style of American high school yearbooks, charted a timeline of events, highlighted the absurdity of some things in numbers and asked scientists what they thought made the biggest difference in 2006--and what they think might happen in 2007.

The fun all begins here.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)