Editorial Policy Statements Approved by the CSE Board of Directors

Editorial Policy Statements Approved by the CSE Board of Directors

1. Policy on Responsibilities and Rights of Editors of Peer-Reviewed Journals
Responsibility for Quality of Content
Editors' Responsibilities to Authors
Editors' Responsibilities to Readers
Editors' Responsibilities to Peer Reviewers
Editor's Rights
2. Policy on Journal Access to Scientific Data
3. Policy of Journal Referral of Possible Misconduct
4. Conflicts of Interest and the Peer Review Process
5. Relations between Editors and their Publishing or Sponsoring Societies
6. Responsibilities and Rights of Peer Reviewers

1. Policy on Responsibilities and Rights of Editors of Peer-Reviewed Journals

Journal editors--including both editors-in-chief and others, such as subject-matter editors, who share in making policy decisions --are responsible for ensuring that the content of their publications is of high quality: accurate, valid, reliable, credible, authoritative, relevant to the journal's scope and mission, readable, and comprehensible. Because young scientists are rarely subject to the long-term mentoring by senior scientists that formerly provided unwritten guidance on science publishing, journal editors are now expected to supply explicit expectations for communicating science in their journals. These expectations cover topics such as authorship, conflict of interest, ethical principles, etc. Editors must treat all submitted material fairly, consistently, and in a timely manner, avoiding bias, conflict of interest, and external pressure in making editorial decisions. In meetingvthese obligations, editors have specific responsibilities to authors, readers, and peer reviewers. Meeting all the obligations--which sometimes compete against one another--and handling the demands of other individuals and groups (such as the owners, publishers, advertisers, news media, and government agencies), requires that the editor must have editorial freedom, based on both authority and autonomy.

What are the journal editor's responsibilities?

Responsibility for Quality of Content

Editors rely on a variety of skills and resources as well as the knowledge and skills of others to ensure high-quality content in their publications. The senior editorial decision maker (often called "the Editor-in-Chief" or just "the Editor") requires personal expertise in and knowledge of the journal's subject. Most journal editors are chosen for outstanding contributions to their disciplines rather than for what they know about publishing. However, sometimes previous publication and editorial-board experience, understanding of scientific methods and statistics, and critical analytic skills may make a scientist more suitable to serve as editor of the journal than would a similar scientist without that publication experience, but with greater stature in their particular scientific discipline.

Editors are responsible for selecting papers that are new, original, important contributions to knowledge; present valid and repeatable results in sufficient detail for readers to assess the validity of the inferences drawn; are logically consistent, and refer appropriately to previous work. Whether or not journal editors are experts in a journal's specific field, they should be able to rely on the expertise of editorial staff, advisors, and peer reviewers. The number and commitment of these varies with the size of the journal, but they can help decide journal policies, recruit and review manuscripts, write editorials, and perhaps serve as editors for specific journal departments. The editor also relies on peer reviewers, experts in the disciplines of the submitted manuscripts, to provide critical assessments of their accuracy, reliability, and validity. Editors also rely on assistant editors and copy editors to improve the substantive and technical nature of accepted papers, making sure they are grammatically correct, consistent in style and usage, accurate, and readable.

Editors are responsible for clearly defining and implementing the journal's ethical standards (e.g. regarding duplicate publication, ethical standards in research, etc.) The editor, although responsible for monitoring for possible failures to meet its ethical standards, is NOT responsible for investigating, judging, or punishing the author for these lapses. CSE has recommended that each journal have a policy on the editor's responsibility for notifying an author's institution of failure to comply with the journal's ethical standards. Additionally, the editor has a responsibility to inform readers and secondary services of work formally found to be plagiarized, fabricated, or falsified.

Editors are responsible for establishing procedures to help maintain journal quality, identify errors and problems, detect trends that reflect a deterioration in quality, and implement corrective actions as needed. Errors in published articles require publishing a correction or erratum. Editors should monitor the number and types of errors that appear in their journals; a formal, retrospective, qualitative review of each issue helps editors monitor the quality of their journals. This review can be as simple as passing a copy of the journal to all of the people responsible for editorial content and production and asking each of them to mark criticisms and suggestions on the copy for all to see.

Editors are also responsible for monitoring editorial processing and production timelines (turn-around times for every stage from manuscript receipt to publication). Processing data and trends can help editors monitor acceptance and rejection rates of specific types of manuscripts, manage the inventory of accepted manuscripts, track reviewer performance, and assess staffing needs. Some journals publish annual editorial audits, which include the total number of manuscripts submitted, an acceptance rate, and the average turn-around time for all manuscripts whether they are accepted for publication or rejected. This information helps fulfil some of the editor’s responsibilities to readers listed below. Including the dates of manuscript receipt and acceptance when an article is published also gives authors and readers useful information.

Finally, editors are responsible for complying with the guidelines and procedures of their sponsoring organization, including any terms specified in their contract with that organization. This includes operating the journal in a fiscally responsible manner and adhering to the agreed-upon publication schedule.

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Editors' Responsibilities to Authors

Editors are responsible for:

• Treating authors with fairness, courtesy, objectivity, and honesty.
• Rendering timely decisions and responses to authors' queries.
• Protecting the integrity and privileged nature of every author's work.
• Setting and monitoring a policy on conflict of interest for authors, editors and reviewers.
• Describing a process for author appeals.
• Describing a process for responding to allegations of misconduct by authors.
• Providing guides for preparing and submitting manuscripts.
• Selecting appropriate and knowledgeable peers to review each paper sent out for review, and guiding the peer review process.
• Providing standards for peer reviewers, including maintaining confidentiality of manuscripts, setting appropriate deadlines, and supplying references to document their criticisms of the paper's shortcomings.
• Monitoring and ensuring the fairness, timeliness, thoroughness, and civility of peer review editorial processes.

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Editors' Responsibilities to Readers

Editors are responsible for:

• Maintaining the quality of the journal's content by ensuring that each article provides the evidence readers need to evaluate the authors' conclusions so readers can trust what is printed.
• Requiring all authors to review and accept responsibility for the content of the final draft of each paper; this may involve signatures of only the corresponding author, or all authors.
• Maintaining the journal's internal integrity (for example, separating or otherwise identifying science content, editorials, and advertising).
• Disclosing sources (authorship, ownership, funding, and so on).
• Distinguishing objective peer-reviewed research and reviews from opinion, and editorial content from advertising and other promotional content.
• Providing a correspondence section to allow reader response and debate (highly recommended although not mandatory).
• Creating mechanisms to determine if the journal is providing what readers need and want (e.g. reader surveys).

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Editors' Responsibilities to Peer Reviewers

Editors are responsible for:

• Assigning papers for review appropriate to the reviewers' area of interest and expertise.
• Allowing reviewers appropriate time to complete their reviews.
• Providing reviewers written explicit instructions regarding the journal’s expectations for the content, quality, and timeliness of their reviews
• Providing guides and standards for reviewers (preferably in written form) that promote thoughtful, fair, constructive, and informative reviews and facilitate the efficient, timely, handling of the papers.
• Finding ways to recognize the contribution of reviewers, for example, by publicly thanking them in the journals pages from time to time, providing letters that might be used in applications for academic promotion, etc.

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What are the journal editor's rights?

Editor's Rights

To establish and maintain high-quality journal content, an editor should have the right at the beginning of his or her employment to receive an explicit written statement from the journal’s publisher that defines the editor’s rights and autonomy. The editor's right to editorial freedom should be supported by the following to be agreed upon by both editor and publisher:

• A journal mission statement.
• Written editorial priorities.
• Written editorial policies.
• A written job description, specifically detailing components of editorial freedom regarding control over acceptance and publication of original content, degree of control over advertising content, etc.
• An editorial board that is appointed by, and reports to, the editor.
• Direct lines of communication with the publisher, owner, or both.
• Sufficient support from the parent society, publisher, owner, or other journal sponsor in both funding and staff to carry out the journal's stated mission.
• Preferably, a mechanism for regular and objective evaluation of editor performance by the publisher or sponsoring organization.

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2. Policy on Journal Access to Scientific Data

Thorough peer review may require access to data and analyses that are not provided in a submitted manuscript, and sometimes such access is needed after publication as well. Editors should establish policies on access that address the following issues.

Organizations that sponsor research should encourage the publication of the results and should provide access to data if requested by journals for the purpose of peer review. Sponsoring organizations may limit access to data by others both during the research and after it is concluded, but should have no right to control the dissemination or interpretation of the results of the research and should provide access to any data needed for peer review.

Submission of an original article to a journal should carry with it the implied consent to provide access to data if needed for editorial evaluation and peer review. Journals should also have the right to review data on which manuscripts are based after publication, should questions arise regarding the validity of the work or of errors in it. This right of journals of access to data should be expressly stated by editors as part of their published editorial policies and in their guidelines for authors.

Editors should request access to data for the sole purpose of evaluating a manuscript for publication or in the case of a challenge to the validity of a work after publication. Editors, reviewers, and journal staff have a responsibility to keep the data confidential and not to use it for their own purposes in any way, or otherwise directly benefit from their access to the data that results from their role in the peer review process.

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3. Policy of Journal Referral of Possible Misconduct

Concerns of possible scientific misconduct are often expressed first to the editors of a journal concerning a manuscript which is under consideration or has already been published. Many journals do not have a consistent policy for handling such complaints. All journals should consider developing such a policy, and including in their information for authors a statement similar to the following:

"Should possible scientific misconduct or dishonesty in research submitted for review be suspected or alleged, this journal reserves the right to forward any submitted manuscript to the sponsoring or funding institution or other appropriate authority for investigation. This journal recognizes the responsibility to ensure that the question is appropriately pursued, but does not undertake the actual investigation or make determinations of misconduct. (Uniform Requirements Ann Int Med 1997 126(1):45)."

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4. Conflicts of Interest and the Peer Review Process

Objective

To offer guidelines useful to biomedical journals as they develop policies and procedures relating to conflict of interest in peer review.

Definition

A widely used American dictionary (Webster's 9th New Collegiate Dictionary) defines conflict of interest as a "conflict between the private interests and the official responsibilities of a person in a position of trust." In scientific publishing, the author of a manuscript, the reviewer, and the editor are all persons "in a position of trust."

Conflicts of interest in the publishing can be defined as sets of conditions in which an author, editor, or reviewer holds conflicting or competing interests that could result in bias or improper decisions. The conflicts of interest may only be potential conflicts of interest or only perceived, and not necessarily even potential, conflicts.

The determination of whether a conflict of interest actually exists can be extraordinarily difficult and often contentious. Recognizing the potential for conflicts of interest is usually easier; they are common and it is not their existence, but rather their potential to cause bias and failure to acknowledge or recognize conflicts, that causes concern. Such failure, which reflects an insensitivity to the potential for conflict of interest, is troubling, whether it is observed in an author, a reviewer, or an editor.

Ideally, authors are completely objective in presenting their findings, and editors and reviewers are entirely objective in evaluating them. These processes are all prey to biases. Personal, political, financial, academic, or religious considerations can affect objectivity in innumerable ways. The challenge for authors, editors, and reviewers is to recognize the potential for biases arising from conflicts of interest and to respond appropriately.

Financial Conflicts

The most evident type of potential conflict of financial interest is the situation in which a commercial product is under study and the author, reviewer, or editor stands to benefit financially if the assessment of the product goes one way or another. For example, an author reporting investigation of a specific product, at the same time he or she holds equity positions or stock options in the company that makes the products, clearly has the potential to realize direct financial gain if the assessment is favorable. A researcher in the employ of a for-profit enterprise has a slightly less direct relationship to product-related research, but still can reasonably expect to benefit financially if a product does well. In these examples, an individual's "private interests" (i.e., his or her financial interests) are potentially in conflict with his or her "official responsibilities" (i.e., the responsibility of a scientist to seek the truth).

The situation in which an investigator studies a product of a for-profit enterprise from which the investigator has received monies previously (e.g., as a consultant or in the form of an honorarium or speaking fee) is slightly different. There is now no direct relationship between the evaluation and any personal gain the investigator may anticipate. Nevertheless, the existence of payments even in the past could conceivably influence research and must therefore be regarded as having the potential to present conflicting interest.

The examples given above involve authors reporting the results of their research, non-research articles, reviews, and opinion pieces, but they could just as well involve reviewers evaluating a manuscript or editors deciding whether or not to accept a manuscript. There are some subtle differences among authors, reviewers, and editors with respect to conflict of financial interest, but the basic principles apply to all.

Some journals refuse to consider manuscripts describing research involving a commercial product when the research was supported financially by a commercial organization involved in the manufacture or sale of the product. A few journals will not permit editorials or review articles to be authored by individuals with potential conflicts of financial interest, feeling that these pieces rely especially heavily on interpretation and judgment, and thereby make conflict of interest and the potential for bias especially problematic.

Non-Financial Conflicts

Many considerations - intellectual, political, academic, and religious, to mention just a few - can represent "private interests." The challenge for authors, reviewers, and editors is to recognize the potential for these types of conflicts as well as those involving finances, and respond appropriately. Complete objectivity is not often possible, but fairness and even-handedness can reasonably be expected. For example, a reviewer strongly opposed to abortion, on religious or other moral grounds, might have difficulty evaluating a manuscript describing the use of fetal tissue in research in an objective matter. Or an editor who is also chair of a department might have difficulty in reaching objective decisions about manuscripts submitted by his or her faculty because the editor has a "private interest" as a chair in helping the academic advancement of his faculty.

Disclosure

The key to recognizing and dealing with conflicts of interest - financial or non-financial - is disclosure: disclosure to the editor when a manuscript is submitted, and disclosure to the reader when a paper is published. The former provides a means for the manuscript to be evaluated by the editor with full knowledge of all its circumstances, and the latter assures that the reader will have sufficient information to interpret the work appropriately.

Disclosure of potential financial conflicts of interest is meant to maintain the integrity of professional judgment and to maintain the public's confidence in professional judgment. A disclosure does not infer that scientists are unduly influenced by financial gain. Rather, disclosure in such cases gives readers the information to allow them to make an informed decision because it is often difficult to determine when research has been inappropriately influenced by financial gain. Informing readers is the responsibility of the journal. Some, however, would argue that mandatory financial disclosure actually does not allow a manuscript to be judged solely on its merits. They believe that such disclosure is based on the faulty assumption that only financial considerations influence authors and that all authors are influenced. They further believe that such disclosure unfairly prejudices the reader against the author. See Rothman J.J. Conflict of Interest: the New McCarthyism in Science. JAMA 1993; 269:2782-2784.