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To back this up he shared three emails he has received about the
publisher. The emails – and some of the comments below the post –
criticise the volume of emails from Frontiers inviting people to review
articles. They also note that review invitations are often not relevant to
the recipients’ specialities, which leads some commenters to speculate
on the quality of the review process. Beall summed up his blog post with: ‘When a scholarly publisher
doesn’t have to worry about losing subscriptions, the entire publishing
dynamic changes. There’s less accountability. We hope that Frontiers can
take these criticisms into account and make improvements in its
operations.’ Kamila Markram, CEO and co-founder of Frontiers, told Research
Information that she was disappointed by the post and
particularly the concerns raised about the publisher’s peer-review
process. She readily admits that the publisher is contacting many researchers.
However she says that this is a normal part of publishing and new journal
launches. ‘What we are experiencing are the growing pains of
success,’ she said. She explained that the recent significant investment
that Frontiers received from Nature Publishing Group has given the company
the opportunity to grow. This, of course, has benefits for the publisher
but has, she said, had unforeseen impacts on the publishing process. The company has used some of this investment to launch new journals away
from the company’s original focus of life sciences. ‘We are
expanding at a quick pace so are contacting thousands of people informing
them of new journals,’ she said. ‘I’m a scientist myself and I hear
from publishers every day and not just OA publishers. You can buy lists of
researchers’ contact details and that’s a normal practice for
publishers when they are marketing journals.’ Many of the comments and complaints raised in Beall’s post and the
emails that he included were about the company’s approach to peer
review, in particular that researchers are asked to review papers that are
not in their field. However, Markram denies that the experiences
shared in Beall’s post show a lack of quality in the peer-review
process. ‘It’s complete nonsense to say that we don’t have a proper review
system in place. Peer review from our point of view is really at the heart
of science. We have put in place a standardised review template that asks
very detailed questions. We also publish the names of reviewers to make it
transparent,’ she said. So what about the experiences people have had of being asked to review
papers in subjects that they know little about? These experiences come
down to the different approach that the publisher has taken to organising
peer review, according to Markram. ‘When we started Frontiers we did it in the conventional way, with
associate editors assigning reviewers but we found that it was a very
lengthy process. It can easily take two months to invite reviewers because
it is an iterative process and then we have to chase up to get the
reports,’ she said. She recounted how her husband and Frontiers co-founder Henry Markram,
was an editor on the board of another journal where every time an article
was submitted to that journal all of the board was informed and given the
opportunity to review the paper. The board found this useful as a way to
keep track of current research even if they were not interested in a
particular paper, she noted. Frontiers decided to adapt a similar approach to its review process. Each
journal therefore has a significantly larger than usual board - ‘we
really want to ensure that all the expertise is covered,’ she said –
and everybody on the board is what the publisher calls a ‘review
editor’. This means that they are all informed of all papers submitted. ‘Everybody on the board has been invited. They are all signed up
and so they should know about our approach and we are doing a lot of
educate about the Frontiers process,’ Markram said, adding that this
move was initially very popular with authors because, instead of up to two
months to assign a reviewer, this process could be done within a few
minutes. And this worked fine, she said, when the publisher was small. What has
happened over the past two to three years, according to Markram, is that,
as the publisher has grown so have the number of submissions, and
therefore the number of emails to review editors. ‘It worked fantastically well for a while and then our journals grew.
We became victims of our own success; the people who complained were those
on our most successful journals,’ she said. For example, she noted that
the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience now receives
around a thousand submissions a year, which equates to a large number of
emails. The company therefore developed an algorithm to filter out relevant
reviewers. This sends review invitations to 10 people and then to 10 more
if none of the first 10 are interested. ‘The algorithm is intended
to accelerate the process and was built with authors and publication
timing in mind,’ she said, although she admits that it is not perfect. ‘We have put in place a system that matches reviewers with articles. We
have a review system software but the algorithm is only as good as the
keywords that people put in,’ she explained. ‘When editors and
reviewers sign up with us it’s very important that they fill in what
they are interested in. This is important for when editors assign
reviewers manually to, which they can also do.’ However, she added that the publisher takes criticism seriously and is
refining the algorithm regularly in response to feedback. ‘Sometimes we
get a bit of negative feedback. Always the burning feedback is from people
who are angry. We are listening to what people are saying and modifying
our algorithms on a weekly basis.’ Markram also feels that some of the criticisms in the blog post are about
OA more widely and believes these criticisms are often unfair. ‘There is
so much discussion now about the quality of OA. We recently compared the
eight journals of ours that already have impact factors and they are above
average in their fields,’ she said. ‘With OA there is a lot of
misunderstanding. We need to educate people and do a lot of advocacy
work,’ she continued. ‘There is a proper process in big OA publishers
and we are members of COASP.’ And
on the concern raised in the blog post and elsewhere about gold OA being
about publishers making money she noted, ‘subscription publishers are
making huge margins. We [at Frontiers] are for profit and have to run a
responsible business and pay our staff but making money is not our primary
goal. I consider that this is human heritage so we can’t do it in a
sloppy way.’ Indeed she noted that Frontiers was founded with the
aspiration that at some stage the process of publishing OA could be made
free by replacing the current system with a freemium business model. 'We
are not there yet so have APCs,’ she concluded. This article inititally published on http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=1452 Posted by Friends of Open Access |
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