Journals Feel Pressure To Speed The Publishing Process

E-Print Archives (Paul Ginsparg) Los Alamos National Laboratory MSB285 Los Alamos, N.Mex. 87545 Phone: (505) 667-7353 Fax: (505) 667-5585 E-mail: hep-th@xxx.lanl.gov (Use the word "help" in "subject" line.) Rapid Communications of Oxford The Old Malthouse Paradise Street Oxford OX1 1LO U.K. Phone: 44 865 790 447 Fax: 44 865 244 012 or 44 865 793 533 E-mail: rapidcom@vax.oxford.ac.uk Publishers of 25 journals: Anti-Cancer Drugs Behavioural Neurology Behavioural Pharmacology BioMetals Blood Coagulation and Fibrinolysis Cancer Causes and Control Chromosome Research Clinical Autonomic Research Clinical and Experimental Metastasis European Journal of Cancer Prevention European Journal of Neurology Glycosylation and Disease Imaging Immunology and Infectious Diseases International Clinical Psychopharmacology Journal of Orthopaedic Rheumatology Mediators of Inflammation Melanoma Research NeuroReport Obesity Surgery Pharmaceutical Science Communications Primary Care Psychiatry Psychiatric Genetics Quality of Life Research World Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology "Usually it takes about a year from the time you submit a paper until it actually comes out, especially if reviewers think something is wrong and the paper is bounced around," says Charles E. Lessman, a professor of biology at the University of Memphis. "It might take a year and a half to be published. It is frustrating. Journals should be able to do better." Despite the prestige of publishing in large-circulation, multidisciplinary journals, researchers are responding quite enthusiastically to new ventures promising faster publication, say editors. "A journal that can print an article in one month gives a way to attract top papers, particularly in a competitive field. So it is to a journal's advantage to be fast," says Monica Bradford, managing editor of Science. Bradford reports that at her journal the time between submission and publication averages 20 weeks. However, she adds, the process may be speeded up for articles with public-health implications, those in very competitive areas, or those containing "ground-breaking information." The reasons for the quickening pace of publication are both old and new. A huge effort such as a genome project, for example, can lead to a torrent of papers from a variety of research groups. In such "hot" areas, a delay of a few months as a manuscript goes back and forth between author and editor could mean the difference between being credited for discovering a gene or just confirming a competing group's discovery of it. Traditional pressures--which are mounting these days because of heightened competition for scarce jobs--contribute to scientists' desire to see their work in print as soon as possible. Indeed, this is leading to a backlog of unpublished manuscripts in journal offices. "The publish-or-perish phenomenon is still on," says Martha Davis, an assistant professor in the department of agronomy at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. "Especially in academia, there is no promotion or tenure if a researcher hasn't published so many articles, and that's true in some industries, too. Because of this, some scientists report partial experiments, so they can publish two articles instead of one. That adds a lot of volume," says Davis, who is the author of Scientific Papers and Presen-tations: A Graduate Student Handbook, scheduled for publication next year by San Diego-based Academic Press. Journal editors are responding to the demand for faster publishing in some innovative ways, merging the speed of new communications technology with the ability to keep the human parts of the process on track. "People want to publish quickly--and that's what a good editor is all about, making quick work of the review process and mediating between reviewers and authors," says Harvey Bialy, a molecular biologist who is research editor at Bio/Technology, published by Nature Publishing Co. in New York. Bialy says that by sending manuscripts out for review within two days of receipt, getting comments back within two weeks (including verification of practical procedures described in papers), and then overseeing revisions, he gets most papers published within two to four months of acceptance. But some journals can beat even Bio/Technology's fast timetable. Advances in Scientific Research (ASR), which debuted in April, promises publication within one month of receipt. "The idea of a rapid-publication journal was the result of discussions with many of my colleagues throughout the years," says David Philips, who is the cofounder, along with physicist David Newman, of the La Jolla, Calif.-based, for-profit Institute for Advances in Scientific Research, which publishes ASR. Philips is a physicist and chemist now interested in environmental sciences who has held research positions at Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego. Newman held a position at the University of Michigan. Philips and Newman say they keep their promise by tapping into a network of expert reviewers who work fast, and by asking authors to help. "When we receive a manuscript, we do a quick internal review, then send it to a number of peer reviewers," Philips says. "We ask reviewers if they can read and return the paper in 72 hours. If they can't, we thank them and find other reviewers. Then we send the comments to the author, and there's some back-and-forth a few times. Of course, the speed of the whole process also depends upon the author." Lessman, who coauthored a paper with his graduate student that was recently published in ASR, confirms that the journal works quickly: "They indeed did it in a week. We faxed it [the manuscript] in, we had comments back a week later, we made changes and resubmitted it. That's the way things should be." Gary Evans, a professor of chemistry at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, had a similar experience. "It was less than 40 days from submission until I was looking at reprints," he says. "Usually, you don't even hear from the journal editor in 40 days." As if the challenge of publishing quickly weren't enough, the new journal also has a very wide focus, accepting papers in physics, chemistry, biology, environmental sciences, and interdisciplinary studies. "To accommodate such a broad range of disciplines, we interact with a network of scientists who provide editorial and technical support," Philips says. The journal's willingness to accept innovative research articles is what attracted Lessman in the first place. His coauthor, Angela Ventura, had written up part of her master's thesis as a paper. Lessman suggested to Ventura that she submit the article to ASR. "This particular work was quite different, unusual," he says. "We centrifuged Rana pipiens [leopard frog] cells and tried to look at how different factors control movement of the nucleus." Because this is the type of descriptive science typical of work early in the century, Lessman felt it might be too unconventional to be accepted by a more established journal. Publisher Philips reports that he is very pleased with the response to two ads and a postcard campaign inviting submissions. Exact circulation figures are not yet available, he says; the third issue is scheduled for publication this month. Several hundred copies are being printed, according to Philips; they are being sent to libraries and individuals who responded to the ads. Another fairly new venture is Rapid Communications of Oxford, England, a subsidiary of the International Thomson Organization. Rapid Communications was founded in 1990 by Ivan Klimes, formerly an editor at Elmsford, N.Y.-based Pergamon Press. After extensive market research identified neuroscience as a field ripe for rapid publication, the founder distributed a leaflet in June 1990 announcing the creation of NeuroReport, guaranteeing publication of papers 12 weeks after submission or sooner. Within days of the announcement, papers began arriving by fax, and the pace of submission has increased ever since. "NeuroReport is a testimony to the fact that a rapidly published journal can be successful," says Kate McKay, who until recently was vice president of Rapid Communications of America. The company closed its New York office earlier this month because it found that it could accomplish its work via fax and electronic mail from its office in England. "We have a high rejection rate because the number of submissions is incredible," McKay says. The journal receives, on average, five submissions every day. McKay credits "word of mouth in the neuroscience community" with the high submission rate. "Researchers say, `If you've got something hot and want it out quickly, go here,' " she explains. Rapid Communications currently publishes 24 journals in addition to NeuroReport. As is also true of ASR, the key to Rapid Communications' ability to work swiftly is the fax machine. A paper is faxed to the relevant journal, where an editor faxes it to appropriate reviewers. A reviewer has five days to fax the paper back to the journal, which then faxes it to the author, who also has five days to respond to the review. Authors help by limiting page length, preparing art, and not seeing proofs, which stimulates them to submit higher quality papers, the editors says. NeuroReport now publishes within nine weeks of submission. So far, finding reviewers who are both expert enough and have the time to perform a rapid review has not been a problem, say Philips and McKay. "You simply get on the phone or the computer and network," Philips explains, "It often happens by word of mouth--someone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone, and ultimately ou reach someone who has both quality and time." Several editors of mainstream serials interviewed for this article do not doubt that it is possible to regularly publish an issue's worth of peer-reviewed papers prepared within a month of submission. "It probably is feasible, if they liberally use fax and E-mail," suggests Charles Bertsch, head of the journals department at the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Washington, D.C. "It all goes very quickly if done right." But such a peedy process may result in a sacrifice of quality, cautions Kevin Davies, editor of Nature Genetics. "When a journal guarantees that any paper will be published in a certian amount of time from submission, that's prejuding the review process," he says. "A journal should focus on promising quick processing once a paper is accepted." Fast-tracking is possible at any journal if an editor suspects that a paper will sail through the review process, as recently happened at Nature Genetics with a paper describing the gene that cuases Crouzon syndrome, a defect of the face and head bones. The papers received on August 10 and was published in the September 1 issue. "It was reviewed and accepted in five days, revised in five days," Davies reports. "We worked overtime, and faxed figures and E-mailed like crazy. Another shortcut was that we set the text [in type] before the final decision was made, assuming it would be accepted." But Davies stresses that this wasn an unusual case: "We can make such preparations for exceptional papers," Other shortcuts include permitting only vital changes in proofs and "sacrificing niceties," such as consistency in reference terminology. "Every journal starting up these days promises more rapid publication," says Davies. "For example, Human Molecular Genetics, our competitor, began in April 1992, about when Nature Genetics did. They made a similar promise of a certain number of weeks from submission to publication. They have kept to it and are doing well." Ads for this Oxford University Press journal claim: "In 1993, Human Molecular Genetics had the fastest average receipt to publication time of any genetics journal." Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, provides a service that combines rapid access to recent research with interactive capabilities: E-Print Archives, which supplies current and archival preprints online to 20,000 physicists worldwide. "One of the primarily useful things about E-Print Archives is not the rapidity of communication, but access to the older papers," he says. "People find it much easier to click a button on a screen than to go across the street to the library, look through journals, and maybe find that the one they want is off to the bindery." A complete online journal, the Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, was started by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in collaboration with a computer library service in July 1992. However, few subscribers signed up for the journal. Rather than undertake a huge marketing campaign itself, AAAS recently sold the venture to London-based Chapman & Hall, a subsidiary of Thomson (J. Kaiser, Science, 265:867, 1994). Will electronic publishing become too fast for peer review? So far, those interviewed for this article seem to think that peer review can indeed keep pace. "Electronic publishing should have nothing to do with peer review," says Bialy. "When everyone is wired in correctly, it will accelerate peer review by saving mailing." Ginsparg thinks that the question is moot because peer review, at least in fields like his own, in which the readers are experts, isn't even necessary. "I'd rather have 30 percent more papers to read in one to two weeks of their submission than see them six to nine months after submission with some small amount of filtering provided by peer review," he says. Although they take longer to be disseminated than online services, print science journals are unlikely to be put out of business soon, their editors say. They note that there's still something to be said for reading a paper journal on the train or out by the pool. "In terms of archival and reference aspects, people want to have papers in a journal that libraries have, and are not out in the electronic ether," says Bio/Technology's Bialy. Ginsparg says there's room in the scientific community for both print and online publication: "It's like asking if you can make the transition from radio to television; suddenly you have an extraordinary new set of possibilities." But like radio--which is still alive and well despite television and VCRs--print journals, at least for the near future, will continue as a primary outlet for the dissemination of scientific information. Ricki Lewis is a freelance science writer based in Scotia, N.Y.

Journals Feel Pressure To Speed The Publishing Process

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