I recently co-authored an article submitted to Nature Urology, a subdomain of the Nature publishing group. It took roughly eight weeks of review before we received feedback from the editorial office. In December 2016 we were finally presented with several reviewer questions that had to be answered before a final decision could be made. After all outstanding questions and reviewer requests had been answered the article was finally, mercifully “accepted in principle” on February 3^rd. That was far from the end of it, however, as another round of editing requests arrived on May 11^th.

This time the requests came directly from the Nature editorial office. The majority of the requests concerned tightening up the narrative flow and bringing the article in line with their in-house style. At this time, we discovered that the edits already made by the editorial office were so extreme that the editors had to check with us to make sure the meaning of our words (and indeed the entire article itself) had not been altered by their editing process. All of this for arbitrary language and formatting issues.

On May 15th, with the article still unpublished, we were yet again asked to check affiliations and other minor aspects of the article. The article was finally published yesterday, May 23rd, roughly eight months after submission. (And it could have been worse!)

How does this kind of perfectionism serve the scientific community? Why does the editorial office of the Nature publishing group change the text of professional scientific authors in a way that even they are not sure if the scientific information is still correct? The editorial work of so-called high-end and high-ranking journals has reached a level where their interaction is beyond thoroughness. It is absurd to edit every paragraph, every sentence, and even every word. This does not serve the scientific community. Instead it unnecessarily prolongs the publication process to guarantee the house style of a specific journal. The scientific message does not change with this heavy editing, but an article may look better and therefore may be better sold by the publisher based on the work of scientific authors.

The process (and underlying philosophy) are different with Cureus. In short, we rely on the individual capabilities of our authors, who also retain their copyright. We want to make the publishing process fast and efficient, so while we provide a certain level of support to our authors, we do not intend to alter their scientific message. Instead, we appeal to their own sense of pride and responsibility for adequate language and general accuracy.

In the end it is the scientific community that will evaluate if the article is scientifically sound, informative and correct. If it is not, the article will be met with heavy criticism, both via a low SIQ score and negative comments attached to the article. This system is not only much faster but also unbiased and transparent. We want to keep the focus of scientific publishing on what we feel is most important – the fast, fair and uncomplicated dissemination of interesting findings around the world.