In recent years, scholarly publishing faced a new paradigm regarding the accessibility:
the open access movement. “If an article is "Open Access" it means that it can be
freely
accessed by anyone in the world using an internet connection”.1 The Budapest Open
Access Initiative states: “By "open access" to
this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting
any
users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts
of
these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them
for
any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than
those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself”.2 Some researchers may
have never been concerned about this topic.
It obviously means that they are affiliated with a rich institution from a rich country.
There are few things more discouraging for a researcher than performing a literature
search, retrieving a list of potentially interesting articles, and not being able
to
access many of them because one’s library does not subscribe those journals. And this
lack of access will increase, even in major Universities from rich countries3, where
the average cost of subscription reached
12,000 USD per faculty member more than 10 years ago.4
Administrations are regulating the access to the results of publicly funded researches
by
using these open access systems: initially, through a voluntary Public Access Policy
and
then making it mandatory.5 The European Union
slowly followed a similar policy, initiated at the Seventh Framework Programme.6 Many
other institutions and countries are
following this movement.7 PubMed Central is a free
archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National
Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM), and it has the
legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature.8
The open access movement led to the emergence of business-oriented publishers aiming
to
make money within this niche. Thus, the authors’ pay system emerged and new journals
were born. Traditional subscription journals created their open access system by
allowing free access through the Internet to some articles whose authors had paid
a
certain amount of money. The amounts due to open the access to an article, whether
in an
open access journal or by opening the access in a subscription-based journal, are
not
cheap.9
Soon, there was a concern that some of these publishers may have been more focused
on
making money out of the open access movement, than in contributing to the diffusion
of
scientific knowledge. The names “Predatory Open-Access Publishers” and “predatory
scholarly open-access journals” are used to describe these questionable publishers
and
journals. Lists of predatory publishers and predatory journals were created based
on
specific criteria.10 A recent study shocked the
open access people and the scientific community.11 Although, at least in theory, open
access should not have any influence
on the quality of the peer-review process1,
Bohannon demonstrated that this assumption is not real, and that a clearly marked
geographic distribution of predatory publishers does exist.
But we should keep in mind that peer-review pitfalls have always existed, even in
highly
prestigious, expensive subscription journals. A lot of examples can be mentioned,
but
probably one stands out because of the journal involved and the research area: the
two
Hwang’s articles, published in Science in 2005 and 2006, pretending having cloned
human
cells [purposively not included in the references] retracted by journal’s editors
after
internal investigations.12 Perhaps because of the
difficulty of identifying frauds, specifically fabricated data, JAMA editors stated
in
1989 “Editors of peer-reviewed journals have relationships based on trust with authors,
readers, owners, editorial board members, reviewers, funding agencies, institutions,
students, advertisers, the media, and the public at large”.13 This disclaimer seems
to be a declaration of the peer-review
process limitations. On the other hand, peer-review process in prestigious journals
has
inappropriately rejected articles. A well know example is the rejection of the letter
submitted in 1937 by Hideki Yukawa to Physic Rev regarding some sub-atomic forces,
with
very explicit reviewer’s comments destroying his thoughts. In 1949, Yukawa was awarded
the Nobel Price “for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of
theoretical work on nuclear forces”.14
Let us think in a different way of scholarly publishing: the collaborative publishing.
Although this name is used for book publishing, scientific journals may consider its
principles, while keeping the highest quality standards in their editorial process.
After appearing the journal management and publishing system with freeware licensing,
such as Open Journal Systems (OJS), one of the major costs in electronic journals
published by non-profit institutions is the peer-review process. Although peer-reviewers
collaborate on a no-cost basis, the process itself is highly time and administrative
resources consuming.
Selection of peer-reviewers should ensure the adequacy of the reviewer, not only in
terms
of absence of conflict of interests, but also in reviewer’s expertise in the specific
area of the manuscript evaluated. Traditional methods of reviewers’ selection are
based
on the areas of interest and skills declared by the reviewers when they apply to join
the journal’s list of peer reviewers. In these methods, the journal waits for reviewers’
applications after a ‘call for reviewers’. Obviously, the editors assess the competence
of the candidates for reviewers through several methods, including their publication
track. However, this method may have two limitations: a) reviewers may have assigned
themselves with a competence too optimistically, and b) editors have only a restricted
list of potential reviewers to assign manuscripts.
An active selection method for reviewers consists in a literature search using the
keywords assigned to the manuscript, in order to retrieve recently published articles
within a very similar theme. This method allows identifying authors that have recently
performed some research in the same area of the manuscript received. No matter if
these
potential reviewers had previously showed their interest by applying for the journal’s
reviewers list, they are requested to collaborate as peer-reviewers of that manuscript.
Although this method may be more appropriate than the list of reviewers to identify
authors recently in a specific research, it is more time and administrative resources
consumption due to a low response and acceptance rate.
In the past few months, Pharmacy Practice adopted the OJS as journal
management and publishing system, has been included in PubMed Central, and has
implemented an active selecting method for peer-reviewers. Articles published in 2013
had a 182-day period from their initial submission to the final decision of acceptance,
including the time given to the authors for modification requested by reviewers. All
the
articles were included in the first issue published after their acceptance. In order
to
maintain, and even reduce this delay, which is one of the shortest among pharmacy
practice journals, we kindly ask the authors in this area to make an effort and accept
the challenge of a collaborative publishing. Pharmacy Practice declares its
commitment with publishing an independent scientific journal, following the standards
of
the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly
work in Medical Journals of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors,
and
the Code of Conduct of the Committee on Publication Ethics.15,16