Protein Engineering, Design and Selection vol. 17 no. 1 pp. 1, 2004
© 2004 Oxford University Press
Editorial |
Welcome to Protein Engineering, Design and Selection
Welcome to Protein Engineering, Design and Selection—the new look, completely overhauled version of what was Protein Engineering. Protein Engineering, Design and Selection, or PEDS, is radically different from its predecessor. A new Senior Editorial team of three is responsible for strategy and final decision making, while an Editorial Board of nearly a hundred top scientists from across the field of protein engineering is responsible for primary editing and reviewing. Thus, all papers are handled by scientists with expertise close to the subject matter of each paper. Papers are being processed rapidly and efficiently by means of an online submission system and a ‘virtual’ editorial office that only handles electronic materials, and pdfs of accepted manuscripts will be published online very shortly after acceptance, ensuring the fastest possible publishing times.
Our desire to undertake this experiment in publishing stems from our reservations regarding many current practices and problems in publishing:
• peer review: it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain expert and unbiased opinions as often editors of more general journals do not have the experience or networks available to judge and obtain the proper reports;
• pricing: the first port of call for accessing scientific papers is increasingly becoming the internet, which opens up the possibility of open accessing and the issue of who should pay for that access, the libraries or the authors;
• undue emphasis on impact factor by institutions that appear to have no other way of assessing quality.
We believe that there is a growing role for community-based journals that are run by a large and experienced Editorial Board with minimal intervention from publishers. The model for this is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which has effectively an Editorial Board of several thousand covering all areas of science. More specialized journals such as PEDS, run along similar lines, can solve those major problems. The large Editorial Board provides the right pool of talent for assessing the quality of papers; the shared workload cuts down cost; and the journal provides the forum for publishing high quality work rapidly and will attract papers of high quality. There are two routes of publication in PEDS. In the first route, members of the Editorial Board will be able to contribute finished papers accompanied by two referee reports: these have to be approved by a second member of the Board, and then the Senior Editors. It is our experience that open reviewing is very reliable, as it is often more constructive than anonymous referees’ reports. In the second route, which is closer to the conventional one, papers are submitted directly to the editorial office and reviewed anonymously. The advantage over most journal procedures is that an expert in the field will be in charge of choosing reviewers and assessing the outcome. It is expected that papers submitted by either route will be subjected to exactly the same standards. We do not aim to publish routine papers; ideally papers should be of significant interest and/or a novel contribution. We therefore encourage authors to clearly identify the significance of the work and/or the novel dimension in their abstracts.
Finally, although we applaud the introduction of open access of online material, we have reservations because it requires authors to bear the whole cost of publishing, which sets up new divisions between rich and poor laboratories. Until the situation is resolved universally by funding agencies, we are concentrating on an affordable journal that is also freely available online to members of academic institutions in the 60 poorest countries of the world and at greatly reduced rates to the next 60 poorest.
Alan Fersht, Valerie Daggett and Greg Winter
Senior Editors
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