The multiple faces of journal peer review

Reaching out for scientific legacy: how to define authorship in academic publishing

“…There are now many ways of publicising scientific discoveries, ranging from the print media to electronic publishing such as video documentary or voice podcast, all of which seek to preserve knowledge beyond human lifetime. Still, the principal way of preserving scientific discoveries for the future is the scientific article published in peerreviewed a scientific journal (Kronick, 1990;Riisgård, 2000;Thatje, 2010). For the sake of this essay, I will hereafter refer to the peer reviewed scientific article as the Bpaper^.…”

“…The number of authors on a paper is often driven by the impact factor (or quality) of the journal in which the article is published. Journals that have a high impact factor, which is based on the mean number of citations each article received (Riisgård, 2000;Thatje, 2010), tend to have greater influence on directing a research area. Authorship of any such article is therefore more desirable.…”

Moving forward: change of journal title and continuous article publishing

“…Discussions of whether a title change would improve the journal's competitiveness internationally have been frequent over the past few years (Thatje 2009(Thatje , 2010. The journal's manuscript submission statistics clearly indicate a global recruitment of scholarly works to the journal; over the past 5 years alone, submissions from about 80 countries have been received.…”

The economics of creative research

“…A few funding agencies, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the European Research Council and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute [1,3], have responded by developing funding schemes to support long‐term and individual‐oriented research, and to give researchers more freedom, independence and the means to “venture into the unknown” [2]. Scientific journals, societies and academies have also expressed opposition to research and knowledge‐rating by evaluation agencies, whilst a range of articles [3,7,8,9] have criticized the non‐specialized super‐expertise relied on by ratings agencies, as well as the lack of critical and creative thought used in their activities and the deleterious effects of science metrics and benchmarking.…”