Abstract
A team of stakeholders in biomedical publishing recently proposed a set of core competencies for journal editors, as a resource that can inform training programs for editors and ultimately improve the quality of the biomedical research literature. This initiative, still in its early stages, would benefit from additional sources of expert information. Based on our experiences as authors’ editors, we offer two suggestions on how to strengthen these competencies so that they better respond to the needs of readers and authors – the main users of and contributors to research journals. First, journal editors should be able to ensure that authors are given useful feedback on the language and writing in submitted manuscripts, beyond a (possibly incorrect) blanket judgement of whether the English is “acceptable” or not. Second, journal editors should be able to deal effectively with inappropriate text re-use and plagiarism. These additional competencies would, we believe, be valued by other stakeholders in biomedical research publication as markers of editorial quality.
Highlights
A team of stakeholders in biomedical publishing recently proposed a set of core competencies for journal editors, as a resource that can inform training programs for editors and improve the quality of the biomedical research literature
We added a phrase in the fifth paragraph to note the lack of agreed-upon academic qualifications or CC for authors’ editors
We added a sentence in the sixth paragraph to note that there are opportunities for journal editors to refer EAL researcher-authors to appropriately skilled authors’ editors, and corrected a typo in this paragraph
Summary
Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. While working with authors on manuscripts, authors’ editors sometimes encounter re-used text and inadequate citation, and use these opportunities to explain why these practices may be inappropriate and how to avoid them[25] These individual efforts are not enough to stop the global spread of plagiarism in published research, which journal editors may inadvertently facilitate if they do not check manuscripts carefully enough before publication. Manuscript rejection based solely on the percentage of non-original text can, in our experience, alienate well-meaning authors from journals that use this criterion These are just two of the areas where authors’ editors can provide valuable input for future efforts to define and refine CC for biomedical journal editors. Grant information The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work
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