As of autumn 2021, we are offering online courses using Gather. The first sessions have now taken place, and I’m happy to report that Gather works really well! There are great advantages over Zoom or other video conferencing tools.

Read more below, and get in touch to talk about running a writing and publishing course in your institution!

The story so far

I have written about proximity chat systems like Gather already, and I’ve been investigating how they could be used  in our training. Since early in 2021 we have been offering informal sessions in Spatial Chat or Gather at the end of Zoom sessions, so that course participants have a chance to chat more informally with us and each other.

Until summer 2021, Gather wasn’t quite ready for use as the main platform for a course: it didn’t work in many browsers and quite a few people had technical problems. But it has improved very rapidly, to the point that I feel confident offering it to clients as the course platform.

Our first tries

In May 2021 we commissioned ReuniVous, a company specialising in Gather spaces, to design a Cofactor training centre. I’m over the moon with the space they created – it has everything we could need and it looks amazing. I feel like Cofactor now owns a large building, at a tiny fraction of the cost of a real building!

As you can see in the video, recorded in the Cofactor Gather Training Centre, the course takes place in one of the two classrooms. When participants arrive they can mingle and talk to each other before the course starts, and can even get a coffee (or at least view a gif of one being poured). They can look out of the classroom windows and see the view.

Then, when it is time to start the session, the trainers stand on a podium. There they can be seen and heard by everyone in the room. They ask the participants to sit at tables, which are private spaces: this means that anyone on a table can chat with others on that table without disturbing the whole class.

The trainers can share their screens and go through slides or other materials, just as they would on Zoom. There is no faffing around with breakout rooms to put participants into small groups – it is already done, using the tables.

Whole group discussions can be done in several ways. Participants can put their electronic hands up, and a trainer can ‘spotlight’ someone. Spotlighting means that that person can be seen and heard by everyone in the room. Alternatively, participants can walk their avatars to a separate podium, where they are automatically spotlit.

We have added a whiteboard at each table for participants to work on, and to play with! They can write or draw and see what others on the same table have done, while they are talking. We tried this out for exercises involving rewriting sentences, and the participants liked it a lot.

Gather makes courses less tiring and more fun. Instead of a wall of faces looking at you the whole time, you get a nice view of a virtual classroom and just a few people’s videos. You can have informal conversations, and there is more variety of activities. The course material is just the same, with the same valuable tips and expert teaching that you expect from Cofactor.

When the participants leave the classroom, they can explore the rest of the space. They can go into the library, where the course videos and handouts are all available (we are also hosting these on Moodle, as a backup). They can also hang out in the cafe, garden or pub. If they want, they can come into the space between live course sessions to go through the material, and they can talk to others who may be doing the same.

The future

I think courses in Gather are going to be much more enjoyable than courses on Zoom (though we are of course still offering them in Zoom). As Gather matures further and adds features, more possibilities will open up. I’ll update this article as we gain more experience.

Get in touch now to talk about running courses for your researchers in Gather – I’ll be happy to show you around and explain further how it works.

This article is based on a blog post from March 2021 by Anna Sharman, updated July 2021.

Are you sick of Zoom?  Yes, it’s great for some things, invaluable even. All Cofactor courses currently use Zoom, and it has made it possible for us to connect with participants and enable them to discuss and work together.

But you may, like me, have experienced this frustrating feeling: you see a friend on a Zoom call and you really want to talk to them without everyone else hearing. But the only way to reach them is in a private message, and sometimes not even that. If this was an in-person meeting you would catch them as they are walking out of the door and have a quick word. But that’s not possible in Zoom, is it?

In Cofactor’s online courses, Zoom breakout rooms help get participants talking, but I wanted to offer something more. You attend a course not just to learn from the trainer, but also to meet other participants and learn from them, get to know them, find new mentors. Breakout room discussions aren’t enough for that – you need a chance for one to one conversations with the people you choose to have them with.

It’s the same for bigger groups. Online conferences have so far been series of webinars, where you just turn your camera off (and probably your brain too) and let the speaker drone on while you get on with your emails. I go to conferences for the networking, to make new contacts, get the gossip that isn’t being talked about on the main stage, even make friends. And don’t get me started on Zoom parties – they just about work if the only person who gets to talk is the one whose birthday or leaving do it is, but they are no fun at all.

What is the solution to this? Since 2020, a few startups have been working busily on the problem, and come up with a new type of software called proximity chat.

What is proximity chat?

A proximity chat platform is a two-dimensional online space in which each person has an ‘avatar’ representing them. Avatars can move around the space, and when your avatar gets near to someone else’s, you can hear and see them on video. When you move away, you no longer hear them. This means that a large number of people can be in the room at once, but they can talk in pairs or small groups, rather than everyone having to listen to one person at once. And if you’re in a conversation that you aren’t enjoying or that has too many people in it, you can move away and find another.

As soon as I heard about proximity chat, I realised it was what I had been missing. The ‘mingling’ part of conferences, the informality of parties, going into a corner for a gossip with your friend – all this can now be replicated online.

So I’ve been trying out various systems in various situations, including as a way of providing a virtual ‘coffee room’ for Cofactor’s online courses. Course participants have valued the chance so far to ask me and the other trainers questions one to one and to chat informally with each other.

The platforms differ in quite a lot of ways, and different ones will suit different people and purposes. Below is a summary of how they compare, and I’ve also tabulated their features in a Google Sheet.

My new favourite: Gather

Gather was the first proximity chat system I tried. It is great fun and has far more features than the others, but this means it takes quite a bit of work to set up compared with the other platforms.

If someone sends you a link to a Gather space, you click on it, check your camera and microphone settings and permissions. You can then type your name, and you can change the little ‘character’ that is your avatar if you like. You can choose from a selection of characters with different colours and styles of skin, hair and clothing, or you can do that later. Then you click ‘Join the Gathering’ to enter the space (no log-in is needed).

The background in Gather is like an old-school computer game, made up of a map of tiles. Your video is separate from your avatar and, like all of the platforms (and Zoom), you can switch off your video or mute yourself at any time. You use your keyboard arrow keys to move around. When you approach another avatar, their video appears at the top of your screen. As you move away from them, their voice gets quieter and their picture fainter, until they eventually disappear. There is a column on the left that shows either a participant list or the chat.

The space can be made up of multiple rooms joined by doors or portals. Within a room there can be private spaces, which are isolated from those ‘walking past’ nearby. This enables something unique to Gather (out of the platforms listed here): you can have a private conversation and no-one else can disturb you.

Text chat is pretty good: you can chat privately, to those near you and to everyone in the space (though not to everyone in one room). Participants can also share their screens, and multiple people can do this at once if they are in different places. Gather doesn’t currently work well on mobile devices or tablets, which I hope the developers will change soon. It works best on Google Chrome, but I’ve had no problems with Microsoft Edge or Safari.

Gather is reasonably easy to use as a participant in someone else’s space. However, both the power and the difficulty come when you want to set up your own space. The easiest place to start is with one of the many templates provided. Spaces can be big, with some replicating entire college campuses, beaches and castles.

You can embed websites, games and videos, and participants are prompted to press a key to interact with these when they get near. You can add a special ‘spotlight’ tile; when your avatar stands on it, you can talk to the whole room.

Having played around a bit, I decided to commission the experts ReuniVous to design a space for Cofactor. Watch out for more about this soon.

Easiest to use: Spatial Chat

Like most proximity chat systems but unlike Gather, in Spatial Chat your avatar has your video inside it.  The background is a photo or abstract pattern rather than a map. You move around by dragging your avatar with your mouse. If you click on another person’s name in the participant list you are instantly teleported to right next to them – or even on top of them, which can feel a bit weird!

As a space admin it is very easy to set up a new space – you don’t even need to do anything! There can be multiple rooms in a space. You can change the background image to one from a gallery or upload your own. You can ‘pin’ pictures or YouTube videos – the latter is great for having background noise or music, because people can move closer or further away depending on how loud they like it. I like to pin a video of waves breaking on a beach or birds singing in a woodland, which make the space really relaxing.

Participants can also share their screens, and the screen shows up wherever someone wants to put it, as big or small as the sharer wants. Luckily the admin can prevent others from doing this, as it could get rather chaotic! There is also a ‘megaphone’ so you can be heard by everyone within a room (but not between rooms). Hosts can ‘broadcast’ to all rooms at once, which is good for announcements.

One limitation of Spatial Chat is the lack of private text chat, and of the ability to send messages just to those near you. It would be good to be able to ‘nudge someone’s elbow’ to suggest moving away from a group for a private conversation, and sometimes you want to share a link with those you are talking to but not everyone in the space. Only Google Chrome is fully supported, but it works well enough on mobiles and tablets (though pinned videos aren’t always visible or audible), and on Microsoft Edge.

In February 2021 I attended  an online conference that used Spatial Chat as a networking space. It beautifully replicated the feeling of conference networking, especially as the organiser had used pictures of BMA House, London, where the conference usually takes place, as background images. Some rooms were used for workshops, where participants worked together in small groups to solve a problem (with shared Miro boards or Google docs). While not all conference delegates tried out the networking rooms, those who did seemed to find them an excellent opportunity.

For a while we were using Spatial Chat for networking with course participants, because of its simplicity, but the extra features in Gather have converted me back. ‘

Other platforms

I’ve gone into some detail about Spatial Chat and Gather as they seem the most mature platforms and illustrate the range of functionality that is currently available. But more platforms are appearing all the time, including the four below and a some more distantly related ‘table-based’ ones.

InSpace

InSpace is remarkably similar to Spatial Chat, but it is intended for educational institutions and has a few features that will be particularly useful there. There are more accessibility features, such as the ability to move around with your keyboard rather than a mouse, or pin someone’s video so that you can watch them signing. You can easily add breakout rooms within a room, where the audio is isolated from those outside them, and remove them with a click. Shared screens appear at the top of the screen, and it is assumed that only the teacher will do this. You can only have one room in a space at a time, with a maximum of 50 people in it. Also, anyone who joins your room has to set up an account, unlike most of the other platforms.

Wonder

Wonder looks like Spatial Chat at first glance, but instead of holding your avatar with your mouse to move it, you click where you want to go. You can define areas within your space with different labels, and the space can expand depending on how many people are in it (there is only one room in the space). It has chat facilities for private, groups near you and everyone. Conversations are held in ‘circles’ that can contain up to 15 people, and you can only hear the people in your circle.

Kumospace

Kumospace looks like a hybrid of Spatial Chat and Gather, in that your video (square not round) is in your avatar, but spaces are made up of rooms where you have an overhead view. Users can pour themselves a virtual drink, which automatically empties over the course of 10 minutes – this feels like a gimmick to me, but it may be a hint of more powerful functionality yet to come. There are only eight room templates, but as of June 2021 you can now customize rooms.

Topia

Like Gather, Topia has the video at the top of the screen, and your avatar is a little character, in this case a simple figure with no distinguishing features. The backgrounds are beautiful line drawings rather than photos or tiles. Admins can add a lot of features to spaces, such as ‘DJs’ that play music audible only when users are nearby. Topia could appeal to those with an artistic mind, and it seems to be aiming at the virtual festival market.

Table-based platforms

As well as the ‘map-based’ proximity-chat platforms described here, there are also ‘table-based’ ones in which people can jump from table to table and talk to those on their table. An example is Remo. See also this list of proximity chat platforms (compiled by Star Simpson and Devon Zuegel, as of mid-November 2020, not being updated).

Pricing

The platforms are experimenting with pricing systems, and many of them have been free in their initial development phase. Wonder and Kumospace are completely free at the moment. Gather is free for as many spaces as you like as long as you have fewer than 25 participants at a time, and you can book events for larger numbers. You can also pay monthly if you’d like to use Gather as a virtual office, as ReuniVous does. Spatial Chat has a free package that is currently quite generous but that might change soon. It measures ‘participant minutes’ and gives an upper limit per package, but any time with four or fewer participants in a space isn’t counted towards the limit. InSpace has pricing designed for large institutions, with annual fees from $1000 upwards and no free version, only a free trial (pricing information isn’t on the website; this was provided to me by a representative). Topia has a relatively good free offering and a ‘Community’ package with a much lower monthly payment than Spatial Chat.

Comparison table of proximity chat platforms

I’ve summarised some key differences between these platforms in this Google Sheet. Please let me know if you find any errors in it.

Conclusion

I really like Gather, Spatial Chat and InSpace. I was put off InSpace solely by their pricing, so that may be a good choice for educational institutions and large companies. The power of Gather, particularly the private spaces and infinitely customizable rooms, has led me to invest in a specially designed space, so we will be using Gather for courses, meetings and parties from now on. I still use Spatial Chat occasionally because it is so easy for users. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this fast-moving field generated exciting new players very soon.

This article is based on a blog post from July 2019 by Anna Sharman. All information was correct at the time of posting but may be superseded by the time you read it, not least by the pandemic. See the page on our values [link] for more on how we are working for equality and the planet.

Today I’m announcing a change in Cofactor’s ways of working. From now on, Cofactor is proud to be both an LGBTQ-friendly and environmentally friendly company. This means we will do our very best, even more than we do already, to accept everyone and to reduce our negative impact on the environment. I’m very excited about this and think it will make our training more effective.

Many companies are trying to market themselves like this nowadays, and sometimes it can look like ‘greenwashing’ or ‘rainbow-washing’, particularly just after ‘Pride month’. How is Cofactor different?

An environmentally friendly company

Most training companies have a large carbon footprint because they fly a lot. I have been aware of this ever since I started being a trainer, and in general I have not tried to market our workshops to locations where we would have to fly. I have flown once or twice a year, when it seemed essential. But I’ve always been concerned about climate change (which is now a climate crisis), and about the destruction of wildlife habitats. The School Strike for Climate and Extinction Rebellion have made me ask what more I do. I am a keen birdwatcher and keep hearing about bird numbers declining.

How could I live without the sound of swifts every summer, or the sight of herons on my local wetlands – especially if I could have done more to preserve their habitats?

As a company owner, I can influence not only my own lifestyle but also the way my company works. I’m not saying that Cofactor trainers are never going to fly to workshops, but from now on we will try very hard not to. As you can see in our statement of values, we will travel by train instead of flying and by bicycle or public transport instead of car, where possible.

Where this is not possible, we will charge extra and donate the difference to an environmental charity. We will also consider other ways to deliver training, such as online or by finding a local trainer to deliver our workshops.

There are other ways in which a company like Cofactor can cause or prevent environmental damage, including our use of plastic and paper and choice of food and drink. We will keep a close eye on how we can improve our record in these areas. We will also nudge our clients by asking them how they are doing in these areas. We will carefully research environmental charities to support as a company.

An LGBTQ-friendly company

What about the ‘LGBTQ-friendly’ bit? LGBTQ stands for lesbian, bisexual, gay, trans and queer. This is more personal to me. I am bisexual, and this has affected my career in science, publishing and business. Until now I have mostly kept my personal life separate from my professional life, but now I have decided to be more open, so as to better help our clients and workshop participants.

When I was a struggling postdoc in another country, my difficulties were not just to do with the lab work, or the fact I was a woman and a foreigner, but also because I had gone back into the closet. After coming out only a few years earlier, I no longer had the LGBTQ community around me. This added to my sense of isolation. Many other LGBTQ researchers have had similar experiences.

Knowing there were others like me would have helped me a lot at that time and later. When I returned to the UK I got involved with the bisexual community, particularly Bicon, where I heard about how others experience bisexuality. I have also learnt a lot about the experience of trans and non-binary people. I am grateful to them for making it possible for cis people like me to dress in less gender-defined ways.

So I now want to be open about my sexuality, so as to show LGBTQ people I work with that they aren’t alone. Our training is on writing and publishing, not on relationships, gender or sexuality. But I want everyone to be comfortable attending Cofactor workshops, however they present or whoever they are attracted to. We will respect people’s pronouns and try to get people’s names and pronouns right, and will apologise if we get this wrong.

Other kinds of diversity are important too. We can’t claim to be experts on other issues in the same way that we can on gender and sexuality, but we will try our best and keep learning about how other issues affect researchers. These include ethnicity, age, disability, nationality and immigration status, social class, income/wealth, and native language. Regarding the last of these, I am becoming more and more aware of how my privilege as a native English speaker has enabled my whole editing and training career, and I want to use that privilege for good and not exploit it or make assumptions about non-native speakers of English.

I’m excited about this change because it will enable Cofactor to help people more, and help me to feel I am doing my bit, however small, to avoid making the climate crisis worse. It will help improve the diversity and environmental credentials of our clients too! And it will mean that my personal and business life will be more integrated, so that I can be more myself in my professional capacity. I won’t be talking about my personal relationships, but being able to say that I’m bi here feels freeing.

I will be able to talk about my career history more openly, which may make my contributions to discussions on science careers more useful. I have given a few talks about my career at scientific institutions over the last few years (and written this for Vitae) and have enjoyed them a lot. So if you’d like me to talk at your careers day for STEM PhD students, postdocs or people in publishing, do get in touch!

Do also get in touch if you have any suggestions for how Cofactor can improve its environmental and EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) credentials or if you have any comments on this change in general. If you support this initiative, please say so! Especially on Twitter, where there is a wider audience.

Thank you for supporting Cofactor over the last five years, and here’s to the next five, ten or twenty years of learning and helping people!

 

In 2013 I wrote a blog post about the time it takes journals to make a decision on papers after peer review. Nine years later it is still one of my most popular posts, but it is now rather out of date. The following is an updated version.

In the original post I analysed the speeds of various journals. I then set up the Cofactor Journal Selector Tool to help researchers find this information. However, I have now decided to archive the tool as it required too many resources to keep it updated.

Elsevier journals all have ‘Journal Insights’ on their home pages, where you can get data on how quickly they have reviewed and published papers in recent years. I wish all publishers provided this information!

What affects review speed?

One conclusion from my 2012 analysis was that newer journals tend to be  faster. If they are, why might that be? One possible reason is that as the number of submitted papers goes up, the number of editors doesn’t always go up quickly enough, so the editors get overworked – whereas when a journal is new, the number of papers to handle per editor may be lower.

It is important to remember that the speed of review is mainly down to the reviewers. Editors can affect this by setting deadlines and chasing late reviewers, but they only have a limited amount of control over when reviewers send their reports.

Another factor is how long it takes to find reviewers. It is rare that all the reviewers who are first asked say yes, so editors have to go down their list and ask their second, third, fourth or even lower choices. There is evidence that it is becoming more difficult to find reviewers in recent years, for instance in this 2017 study.

There could be various reasons for variations in the average speed of review between journals. Reviewers might be excited by the prospect of reviewing for newer journals, so they are more likely to be fast. This could equally be true for the highest impact journals, of course, and also for open access journals if the reviewer is a fan of open access. Enthusiastic reviewers not only mean that the reviewers who have agreed send their reports in more quickly, but also that it will be easier to get someone to agree to review in the first place.

A logical conclusion from this might be that the best way in which a journal could speed up its time to first decision would be to cultivate enthusiasm for their journal among the pool of potential reviewers. Building a community around the journal, using social media, conferences,  mascots or even free gifts might help.

Another less positive possible reason for shorter review times could be that reviewers are not being careful enough. This hypothesis was tested and refuted by the editors of Acta Neuropathologica in a 2008 editorial. (Incidentally, this journal had an average time from submission to first decision of around 17 days between 2005 and 2007, which is pretty fast.) The editorial says “Because in this journal all reviews are rated from 0 (worst) to 100 (best), we plotted speed versus quality. As reflected in Fig. 1, there is no indication that review time is related to the quality of a review.”

More recent developments

A 2015 post by biologist Stephen Heard suggested that 7 weeks is a reasonable minimum to expect peer review to take,  including time for associate editors and the editor-in-chief to process the reviews. So perhaps journals that take less time than this aren’t taking enough time over review?

A 2015 post by Terry McGlynn asks readers to fill in a survey of how many weeks after manuscript submission they think they deserve to receive reviews and a decision. The author says:

“When a review is taking a long time, I suggest there are three major possibilities:

The editor is having a really hard time finding people to review the paper.

A reviewer is being irresponsible.

Someone dropped the ball due to negligence or circumstances beyond their control.”

In 2020 peer review of papers related to Covid-19 was speeded up enormously, partly by a sense of urgency felt by everyone involved and partly because of a new initiative, the Covid-19 rapid review project.

Other ways to speed up peer review

Of course there are ways you can speed up peer review of your paper that aren’t simply choosing a fast journal. You can:

• Choose a journal that publishes before peer review
• Use journal-independent peer review so that your paper is only reviewed once but has a chance with several journals
• Pick a journal that uses cascading peer review so that if it rejects your paper it can be published quickly by a sister journal
• Ensure that your study has been done rigorous and is clearly reported, that you avoid overclaiming and include all possible controls, so that reviewers don’t have to ask for all this

And you can post a preprint of your paper before submitting it to a journal, so it is already available for others to read and build on while you wait for the peer review process.

This article is based on a blog post from June 2012. All information was correct at the time of posting but may be superseded by the time you read it. We have updated the article slightly and aim to revise it fully soon.

Journals vary a lot in how long they take to publish accepted papers.

Publication speed is one factor that many authors take into account when choosing a journal. The time from submission to publication in a peer reviewed journal can be split into three phases:

1. The time from submission from the first decision
2. The time needed for the authors to revise
3. The time from acceptance to publication

The second of these cannot generally be controlled by the journal, because different papers need different amounts of time to revise and the personal circumstances of the authors can affect the time needed. So only the first and third phases should be used to judge the journal. I cover submission to first decision time in a separate post and will focus on post-acceptance speed here. By ‘publication’ I mean the first time the paper is made publicly available, whether online or in print.

What happens after a paper is accepted?

Most journals have variations on a standard procedure: copyediting, typesetting, sending proofs to the authors, checking the proofs, and conversion to various formats (such as XML, HTML and pdf). For print journals, there are extra steps of compiling the pdf files into an issue and preparing them for printing – these steps don’t usually affect the time to online publication, but see below for exceptions to this.

Copyediting involves a professional editor (sometimes employed by the journal, but very often a freelancer), who reads the paper carefully and ensures that it is accurate, clear, readable, in correct English and in the journal’s house style. Typesetting involves laying out the paper in the journal’s format for print or pdf, with the correct fonts and symbols and with the figures at their final sizes. Some journals use the figures as the authors provide them, others edit or even redraw, and most at least check that the figures fit with the accompanying text.

After typesetting (or sometimes before), the author is sent the proof to check, along with any queries from the copyeditor. Some journals use professional proofreaders to check the proofs after typesetting and after the author has sent their corrections, but nowadays this step is skipped by many journals. But someone still needs to incorporate the author’s corrections into the article and do final checks before publication.

In my experience copyediting, typesetting and proof checking a typical research paper usually takes a few weeks. So, if the process starts immediately after acceptance and isn’t delayed, and if there is no delay from a paper gaining its final form and being published, a corrected paper can be published online a few weeks after acceptance. However, delays can occur at any stage.

Some journals display a typical or promised time from acceptance to publication on their websites. I have trawled through lots, and below is a selection. If you find more, please do add them in a comment. Note that these times are neither maximum nor minimum times – they are probably what the editors feel is a typical time, allowing for some papers to be published more quickly and some more slowly.

Times as of 2012

• Average of 10 days: Stem Cells (Wiley)
• About 3 weeks: BMJ Group journals such as Journal of Medical Genetics
• Within 4 weeks: Biology Open (Company of Biologists)
• Within 6 weeks: PLoS Biology (Public Library of Science), Journal of Cell Biology (Rockefeller University Press)
• Within 6-8 weeks: PLoS Medicine (Public Library of Science)
• Around 8 weeks: FASEB Journal, Systematic Biology (Oxford University Press), American Journal of Human Genetics (Cell Press)
• Within 2 months: Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences (Springer)
• 77 days: Circulation (American Heart Association)
• Up to 12 weeks: Cell (Cell Press)

You can see from this list that journals from the same publisher vary in their promised times and even in whether they promise a time or not.

Factors that affect publication speed

There are many things that can affect how quickly papers are published once they are accepted.

Publication in issues

Scheduling of issues is one of the commonest reasons for delays. Although most journals now publish articles online before print, there are still some that hold accepted papers in a queue until there is space for them in an issue. Elsevier changed to article-based publication in 2010, and their press release at the time claimed that this could shorten acceptance to publication time by up to seven weeks, to only a few weeks.

Some journals have backlogs of accepted papers that lead to delays in publication of months or even years. Others have got rid of these backlogs by changing to publishing online as soon as possible after acceptance and only later assembling papers into issues (I have been involved in helping one publisher with this transition).

Journals that publish only in issues can also delay particular papers for other reasons than space: if they aim for a balance of article types in each issue they may hold a paper over if there are too many of that type in the current issue; or if they want to publicise several papers on the same topic together, they may hold some of them until all are ready.

It is difficult to work out from journal websites whether they publish in issues or not. The best way to check for any particular journal is probably to look at the acceptance dates for articles in a particular issue and see whether they are spread out (in which case publication probably happens by article) or whether they are all a similar time before the issue date (in which case publication is probably by issue).

Copyediting first or later

The most common system is to copyedit, typeset, send proofs to the authors and perhaps proofread before online publication. Some journals, however, now publish the accepted version almost immediately after acceptance, and do any copyediting and typesetting later, replacing the accepted version when the edited and typeset version is ready. The latter journals can therefore boast acceptance to publication times of a few days or even hours rather than weeks.

I have been able to establish that the following publishers post accepted articles online before editing or typesetting for some or all journals:

• Wiley (‘OnlineAccepted’ option offered by some journals)
• Elsevier (Gastroenterology, publication within 5-7 business days)
• American Chemical Society (all journals, ‘usually within 30 minutes to 24 hours of acceptance’)
• Genetics Society of America (Genetics)
• BioMed Central (all journals, ‘publication occurs at the moment of acceptance’)

Fast track articles

Some journals have a fast track that offers faster publication for selected articles. This can speed up publication of these articles, but it can result in slower publication for all the non-fast-track articles if staff time is taken up with the fast-track ones. The editors make the decision on which papers are fast-tracked, but authors can usually request it and their request may be honoured if their reasons are judged to be good enough.

The following publishers offer fast-track publication for some or all journals (data as of 2012):

• Oxford University Press (eg European Heart Journal; publication within 10 days)
• Elsevier (eg Journal of the American College of Cardiology, publication of ‘Expedited Publications’ within 10 days)
• Annals of Internal Medicine (publication within 3 weeks)

Acceptance date issues

When looking at journal acceptance to publication times, it is worth bearing in mind that the acceptance date is the date when the final formal letter of acceptance is sent to the author. In reality, the decision to publish in principle is often made earlier, and the authors receive an email saying that the paper will be accepted as long as they make some final minor changes. Authors often feel at this point that the paper has been accepted, and it is usually safe to celebrate at this point. But it is not a final acceptance, and acceptance to publication times are measured only from the formal acceptance date.

How to estimate how fast a journal will publish after acceptance

I suggest following these steps to work out how fast your target journal is likely to publish your accepted paper.

1. Check if it publishes accepted versions before any editing or typesetting. If so, publication time is likely to be 0–3 days.
2. Check if it publishes papers online as soon as possible after acceptance, rather than waiting for an issue (print or online). Check whether this happens to all papers or just when the author requests, and request it if needed. If your paper is in this system, publication time is likely to be about 3–8 weeks.
3. Check what the journal’s website says about the acceptance to publication times they aim for, and multiply by about 1.5 to get a maximum probable time. If this time has elapsed after acceptance, you can justifiably email the editors requesting an update.
4. Look at some recent papers: most journals give the dates of acceptance and online publication on the paper, and often on the page containing the online abstract, so you can get a feel for how much time elapses between these events.
5. If it publishes only in print, be prepared for a long wait!

In this article first published as a blog post in May 2012, I argue that journal style guides should allow both ‘data is’ and ‘data are’. There are a few updates at the end of the article.

Given the controversy over this grammatical point, I argue that journal style guides should allow both ‘data is’ and ‘data are’.

I was recently directed (via @blefurgy and @deb_lavoy on Twitter) to an old blog post on something that frequently bugs me: the question of whether the word ‘data’ is singular or plural. The post, by Norman Gray, an astronomical data management researcher at Glasgow University, UK, dates from 2005 but I haven’t seen a better one on the topic. Gray argues that:

“…the word ‘data’, in english, is a singular mass noun. It is thus a grammatical and stylistic error to use it as a plural.

Plural use is barbaric: amongst other crimes, it is a deliberate archaism, and thus a symptom of bad writing.

Strong stuff.

An alternative view is given by Peter Coles (@telescoper), another astronomer at Cardiff University, UK, who also explains the issue clearly:

“For those of you who aren’t up with such things, English nouns can be of two forms: “count” and “non-count” (or “mass”). Count nouns are those that can be enumerated and therefore have both plural and singular forms: one eye, two eyes, etc. Non-count nouns (which is a better term than “mass nouns”) are those which describe something which is not enumerable, such as “furniture” or “cutlery”. Such things can’t be counted and they don’t have a different singular and plural forms. You can have two chairs (count noun) but can’t have two furnitures (non-count noun)…

…Norman Gray asserts that (a) “data” is a non-count noun and that (b) it should therefore be singular.

I tend to look and listen out for instances of ‘data’, and I have very rarely heard someone say ‘the data are’ in natural speech. As Gray says:

“The majority of writers who would dutifully pluralise ‘data’ in writing naturally and consistently use it as a mass noun in conversation: they ask how much data an instrument produces, not how many; they talk of how data is archived, not how they are archived; they talk of less data rather than fewer; and they always talk of data with units, saying they have a megabyte of data, or 10 CDs, or three nights, and never saying ‘I have 1000 data’ and expecting to be understood.

You may wonder why this matters at all. Well, practically every scientific paper contains the word ‘data’ somewhere, and all the journals I edit for insist that it is made plural every time. I spend a ridiculous amount of my editing time looking out for instances of ‘the data is’ and similar. And they can’t be found automatically using a macro, either, because the subject and verb can be separated by other words, or the verb may be something else like ‘shows’ or ‘illustrates’ rather than ‘is’. This is ‘mistake’ that a lot of authors make.

So is ‘data is’ really a mistake? Are the journals right to insist on this change?

The argument from etymology

The main argument used for ‘data are’ is that the word is derived from a plural Latin word. Gray dismantles this thoroughly by showing that it never was a simple plural in Latin. It is:

“…the neuter plural past participle of the first conjugation verb dare, ‘to give’ (it’s actually also the feminine singular past participle, but that really, really, doesn’t matter).

“…there was almost certainly no latin word for the concept that we now identify by the english word ‘data’….

“…Put another way, that means that the word ‘data’, as a technical term referring to the ore of observations, which can be painstakingly reduced to extract knowledge, is not a latin word at all. It’s a native english word with a latin past, which means, bluntly, that we get to choose how to use it, and if its meaning changes over time – as it has – then its grammatical analysis can reasonably and properly migrate also.

I find this a convincing argument. It reminds me of the pedants who don’t like split infinitives (‘to boldly go’) because Latin infinitive verbs couldn’t be split, which is pretty irrelevant to how we should treat them in English (see Wikipedia for current views on this issue).

Gray goes on to compare ‘data’ with other similar Latin-derived words, such as ‘agenda’, ‘stamina’, ‘media’ and ‘phenomena’. ‘Stamina’ is at one end of a spectrum: it is never used in the singular (‘stamen’) except in a specialist botanical sense, and it is a singular noun. ‘Phenomena’ is at the other end – the singular ‘phenomenon’ is frequently used and ‘phenomena’ is a plural noun. ‘Agenda’ is almost the same as ‘stamina’ but the singular ‘agendum’ just about makes sense (although ‘agenda item’ would be more usual). ‘Media’ is moving from being a plural of ‘medium’ to being a separate singular noun in its own right. Gray says:

“In this spectrum (not ‘spectra’, of course), ‘data’ is clearly located near ‘agenda’.

I would agree with this assessment on the whole, though I disagree with Gray that ‘datum’ is ‘certainly not one of the things that makes up data’. But like ‘agenda item’, a more commonly used term would be ‘data point’.

In fact, there is a technical use of the word ‘datum’, which Gray has dug out: it is a surveying term. But the plural of this usage of ‘datum’ is ‘datums’, not ‘data’.

Peter Coles doesn’t in fact completely agree with the journal publishers’ stipulation that ‘data’ is never singular – rather, he argues that there are contexts in which the plural use makes sense, and others in which singular use is better:

“If I had less data my disk would have more free space on it.” (Non-count)

“If I had fewer data I would not be able to obtain an astrometric solution.” (Count).

I’m fine with this distinction if people want to use it. But why, then, should journals insist that the singular use is incorrect?

A proposal: stop being prescriptive about data

You may or may not agree with Norman Gray (and me) that ‘data are’ is incorrect. But you can surely agree that there is controversy about the issue. The reasons to insist on plural data are hotly contested, to say the least.

So I propose that publishers remove the stipulation in their style guides that ‘data is’ is incorrect and should be changed to ‘data are’. In fact there is no need to be prescriptive on the issue at all: if the author writes ‘data are’, it can stay, but if they write ‘data is’, that can stay too. This would save a not insignificant amount of time for copyeditors, in searching and replacing ‘data is’ and in arguing the point with authors. It would probably save authors some time and annoyance too. And it would also make journals look more modern in this age of terabytes of data.

Who is going to be the first publisher to take a leap into the unknown? You have nothing to lose but your fuddy-duddy reputation.

There have been several other discussions of this issue online:

• The Wall Street Journal now allow ‘data is’ in certain circumstances
• The Guardian have reiterated their use of data in the singular in response to the WSJ’s post (the post also includes a Storify of tweets on the issue)
• The Economist responded to the WSJ post, mentioning that they say ‘data are’.
• Theo Bloom in PLoS blogs quotes the Guardian post to explain her use of ‘data is’.
• This 2011 blog post by Kevin MacDonnell includes a Google ngram showing the decline of ‘data are’ and the steady increase of ‘data is’.

This post from 2012 is in the process of being updated. In it I summarise six measures of journal impact (including the well known impact factor) and compare metrics for some high-impact journals in biology and medicine.

Last week a new measure of the impact of a journal was launched: Google Scholar Metrics. So it seems like a good time to review the various metrics available for journals.

Below I summarise six measures of journal impact: the impact factor (IF), 5-year IF, Google Scholar Metrics, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) and Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) ranking. As part of the research for this post I have found out the metrics (except 5-year IF) for a sample of 97 of the higher-impact biomedical journals and put them into a Google Docs spreadsheet, which can be viewed here (or on Google Docs directly here).

Most researchers get to know the IF fairly quickly when they start to read journals. So you probably know that an IF of 30 is high and that thousands of journals (the long tail) have IFs below 1. But fewer people have this kind of familiarity with the other metrics. So I have tried to estimate what range of numbers counts as ‘high impact’ for each metric. ‘High’ here means in the top 33% of my sample of 97 journals (already a high-impact sample).

To summarise the number that counts as high for each metric:
IF: 14
5-year IF: about 15
Google Scholar Metrics: 101
SJR: 0.53
SNIP: 3.85

Note that I am only talking about journal metrics, not metrics for assessing articles or researchers. As always, anyone using these figures should make sure they are using them only to judge journals, not individual papers or their authors (as emphasised by a European Association of Science Editors statement in 2007). Also remember that citations can be gamed by editors (see my previous post on the subject or a recent Scholarly Kitchen post on a citation cartel for more details).

Impact factor

The IF is provided by Thomson Reuters as part of their Journal Citation Reports, which covers ‘more than 10,100 journals from over 2,600 publishers in approximately 238 disciplines from 84 countries’.

It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in one year of articles published in that journal during the previous two years.

What counts as big: the highest-ranked journals have IFs over about 14; middle-ranking journals have numbers between 3 and 14; many low-ranked journals have numbers around 1.

Five-year impact factor

This is similar to the standard two-year IF except that citations and articles are calculated over the previous five years rather than two. It has been published only since 2007. This metric has advantages in slower-moving fields, where papers gather citations more slowly than a year or two after publication.

It is difficult to find lists of five-year IFs online, although some journals display them on their home pages. I did, however, find a study in the journal Cybermetrics that showed it is generally about 1.05 times the size of the two-year IF.

What counts as big: 15 using this figure.

Google Scholar Metrics

These were introduced on 1 April 2012 and are based on the Google Scholar database, which includes more journals and other publications than that used for the IFs. They are based on the h-index, which is defined on the Google Scholar Metrics page as follows:

The h-index of a publication is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were cited at least h times each. For example, a publication with five articles cited by, respectively, 17, 9, 6, 3, and 2, has the h-index of 3.

This is a rather difficult concept to get your head around (at least it is for me). Basically the number cannot be bigger than the number of papers a journal has published, and it cannot be bigger than the highest number of times any one paper has been cited. So in the above example the h-index cannot be greater than 5 because there were only 5 articles, and the largest number of citations lower than 5 is 3, so the h-index is 3.

Google Scholar Metrics extends this as follows:

The h-core of a publication is a set of top cited h articles from the publication. These are the articles that the h-index is based on. For example, the publication above has the h-core with three articles, those cited by 17, 9, and 6.

The h-median of a publication be the median of the citation counts in its h-core. For example, the h-median of the publication above is 9. The h-median is a measure of the distribution of citations to the h-core articles.

Finally, the h5-index, h5-core, and h5-median of a publication are, respectively, the h-index, h-core, and h-median of only those of its articles that were published in the last five complete calendar years.

So the main metric is the h5-index, which is a measure of citations to a journal over 5 years to April 2012.

Note that this metric doesn’t involve any division by the number of papers published by the journal (unlike the other metrics discussed here). This means that journals that publish more papers will have proportionally larger values in Google Scholar Metrics than with other metrics.

What counts as big: the highest-ranked journals have h5-indexes over about 101; many journals seem to have numbers under 50.

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)

The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a metric produced by Scopus (part of Elsevier). It is calculated as follows:

It expresses the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the documents published in the selected journal in the three previous years, — i.e. weighted citations received in year X to documents published in the journal in years X-1, X-2 and X-3.

So it is also a measure of citations similar to a three-year impact factor, but the citations are weighted according to where the citation was. Further information is here (pdf). The weighting depends on how many citations each journal gets. So if journal A is cited a lot overall and journal B is not cited as much, and a paper in journal C is cited in journal A, that citation is given more weight in the calculation than a citation of journal C in journal B.

What counts as big: the highest-ranked journals have SJRs over about 3; many journals seem to have numbers under 0.5.

(Note that on the SCImago website the decimal point in the SJR is given as a comma in some places, so it looks as if the top journals have SJRs of over 1000 (1,000). On the spreadsheets that are freely downloadable from the same site or from the ‘Journal Metrics’ website (also from Elsevier) the metrics are given as 1.000 etc, so I think this is the correct version.)

Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)

The Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is defined as the ratio of a journal’s citation count per paper and the citation potential in its subject field. It is designed to aid comparisons between journals in fields with different patterns of citations. It is calculated as follows:

Raw impact per paper (RIP)
Number of citations in year of analysis to a journal’s papers published in 3 preceding years, divided by the number of a journal’s papers in these three years

Database citation potential in a journal’s subject field
Mean number of 1-3 year old references per paper citing the journal and published in journals processed for the database

Relative database citation potential in a journal’s subject field (RDCP)
Database citation potential of a journal’s subject field divided by that for the median journal in the database

Source normalized impact per paper: (SNIP)
Ratio of a journal’ raw impact per paper (RIP) and the relative database citation potential (RDCP) in the subject field covered by the journal

So basically a three-year impact factor is weighted according how much papers in other journals in the same field are cited.

When I looked for lists of SNIPs for 2010 I encountered a problem: two different lists gave two different answers. The list downloaded from the Journal Metrics site gives the 2010 SNIP for Cell as 1.22, but when I searched on the CWTS Journal Indicators site (which is linked from the Journal Metrics site) it was given as 9.61. So there are two answers to the question of what counts as big: either anything over 0.7 from Journal Metrics or anything over 3 from CWTS Journal Indicators. If anyone can help me resolve this discrepancy I’d be grateful.

Australian Research Council Ranking

The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) evaluation exercise in 2010 included a system in which journals were ranked A*, A, B or C. Details of what the rankings mean is here. Top journals (in fact many that might elsewhere be called middle ranking) are ranked A*. It is not clear how these rankings were decided. These journal rankings were controversial and are not being used for the 2012 ERA.

Comparison of journals using these metrics

In 2012 I selected 97 high-impact journals in biology and medicine and compiled the various metrics for them. The data is now out of date but the following points may still be useful.

Notes on particular journals:

A few journals have anomalous patterns, unlike most that are high or lower in all the different metrics.

• Ca: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians has a very high IF, SJR and SNIP, but comes out lower on Google Scholar metrics. A recent post in Psychology Today includes a suggestion of why this might be:

The impact factor reflects that the American Cancer Society publishes statistics in CA that are required citations for authoritative estimates of prevalence and other statistics as they vary by cancer site and this assures a high level of citation.

• A few journals rank relatively low (out of this selection of journals) on all the metrics except the ERA rating, where they are rated A*: Development, The Journal of Immunology, Cellular Microbiology, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Molecular Microbiology, Developmental Biology, and Genetics. I don’t know why this might be, except that the ERA ratings appear to be subjective decisions by experts rather than being based on citations.
• Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, Blood, Nucleic Acids Research, Cancer Research, Gastroenterology and most notably the BMJ come out high in Google Scholar Metrics but not so high in IF, SJR and SNIP. Perhaps they are journals that publish many papers, which is not accounted for by Google Scholar Metrics, or they could have more citations four or five years after papers are published, which would be picked up by Google Scholar Metrics but not the other metrics.
• Finally, Systematic Biology has a high SNIP, a medium SJR and IF and a lower Google Scholar Metric. Perhaps it is in a field in which citations per paper are usually low, which is accounted for by the SNIP.

This post from 2012 is in the process of being updated. In it I look at fees that are charged to the authors of all submissions, including those that are rejected. I list some journals that charged submission fees at that time and consider how reasonable this kind of fee is.

In a previous post I discussed fees that journals charge for colour printing, per page or for supplementary material. All those fees are charged only to authors whose papers are accepted. Here I’ll look at fees that are charged to the authors of all submissions, included those that are rejected.

In 2010 a report on submission fees by Mark Ware was published by the Knowledge Exchange, a collaboration of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) with similar organisations in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. This followed a study investigating whether submission fees could play a role in a business model for open access journals. They concluded that for journals with a high rejection rate in particular, submission fees can help to make the open access publication fee more reasonable and could thus make the transition to open access easier.

Although the report focuses on submission fees in the transition to open access, they also noted:

In certain disciplines, notably economic and finance journals and in some areas of the experimental life sciences, submission fees are already common.

Which journals charge a submission fee?

The Knowledge Exchange report includes a table of journals that already charge a submission fee. For biology journals, these fees are listed as mostly being around US$50-75.

I’ve checked on the journal websites for a selection of those listed in this report, and some seem to no longer charge for submission – in particular, the US$400 submission fee that Ideas in Ecology & Evolution charged when it launched in 2008 seems to have now been dropped, and I can’t find any mention of submission fees on the websites of Journal of Biological Chemistry or FASEB Journal.

The journals that I could verify as charging submission fees are:

• Journal of Neuroscience (Society for Neuroscience) has a submission fee of US$125 (as well as the page charges and colour printing charges mentioned in the previous post)
• Hereditas (an open access Wiley-Blackwell journal) charges 100 euros (US$133)
• Stem Cells (Wiley-Blackwell, with an open access option) charges $90
• Journal of Clinical Investigation (American Society for Clinical Investigation) and Cancer Research (American Association for Cancer Research) charge US$75
• several other journals mentioned in the Knowledge Exchange report charge around US$50.

Elsevier say in their FAQ that you need to look in each journal’s guide to authors to find out if they charge submission fees (as with other charges).

All the above except Hereditas are subscription journals.

Why submission fees, or why not?

The Knowledge Exchange report interviewed publishers about the pros and cons of submission fees. Unfortunately, they don’t give any details of who was interviewed, except that they were ‘stakeholders including publishers, libraries, research funders, research institutions and individual researchers’, or the text of the interviews, so it is difficult to interpret the results. However, from these interviews the report identified the following advantages:

• The costs of publication are spread over more authors
• The fee may put off authors from submitting ‘on spec’ to a journal where they know their paper has only a tiny chance of getting accepted, thus saving work for the journal.

The disadvantages mentioned included:

• The fee might put off authors and thus make the journal less competitive
• It was unclear whether funders would cover the charge (though interviews with funders for the study suggested that they would)
• It would require administration.

Given the findings of this report, I’m surprised that more journals don’t charge a submission fee. I would be surprised if it put off speculative submissions (the time it takes for a paper to be reviewed is surely a bigger cost to the authors than a charge at the level of US$50-100). But for  open access journals with high rejection rates, as the report says, it seems particularly appropriate. Is the risk of seeming uncompetitive with other journals the only reason why these fees aren’t being widely tried?

This is interesting in the context of the statements by Nature Publishing Group that Nature couldn’t go open access because they would have to charge a very high publication fee. I’ve heard this most recently from Alison Mitchell at the debate ‘Evolution of Science’ in Oxford in February: she said that the publication fee would need to be about £10,000 (US$15,850) for Nature research journals and £30,000 (US$47,550) for Nature (see the video of the debate – this statement is at 17 minutes 30 seconds).

A conversation on Twitter with Heather Piwowar (@researchremix, a postdoc with Dryad studying data use among researchers) and Ethan Perlstein (@eperlste, an evolutionary pharmacologist at Princeton University) about this NPG statement led me to Jan Velterop (@Villavelius, a director of Aqcknowledge.com and a former colleague of mine at BioMed Central), who has written on submission fees several times on his blog. He kindly emailed me with further thoughts.

Jan’s most recent blog post summarises his reasons for liking submission fees:

The basic reason I am in favour of submission fees is that it makes scientific publishing really the service industry that it is, its main task nowadays having nothing to do with publishing per se, but mainly with arranging peer review and quality assurance of one sort or another.

Of course, this might not be what publishers want their main task to be…

Another argument for them that he lists is:

It removes the suspicion that OA journals might be tempted to accept more than they should just because of the money that accepted articles bring

And what about the disadvantages? Jan tells me that journal publishers are wary of introducing new fees that other journals don’t charge (see the ‘competitiveness’ point above). They are particularly wary because of a bit of history I didn’t know about:

One of the reasons why commercial journals dominate STM these days is the fact that society journals, still mostly independent in the 1960’s, charged page charges. Commercial journals made much of the fact that (then) they didn’t, and so attracted a growing percentage of authors, who could publish with them for free…

Among the reasons publishers are not too keen are:

1) The risk that authors ‘defect’ to journals without charges. After all, that happened before.

I can see that given this history, journals might be more cautious than otherwise.

Jan goes on to mention a reason I hadn’t heard before:

2) The risk that authors might expect transparency with regard to the speed, peer-review, and acceptance/rejection procedure. If you only have to pay when accepted (as is the case for the current author-side payment OA journals), you may not care too much about the speed, quality of the peer review, and acceptance processes, but if you have to pay even if you are rejected, then that becomes a very different story. Publishers know that they cannot guarantee any quality in that regard – with a few exceptions, perhaps – and fear the pressure of quality requirements on them if they were to move in that direction.

This is a very good point. It is certainly difficult to give guarantees about the speed or quality of peer review, which relies on voluntary work by researchers. It is related to a disadvantage listed in Jan’s recent blog post:

The need to be able to justify rejections properly, particularly if challenged (after all, submitters have paid for an assessment)

Jan also gives a third reason that intrigues me: that the level of submission fees might reveal information about a journal’s rejection rate that they would rather be kept quiet:

if they reject only about a tenth of the submissions, then obviously the submission charge cannot be very much lower than 9/10th of the publication charge for the same revenue to be achieved

So a journal might want to be seen as very selective, rejecting a high proportion of submitted articles, but they might actually have a lot lower rejection rate than this. For example say a journal with a rejection rate of 90% was considering a submission fee of $50 and a publication fee of $1000 (and all authors pay the submission fee, whether accepted or not). Then for every 9 articles accepted, the journal would receive $9000 in publication fees, plus $4500 for the 90 articles submitted, making $13500. But if the same fees were applied to a journal that rejects only about 10%, then for every 9 articles accepted, they would get only $9000 plus $500 for the 10 submitted articles ($9500). The number of articles accepted is public, whereas the number rejected isn’t. To get the level of fees they would receive if they had a 90% rejection rate they would need to charge a submission fee of ($13500 – $9000)/10 = $450. This level of submission fee is unlikely to be acceptable to authors.

(My calculation comes out with a submission fee half what Jan estimates, which I think is because I am assuming both a submission fee and a publication fee are charged, whereas he is assuming only a submission fee.)

In conclusion, the main advantage of submission fees is also their main advantage in other circumstances: that they would reduce the number of submissions. So if a journal has a high rejection rate, it makes sense to charge a submission fee, but otherwise it doesn’t. This actually applies to subscription and open access journals equally – in both cases a submission fee provides extra revenue, which could be used to reduce other charges, included subscriptions, page charges or publication fees (or to increase profits of course). The main reason why high-rejection-rate journals aren’t currently charging submission fees seems to be because it would make them less competitive, but given that these journals are by definition the place that people want to be published, this doesn’t seem a very strong argument. I wouldn’t be surprised if one journal tries submission fees and other then followed suit in the next few years.

This post from 2012 is in the process of being updated. In it I explain the fees that journals sometimes charge apart from open access fees: page charges, colour charges and supplementary information charges.

Among the discussion of open access recently, there have been a few comments about the level of charges for open access publication. But of course many journals charge authors even without making their articles freely available. I think these charges are worth highlighting so that you can make an informed choice of journal.

Frequently these charges are to cover the cost of colour printing, which seems reasonable given that nowadays printed journal articles are a bonus not standard. But not all: some journals have submission fees (which I’ll cover in a future post), others have page charges, and I found two that even charge for supplementary material.

I’m not going to comment here on whether I think these charges are justified. But I suggest you take the charges into account when choosing a journal, and think about whether they represent value for money. If they go towards supporting a scientific society that you would like to donate to, for example, or if you feel that your paper will have its full impact only if printed in colour, you might be happy to pay. Also, if you can afford these charges, why not consider spending the money on making your article freely available instead?

Colour charges

In the past, print journals often charged authors for printing their article in colour, as colour printing was (and still is) more expensive than printing in black and white. With online publication there is no difference in cost, so it doesn’t make sense for journals to charge authors for colour for the online version of an article. But some journals are still charging for colour printing.

A few examples (with links to the relevant page) are:

• The Journal of Neuroscience (Society for Neuroscience) charges US$1000 per colour figure, but offers free colour when it is judged essential by the editors and when the first and last authors are members of the society.
• J Biol Chem charges US$150 per colour figure (with discounts for society members).
• Evolution (Wiley-Blackwell) charges $500.00 per printed figure. FEMS Microbiology Letters (also Wiley-Blackwell) offers free colour provided that the colour is deemed essential for interpretation of the figure, whereas another Wiley-Blackwell journal, Proteomics, charges €500 for one colour figure up to €1664 for four.
• FASEB Journal charges US$350 per colour figure.
• BMJ Journals all seem to charge £250 per article for colour printing, but the BMJ itself (pdf) does not.
• Of Oxford University Press journals, Bioinformatics and Human Molecular Genetics charge £350/US$600/€525 per colour figure, whereas Journal of Experimental Botany charges £100/US$190/€150.
• Some Springer journals charge for colour printing, but I wasn’t able to find out which ones.
• Similarly, some Nature Publishing Group journals charge for colour printing, but I wasn’t able to find out which ones. As far as I can tell, Nature and its sister journals with the word ‘Nature’ in the title have no charges.
• Elsevier’s author site seems to imply that all their journals have colour charges.

Journals that do not charge for colour printing include:

• BMJ (pdf)
• Science
• Nature, Nature Genetics, EMBO Journal, EMBO Reports and some other Nature Publishing Group journals
• Development, Genes and Evolution (Springer), as proudly proclaimed on their home page
• Company of Biologists journals (such as Development and Journal of Cell Science)
  

Page charges

Page charges seem to be almost as common as colour charges, but there isn’t much logic as to which journals charge for what. Only one journal that I could find, Journal of Neuroscience, has publication fees per article (US$980, or US$490 for Brief Communications) – all others charge per page, sometimes over a certain limit. For example:

• FASEB Journal charges US$80 per printed page for the first 8 pages and $160 per page thereafter. Articles containing eight or more figures and/or tables cost an additional $150 per figure or table.
• J Biol Chem charges US$80 per page for the first nine pages and $160 per page thereafter (with discounts for society members).

The charges don’t seem to be consistent within each publisher.

• Of Oxford University Press journals, Bioinformatics charges £100/US$190 per page over 7 pages (or over 4 or 2 pages for shorter article types). Journal of Experimental Botany and Human Molecular Genetics have no page charges.
• Of Wiley-Blackwell journals, Evolution charges US$55 per printed page (but society members can have 12 free pages a year). Proteomics charges €196 (US$261) per page over 7 pages (or over 4 pages for shorter article types). FEMS Microbiology Letters and Synapse have no page charges.
• Some Elsevier journals have page charges. I tried a small selection: Journal of Structural Biology, Journal of Molecular Biology, Animal Behaviour and BBA Molecular Cell Research don’t have page charges, and I couldn’t find any that do.
• As far as I can tell, Nature and its sister journals with the word ‘Nature’ in the title have no charges. Some other journals published by Nature Publishing Group do have page charges, however. For example, EMBO Journal charges £158/US$242 per page (except pages containing only references). Obesity and Oncogene, two others that I checked, have no page charges.
• Some Springer journals charge for over-length articles.

One publisher is consistent – none of the BMJ Journals or BMJ (pdf) have any page charges.

Fees for supplementary material

I had never heard of the idea of charges for supplementary material until I was researching for this post. But FASEB Journal charges for supplemental ‘units’ (presumably files) at $160 each (up to four units are allowed), and Proc Natl Acad Sci USA charges US$250 per article for up to five pages of SI (US$500 over six pages). I haven’t come across any other journal that does this.