How journals work- the review process

Hello, everyone. I’m Haruki. In our previous class, we’ve discussed how to start knowing your scientific community. This chapter will explain you more about the publication process that most academic journals follow. The keyword is peer review system. What does this mean? When you submit an article to the Chief Editor of the journal, he send it to the reviewers. These reviewers are normally experts in your domain. They read your paper, trying to improve it and make comments. Once the finished, the final decision is made by the chief editor, taking into account the evaluations of the reviewers. Either rejection, game over for the journal or they agree to publish the paper with modifications. You must take into consideration your reviewers comments. Through this reviewing process, the journal aims at securing the quality of the articles. That detailed procedure is differ from one journal to another. And notably, there are several discussable points on the system that leads people to develop a new open way of reviewing. We won’t go into too much detail at the moment, but main points to have in my mind are, anonymity, acceptance ratio, time scale and its content’s accuracy. Anonymity of the peer review process differs from one to another. The most severe way is double blinded that hides both author’s name to the reviewer’s and the reviewer’s name to the author. On the other hand, in some academic domains, most journals ask the reviewers if they want to keep their names secret or not. On occasion, the acknowledgement of the article even includes the reviewers’ names. Acceptance ratio for publication also differs depending on each journal from around 5% to 70% of old submitted papers. Some first rate journals such as Science and Nature set a rigorous standard for the selection of the article, and even if the content shows outstanding academic result, they may demand to satisfy additional values. For example, in case of Nature, interdisciplinary of the conclusion. The duration from submission to publication ranges from several months to years. It is problematic when the research domain is under a fast developing environment. It hinders the speed of academic advancement. So in such cases researchers use what they call preprint server to register their paper to allow for immediate sharing of the results. It is common in Astronomy and in high energy Physics. But it is not only a matter of speed but securing the accuracy of the published content is also important. Spreading inaccurate knowledge harms not only the healthy development of the science but also harms the credibility of society to the scientific community. So as you can see, there are always trade-offs between the speed, the quality, the transparency, the fairness, and the efficiency. In this context, according to the development of information technology, there are some journals adapting new methods that aims at making a wider range of people accessible to the academic results. And the project that aims at qualifying the work of the reviewers. The changes are firstly, but who pays the publication, authors or readers? And secondly, about how to evaluate the efforts of reviewers. We will discuss about this open system in the course later. Thank you for watching the video. See you at the next one. Bye.