Of abstract importance – new abstract style for 2011

The Expert Opinion journals recognise how important an article's abstract is in drawing in the interested reader. The clearer and more insightful the abstract, the more interest, and potentially more citations, the manuscript will attract. For original research and systematic reviews, structured abstracts are typically required, with guidance on how to prepare these provided by the CONSORT Group. For review articles with free, unstructured abstracts, however, it can be difficult to know how best to present the abstract and what information to include to best represent the full paper. To help authors prepare fitting abstracts and to provide consistency for readers across the Expert Opinion series, in 2011 we are requesting authors include the following in their abstracts for review articles:

• Introduction - describing the significance of the topic and reason for the review
• Areas covered - describing the research discussed and the literature review undertaken
• Expert opinion - summarising the article's 'Expert Opinion' section, a unique feature of all Expert Opinion reviews in which the author goes beyond the conclusion to provide their own personal view of the field

Expert Opinion 2009 Impact Factors

The 2009 ISI Impact Factors (IFs) have just been released, and Expert Opinion has had a good year:

Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs = 4.218
Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets = 3.713
Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy = 3.215
Expert Opinion on Drug Metabolism and Toxicology = 3.076
Expert Opinion on Drug Safety = 2.496
Expert Opinion on Emerging Drugs = 2.407
Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy = 2.018
Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents = 1.280

Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery has now received its first IF, emerging with a strong first showing of 3.345.

The IF indicates a publication’s influence within the global research community. In a given year, the IF of a journal reflects the average number of citations to those papers that were published during the two preceding years. Expert Opinion’s 2009 IFs therefore account for the number of articles published from 2007-2008, which were cited in 2009.
Further information on IF’s can be found on the ISI Web of Knowledge website, under Journal Citation Reports.

Scholar One 'submitting agent' feature activated for Expert Opinion journals

Medical communication agencies can now submit manuscripts to Expert Opinion journals as third party, on behalf of the authors .
The name of the submitting agent will not appear in the authors' list and both the submitting agent and the corresponding author will receive emails from the editorial team regarding the manuscript.

The submitting person must now identify itself as an author or a third-party submitting agent at the first step of the submission process.

This feature has been activated for the following journals using the Scholar One submission platform:

• Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy
• Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets
• Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs
• Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy
• Expert Opinion on Metabolism and Toxicology
• Expert Opinion on Drug Safety
  

Open repositories VS the Publisher

On March 18th the MIT introduced a policy requiring all scholarly articles written by its faculty members to be made freely available in an open access repository. While researchers understandably applaud the free and open dissemination of data, there are questions that should be considered with regards to the impact of a growing number of open repositories on the value added by Publishers, and how this value would be retained if in the long term the open access journal turns out to be unsustainable.

How important is the value added by the Publisher (and this is not an open access versus non-open access journal debate)? While the peer review process is certainly not without its failings, to any Publisher or Editor worth their salt, the integrity of the peer review process is paramount. To quote a previous blog post on this site, an author of a CMRO article on receiving his peer review comments said "I have never received 58 referee comments on a manuscript less than 3000 words long, but the referees' comments and the revision definitely improved the paper." An author of a recent paper submitted to Expert Opinion on Medical Diagnostics fed back "a comment about the reviewers: it was clear that they read the manuscript carefully. Regardless of whether they agreed with some of our arguments, their comments reflected readers that thought about what they read. This is how peer review is supposed to work. Excellent reviewer selection on your part, and a thorough job on theirs." Aside from assisting the author in critically reviewing their work and ultimately leading to a better paper, without the peer review process how do we ensure no dangerously inaccurate information is published that is indistinguishable from high calibre scientific research?

And it’s not just in the peer review that value is added by the Publisher. Who checks references are cited correctly and terms are not misspelled - will the institutions running their own open access repositories employ copyeditors? Who will ensure the figures are legible and of good quality – will the institutions employ production editors who lay the work out in such a way that it is easy on the eye and doesn’t give readers a headache? Will there be any independent quality check before the research is published? With a limitless amount of potentially unqualified freely available literature, how will the busy physician who only has 5 minutes in his/her day to digest the most important findings even know where to start? These are just a few of the questions that would need to be answered.

Ok, I’m playing devil’s advocate a little here. I do not envisage a world where the peer-reviewed journal ceases to exist, but the open access model of publishing is widely debated, both in terms of quality and sustainability. So what is the future of publishing? Even if the open access, pay to publish model is viable in the long term, does the scientific community agree to paying to publish all of their work in the future, rather than pay to read the work of others? The fact is, publishing a journal is a costly business and the money has to come from somewhere. Publishers are accused of placing scientific research behind ‘commercial barriers’, but surely the same argument could be applied to the pay to publish model. Is it fair that only authors with funding can afford to have it published? Will this lead to a bias in the literature towards sponsored research, not even so much through the choices of the Editor, but through the fact that only authors who can pay can publish? Or is there an alternative, free to publish, free to read, sustainable model for open access publishing that still maintains high standards of peer review and editorial quality?

While Publishers undoubtedly need to take steps to ensure the advancement of science through the widest possible dissemination of research, with respect to the whole principal of open access, how do we do this for free? Surely someone, somewhere has to pay something?

In summary:

• How important is value added by the Publisher?
• How will high calibre research be distinguished?
• How will the reader filter the wealth of freely available literature?
• Does the scientific community want to pay to publish all of their work in the future?
• Could this lead to bias in the literature?
• What if the pay to publish model doesn't work?
• Is there an alternative, free to publish, free to read, sustainable model for open access publishing that still maintains high standards of peer review and editorial quality?

By Anna Heinink, Publisher, Expert Opinion

Informa Pharmaceutical Science’s policy on NIH-funded research can be found here http://www.informapharmascience.com/page/resources/authors#nihfundedresearch

Profile: Dimitri Mikhailidis

It seems appropriate that our first profile for the Informa Pharmaceutical Science blog should feature Dr. Dimitri P. Mikhailidis. Dimitri is currently Editor-In-Chief of four journals published by Informa Pharmaceutical Science: Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs, Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets, Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy, and Current Medical Research and Opinion. Beyond Dimitri's editorial role, he has been an author on numerous original research articles, reviews, and editorials, with over 60 published articles in Expert Opinion and CMRO since 2000. Lest we give the impression that Dimitri favours our journals over others click here to see his 600+ Pubmed listings.

Dimitri is currently the Academic Head & Honorary Consultant to the Department of Clinical Biochemistry at the Royal Free University College Medical School, University College London, and he holds Visiting Professor positions at Robert Gordon University (Scotland) and University of Ioannina Medical School (Greece). Dimitri has travelled widely to present his research, having lectured in 40 countries around the world. Beyond the editorial posts he holds with the Informa Pharmaceutical Science journals, Dimitri is also Editor-in-Chief of four other medical journals, and holds other editorial positions with several more. And sometimes, apparently, he eats and sleeps, although we have no empirical evidence to support this claim.

Research by Dimitri and his network of collaborators primarily focuses on treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease, and Dimitri was awarded the British Medical Association (BMA) award for vascular research in 1995. His articles cover a broad spectrum of topics: many are written with an eye towards utility for current clinicians, some cast needed attention on new promising therapies in the drug development pipeline, while still others focus on future directions for research in cardiovascular disease. A notable recent paper published in EOP, authored by Dimitri and his colleague Martin Press from the Royal Free Hospital, reviewed the importance of targeting multiple risk factors, including both traditional and novel cardiometabolic factors, in the prevention of cardiovascular events in patients with type 2 diabetes (available for free download). In another recent publication, an editorial commentary in the March 2008 issue of CMRO, Dimitri and his colleagues present an interesting discussion on how age affects how cholesterol levels can and should be used to predict vascular risk and the implications for elderly patients (available for free download).

Dimitri's most recent article, an editorial in CMRO, is likely to create some waves in the cardiovascular community. The editorial focuses on the growing controversy over the potential danger of abruptly stopping statin use in high-risk patients. Instead of giving away the punchline, read the paper for free here.

How Evolutionary Biology Can Help Design Novel Anti-Viral Drugs

While the concept of evolutionary medicine has been around for well over fifty years, the collaboration between evolutionary biology and medical research has proven less profitable than was predicted by early proponents of the field. However, recent efforts to fight rapidly evolving infectious viral pathogens have been increasingly relying on the underlying understanding of viral evolution in order to design more effective antiviral drugs. Esteban Domingo and his colleagues in a recent perspective for Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy entitled "Future prospects for the treatment of rapidly evolving viral pathogens: insights from evolutionary biology" review the promise of drug design informed by evolutionary biology for overcoming viral escape mutations.

1. Click Here to Receive a Free Token to Download this Paper

and then

2. Click Here to Take You to the Paper

Expert Opinion to use Manuscript Central

In an effort to facilitate the copy flow administration, the Expert Opinion series will start in the next few weeks to use the online Manuscript Central platform to manage its pipeline of articles from commission to pre-production.

This system will semi-automatically move manuscripts through the different editorial processes, while making the data and documents directly available online to authors, commissioning editors, editorial assistants and referees.

Authors will be expected to submit their paper online at the following addresses:

• Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eobt
• Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eodc
• Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eodd
• Expert Opinion on Medical Diagnostics http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eodg
• Expert Opinion on Drug Safety http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eods
• Expert Opinion on Emerging Drugs http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eoed
• Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eoid
• Expert Opinion on Drug Metabolism and Toxicology http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eomt
• Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eoop
• Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eotp
• Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eott

As always, the editorial team remains contactable directly and will work closely with authors and referees.

New Hope for Old Chemotherapy?

While the vast majority of cancer research focuses on new therapeutic approaches, recent research on an unrelated topic has revealed new potential for old chemotherapy techniques. Anti-aging research by Valter Longo and colleagues at the University of Southern California chanced upon the idea while studying the effects differential stress resistance brought on by fasting. The groundbreaking study, published recently by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that fasting before chemotherapy has the potential to protect healthy cells from the deleterious effects of broad-spectrum chemotherapy, while cancer cells remain susceptible. Expert Opinion author Antonio Russo has reviewed this research and the potential for further development of this concept in a recent article in Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets.

1. Click Here to Receive a Free Token to Download this Paper

and then

2. Click Here to Take You to the Paper

Expert Opinion 2007 Impact Factors

The 2007 ISI Impact Factors have just been released, and Expert Opinion has had a good year. Expert Opinion on Emerging Drugs has now received its first Impact Factor, emerging with a strong first showing of 2.725. Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets enjoyed the greatest increase from 2006, jumping from 2.662 to 3.333, while Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs continues to have the highest Impact Factor and total citations among the Expert Opinion journals.

Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs: 3.667 (up from 3.174)
Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets: 3.333 (up from 2.662)
Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy: 2.815 (up from 2.705)
Expert Opinion on Emerging Drugs: 2.725 (first Impact factor for EOED)
Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy: 1.703
Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents: 1.589 (up from 1.488)