Submission to multiple journals: a method of reducing time to publicat
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《英国医生杂志》
1 York Trials Unit, Department of Health Sciences, University of York, York YO10 5DD
Correspondence to: D J Torgerson djt6@york.ac.uk
Getting a manuscript accepted by a journal can be a long, drawn out process and delays dissemination of clinical research. Allowing authors to submit to several journals simultaneously could speed up publication
Introduction
Authors intending to submit a manuscript that they consider to be of high quality and general appeal may consider a general medical journal (BMJ, JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, etc). These journals have a fairly rapid turnaround. Even so, unless the journal considers the paper for its "rapid" publication section, a decision usually takes six to eight weeks. If the decision is positive (usually subject to amendment), the study is then published within a few months of the final manuscript being received.
However, many papers are not accepted by the first journal and resubmission to a second or third journal is required. Ironically, in our experience, the most interesting and methodologically sound papers are often delayed the most as these are usually more likely to be sent to highly cited and competitive journals. On the other hand, many authors overestimate the value of their work and aim too high and therefore contribute to the delay in publication. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for a paper to be rejected two or three times before it is finally accepted. Indeed, major general journals reject most of the papers they receive.
Because our anecdotal experience was that such delays were widespread we undertook a small survey of corresponding authors of randomised controlled trials. We searched Web of Science with the phrase "randomised controlled trial" for a single month (January 2004). We emailed 95 corresponding authors asking how many times they had submitted their manuscript before it was accepted. Of the 40 who replied, about half (18/40) had submitted the paper to two or more journals, and for a quarter of those the time to publication was 20 months or more (compared with about 12 months for those who published in their first journal). This delay will not be entirely the fault of journals: some of the authors will have been inefficient in resubmitting their manuscripts. Nevertheless, a large proportion will be due to the requirement of journals that papers are submitted to one journal at a time.
Sequential submission
Multiple or simultaneous submission could introduce valuable competitive forces among journals for the best manuscripts. Multiple submission is allowed in some specialties. Piron compared his experience of writing and submitting papers to economics, finance, maths, and psychology journals, which do not allow multiple submissions, with law review journals, which do.5 He noted that law review journals in the United States had the "fastest turnaround times of any set of journals on the planet."5
Journals may have other reasons than preventing competition for not allowing multiple submission. Multiple submission would increase the workload of journal staff through the increased flow of manuscripts. For some journals, the extra administrative burden would not be worth while as it may slow down their decision making processes and allow a competitor to "scoop" the article. This would leave them with the sunk costs of mailing the paper to reviewers etc, without having had the chance of publishing the paper.
Workload would also increase for researchers as they will be asked to review more papers. This is a burden some of us would bear to increase turnaround. Indeed, as a condition of allowing multiple submission, journals could set the condition that one or more of the authors of the submitted paper would agree to review one of the journal's other recent submissions.
Workload for both journals and reviewers would fall, however, if a collaborative model of multiple submission was adopted. In this model, a journal would allow multiple submission on the condition that the paper went to a partner journal. Both journals could then share the reviewer's reports and one journal's staff could handle the administration.
Some journals use an author pays system—for example, BioMed Central journals. It is feasible that journals could have a single (free) submission policy or a multiple (pay) approach. This would allow the journal to offset some of its increased costs from losing an article to a rival but it would also depress the demand for the service. However, this approach might be less than ideal given that some organisations can better afford to pay than others. Additionally, authors may be more likely to pay if they have positive findings than negative results. Allowing papers with negative findings to be submitted at no charge might offset this problem.
Several models of multiple submission exist. Journals could adopt any of these, and they might even experiment with different models using a randomised trial.
Contributors and sources: DT and JA originally discussed the idea for the paper. SC, JD, and EP made suggestions for the paper. SC, JD, and EP identified a sample of papers and developed a short email questionnaire to corresponding authors. All authors emailed to a subset of corresponding authors. JD collated and analysed results for survey. DT will act as guarantor.
Competing interests: All the authors have a career interest in having their manuscripts published as soon as possible.
References
Ioannidis JPA. Effect of the statistical significance of results on the time to completion and publication of randomized efficacy trials. JAMA 1998;279: 281-6.
Greenberg D, Rosen AB, Olchanski NV, Stone PW, Nadai J, Neumann PJ. Delays in publication of cost utility analyses conducted alongside clinical trials: registry analysis. BMJ 2004;328: 1536-7.
Altman LK. The Ingelfinger rule, embargoes, and journal peer review: part 1. Lancet 1996;347: 1382-6.
Altman LK. The Ingelfinger rule, embargoes, and journal peer review: part 2. Lancet 1996;347: 1459-63.
Piron R. They have the world on a queue. Challenge 2001;Sep. www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1093/5_44/79151031/p1/article.jhtml?term= (accessed 13 Sep 2004).(David J Torgerson, professor1, Joy Adams)
Correspondence to: D J Torgerson djt6@york.ac.uk
Getting a manuscript accepted by a journal can be a long, drawn out process and delays dissemination of clinical research. Allowing authors to submit to several journals simultaneously could speed up publication
Introduction
Authors intending to submit a manuscript that they consider to be of high quality and general appeal may consider a general medical journal (BMJ, JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, etc). These journals have a fairly rapid turnaround. Even so, unless the journal considers the paper for its "rapid" publication section, a decision usually takes six to eight weeks. If the decision is positive (usually subject to amendment), the study is then published within a few months of the final manuscript being received.
However, many papers are not accepted by the first journal and resubmission to a second or third journal is required. Ironically, in our experience, the most interesting and methodologically sound papers are often delayed the most as these are usually more likely to be sent to highly cited and competitive journals. On the other hand, many authors overestimate the value of their work and aim too high and therefore contribute to the delay in publication. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for a paper to be rejected two or three times before it is finally accepted. Indeed, major general journals reject most of the papers they receive.
Because our anecdotal experience was that such delays were widespread we undertook a small survey of corresponding authors of randomised controlled trials. We searched Web of Science with the phrase "randomised controlled trial" for a single month (January 2004). We emailed 95 corresponding authors asking how many times they had submitted their manuscript before it was accepted. Of the 40 who replied, about half (18/40) had submitted the paper to two or more journals, and for a quarter of those the time to publication was 20 months or more (compared with about 12 months for those who published in their first journal). This delay will not be entirely the fault of journals: some of the authors will have been inefficient in resubmitting their manuscripts. Nevertheless, a large proportion will be due to the requirement of journals that papers are submitted to one journal at a time.
Sequential submission
Multiple or simultaneous submission could introduce valuable competitive forces among journals for the best manuscripts. Multiple submission is allowed in some specialties. Piron compared his experience of writing and submitting papers to economics, finance, maths, and psychology journals, which do not allow multiple submissions, with law review journals, which do.5 He noted that law review journals in the United States had the "fastest turnaround times of any set of journals on the planet."5
Journals may have other reasons than preventing competition for not allowing multiple submission. Multiple submission would increase the workload of journal staff through the increased flow of manuscripts. For some journals, the extra administrative burden would not be worth while as it may slow down their decision making processes and allow a competitor to "scoop" the article. This would leave them with the sunk costs of mailing the paper to reviewers etc, without having had the chance of publishing the paper.
Workload would also increase for researchers as they will be asked to review more papers. This is a burden some of us would bear to increase turnaround. Indeed, as a condition of allowing multiple submission, journals could set the condition that one or more of the authors of the submitted paper would agree to review one of the journal's other recent submissions.
Workload for both journals and reviewers would fall, however, if a collaborative model of multiple submission was adopted. In this model, a journal would allow multiple submission on the condition that the paper went to a partner journal. Both journals could then share the reviewer's reports and one journal's staff could handle the administration.
Some journals use an author pays system—for example, BioMed Central journals. It is feasible that journals could have a single (free) submission policy or a multiple (pay) approach. This would allow the journal to offset some of its increased costs from losing an article to a rival but it would also depress the demand for the service. However, this approach might be less than ideal given that some organisations can better afford to pay than others. Additionally, authors may be more likely to pay if they have positive findings than negative results. Allowing papers with negative findings to be submitted at no charge might offset this problem.
Several models of multiple submission exist. Journals could adopt any of these, and they might even experiment with different models using a randomised trial.
Contributors and sources: DT and JA originally discussed the idea for the paper. SC, JD, and EP made suggestions for the paper. SC, JD, and EP identified a sample of papers and developed a short email questionnaire to corresponding authors. All authors emailed to a subset of corresponding authors. JD collated and analysed results for survey. DT will act as guarantor.
Competing interests: All the authors have a career interest in having their manuscripts published as soon as possible.
References
Ioannidis JPA. Effect of the statistical significance of results on the time to completion and publication of randomized efficacy trials. JAMA 1998;279: 281-6.
Greenberg D, Rosen AB, Olchanski NV, Stone PW, Nadai J, Neumann PJ. Delays in publication of cost utility analyses conducted alongside clinical trials: registry analysis. BMJ 2004;328: 1536-7.
Altman LK. The Ingelfinger rule, embargoes, and journal peer review: part 1. Lancet 1996;347: 1382-6.
Altman LK. The Ingelfinger rule, embargoes, and journal peer review: part 2. Lancet 1996;347: 1459-63.
Piron R. They have the world on a queue. Challenge 2001;Sep. www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1093/5_44/79151031/p1/article.jhtml?term= (accessed 13 Sep 2004).(David J Torgerson, professor1, Joy Adams)