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18 news posts in Publishing

Frontiers news

27 Oct 2016

Frontiers Blog Guidelines

Community Guidelines for comments and content The Frontiers blog is a place for researchers, media, industry and the general public to discuss science and scholarly issues in a respectful and intelligent way.   Please keep your posts on topic and constructive. Above all, respect others and their opinions. All comments, blog posts and other content will be reviewed by Frontiers’ blog editorial team.  Content that defames or attacks others will be removed. In addition, content that promotes products or services, or is not on topic will also be removed. Frontiers reserves the right to remove any content that we feel is abusive or not constructive.  Repeat offenders may be blocked. If you have a specific complaint about a published research article or about a review process, we are happy to look into the matter. Please contact the editorial office editorial.office@frontiersin.org so that we may follow our standard procedures for formal complaints. REPUBLISHING GUIDELINES: At Frontiers, open-access and sharing research is part of our mission. Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles posted in the Frontiers blog – as long as you credit us with a link back. Editing the articles or selling them is not allowed. Want to contribute with a blog post? If you are […]

Open science and peer review

04 Mar 2016

New Data Debunks Old Beliefs: Part 2

Our original New data debunks old beliefs blog post plotted the impact factors of 570 randomly selected journals indexed in the 2014 Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters, 2015), against their publicly stated rejection rates. The goal was to understand the relationship between rejection rates and journal quality. Despite a widespread belief that high rejection rates secure high impact factors, no significant correlation was found. This study was preliminary, to start a discussion, because it suggests that such an entrenched belief may be wrong. This blog post is going one step further by removing what could be the main reason why we could not find any correlation: varying citation rates across academic fields. It is widely known that articles in some fields typically get more citations than in other fields. Perhaps a correlation would become evident once we removed this variable. In Figures 1-7 below, we normalized the impact factors by field, thus effectively removing this variable from the results (data accessible here). We have done this by calculating the ranking of each journal within its own Journal Citation Reports category (or field). As an example, a journal that has the 4th largest IF among 200 journals in its category will […]

Frontiers news

19 Nov 2015

Best practices for scientific writing and publishing

On October 7, 2015, upon the kind invitation of the Young Researchers Network (LYRN) and the Department of Biology and Chemistry at PSI, I had the pleasure of speaking with students and fellows of the institute on scientific writing and publishing. As the former Managing Editor of a journal in biotechnology and these days the Program Manager of the health portfolio of journals at Frontiers, sharing my experiences in peer review and publishing with the research community is a real highlight of the job. Some of the questions that I was presented with, both while preparing for and during the presentation, included: How do I choose which journal to submit to? With students in the audience, my usual answer to this is, of course, Nature or Science, as inevitably the students and young fellows are the ones that need to conform to the system the most and such high profile publications significantly boost their careers. In addition to the Impact Factor, which remains the measure of quality used by many funders across the world, other factors to take into consideration include the intended audience of the paper (e.g. if you wish to reach a specific community), the ability of the publisher […]