With a change this month to our new publishing partner, Wolters Kluwer, I thought it was a good time to review how associations such as AANP relate to a publishing partner and why it is important to the reputation of a journal to work with legitimate publishers. Although nursing journals are published by several well-known, legitimate publishing companies, some are self-published and maintain the same high-quality standards as those published by large publishers. For associations, the mission and scope of their journals reflects the needs of their members, while the publishing practices are driven by the scholarly publishing enterprise. The high standards demanded by the scholarly community are reflected in the reputation and practices of the publishers. You might ask why the reputation of the publisher matters, and a recent notice from the National Institutes of Health (NIH, 2017) claims that the credibility of science rests upon that reputation.
The purpose of the NIH Statement on Article Publication Resulting from NIH Funded Research is "To protect the credibility of published research, authors are encouraged to publish papers arising from NIH-funded research in reputable journals." Funding agencies all around the world want to assure their research funds are doing good and advancing science, and the NIH is no exception. It is estimated that that worldwide, approximately 18,000 funded biomedical reports of research (not all funded by NIH), languish in "poorly indexed and scientifically questionable journals" (Moher, Shamseer, & Cobey, 2017; p. 24). There are several institutes within the NIH that fund nurses and nursing research, so nurse researchers will benefit from this advice.
This NIH guidance specifically calls out deceptive practices such as aggressive solicitation of articles, inaccurate statements about pricing, a suspicious peer review process, and poor editorial oversight of a journal. The guidance includes some useful recommendations, many of which I have advocated in previous editorials (Pierson, 2014). The NIH guidance specifically recommends other industry standards that might be useful to authors, such as membership in COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) and indexing in Medline, Scopus, Web of Science, or other legitimate databases.
Our assurance to authors and researchers
As we begin our 30th year of continuous publishing of JAANP with a new publisher, I can say with confidence that our publication practices have always been and continue to be transparent and reputable as we worked with several publishers over the years. One hallmark of reputable journals according to the NIH statement is a transparent and rigorous peer review process. One way to determine if an article has been peer reviewed is to examine the article history data (dates of submission, revision, and publication), which should be published for full transparency. In my editorial experience, it is impossible for an article to progress through a peer review process and be published in a matter of days. You will see from our article histories, this process often takes months. For a peer review process to be robust, expert reviewers must be found, they must agree to review, and they often must fit a peer review into their otherwise busy schedules. On the editorial side, the editor must thoughtfully consider the reviewers' comments, make a decision on the manuscript, communicate with the authors, and wait for the authors' response. Once the authors have responded, the editor must either make a decision on the revised manuscript or send out the revision for additional peer review if the changes requested were extensive; and the entire process repeats. So, it is implausible when an article history indicates submission, revision, and acceptance within a 3-day period.
A further testament to our quality peer review is the publication of reviewer names every year, which you will find in this issue. Although we do not publish the reviews, which has been recommended by many as a truly transparent process, we do publish the list of reviewers who contribute to the quality of the articles we publish. Reviewers are accountable for their comments and recommendations; however, not all reviewers see the same paper in the same light. There are disagreements among the recommendations of reviewers and sometimes in the comments as well. It is the job of the editor to arbitrate those disagreements, and it is the responsibility of the authors to determine how to respond to the comments. It is not uncommon for authors to recognize they had not been clear in their presentation of ideas, which caused reviewers to ask for something not relevant to the development of the manuscript. It is the author comments that accompany a revised manuscript that help the editor decide if the revision is satisfactory.
We adhere to all of the recommendations for transparency and robust peer review as we approach our 30-year record of publishing quality work. There is always room for improvement, but we continually strive to publish the best articles possible to meet the needs of nurse practitioners in education, practice, research, and health policy. That is the mission of JAANP.
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