Mais sobre alternativas de peer review

Vai aí a dica dos professores Luís Carlos Crocco Afonso (UFOP) e Leda Quércia Vieira (UFMG) para a discussão sobre o processo de publicação de trabalhos científicos. A Free Radical Biology & Medicine irá requisitar a formatação do artigo somente após o aceite, evitando trabalho desnecessário dos autores.

A Elsevier também tem estudado uma nova visualização para os artigos online - chamam de 'Artigo do futuro'. Assista ao vídeo no canal do SBlogI no Youtube.

FRBM Invites You to Submit Your Paper, Your Way

Imagine if you could submit your paper to a journal without worrying about formatting the manuscript, including those pesky references, to their exact specifications? Well that’s precisely what we are inviting you to do at your society journal, Free Radical Biology & Medicine. From now on, we’re inviting you to submit ‘Your Paper, Your Way.’ Please click on the image below to watch a short video editorial from Kelvin Davies, Editor-in-Chief of Free Radical Biology & Medicine.

As fellow scientists, the editors of Free Radical Biology & Medicine wondered why journals make you spend so much time and effort formatting your entire paper for submission, especially when it’s a journal with extremely high rejection rates. Although standard formats do make it a little bit easier for editors and reviewers to see everything in the correct style, the reality is that we should be focusing on the quality of science and not the format. For you as an author the difference is significant. Just think of all the time you have spent doing secretarial formatting work on a paper, only to have it rejected immediately and be forced to repeat the whole process again for the next journal. An easier submission process will not only save you time and effort but might also allow you to achieve faster publication speeds.

In initiating ‘Your Paper, Your Way,’ Free Radical Biology and Medicine is inviting all authors to submit their manuscripts as single PDF files, including all figures, figure legends, and references. Of course, all scientific papers need to include the following key elements: title, abstract, introduction, materials & methods, results, discussion (or results & discussion combined), references, and figures and figure legends. In addition, we are adding two new features to FRBM papers, Highlights and Graphical Abstracts (see Instructions to Authors for details), so you may wish to add these sections in your initial submission.

Anyway, just use whatever layout style suits you best (including references). All we ask is that the paper has all the key elements, be legible, and that all figures be of sufficiently high quality to permit proper review. If we don’t accept your paper, you will have saved valuable time and effort. If we do accept your paper we will, of course, ask you to format your work to fit the FRBM style, but we suspect you won’t mind at that point. In addition to the new policy, Elsevier, the publisher of FRBM, has also agreed to actually convert any reference style for you at the time of acceptance, as long as your references contain all the normal information, including the paper title.

Naturally, we hope that you will make Free Radical Biology & Medicine your first choice for publication but, if your next paper should happen to be rejected by another top-flight journal, don’t waste time reorganizing, reformatting, and composing initial inquiry letters; just make a PDF file of the whole thing and send it to us! If you choose to submit your paper in the traditional way, that is not a problem – after all it’s your paper.

The Editors and Publisher of Free Radical Biology & Medicine think that ‘Your Paper, Your Way’ represents a return to common sense and a genuine renewed focus on the rights and needs of authors. We trust you will agree, and we look forward to seeing ‘Your Papers, Your Way.’
We are interested in your response to ‘Your Paper, Your Way.’ Feel free to let us have your short comments and brief opinions by e-mailing us at: mailto:frbm@elsevier.com We will try to publish a collection of such comments in the Journal.