I have now been Editor-in-Chief of Human Reproduction for 4 years and I am enjoying the position, but I am now aware that it does take up a lot of time. It is a role that would be unmanageable without the considerable efforts of the Associate Editors whose contribution to the reviewing process has been key to the improvements in performance that we have achieved. I believe that it is worthwhile informing our readership about this and some other developments in the journal by means of this editorial.
We intend to take advantage of the Associate Editors' commitment and expertise in creating a new series of mini-review papers for the journal. With the volume of publishing that is taking place in some aspects of our field, we perceive that it would be of value to readers of the journal to introduce a series entitled Developments in Reproductive Medicine in which authors draw together the important papers in a topic from the past 2 or 3 years and set this in the context of previous knowledge and key papers of that field. The authors, who will mainly be Associate Editors of the journal, will also be asked to conclude the article by providing an expert view on how the recently published data affect thinking and include speculation on how that specific field may develop in the next 5 years as a result. The first in this series will appear in the last quarter of the year. These reviews will not overlap with the more extensive, authoritative reviews featured in our sister journal Human Reproduction Update.
At Human Reproduction we have been making considerable efforts in the last few years to optimise performance in decision and publication times. All authors, very reasonably, want to get their work into the scientific literature as soon as possible.
For a period, before the introduction of the Associate Editor system following my appointment, the interval from receipt of a manuscript to a decision on publication, or rejection, being reached was an average of 85 days. Fifteen percent of submissions were taking more than 3 months and 30% were taking more than 2 months. Following this, the average interval from a decision to publication in hard copy was 12 weeks. With the Associate Editor process having been put in place from January 2001, we have made a great effort to bring this time down. We can report that the interval from receipt of a manuscript to a decision is down to a mean of 40 days, with less than 5% of papers now taking more than 2 months to receive a decision. Since January 2004, papers which have been accepted for publication are published electronically as soon as the authors have checked and approved their proofs. This has further speeded up the process. Thus the average paper now takes 6 weeks to receive a decision and a further 46 weeks to electronic publication, and about 10 weeks to hard copy from decision.
For some time, we have noted that authors occasionally ask if there is a rapid publication procedure available for important papers. Having achieved the improvement in our overall process described above, we feel that we are now in a position to offer a fast-track channel for peer review. We believe that we can offer a submission to decision time of 25 days for those exceptional papers that justify particularly rapid publication. Where appropriate, authors may request that their paper is considered for the fast-track channel and we shall consider if this is appropriate and, if so, apply the process. Authors must realize that only papers of high importance, that can make a difference to the field, or that are capable of changing concepts or practice are likely to be put through this channel and that this will be judged by a fast-track adjudication panel. The authors will be notified quickly as to whether their paper is being processed by this method. We do not envisage that a large number of papers will go through the fast-track channel, but it is important that groundbreaking papers can reach publication speedily. Each accepted paper in this series will be clearly identified in the journal. The system will be open for submission from September 2004.
It is well accepted that the highest quality of research on clinical effectiveness of treatments is the randomized controlled trial (RCT) and in the consideration of some papers recently, authors who have submitted clinical studies not using an RCT design, and whose papers have not succeeded in peer review, have queried whether the journal is any longer interested in non-RCT designs. I believe that most people in the field would agree with the idea that the RCT is the best design for effectiveness questions and that the large observational study is the best practicable design to address outcomes of low prevalence such as risk events during treatment. On the other hand, there will be occasions where other designs do make a worthwhile contribution to a subject, often because there is a lack of work using the ideal models. Such studies will include pilot studies on new topics or using new agents or interventions or experimental designs in an area where there are no RCTs. The journal welcomes the opportunity to consider these papers since our aim is to advance the field of reproductive medicine using the best available evidence. Indeed, it is clear from my experience of leading the group which produced the NICE Guidelines on infertility for the UK (http://www.nice.org.uk/page.aspx?o=104435) and from my work as a Cochrane editor (Johnson et al., 2003) how many areas of our field are relatively devoid of good RCT evidence.
Another new departure that was introduced to the journal earlier this year is that in two areas of the field there has been simultaneous publication in Human Reproduction and Fertility and Sterility. The first example concerned a consensus statement reached in the autumn of 2003 regarding the diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome on which there has been divergence between Europe and America. With the development of a joint position at a meeting organized jointly by ASRM and ESHRE, it was thought to be a good development to publicize widely the combined statement which resulted (The Rotterdam ESHRE/ASRM-sponsored PCOS Consensus Workshop Group, 2004a,b). The second joint publication concerns a matter of terminology and occurred at an earlier stage in the concensus process in the sense that the paper concerned a proposal for a change in use of terms and is aimed at reaching a consensus (Habbema et al., 2004a
,b
). In this case, both journals published in July 2004 the lead article and invited contributions to the debate, to be published in one journal or the other, in the hope of this making a contribution towards a possible later consensus statement. We have been heartened to see the way in which these two leading journals in our field have collaborated.
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Habbema JDF, Collins J, Leridon H, Evers JLH, Lunenfeld B and te Velde ER (2004b) Towards less confusing terminology in reproductive medicine: a proposal. Fertil Steril 82, 3640.[CrossRef][Medline]
Johnson NP, Proctor M and Farquhar CM (2003) Gaps in the evidence for fertility treatmentan analysis of efficacy trials in subfertility. Hum Reprod 18, 947954.
The Rotterdam ESHRE/ASRM-sponsored PCOS Consensus Workshop Group (2004a) Revised 2003 consensus on diagnostic citeria and long-term health risks related to polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Hum Reprod 19, 4147.
The Rotterdam ESHRE/ASRM-sponsored PCOS Consensus Workshop Group (2004b) Revised 2003 consensus on diagnostic citeria and long-term health risks related to polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Fertil Steril 18, 1925.