The stressful life of an editor from a non-predatory journal

Abstract

I hope that the title has caught your attention and perhaps intrigued you. Well, if you are an editor, you may well agree with most of my comments and most certainly have your own set of challenging issues. Thus, I hope you can read this and share your thoughts on social media or with your own editorials.

Am I complaining of being an editor? No, I am certainly not! This is one of the most enjoyable activities I took and despite all challenges that naturally are presented to me, most of the time it is good fun and rewarding. Taking part in the process of publishing someone else's work is terrific. When I see the finalized journal issue, I get—if possible—as excited as the authors, especially if their work is well received, commented, and seen by our scientific community. So, yes, I am totally happy as editor for Annals of Applied Biology.

I want to tell you a little bit more about Annals. In brief, it is a well-known journal with an excellent reputation within the scientific community, particularly among folks focusing broadly on agriculture. And it is not because one or another metric I affirm that. Annals (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17447348) is a 109 years old journal, which published its first issue in May 1914 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17447348/1914/1/1) opening with the editorial by Maxwell-Lefroy (see Maxwell-Lefroy, 1914; The Annals of Applied Biology—https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-7348.1914.tb05406.x). The Centenary was celebrated in 2014 and in the first issue of that year we included a historical view of the journal (Azevedo et al., 2014—https://doi.org/10.1111/aab.12093). We revisited the work published and asked a few colleagues to write about some of the topics that left their mark in the journal in the previous 100 years and how they evolved, advanced. Our mission does not focus on metrics, numbers, or anything like that, but on the impact of what we publish. Annals is published by Wiley (https://www.Wiley.com/en-us), which is endorsing the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). The overarching goal of DORA is to shift emphasis away from journal-based metrics, toward article level metrics and individual author contribution. This supports a broader, more equitable view of research impact. Moreover, Annals is owned by the Association of Applied Biologists (AAB—https://www.aab.org.uk), a learned society and charity focused across many areas of Applied Biology. This partnership between AAB and Wiley has been very positive for the journal.

The COVID-19 pandemic was really something that shook the world and put us all to test in many different ways. What we easily noticed was a major increase in submissions during 2020–2021, followed by a reduction in 2022, while 2023 up to April is showing a similar trend to 2022. Was this a general trend, also observed for other journals? Perhaps, but what is really bothering me is that we are having to make an extra effort to make sure we are not confused with predatory journals and publishers. I am not going to tell you how they operate because we all know, but for ~100 USD you can get a paper published within a week without any revision at all. We are bombarded with messages on a daily basis to submit papers and to join the editorial board of very suspicious journals and publishers. That may be confusing for the young author who needs to be advised and warned about these predatory practices. Moreover, the negative impact of such publications is huge, affecting the entire publication system and the society.

Another challenge in 2023, which does not surprise me at all, is the extensive discussion on social media (and among colleagues) about the publication fees for Open Access (OA) journals, some of them astronomical, unrealistic if I may say. Open Access can give everybody advantages because we all can freely read about science, but often people from some parts of the world cannot afford to publish their own results because of the article processing charges (APCs).

Now I come to some points raised from these heated discussions about publication fees and Open Access. The first one is obvious: Reviewers! Oh dear, reviewers, as once put by Igor Chirikov ‘Peer review in academia is a story of love and hate’—but reviewers are ‘invisible heroes in science’ (Schiermeier, 2017). That seems to be the feeling among many, and growing especially when reviewing papers for Open Access journals, which are charging hefty fees and not paying any money for the refereeing work that has to be done. It is also amazing that many Open Access journals are producing special issues with guest editors inviting authors, who still have to pay for the publication of their work, or in some cases getting a small, most of the time, insignificant discount.

The other point is … reviewers, again! The huge number of new journals, publishers and researchers are leading to major increases in articles published and thus, for reviewers to do the work of analysing the submissions. What I have noticed, and I am here also sharing the view of some of my fellow Annals' editors and colleagues from other journals, is that we are having to invite 2 to 3-times more people than we used to, in order to get two reports for a manuscript. I do not recall the last time I invited less than 10 people to get two positive responses. In the same way, the increased number of submissions and the time taken to edit the manuscripts, are taking a burden on our editors. We have invited new editors to join the board especially after a good number of them resigned in recent years, but still, it is very frustrating the task of finding reviewers willing to do the work.

Having said that, I must stress that Annals is a subscription journal, so there are no fees! YES!!! If your work is accepted, it will be published for free. You will only pay an Open Access fee if it is of your choice to have your article published as Open Access. Moreover, some articles are published Free Access with no costs for the authors, for instance, when they are published in special issues. Furthermore, Wiley has established agreements with countries, such as Germany and Italy, and if an author affiliated to one of these countries publishes in a hybrid journal, their APCs are covered.

Some authors are also to blame for some of the problems. Ok, not a good idea the previous comment since we may be losing authors now! No, we are not losing authors! Listen to me: as authors, when we submit our work, someone has to review it, and normally we are thankful because reviewers can truly help us to make our articles better in so many ways. So, each of us has to do their share of reviewing too! This one next example, that is an exception, illustrates what I am saying: One author in our records has submitted 10 papers to Annals over the years, with a 30% acceptance rate. Guess how many times was this author invited to referee manuscripts for Annals, and how many times did this author accept to do it? Seven and zero, respectively! And it gets worse because for all 7 invitations this author did not even reply saying ‘no’, that typical ‘No Response’ in the system. Are we looking different at them? No, because it is our duty to consider all submissions without any type of prejudice. Ethical issues are not negotiable and we will always give our best to make sure we keep Annals a journal publishing good science and respecting everyone involved, from the author to the reader. It is important to bear in mind that most authors do their job and contribute reviewing papers, but this big demand may be putting many authors away from the reviewing part. From my own experience, I receive some 3–5 requests a day to review manuscripts.

Not always the ‘submission to publication’ process is an easy road free of hurdles, problems. We are facing a higher rate of issues, which we are trying to keep close to zero. Finally, a note to authors that (a) all submissions to Annals over the last few years are being checked for plagiarism, and (b) the new Research Exchange (ReX) submission platform system has been implemented by Wiley, and so far, it is looking good (see more about it and other recent actions in the editorial: Azevedo, 2023). In Figure 1, I share with you the time taken to submit this editorial for consideration in Annals. The experience was very positive, but research and other types of manuscripts will obviously take longer.

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