It Takes a Megalopolis to Relaunch a Journal: A Story of Gratitude

Abstract

From where I sit, the peer review process is not unlike the families described by Leo Tolstoy in his masterpiece Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We all know what the prevailing peer review process entails. A newly submitted manuscript is first subjected to editorial review and if deemed to satisfy editorial criteria in terms of scope and the significance of the findings, it is sent out for external review. External peer review usually involves several experts working on questions and systems that are similar or related to those discussed in the manuscript under consideration. These experts will read the work and provide editors and authors with a set of comments about the technical merit of the work and whether the insights obtained are likely to be viewed as important for the field. The editor will then evaluate the comments and reach a decision, usually in consultation with an editorial team and often in additional consultation with the reviewers.The goal of every editor is to publish scientific results that not only advance the science but are reliable, reproducible, and ready for follow up. In some cases, the reviewers have a unified positive view of a study, and the editors, authors, and reviewers become a part of one happy family. But there are also those cases in which this unity of opinions does not materialize, and the reviewers, editors, and authors find themselves at odds with each other. Based on my experience, every “unhappy” peer review outcome is indeed “unhappy in its own way.”As the editor, my focus is first and foremost on science and not on degrees of individual happiness. However, I do recognize and revere the fact that science is done and peer reviewed by passionate and driven people who invest huge amounts of blood, sweat, and tears into their own research and then more time, energy, and intellect in evaluating the research of others. So, when we started talking about re-launching Chemistry & Biology as Cell Chemical Biology and rethinking our scope and criteria for what it takes for a piece of scientific work to be a strong candidate for publication in the new journal, we also began to discuss how this change would affect our authors and reviewers. Because we wanted to strengthen the journal and make it more influential and engaging, very early on we realized that we couldn’t do it alone. Not only did we need to clearly communicate our revised standards and scope to our authors, we also wanted to enlist the help of our reviewers in making the process of putting Cell Chemical Biology on a new and exciting trajectory a true collaboration between us and the chemical biology community.Although the first issue of Cell Chemical Biology came out in January 2016, the outreach and reviewer and author engagement began around September 2015. We did this because we wanted our community to be aware of the plans to relaunch the journal, and because we were keen to gather feedback, suggestions, concerns, and expectations. We also wanted to let the authors who were submitting their work in the last few months of 2015 know that those papers were being evaluated with revised standards in mind and to ask the reviewers refereeing those manuscripts to apply our updated criteria.It became obvious that we had to be very clear on what we wanted our reviewers to keep in mind as they evaluated potential candidates for publication in Cell Chemical Biology. After a great deal of discussion, internal and external, we decided to frame our criteria in the form of the following questions that we hoped our reviewers would help us answer. (1) Is the paper technically solid and reported at the level at which other labs can use and reproduce the findings? (2) Is this paper among the top 10% of papers you reviewed over the last 1–2 years in this field? (3) Would you label it as “must read” for your lab's journal club or suggest it to colleagues and collaborators? (4) Do the reported findings change your view of the field? (5) Are you looking forward to seeing this work published? Finally, for Resource articles, we also started asking whether the authors present a new, innovative way to tackle important biological questions and provide compelling evidence that their approach will yield significant improvements over what is already out there.We made it clear that we don't expect specific answer, but that we hoped these questions would help reviewers frame their thinking and help them reset their bar. Many of our reviewers had been reviewing for Chemistry & Biology, and we wanted to make sure that they were on board with what we were trying to achieve with Cell Chemical Biology. We also wanted to extend our scope and emphasize the biological relevance of the work published in Cell Chemical Biology, which means that we have been enlisting help from many new reviewers, and these questions help them understand better what the journal is all about. Finally, chemical biology is a young field, with many early career researchers just stepping into it. We want to welcome them into the journal's family both as reviewers and authors, and we are sensitive that part of the career development needs of early career researchers revolve around how to navigate the peer review process and be a constructive reviewer.In addition to clarifying the criteria and prompting reviewers to think a bit differently about how to evaluate Cell Chemical Biology papers, we also wanted the entire peer review process to be more collaborative and open and more rewarding for our reviewers. Therefore, we decided to not only allow reviewers to see each other's comments once they've completed their assignment, but also to make our editorial decision letters open to the reviewers. This means that each reviewer receives notification of when the editorial decision is made as well as instructions on how to access comments from other reviewers and the editorial decision letter. However, we don’t stop there. In addition to thanking the reviewers for their efforts and advice, we also ask them for feedback. We ask them to let us know what their experience reviewing for Cell Chemical Biology was like and whether they thought our editorial and peer review process was fair, constructive, and clear. We ask our reviewers to let us know if there is anything that we can do to make reviewing easier and better.It’s been a year since we introduced some of these changes, and we are gratified by the response from the reviewers and the authors. As we push on to improve Cell Chemical Biology and to make a difference in the fascinating field of chemical biology, we continue to consider Cell Chemical Biology an ongoing collaboration among us, our authors, and our reviewers. Although we can’t publish every paper that is submitted to us, we can and do work relentlessly to create a more open and friendly environment in which scientists who we interact with feel respected and engaged, regardless of whether the final publishing decision is a positive one. My hope is that even those authors and reviewers who think that the outcome on a manuscript should have been different walk away feeling that the experience was beneficial and that Cell Chemical Biology is a journal worth supporting.