Recommendations for accelerating open preprint peer review to improve the culture of science.

Peer review is an important part of the scientific process, but traditional peer review at journals is coming under increased scrutiny for its inefficiency and lack of transparency. As preprints become more widely used and accepted, they raise the possibility of rethinking the peer-review process. Preprints are enabling new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial than traditional journal peer review, and to thus fundamentally shift the culture of peer review toward constructive collaboration. In this Consensus View, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to accelerate the growing momentum of preprint sharing and provide recommendations to empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.

Access to evidence-based care: a systematic review of trauma and surgical literature costs across resource settings.

Background: Evidence-based medicine has become the foundation for surgeons around the world to provide the most effective surgical care. However, the article processing charges (APCs) and subscription fees for surgical journals may be a barrier, particularly for those in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). Objectives: The objective of this study was to define the current options for producers and consumers of surgical literature, inclusive of trauma, across resource settings. Data sources: The Web of Science Core Collection database. Study appraisal and synthesis methods: A complete list of journals publishing surgical content between 2019 and 2020 was compiled. The most frequently indexed journals were reviewed using the individual journal websites to extract the type of access (ie, open, closed, hybrid), impact factors, publication languages, APCs, subscription pricing, and any discounts listed. Results: The literature search revealed 4759 unique journals. The 500 most frequently indexed were reviewed. The mean APC for a fully open access surgical journal was US$1574 and for a hybrid surgical journal was US$3338. The average costs for a 1-year subscription in a hybrid surgical journal were US$434 and US$1878 for an individual and institution, respectively. When considering purchasing power parity, APCs and subscription costs ranged from 2 to 15 times more expensive in LMICs when compared with those in the USA. Limitations: Primary search term was in English only, and only peer-reviewed journal articles were reviewed. Conclusions or implications of key findings: Although initiatives exist to support peer-reviewed journals in LMICs, there is an exorbitant cost for authors in these countries, as well as those in high-income countries that are not affiliated with a large institution, to either publish in, or access, a majority of surgical journals. Efforts to lower the overall cost of publishing must be made to provide greater access to medical literature. PROSPERO registration number: CRD4202140227. Level of evidence: Level IV.

The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles.

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA. We encourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice.