Reflections and rants after three years of being a journal editor

Over the past three years I’ve served as an Editor for the American Joᴜrnαl of Traffic and Transportation Engineering¹ journal Microbial Genomics. Now my term has ended, here are some reflections on what I’ve learnt about the publishing process during my tenure from the editorial side. I hope this might be useful for authors and reviewers, especially earlier in their careers.

The journal

Microbial Genomics (‘MGen’) is run by the UK Microbiology Society, started in 2014, and I believe is doing rather well in terms of submissions.

I am a supporter, and I think I submit on average one paper per year there, and my first(ish) paper was published there. There’s plenty of high-quality research I read and cite in from the journal, and the review and editorial process seems to work well to stop anything poor being published.

Papers passing an initial quality screen by the editors (which mostly served to sift out total garbage, incomplete or non-novel work) would be sent to review. There was no explicit impact criteria beyond this, which made sense for this journal.

I handled 43 submissions in my three years, so on average a bit over one a month. It’s not a huge workload, but was not always evenly spread out. I would definitely recommend to any scientist to see this side of the publishing process at least once.

Advice for authors

On the submission system:

• For the editorial pre-screening, the letter to editor is really important. Stating clearly and succinctly what the paper shows, what you think its strengths and novelty are, and why it is in the journal scope are most important. I was surprised that some submissions don’t include one.
• I am sorry if the system is bad or annoying, the editors also struggle with many of the same issues! I think getting the basic information in quickly but accurately is most important. Do try and make sure your figures aren’t totally pixellated, and just submit a single PDF if you need to.
• Opposed reviewers: I would always honour these, but rarely seem to be used by most authors, and if they were used only listed a couple of individuals.
• Suggested reviewers. This may vary journal to journal (as some ask for at least 5/6), but one thing I didn’t realise is that due to scandals in lower quality journals these could be seen as conflicts. We would hesitate to use more than one of these.

On the review process:

• The journal/editors are not trying to catch you out or reject your paper!
• Most of the time the reviewers aren’t either. Bad reviews were very rare, and usually they were bad, it was due to a lack of detail rather than being outright wrong or rude. The editors will usually support you if you’ve gotten a bad faith review. There’s a distinction between a reviewer asking for more work you’d rather not do, and a reviewer that’s being rude or unfair to your work. The first isn’t a bad review.
• Actually address the comments, don’t just say no thank you or we know better. You can very easily tell when someone is just trying to get the paper to get past review with as little extra work as possible. The reviewers and editors are putting in their time for free which should be respected, and they are trying to help you and make your work better.
• You can push back against some comments which aren’t scientifically necessary, with evidence. ‘Beyond the scope of this paper’ isn’t enough without a good explanation/evidence of why.

Advice for reviewers

My thanks to all reviewers who spent time donating their insights for free! Generally I found that reviews were fair, helpful and end up improving the paper. Some advice for those newer to reviewing, which are actually more based on reviews I’ve seen at other journals:

• It’s not your paper, and the authors don’t need to have done it how you would have done. Focus on scientific correctness as essential comments, or clear improvements.
• Commenting on the title, figures, and abstract is useful.
• It’s fine to suggest additions that might be interesting, but mark them as optional.
• Bad reviews consist of: unclear advice; ‘do this’ when not necessary; ‘I would have done’; being very unkind; stalling the paper for personal gain; making multiple rounds of review, especially when over minor points.
• Good reviews: constructive, give examples or advice. Clear how problems might be addressed.
• If you would never accept the paper, don’t suggest revisions.
• If declining to review that’s totally fine, but it really helps to say why/give alternatives, and only takes a minute.
• It’s helpful to flag data access or code issues.
• The remarks to editor does not need to be used, but can be useful to ask questions about journal policies or note uncertainties.

It can be difficult if you fundamentally disagree with the authors and seem to have reached an impasse. In these cases, I think it is the editor’s job to adjudicate, or engage more reviewers to help do so.

Advice for other editors

Some things I learnt from the MGen process:

• Editors should make decisions, and go to second review very rarely, and almost never to third review or beyond. (I acknowledge that if you have a society journal where editors are subject experts this is possible; less so with professional editors across subject areas.) Editors completely delegating their decision to reviewers, especially those being difficult about certain points is very frustrating for authors, and often a waste of time for everyone.
• Editors should also provide advice or an overview about reviewer comments. It helps the authors a lot to note which need to be address and which could be optional.
• A quick check of the code and data availability is easy and useful to do.

The scientific publishing industry

Overall I think the scientific publishing system is struggling to cope with the volume of papers being submitted. It is harder to get reviewers, and we’re getting more review requests. Metrics are bullshit, and the prestige of journals is subjective and maintained by people with vested interests in the current system. Private companies are extracting huge profits from public and charity money.

What’s the solution? I don’t know, but there are two obvious things that help. Firstly, submit your work as a preprint. This is probably the only truly innovative thing that’s happened in scientific publishing in recent years. Secondly, support your society journals (like MGen). Then the fees are at least going back into your research community rather than the pockets of disinterested investors, enabling meetings, student grants, workshops and various other benefits.

Open access

Some analysis that mandated open access has made some problems worse, generally increasing fees over the previous subscription model, and further increasing the profits of the publishing industry as costs are still entirely bourne by institutions and funders. But don’t forget that open access has let more people read our work. This is really important, and sometimes easy to forget when we work somewhere which automatically grants us access.

As a final moan, even as someone who has broad access to scientific papers through their employer, it’s often a struggle just to get the PDF. I particularly dislike that Elsevier/sciencedirect have now added cloudflare and captcha to all of their PDFs, so we get to solve ever more stupid image puzzles to read research. It also serves to block the auto-download of papers by reference managers, which was maybe the point. Modern life is terrible!

But at least if your article is on PMC we can all read it without doing one of these bloody things: