Semir Vranić| Future of Medical Journals

We have witnessed a lot of changes already to open access, including predatory publication, the lack of funding to pay, because scientific publishing is not cheap- it costs a lot.  So, there are obstacles in this regard-who will cover, who will pay the cost of scientific publishing?  That’s the second issue.

The third issue is huge competition. There are more and more journals. There is no control over the number of journals and still new journals come out every day, not only from small countries from the periphery of the scientific world, but also from the developed world, from the big publishers who also create these so-called ‘mega journals’. Each big publisher, and when I say big I mean publishers like Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and, BMC, and all have all these mega journals. The competition is huge.

And the fourth is an issue that really concerns me: Scientific integrity; scientific misconduct; data fabrication.  A lot of problems are ongoing but also becoming more visible as a result of  the wide accessibility of scientific publication.

I mentioned several issue relating to how scientific medical publishing is moving forwards but I also mentioned some of the obstacles that I currently see, and those that that will become more and more visible in the coming years.

 

DMacA: You mentioned the number of issues relating to publishing but, even before you get to publication, what are your thoughts about preprints?

SV:  I didn’t mention preprints because I listed a couple of the more important, in my view, areas of scientific publishing.  Preprints are also something relatively new, that started a couple of years ago.  Personally, I don’t mind having scientific publication available before being formally peer reviewed.  I have also uploaded several of my publications. When I, and my colleagues on my team and collaborators, considered that it was good to make a publication available as early as possible, we made a preprint.  So, I don’t see the problem with a pre-print although it should be considered carefully given that it’s not peer-reviewed. And, most platforms that offer preprints also make it clear to readers that it is not a peer-reviewed publication.  So, I think that there is nothing wrong with preprints in their nature, taking into consideration that they are not a peer-reviewed publication.  And readers must take this into consideration when reading and reviewing such manuscripts.

 

DMacA: What are your thoughts on peer review itself? It comes under some criticism from time to time.

SV: That’s another very good and important question that I didn’t mention in the first instance.  Peer review is still essential to keep the quality and control scientific publication.  I recently read an article on how much scientific publications change following peer review. In my experience, I would say that, maybe in 20 – 30% of cases, peer review improves the quality of the paper.  But, we should not forget that in many scientific manuscripts, once it’s complete, you cannot do that much in the terms of the study type, design or results.  You can improve some things but, only in a minority of the cases can you really change the study design.  Additional experiments may be required, to really change the overall quality and content of certain studies.  But, I still believe in peer review as a process as long as it’s fair and transparent. It contributes to a certain quality of scientific publishing.  We must keep peer review as an essential tool for control over the content.

DMacA: One of the interesting things about peer review, among the many positive aspects, is that it can identify scientific misconduct and, in your specialty, pathology, there has been a problem with, for example, image manipulation.  How do journals cope with that?

SV: That’s a very good question about scientific misconduct.  Maybe in pathology compared with some other disciplines, imaging based disciplines, where image manipulation is relatively common, but it looks like there is light at the end of the tunnel. There will be tools just like we check for plagiarism.  We have tools now, pretty efficient tools, to check for plagiarism. Similarly, we will also be able check for image manipulation and fabrication and these tools will definitely help reduce the rate of scientific misconduct that we face these days.  As editor of the journal I can tell you that we have seen such misconduct. Paper mills also recently show up as the worst of all possible types of scientific misconduct. I’m trying to keep alert to all these issues all the time and I have now have a team to help me check the integrity of a paper including data fabrication, paper mills, and image manipulation that now occur in scientific and in medical publishing.  I also follow certain websites like Retraction Watch and receive their output on a daily basis. I’m not saying that I read all of them every day but, frequently I do, just to keep my eye on what’s going in the terms of scientific misconduct including the question you raised about data or image manipulation.

DMacA: Let me talk about something slightly different now.  You discussed how there are so many journals and, in the context of the Croatian Medical Journal and in your own journal, how can smaller journals compete with the big players?

SV: Yes, we are really small. Like the Croatian Medical Journal, the Bosnian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences is also a small journal.  It’s a society- association based journal and, as I said, the competition is really huge.  And it will be very challenging to survive in the next five to ten years being a single journal published in a small country.  But, we will do our best to survive and not be taken over by the big publishers although I’m sure the Croatian Medical Journal, like the Bosnian Journal, has received offers from the large publishers in recent years. I’m talking about big publishers- we had at least three or four offers since 2015/16 to go to their platform. But we decided not to so far, despite the offers, in some cases not at all unreasonable, which would offer better visibility to the journal.  And, they would probably also offer better promotion of the journal- being on the platform of these big publishers.  So small medical journals need to be very highly competitive.. We need to put additional efforts into all the aspects of scientific publishing, from the very basic like online submission systems, the website, from the speed of your handling process, from the quality of peer review, to the final stage when you accept the manuscript, to post acceptance phase, and post publishing phase. These are all really challenging for small medical journals but, for the Bosnian Medical Journal, we put in a lot of effort. We created a team of seven, eight people now actively working every day on the journal, including myself, to speed up the peer review process, to make it professional, and to run timely peer review processes. In the later phase we work to give authors early visibility and early release on the website, on PubMed, and to quickly generate PDFs etc.  And I think this has really helped us to improve the Bosnian Medical Journal, to become more International, more recognized in the region and worldwide and, it’s also reflected in our Journal Impact Factor.  When I started in 2014, the  Impact Factor was just 0.4 and now it reached 3.8 in 2021. Our cite score by Scorpus is, by the way, now more than 5 ( 5.2) .

DMacA: We’ve spoken a little about submission to a journal, we’ve talked about peer review and the process of publication.  Then after it’s published, the great new addition in publishing is social media. Tell me how you see social media fitting in with the publication mechanism?

SV: I think that this is another important aspect of scientific publishing. We put a lot of  effort in this regard. We have a dedicated person in our editorial team. We have our blog, we also have our profiles on Twitter on Facebook on LinkedIn.  Our content is available continuously and regularly updated. We also send newsletters and we have a pool of several thousands of reviewers in our peer review pool.  Occasionally we send them newsletters about the journal’s content when we publish a new issue. We keep a really close eye on our authors and our reviewers- in other words- our scientific community so the journal is somehow visible on all the available platforms