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?

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…

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?

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.

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

The Scientist recently published a “”https://www.the-scientist.com/article/home/52864/“>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.

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?

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?