[Ed. We recently learned from the George Maldonado, University of Minnesota epidemiologist and editor-in-chief of Epidemiologic Perspectives and Innovations (EP&I) that the journal would cease publication. According to Maldonado, “the journal will stop being published by BioMed Central as of March 30, 2012 because we do not publish enough articles to fit their business model.”

We were surprised by the news and wondered how Emerging Themes in Epidemiology (ETE), a second online epidemiology journal launched at the same time and published by BioMed Central was faring. These were the only exclusively online journals we knew about in epidemiology and we were curious about the state of online publication of epidemiology journals. We contacted the editors and asked them to reply to a common set of questions to help readers understand the current situation. What emerges is a contrasting but always interesting set of perspectives on epidemiology in 2012.

The first interview published below is from the editors of EP&I (George Maldonado [GM]and Carl Phillips [CVP], former professor now operating a private, academic-style epidemiology and economics research shop called Populi Health Institute. This is followed by comments from the team of editors of Emerging Themes in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine [LSHTM] ((Peter Smith, Clarence Tam, Ben Lopman, and Anita Ramesh)

First Interview

Editors of Epidemiologic Perspectives and Innovations

EM: When was the journal launched?

GM: September 2004

EM: Have the editors been the same since then?

GM: The Editor in Chief was originally Carl, then I joined him as co-editor-in-chief in April 2007, and then Carl left it entirely in June 2010. We are currently discussing how to possibly continue it under a different publishing model.  I would be in charge, and Carl is considering joining me in a co-chief type role.

The original editorial board consisted of a group of well-known and impressive senior and junior epidemiologists.  Over the years, it evolved toward less involvement by most of them, with a few younger scholars really being the supporting editors.

Hopes and Expectations

EM:  How has the journal lived up and fallen short of your hopes and expectations?

CVP:  The quality of the journal was great.  I genuinely believe that the average quality of the articles, in terms of value and scientific legitimacy, was the highest of any journal in the field.  Of course, it was biased toward that by being designed to capture what we thought were critical aspects of epidemiology that no one else would publish because they deviated too much from business as usual.  However, part of the reason for the high average quality was low volume.  When I started this, I had the notion that there was a huge backlog of ideas that were ideal for this journal because I heard so many of them from our colleagues. Unfortunately, many of those just never appeared -- not in EP&I or anywhere else.  Sadly, even among those who really want to help push the field away from where it seems to have been stuck since well before I joined it, there is not really much incentive to spend one's time that way.

GM: Authors from "subscriber" institutions could publish in EP&I at no charge. Authors from non-subscriber institutions are charged a publication fee that has increased over the years and is currently at $1700. That is a steep price for the kind of papers that EP&I hoped to publish---methodological work that often has no grant support. Over time, fewer institutions subscribed to BioMed Central, and consequently a rising proportion of authors faced this publication cost. I believe this has been a significant disincentive to submit to EP&I. And over time, as BMC was sold and it's business model evolved, BMC decided that they are not interested in publishing small-volume journals like EP&I. 

The Future

EM: What is your view about the future of your journal and of any similar online journals?

CVP:  The BMC publishing model is a strange niche that made sense for about five minutes in the 2000s, but it really is already as scientifically obsolete as the paper it half replaced.  However, it will hang on for a long time, and indeed is expanding because of academic score-keeping.  What I mean is that it makes little sense for a publisher to create something that is exactly like an old paper journal, except minus the paper, and charge a large amount to publish in it.  What passes for finished work in public health sciences, as well as peer review as it is practiced, is already a joke and is getting worse.  So most journals serve little purpose other than adding common formatting to a working paper archive.  But because there are thousands of people who get points for "peer reviewed" publications in a journal that is associated with a for-profit publisher, and hundreds more every year in China, India, Nigeria, etc., there is a market for pay-to-publish journals that fit the score keepers' criteria and I think I get an email about a new one starting every few weeks.

But these journals are being squeezed.  On one side are low- or no-cost open-access journals which we hope EP&I will become which can be published using modern technology for almost free by the same people who do all the work anyway, the editors.  On the other side is the obsolescence and failure of the whole current model, which has been largely displaced in fields that are serious about quality (physics, math, economics). As I said, there will be plenty of demand for the new page-fee harvesting operations, supporting promotions at new Chinese universities that are trying to imitate America c.1980.  I would like to think that the rest of us can move into the next century; well, I would like to hope anyway -- I am not actually optimistic.

GM: Currently there is really no good reason for EP&I to continue to publish under a business model like BMC. As I mentioned, the publication charge is a disincentive for the kinds of papers we are hoping to publish. And BMC gave us no support for the day-to-day activities of running a journal, other than formatting manuscripts and maintaining a web site. We are optimistic that we can find a low-cost alternative to BMC. Consequently, I am optimistic that EP&I will continue to be published and continue to attract manuscripts that address the methodological needs of epidemiology.

CVP: As a result of conversations between George and I, our plans are to create a new version of EP&I (BMC is graciously letting us keep ownership of the name) that fulfills some of the original goals and perhaps broadens the scope a bit further.  We (GM and CVP) along with Igor Burstyn (Drexel University) plan to re-launch using some of the inexpensive open-access journal tools that are now widely available, and will allow publication with very little or no fee.  We will continue the recent main mission of EP&I under GM's leadership, publishing invited papers that revisit classic thoughts
and articles, as well as providing a home for analyses that do not fit well into standard medical or epidemiology journals.  We are excited about introducing an "open peer review" system for most of the submitted papers.  With this, we hope to attract articles from traditional sources, but also from some of the countless analysts who do good epidemiologic analysis but do not want to bother with the abuse and arbitrariness in the standard peer review process.

Open peer review, in which pre-final copies of papers would be posted to be openly reviewed by any interested readers, is a version of the crowd-sourced reviews that have pretty much taken over other fields
like physics, math, and economics, and are being used to some extent in most fields across academia.  In many other fields, this consists of a finished paper being posted and then subject to "post-publication peer review" rather than peer review consisting of three or four people engaged in arbitrary gatekeeping.  In those cases, the final journal article (if there is one) is almost like an archiving after the work has been
in play for years.  Our version will be more of a hybrid with traditional peer review, designed to improve the paper before finalizing it, but with the goal of a accepted peer-reviewed version in the journal as rapidly as is appropriate.  But our version would share with the others a recognition that dialogue and crowd-sourcing needs to replace the star-chamber-like gatekeeping and stamp-of-approval process.

Other Comments

EM: What comments, if any, would you make to your epidemiology colleagues on the topic of your journal?

CVP: The day will dawn when there will be demand for scientific thinking in epidemiology rather than either just cranking out studies using 1980s technology or layering on complicated statistics that amount to polishing the chrome on the Titanic. If you are one of the true scientific thinkers, don't give up.  But also

don't try to fight the powers that be on their own ground, an experience that will leave you either miserable or co-opted.

GM: I believe there is a need for outside-the-box thinking about how to ask and answer cause-and-effect questions about health. My perception (and personal experience) is that established journals are not comfortable with these kinds of manuscripts. It appears to be easier for reviewers and editors to reject such  papers than to risk accepting a manuscript that is based on (or is proposing) an alternative framework for thinking about epidemiologic issues. EP&I is comfortable with these manuscripts, and indeed encourages them.

Second Interview

Emerging Themes in Epidemiology

EM:  When was the journal launched?

LSHTM: The journal was launched in 2005, at around the same time as EP&I

EM: Have the editors been the same since then?

LSHTM: The senior management (editor-in-chief and deputy editors) have remained the same since ETE's launch. Part of the journal's remit is to provide doctoral students with editorial experience, so the editors responsible for the day-to-day operation of the journal change on a regular basis. The editorial board has recently undergone a major restructuring.

EM: Is your journal being dropped by Bio Med Central for infrequent publication?

LSHTM: BMC was considering dropping the journal. Over the past year, we have been having discussions with them to develop a plan for broadening the focus of the journal and increasing publications, which includes a restructuring and expansion of the editorial board, a change to the journal's remit and activities to promote the journal and increase article submissions. We have found BMC to be very supportive and receptive to these changes.

Hopes and Expectations

EM: How has the journal lived up to your hopes and expectations?
 

LSHTM: As mentioned above, part of the journal's remit is to provide a training ground for young researchers who want some practical experience in the editorial process and to this end, we feel that the journal has largely been a successful enterprise. We have been disappointed that the submission rate has been lower than we anticipated.

EM:  How has the journal fallen short of what you were hoping for?

LSHTM: We have encountered many of the same difficulties as our EP&I colleagues in terms of attracting a sustained volume of submissions and achieving the journal's other main aim, which is to be a leading publication for promoting discussion into epidemiological concepts, methods and developments. We have also been less successful at attracting high quality publications from low and middle income countries as we had hoped.

The Future

EM: What is your view about the future of your journal and of any similar online journals?

LSHTM: We have a revamped and reinvigorated editorial board, and we believe that Open Access journals are the way of the future.  However, we recognize that established epidemiological journals pose substantial competition for high quality articles and we have widened our scope to appeal to a larger author base.

Other Events

EM: What comments, if any, would you make to your epidemiology colleagues on the topic of your journal?

LSHTM: We believe there are strong ethical and moral imperatives for Open access publishing and we would urge your readers to submit to ETE to give their findings the widest circulation. We particularly encourage submissions in the following areas:

Submissions

-  New epidemiological concepts and methods
-  Novel ways of presenting and providing insights into existing epidemiological concepts and methods, including in a teaching environment
-  Use of epidemiological research methods in non-medical settings (e.g. criminology)
-  Causal inference in epidemiology
-  Applications of new technologies in field studies (e.g. mobile technologies, pattern recognition techniques, social networking tools)
-  Ethical issues in epidemiological research
-  New statistical methods, or novel uses of existing methods, in epidemiological studies
-  Methodological developments in molecular and genetic epidemiology and novel applications in these areas
-  Historical articles and re-assessments of classic paper