Month: February 2016

Publishing all credible science: Where do we draw the line?

Stemming from the belief that market-driven open access publishers are inherently predisposed to publish any article for which an author is willing to pay, there is a common prejudice that the scientific quality of such articles must be inferior to those published within non-open access journals. Whether true or not for other journals, this rationale certainly does not apply to a free publication model like Cureus.

For us, ensuring scientific quality is about preserving the brand of Cureus; by undermining credibility, bad science will, over the long term, inevitably diminish every conceivable measure of journalistic success. Destroying our reputation is the last thing Cureus leadership wants to see happen. However, working against this same concern is our journal’s philosophical commitment to publish all “credible” medical science; inevitably these two contradicting objectives require a delicate balancing act.

Despite (or as a sad result of) Cureus’ idealism, our journal sometimes receives questionable submissions: carelessly prepared manuscripts, sloppily presented results, poorly argued and unfounded conclusions, etc. Authors occasionally suffer from the misperception, perhaps due to our status as an open access journal, that we will publish whatever they submit and therefore they need invest only minimal effort.

Not so fast! I must caution against such thinking. Cureus is happy to publish articles that might be rejected elsewhere due to “political” or contrarian philosophical reasons, but like most quality journals, we will not abide substandard manuscripts. Cureus takes peer review and editorial oversight very seriously. Ensuring that authors do not abuse the easy-to-use Cureus submission system is quickly becoming a full-time job for editors who, frankly, have many better things to do.

Please do not confuse the ease of Cureus submission process with a willingness to overlook second-rate science. Does your article have a clear message and can it help interested colleagues in their daily clinical and/or scientific work? Put yourself in a reader’s shoes; if you were a reader, would you feel that the author in question has shown proper respect for your time? If you cannot answer yes, please do not submit your article to Cureus.

Anyone who intends to submit a shoddy article (and yes, you know who you are), be prepared to be blocked during editorial review. And should anyone choose to abuse Cureus’ generous spirit more than once, they should expect to be banned from our platform for an eternity. Meanwhile, the vast majority of conscientious authors, who both respect their potential readers and do their utmost to produce a quality manuscript, will be amply rewarded with a hassle-free submission process, and, once published, a large, appreciative audience of readers.

Ultimately we at Cureus like to think that a beautiful article of science is in itself, the best reward possible. Thank you for your understanding, cooperation and support.

Scholarly Roulette: Impact Factor & Scientific Quality

A friend and colleague referred me to a recent publication that represents a major indictment of the peer-reviewed journal cartel.

This article summarizes a blog published by what is arguably a Cureus competitor, the open access-publishing house, Frontiers, which in this study could find no correlation between rates of rejection and journal impact factor.

Just for argument’s sake, let’s assume that impact factor does correlate with scientific quality. So if this study is correct, it means by extension that the rate of rejection also doesn’t correlate with quality. In turn this means that the standard peer review process (which totally dominates the journal industry) has no bearing on article quality. In other words, getting published, or not, appears to be a random event.

Accepting this fact (parenthetically one which I already subscribe to) means that despite all the process and rituals of scientific journal publishing, and the huge importance of this matter to society and academic tenure decisions, there is currently no objective index for assessing research article quality. Of course if one believes that impact factor is not a measure of quality, then the above random publication process is even more random than I implied in my argument! Based on this observation, I would like to sarcastically suggest we should rename this current process “scholarly roulette.”

Clearly there are huge shortcomings to the Frontiers study, such as selection bias and the non-medical nature of many scholarly journals. However, to a huge research community that has invested so much of their lives into the existing peer review process these type of findings must be dispiriting. Nevertheless, this current set of observations does resonate with our philosophy at Cureus, where we subscribe to the belief that as long as the medical science within is credible, there is no reason not to publish an article. In other words, we believe that we are, on average, no better equipped to discern quality than any other journal.

A big part of our confidence stems from Cureus’ unique post-publication SIQ scoring system. Although we are no smarter in finding scientific quality up front, we do believe that it is quite possible for the medical community-at-large to find quality over time, post publication. Nevertheless, to make this a reality, every reader has a role to play, which of course includes you!