This is the first report from the Editorial Office with its new team, namely the editor-in-chief in Paris and the deputy-editor in Gent. We took over from Eberhard Ritz, Hein Koomans and Alex Davison in July 1999. We were lucky enough to take charge of a journal whose international reputation has been steadily rising since its first issue in 1986 and whose place is at present firmly established among the major nephrology journals. However, it is not easy to match the outstanding performance of our predecessors.
General editorial policy
The particular focus of Nephrology Dialysis Trans-plantation is on clinical aspects, including clinical and clinically oriented experimental research, and continuous medical education, as it was in previous years. According to the wish expressed by the Council of our association, the ERA/EDTA, we have decided to reduce the total number of case reports and to restrict acceptance to those which provide novel findings or propose novel hypotheses based on clinical observations. We have maintained the publication of a large number of relatively short editorial comments which are aimed at informing our readership about recent major developments in selected areas of the broad field of nephrology. These brief commentaries are a special feature of NDT. They occupy the first pages in each issue and are, to the best of our knowledge, read with great interest. In addition to the regular issues, we continue editing supplements which deal with special topics in nephrology.
NDT has also become a platform for news in nephrology from Europe as well as from outside Europe. Although its diffusion to the other continents has been slowly increasing in recent years, with a continuing opening to a large readership and authorship in overseas countries, it is our goal to accelerate this trend in the near future.
Website access, electronic manuscript handling and peer review
Thanks to an excellent collaboration with the publishing staff at Oxford University Press, easy access to NDT on the Web has been realized and other innovations in this field will soon take place. Thus, we joined last year the American Highwire Press family which is a broad electronic platform serving a large number of medical journals. Website visits have been growing rapidly. In July 1999 there were some 1500 hits on our home page. In July 2000 this had increased to 7000.
Starting in April 2001, our manuscript handling process will be progressively switched from the present paper format to an electronic format on the Internet. Manuscript submissions, dispatched to subject editors or directly to peer reviewers, return to the editors and final transmission to the publisher (in case of acceptance) via the Internet should allow us to speed up the publication process. We are aware of the fact that this process is intolerably slow at present, and we are very much concerned about this. It is only by a radical change such as the introduction of electronic manuscript handling that we will be able to improve this situation. Obviously we shall rely for this, as much as in the past, on the continuing good will of highly dedicated reviewers from all over the world who, in general, do an excellent job, together with our heavily committed subject editors and editorial board. What will change in April 2001 is that referees will be asked beforehand whether they are available for article review, as is already common practice for many other journals.
We know that peer reviewing of original articles means that one accepts additional work and takes responsible, sometimes difficult, decisions in research areas which are not always precisely within one's field of expertise. Clearly, the mutual evaluation of original articles by clinical and basic research scientists is, and must remain, the fundamental basis of medical science journals like ours, in contrast to the increasing amount of unreviewed medical information of all kind. It gives great satisfaction to work with motivated colleagues, whose kind assistance, alertness and critical spirits are of utmost importance for the achievement of our common goal: to increase further the scientific value of original work published in NDT.
Number of subscriptions
The total number of subscriptions in the year 2000 slightly exceeded 5000 of which 3199 were for members, 105 for personal subscribers and 399 for institutional subscribers (mostly libraries).
Present manuscript flow and handling
From July 1, 1999 to June 30, 2000 the NDT office received 691 original articles, 338 case reports, and 104 letters to the editor. In addition, a large number of other types of manuscript such as editorial comments, invited comments, teaching points, interesting cases, and nephroquiz articles are handled by the Paris office. Supplements are handled directly by the NDT office in Gent. This means that the deputy editor has a close look on the quality of each supplement project and follows the edition from submission to publication. There were seven supplements in the year 2000.
Manuscripts are sent from the Paris office either to the deputy editor, to the subject editors or section editors, to the official reviewers of the editorial board, or to other outside reviewers. We have also maintained the rapid rejection procedure, as introduced by our predecessor.
In the past year we have relied heavily on the expertise of approximately 1200 referees, with a mean of 2.5 reviewers per manuscript. Only a small number of reviewers actually declared that they were unavailable for the evaluation of an article. However, a worrisome negative point is the excessively long delay between the submission of manuscripts to the Editorial Office and the first decision letter. This is due in part to a small number of slow reviewers whose late comments retard our decision making, and in part due to a relatively inefficient reminder system in our office. This delay needs to be shortened considerably, and we shall actively work on this problem as pointed out above.
Acceptance rate
From July 1, 1999 to June 30, 2000 the acceptance rate for original articles was approximately 50%, and that of case reports approximately 30%, often after resubmission as a letter to the editor. The acceptance rate for manuscripts initially submitted as letters to the editor was approximately 65%.
Size of the journal
In volume 15 (year 2000) 2094 pages were published, compared with 3014 pages in 1999 and 3326 pages in 1998. This decrease is part of our publication strategy. It has been mainly achieved by a drastic reduction in the acceptance rate of case reports.
Publication committee
According to the wish of the Council of ERA/EDTA, a Publication Committee was set up in autumn 2000. Its purpose is to assist the Editors in defining the general editorial policy of the journal, in adapting the journal's orientation to new needs of the nephrology community and to changing conditions of the publishing market, in proposing new developments of interest with respect to scientific and management aspects, and in raising external funding. It should also be actively involved in the search for a new editor-in-chief and deputy editor, which should start at least a year before the end of the term of the incumbent team.
The Publication Committee is composed of the editors, the past editor (E. Ritz), the president (A. Davison) and the secretary/treasurer (F. Carrera) of the ERA/EDTA, and three personalities with an outstanding experience in medical science and publication matters (J. Floege, W. Hoerl and C. Ponticelli).
Publication ethics and conflict of interest
Since a large part of medical science is sponsored by industry conflict of interest statements should be included in each article, whenever appropriate. At present, an initiative is underway, launched by the editors of the British Medical Journal, aiming at the adoption of general rules of publication ethics. We shall probably adopt these rules for NDT, once they are completely elaborated.
Financial ties between medical scientists and industry may definitely influence the interpretation of scientific data, and, perhaps even more importantly, lead to a failure to publish negative or adverse research outcomes. An example of the complex relationship between scientific achievement and industry involvement is given by the 1989 landmark article by Eschbach et al [1] on the correction of anaemia in uraemic patients with recombinant human erythropoietin therapy. This advance has been one of the major breakthroughs in the treatment of end-stage renal disease. The authors acknowledged in the article that they owned shares in the company producing the drug. In our view, this connection was evidence of an extremely fruitful collaboration between academic medicine and industry in the US. Therefore, one should accept the notion that the acknowledgement of financial support, irrespective of the source, should suffice to indicate potential conflicts of interest. Numerous colleagues all over the world share this view and are concerned about the stigma of being bought, as suggested in a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine [2]. After all, governments supporting research may also have an agenda. We agree there may be a risk, as emphasized in a recent article by Bodenheimer [3]. He pointed out that researchers with ties to drug companies might be more likely to report results favourable to the sponsoring company, compared to scientists without such ties. However, there is also another important risk, namely that researchers with preconceived ideas may either over- or under-report data which do or do not fit their particular views. This state-of-affairs is particularly true for established scientists who are unwilling or unable to recognize that sometimes a life-long work and favoured hypotheses no longer stand up to new evidence. As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it: convictions are greater enemies to truth than lies, similar to the folk maxime of my mind is made up, do not bother me with facts.
In our opinion, the merit of new research data must withstand independent evaluation. This is true for data obtained with the help of industry money as well as that of public resources. The latter must be subjected to the same scrutiny since public support is no guarantee for unbiased reporting.
This being said, we shall pay great attention that potential conflicts of interest are clearly stated in each manuscript to appear in NDT and we will try to reduce publication bias to a minimum. However, in the end it is the responsibility of each author to report and discuss his own clinical and experimental data honestly and to comment on findings of others as objectively as possible.
Perspectives
We hope that the present quality of NDT will grow linearly, if not exponentially. We also hope that its large readership will continue to enjoy each issue that contains novel information in the broad field of nephrology and related basic research. Furthermore, we hope that especially the younger readers will continue to appreciate our regularly provided material for the improvement of their clinical skills. Finally, we hope that in the long run, our efforts will be compensated by an adequate recognition of the scientific merits of NDT.
References