Nothing to see here

Based on one company's past poor publishing practices, a top-tier medical journal misguidedly stigmatizes any paper from industry.     

Dragging scientific publishing into the 21st century

Scientific publishers must shake off three centuries of publishing on paper and embrace 21st century technology to make scientific communication more intelligible, reproducible, engaging and rapidly available.The Internet has massively disrupted how we communicate - primarily for the better. Many business sectors, however, have struggled to adapt to online platforms, with many simply resisting change. The newspaper industry is an example of a centuries-old industry persisting in the face of new conditions - until it can’t. In the early 1990s the Web began displacing traditional information delivery. By the mid 2000s it had become a widespread facet of life in many countries. Web 1.0 journalism translated ink to pixels, but as technology advanced the slow erosion of print became a landslide [1].Scientific publishing is following a similar path, with its hesitance to adapt and slow (or no) adoption of the many advantages the Internet affords.For now, scientific publishing remains profitable. Nevertheless, its sustainability rests upon antiquated pillars. Scholarly print journals date back hundreds of years to the availability of a cheap distribution method with the introduction of the printing press.Most journals have made only incremental changes. A few have taken some advantage of the Internet and experimented with multimedia, but use of the medium has been limited primarily to extra content, such as unsearchable encyclopedic online supplements to accompany articles that maintain print page limits; or publishing many more articles by relaxing peer-review requirements for ‘novelty’, as exemplified by PLoS ONE, which has published 30,000 articles in 2013 alone [2]. Overall print-era anachronisms still persist through the continuation of page limits and surcharges and the release of discrete issues, as if all articles remain subject to print-only production schedules.So how do we imagine the future of scientific publishing?     

Publication Committee meeting. HUPO 5th annual World Congress. Long Beach, CA, USA 30 October 2006

This meeting brought together delegates from industry, academia and the publishing houses to facilitate discussions on the level of support from the journals for the use of standardised data formats and their interest in the creation of a network of proteomics repositories collaborating on a coordinated data curation effort. Discussions centred on how best to structure interactions between journals, databases and researchers to improve accessibility to data, and facilitate comparisons between datasets.     

HUPO World Congress Publication Committee Meeting August 2008, Amsterdam,The Netherlands

The plenary session of the Publications Committee of the Human Proteome Organisation at the 7^th annual HUPO world congress examined the relationship between journals, proteomics standardization initiatives, such as the work of the HUPO‐PSI, and the public domain data repositories. Delegates from industry, academia and the publishing houses discussed how best to bring these bodies closer to together and facilitate the publication process for the bench scientist.     

Fresh powder on Waddington's slopes

The Keystone Symposium on Stem Cell Differentiation and Dedifferentiation attracted nearly 500 participants affiliated with academia, the biotechnology industry, scientific publishing and clinical practice. This broad group examined current advances in stem‐cell biology, with a particular focus on induced pluripotent stem cells, and discussed both their potential and limitations in therapeutic applications.     

The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of scholarly publishing.     

Biomaterials in medical devices: an interview with Jörg Vienken of Fresenius Medical Care, Germany

Biomaterial and biopolymer research have significant impact on the development as well as application of biotechnology. Biotechnology Journal recently attended the "Nanomaterials for Biomedical Technologies 2012" conference. We were privileged to have the opportunity to ask Prof. Dr. J?rg Vienken, VP of BioSciences at Fresenius Medical Care, a few questions relating to medical devices, the importance of publishing for industry, and also his advice for young scientists/engineers looking for a career in industry.     

Multimedia opportunities for chemistry

Chemists are served by a wide range of information retrieval and software packages, both innovative and traditional, provided by the chemical information industry. Multimedia is the buzzword in electronic information at the moment. Why have we not heard (even) more about what multimedia can do for chemistry? This paper attempts to provide some answers to this question by examining the publishing issues involved in creating multimedia products. Effects in text, graphics, sound and video that can be achieved are discussed with reference to some of the packages currently available.     

Publishing bioethics and bioethics--reflections on academic publishing by a journal editor

This article by one of the Editors of Bioethics, published in the 25th anniversary issue of the journal, describes some of the revolutionary changes academic publishing has undergone during the last decades. Many humanities journals went from typically small print-runs, counting by the hundreds, to on-line availability in thousands of university libraries worldwide. Article up-take by our subscribers can be measured efficiently. The implications of this and other changes to academic publishing are discussed. Important ethical challenges need to be addressed in areas such as the enforcement of plagiarism-related policies, the so-called 'impact factor' and its impact on academic integrity, and the question of whether on-line only publishing can currently guarantee the integrity of academic publishing histories.     

HTLV-1 p30II: selective repressor of gene expression

Retrovirology has been publishing as an Open Access online journal for approximately six months. In this editorial, I review the reasons for and the advantages of Open Access publishing, update our progress to date, and summarize where we intend to go with this journal.     

Publication Patterns in Dream Research: Trends in the Medical and Psychological Literatures

The annual rate of journal publications is a pertinent index of a scientific field's prosperity. In the present study, annual publication rates were calculated for the field of dream research using both medical (Index Medicus, MEDLINE) and psychological (PsychINFO) reference databases. A composite profile from the medical database spanning 111 years revealed very similar changes in publishing levels following the release of Freud's (1958/1900) The Interpretation of Dreams and the publication in Science ofAserinsky and Kleitman's (1953) article on dreaming and rapid, jerky eye movements. In both cases, the peak year occurred about 15 years after release of the work, and the peak was followed by a precipitous 3-year drop and then a slow and yet variable decline. In the more recent case, the peak level (reached in 1969) dropped (during 1970-1972) by about half and has continued a slow decline to the present day. As is the case with basic sleep research, this level of activity does not keep pace with either (1) global growth in scientific publishing or (2) growth in related sleep disciplines, particularly, sleep disorders and chronobiology. The psychological database confirms many features of the medical database profile—but is advanced by 1 year, i.e., a publishing peak in 1968, a drop from 1969-1971, and a slow decline until 1980. In this case, however, 1981 marks the beginning of a period of renewed growth that has endured to the present. This divergence between the two publishing profiles may reflect the field's shift from psychophysiological to cognitive and dream analytic approaches since the early 1980s.     

扶桑绵粉蚧研究状况的文献计量分析

本文从文献计量学角度分析了扶桑绵粉蚧在CNKI数据库和Web of Science数据库中的文献情况。在CNKI数据库中,分析了文献的发表时间、分布类型、刊载期刊,以及高被引文献、培养研究生和文献关键词的情况。在Web of Science数据库中,分析了文献的发表和引文情况、作者的国家和机构、刊载期刊、资助资金以及高被引文献的情况。预计扶桑绵粉蚧的研究热度继续,在注重防治工作的同时,向着分子生物学等深入方向发展。     

Why Publishing Everything Is More Effective than Selective Publishing of Statistically Significant Results

Background

De Winter and Happee [1] examined whether science based on selective publishing of significant results may be effective in accurate estimation of population effects, and whether this is even more effective than a science in which all results are published (i.e., a science without publication bias). Based on their simulation study they concluded that “selective publishing yields a more accurate meta-analytic estimation of the true effect than publishing everything, (and that) publishing nonreplicable results while placing null results in the file drawer can be beneficial for the scientific collective” (p.4).

Methods and Findings

Using their scenario with a small to medium population effect size, we show that publishing everything is more effective for the scientific collective than selective publishing of significant results. Additionally, we examined a scenario with a null effect, which provides a more dramatic illustration of the superiority of publishing everything over selective publishing.

Conclusion

Publishing everything is more effective than only reporting significant outcomes.     

Future Prospects: Scientific Quality Relies on the Critical Reviews from Our Peers

From Executive Editor to Editor-in-Chief is a big jump for me, and means many more responsibilities.I could feel the pressure on my shoulders;from the hopes of my predecessors,my colleagues, and the board members. As a journal with a 57-year history,JIPB has built its credit over the years,publishing many original works in both Chinese and English.However,in the international scientific community,JIPB is still a minor player, especially under the current not-so-healthy impact factor-driven publishing environment.     

Mycopathologia 2020: Legacy and Change to Remain Relevant for Content,Creation, and Communication

Mycopathologia - The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on the publishing landscape. The ‘pre-peer-review’ publication model is likely to become common as a lag in publishing...     

It Is Time to Re‐Evaluate the Peer Review Process for Preclinical Research

Problems in peer review, the backbone of maintaining high standards in scientific publishing, have led to wide spread discontent within the scientific community. Training in the peer review process and a simpler format to assist in decision making are possible courses to improve and expedite the process of peer review and scientific publishing.