Vigorous debate currently surrounds peer review, and polarized views are often expressed. Despite criticisms about the process, studies have found that it is still valued by researchers, with rigorous peer review being rated by authors as the most important service they expect to receive when paying to have their papers published open access. The expectations of peer review and what it can achieve need, however, to be realistic. Peer review is also only as good and effective as the people managing the process, and the large variation in standards that exists is one of the reasons some of the research and related communities have become critical of and disillusioned with the traditional model of peer review. The role of the editor is critical. All editors must act as proper editors, not just moving manuscripts automatically through the various stages, but making critical judgements throughout the process to reach sound and unbiased editorial decisions. New models and innovations in peer review are appearing. Many issues, however, remain the same: rigorous procedures and high ethical standards should be in place, those responsible for making decisions and managing the process need to be trained to equip them for their roles and responsibilities, and systems need to be adapted to deal with new challenges such as the increasing amounts of data being generated and needing to be taken into account when assessing the validity and soundness of work and the conclusions being drawn.
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It is a time of great innovation in peer review. Traditional models are being adapted and completely new ones introduced. Independent peer-review services are also starting to be offered by organizations outside the traditional journal ecosphere. In both new and established systems, the importance of increasing openness, transparency, and interaction between peer-review participants is being recognized, and these are being introduced to varying degrees. Concern with the ‘wastage’ of review effort in traditional peer review, where manuscripts often go from journal to journal, being reviewed afresh at each, before being accepted for publication, is also being addressed. Reviews are being transferred (‘cascaded’) and shared between some journals. The separation of the two basic functions of peer review—critical review and selection—as originally introduced by the journal
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CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org) is a not-for-profit membership association of publishers. Since its founding in 2000, CrossRef has provided reference linking services for over 62 million scholarly content items, including journal articles, books and book chapters, conference proceedings, reference entries, technical reports, standards, and data sets. CrossRef also provides additional collaborative services designed to improve trust in the scholarly communications process, including Cited-By linking, CrossCheck plagiarism screening, CrossMark update identification, and the FundRef funder identification service. All of these services continue to develop to try to meet the evolving needs of publishers, and this article attempts to give an overview of them and highlight important updates which have taken place over the last 12 months.
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The Republic of Korea is the fourth ranking country for the number of PubMed Central (PMC) journals. As of September 2013, 75 journals from Korea are included in PMC. Starting in 2013, several research funding agencies for scholarly journal publications in Korea began to establish open access, full-text databases in the fields of medicine, science, and social sciences and humanities. In those databases, Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) 1.0 is used so that articles written in the Korean language can be easily manipulated as full-text extensible markup language (XML). Editors or publishers must produce full-text XML files based on JATS 1.0. Thus this paper surveys the current state of the application of JATS 1.0 to Korean scholarly journals, including both those in English and those in Korean, focusing on the current technology, training programs, and the policy of the Korean government on open access, full-text XML. This experience in Korea can be a model for constructing mother-tongue, open access, full-text journal databases based on JATS 1.0 in other countries. The usefulness of JATS in scholarly journal publications not only of all fields, but also in all languages, is stressed.
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We hypothesized that it is not open access status but rather exposure in the PubMed platform that affects citation frequency in medical journals. In November 2008, medical journals from Korea began to be added to PubMed Central (PMC). Therefore, it would be interesting to know whether or not their impact factor based on Web of Science has increased since the journals were listed in PMC/PubMed. To answer this question, a citation analysis of seven journals that have been indexed in PMC since 2008 or 2009 was done. Only non-Medline journals were selected and the impact factors of five Medline journals were compared. The impact factor was calculated via Web of Science. Journal Citation Reports (JCR) data were used if the data of the target journals were provided in JCR. Trends for the impact factors of different years were analyzed using dBSTAT ver. 5.0. There has been an increasing rates of the impact factor for the seven non-Medline journals, 1.92 in 2011 over 2010; 3.27 in 2010 over 2009; 1.12 in 2012 over 2011. As for the five Medline journals, the increasing rate in 2010 over 2009 was 1.18; however, those of 2011 over 2010 and 2012 over 2011 were 1.01 and 1.04 respectively. The Science Citation Index Expanded impact factor of medical journals published in Korea can be increased if those journals are published in English and listed in PMC. This is an effect of the platform in which the journals are listed and not just an effect of free access.
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We would like to verify the correlation among various citation indicators of 62 Korean scientific journals listed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. From a total of 85 Korean journals listed in both WoS as of January 2013, and 132 journals listed in Scopus as of 2011, 62 Korean journals listed in both citation indices were selected for analysis. Citation index indicators selected for analysis include impact factor (IF), 5-year impact factor (5yrIF), Eigenfactor score (EF), article influence score (AIS) (list of WoS indicators), SCImago journal rank (SJR), h-index, and impact index (ImIndex) (list of Scopus indicators). It took an average of eight years for a newly founded journal to be listed in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). Since the IF, ImIndex, and AIS values failed to exceed 1.0, Korean journals’ popularity and prestige were confirmed to be minimal. Analyzed journals that were written in English exhibited higher SJR and h-index values than ones written in Korean. WoS’ IF exhibited a correlation with WoS’ 5yrIF, EF, AIS, and Scopus’ SJR, h-index, and ImIndex. Since the ‘popularity and prestige of Korean journals’ have been confirmed to be minimal, steps must be taken to improve this status. Popularity-based indicators have been shown to strongly correlate with prestige-based indicators in Korean science journals. Therefore, there must be a strategic approach taken to improve IF values.
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This work aims to develop a paper authoring support system that helps biomedical scientists to organize their ideas for a specific discourse purpose. As an initial step toward the goal, this study developed an abstract authoring support tool that provides candidate lexical bundles organized according to the introduction, methods, results, and discussion (IMRAD) structure. Lexical bundles were extracted from the sentences in 152,083 structured abstracts of the PubMed Central open access subset and their distribution was analyzed by IMRAD section. To organize lexical bundles according to IMRAD, the Lexical Bundle Ontology was built. A Journal Article Tag Suite compliant authoring support tool was implemented. This tool lists candidate lexical bundles corresponding to authors’ discourse purposes in a specific section and thereby helps to complete sentences. We expect this tool be useful, at least in biomedical abstract writing, to organize an author’s ideas to achieve a specific discourse purpose. This tool is targeted primarily at biomedical scientists whose mother tongue is not English; however, English native speakers may find it useful as well.
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