Hello metabolomics community,
Please post your suggestions and ideas that you would like to see, for the new journal planned to be setup by the International Metabolomics Society.
on behalf of "The Board of the Metabolomics Society"
Wish list:
- Open access at sane prices
- Double blind review
- free color figures. no need to spend money on print
- Require description of the identification of each compound (beyond MSI)
- Require reprodudible data analysis (i.e. no black box in house methods)
- Require raw data available
- Description of data analysis methods uninteresting without available implementation
EDIT: I think
@Reza Salek intended to put it in this forum so I moved it here.
Hello Reza,
My wish list for the journal:
1. Compulsory Data Archiving (MetaboLights, MetabolomicsWorkbench- MetabolomeExchnage) and Accession ID before/ during peer-review/ post-publication. Published literature and submissions at these databases do not match.
2. No features list published without validations/ identifications/ assignments.
3. Open Access or not, but fees needs to be minimum and realistic.
4. Sections on animal, plant, microbial, tools, databases, applications, interdisciplinary clearly specified so that readers find them easily.
5. Section on announcements of opportunities (jobs/ positions), conferences/ symposium/ workshops and online resources.
6. Yes, all R and Python scripts, Matlab tools available.
7. Faster turn around times for peer review, and more inclusive peer reviewers with ECRs.
8. Reviewer MUST sign for identity at the end of peer review process.
9. Perks for peer reviewers with discounted offers, honorarium etc.
10. Videos for implementation of workflows (bioinfo, stats, computational, mass spec runs) and them being mirrored from Youtube or MetSoc Journal websites. This would be informative and enriching for wider readership interests/ experience.
Thanks and regards,
Biswa Misra
Great suggestions Biswa and Jan,
Dear all,
Please express your opinion even if you have objection to such activity.
Reza
Any such discussion should begin with an explanation of what happened to the previous journal or a reference to where (in print) this has already been explained.
The question of a new journal does not exist in a vacuum and this question of how the Metabolomics journal was handled is absolutely relevant.
#transparency
This forum topic raises a lot of questions with me too. The reasons why the current journal is no longer suitable, sound like the key things the new journal must improve.
My wishlist:
- CC-BY license for the article, CCZero for all supplemenatary information and data in the article
- identifiers for all discussed metabolites ((Standard) InChI key, preferably; consider additional use of SMILES, molfiles, and/or (preferably) CML)
- deposition of the full papers in EuropePMC
- top notch data and software citation standards (see DataCite, etc, etc)
- no use or advocacy of the journal using the impact factor (use citation distributions)
- experimental and computational (broadest sense) work can all be reproduced (if closed software is used, all intermediate data is provided)
- tight integration and collaboration with metabolomics related databases
- support non-traditional paper types (like project proposals, project deliverables, etc) (see the work of RIO Journal)
- data in the paper is machine readable (e.g. tables downloadable as CSV)
- all figures and tables are uploaded to FigShare (ore similar; see PLOS journals)
- full journal support of LaTeX
- required use of ORCIDs during submission (and allow authors to *only* provide ORCIDs during the submission process)
- strongly favor vector graphics for images (and don't complain about bitmap screenshot resolution)
- use microformats and/or RDFa, etc in HTML version of papers
- support easy bookmarking of papers in CiteULike
And browse my blog for posts about innovation in publishing for more ideas.
Dear @billwikoff and @egonw, I do agree with both for you on transparency and engagement with community, hence one the reasons forum was updated to engage better with you. While I seek a more official and transparent reply to your questions, I'm sharing an email send around to members on 25 November 2015.
Reza
The email send to the community
Just a clarification the
Metabolomics Journal is a great journal to publish and I would personally continue to do so, the only thing that has change is the relationship with the society, see above email.
Yes, I received the same email. The problem is, it doesn't say or explain anything. At the time, I made exactly the same comment as now, namely that some explanation should be forthcoming. Well, it is now eight months later and there is still silence...
We can only guess at the reasons for this.
A new journal should not be proposed or discussed at this point.
Bill Wikoff
It was brought up during the meeting in Dublin, Were you attending? Anyway hopefully have somethings soon here as well.
Note; I'm only expressing my own opinion here.
Metabolomics Society Statement:
After a partnership of ten years, the Society’s contract with Springer Science+Business Media has expired. After much discussion and lengthy consideration, the Society’s Board of Directors now believes the time is right for a new publishing model to be adopted that better represents the interests of our membership, provides added value to members, appropriately balances benefits and risks, and allows the Society greater editorial and copyright control.
The Metabolomics Society is proud of its association with Springer’s Metabolomics journal. Past and present members of the Metabolomics editorial board, and in particular the editor-in-chief, have been supporters of the Society since its inception, and we are sure they will continue to push forward the ideals of rigorous scientific endeavour to which we all aspire. We deeply appreciate their contributions.
The Society’s Board of Directors is currently reviewing proposals from candidate publishing houses. After considering opinions expressed by the membership, we hope to launch the new Society journal in the near future. We hope that all our members will enthusiastically embrace this new endeavour.
Just a quick comment on Jan's wishlist - why double blind review? Why not consider the other way and have open review - to get back to #transparency :-) As a reviewer I appreciate knowing who the work comes from, it is often obvious (but not always and guesswork is not a great idea). If I want to discuss the work with authors beyond the review, I would like the opportunity to do so; I have also considered identifying myself in some reviews, my husband always does and receives very positive feedback. I feel this way is more constructive than double blind, but that's my personal opinion.
Because I think it is important to avoid bias also in the review process.
Of course I cannot know if there is a real problem with that but I am personally convinced that high profile researchers often get away with things other researchers might not (and that they shouldn't); lack of openness about methods, "trust me" kind of replies to review points, borderline appropriate papers for the journal etc. At least I have seen what I considered such kind of biases.
There might also be a bias from the reviewer being more likely to accept unclear methods and speculative conclusions if they already trust the authors. Also gender bias could be an issue.
Metabolomics is a small community so I would find it prudent to avoid favoritism, unconscious or not. This could also make it easier to find reviewers without conflicts in a narrow field.
I can see that generally people are moving to open reviews but it is my personal gut feeling, without much evidence, that it does not lead to better reviews. With open reviews you might tend to make more thorough reviews, but perhaps less likely to shoot down papers that really is not worth the time of a thorough review in the state it was submitted.
I am not sure "positive feedback" to reviews is really a metric worth aiming for...
I do accept that I could be completely wrong about this idea.
I just found this old paper on the subject that suggest there is some effect of blind reviews: http://www.unifr.ch/wipol/assets/files/PhD%20Course/Blank1991.pdf
Something that would be great that isn't currently mentioned would be allowing papers to be placed on bioarxiv before submission....
Adding context: positive feedback was received on a detailed, critical review, not a nice&easy one.
Having constructive discussions about scientific work is something worth aiming for.
Is anyone able to address the concerns of Bill and Egon? I just received the same statement yet again...
Partly by Reply #11 (http://www.metabolomics-forum.com/index.php?topic=1029.msg3037#msg3037), which is what was official announced.