Gunther Eysenbach's random research rants

The insanity (and probably illegality) of transformative agreements (including Plan S and Project Deal) - An Open Letter to Libraries and Coalition S

2020-01-07T12:14:00.003-05:00

Prologue

From JMIR Publications' email inbox - daily emails from authors (incl the developed world!) requests to waive the article fees because authors don't have funding and there is no institutional general APC fund supporting APCs from all publishers while at the same time libraries have transformative agreements with some big publishers forcing them to convert to OA by covering their APCs. JMIR can now either waive the fees (and subsidize the publication costs) or authors withdraw and the JMIR journal loses the manuscript (sometimes already peer-reviewed and revised/improved over multiple rounds by a JMIR reviewer) to another journal/publisher whose APCs are paid by the library through so-called transformative agreements (i.e. JMIR loses the manuscript to a competitor journal or has to pay for publication himself), at a higher price than the most expensive JMIR journal (Wiley gets $3000 APC per article, JMIR's most expensive APC is $2500!). Examples of cries for help from authors:

For authors from Germany, full open access publishers such as JMIR Publications (who are not part of "transformative agreements" because there is nothing to "transform" - they are OA already), publishers like JMIR, Frontiers, MDPI have to routinely reduce the APC to 1680 EUR, because the major research funder DFG has capped the APC to that amount. Meanwhile, in the transformative agreements e.g. struck by Project Deal with Wiley and Springer, these publishers receive up to EUR 2750 (US$3000) per article - in addition to receiving free publicity. Project Deal is negotiating only with the 3 biggest publishers because... they are big. Similar national deals are proliferating in Europe. Fair? Legal?

I am all for open access. I worked the last 20 years on OA.
So-called "transformative agreements" (which seems to be central to Coalition S/Plan S) are done with the best intentions to increase the number of OA journals, but pose a mortal threat to existing smaller/medium and society open access journals, directing manuscripts to the large publishers who have a prepaid APC deal with libraries or consortia under such transformative agreements, away from existing OA journals, which often have significantly lower APCs.
In essence, public funds are used to help large commercial companies to switch to a business model they have long resisted, instead of positively directing funds to existing OA publishers who did not have the luxury to make billions with the business model of reselling academic content in toll-access journals.
Existing negotiation principles (drafted by libraries) for transformative agreements ignore the fact that there are existing Open Access publishers, and that signing an agreement with a legacy/hybrid publisher takes away from submissions to existing OA publishers, who compete with legacy publishers for the best manuscripts. Coalition S aims to increase open access, but has only published "criteria for publishers of transformative journals" without spending a single word in their implementation guidelines about how to support existing open access publishers and platforms and about criteria for funding such journals.

What librarians do with transformative agreements such as Project Deal (a very powerful alliance of all German science and research organizations, negotiating a single-sourced contract with Wiley and Springer which will direct manuscripts of all German faculty and students preferably to the hybrid/open access journals of these large publishers) is to cement the existing monopolies/oligarchies in publishing, stifling innovation, and reducing diversity in the publishing market.

The reality is that libraries are used to negotiate with legacy publishers about subscriptions, and there has been no historic need to negotiate with OA publishers about anything, as they already do exactly what librarians or Plan S/Coalition S and other government entities want them to do - but open access publishers do need support, and need it more than those "poor" publishers like Springer-Nature who wants the transformative deals (all APCs covered) but is screaming and kicking having to abandon their hybrid journals which allows them to double-dip (getting paid for subscriptions AND article processing fees). Why are we spending public tax money to "help" commercial entities to switch to a different business model because they didn't understand the sign of times 20 years ago? The situation is similar to a government wanting to switch from Internal Combustion Engine cars to electric cars nationwide, prepaying for and subsidizing the costs for consumers to buy a car from BMW or Ford but not from Tesla, and throwing money only at traditional car makers to fund their costs to switch production without reimbursing or subsidizing the costs to buy a car from an electric car maker like Tesla. Imagine if consumers would be incentivized to buy electric cars from BMW and Ford but not Tesla - how would we call this? Unfair competition. A violation of antitrust laws.

In my 20 years of publishing fully open access journals, we have not once received a single dime (or $) of funding from libraries (other OA publishers, like Frontiers, MDPI, Plos, have more muscle and may have institutional agreements, but as niche publisher we simply do not have the market size and staff to negotiate with hundreds of universities/libraries) - rather than being paid by libraries, it is all our authors paying from their research grants. The only exception is our recent deal with the University of California (which frankly seems to be the only institution having the vision to support native OA publishers) - but it remains to be seen if other libraries/consortia replicate this model (our emails to Project Deal and other libraries who made transformative deals and are covering the APC of large publishers, asking them to match the conditions they gave to Wiley and Springer have not been responded to at all). And to be clear, if you want to go with the "quality argument", keep in mind that 4 out of the 8 leading health informatics journals are published by us.

If the general model changes in the future from APCs being paid by authors/research grants towards libraries picking up these costs, libraries/funders must ensure an "open-access first" policy, where APCs of native open-access publishers and their journals are equally paid or even paid first (i.e. transformative agreements should only be made for journals where no OA journal are in existence and where there is significant demand to publish in a former subscription/hybrid journal). And by the way, don't use Web of Science or Scopus for these assessments (rather use DOAJ).

In reality, funders and libraries continue to talk to legacy publishers in an effort to reduce their library budgets/subscription costs. But this reduction in subscription costs comes at a price. The price is the eradication of native/full open access publishers, a drastic reduction in the diversity of the publishing market, with small publishers like us being unable to compete for the best authors because if they submit to the large publishers their APCs are already paid, even though our journals and author services may be better and APCs may be cheaper. For example, 4 out of the top 8 journals in the medical informatics category ranked by Clarivate are not published by Springer, Elsevier or Wiley, but by us. Yet these publishers have contracts with libraries, funders, and consortia, and we don't. Their APCs are subsidized or fully paid by libraries under "transformative deals", encouraging authors to submit to their journals. If we (JMIR Publications) get a DFG-funded manuscript from a German author, we are forced to reduce the fee to EUR 2000, as this is DFG's funding cap, so the author needs to find a journal that is willing to provide a discount (JMIR does) or find a journal covered by a transformative agreement. Wiley, on the other hand, gets EUR 2750 under their golden Project Deal TA deal, with the APC paid centrally and automatically by the Project Deal consortium, without the author having to tap into their research funds. The deal with Wiley by Project Deal (as well as all the other transformative deals where library consortia throw money at legacy publishers to convert to OA, without funding true OA Publishers) was done without procurement process, without competitive bidding.

Side note: The contract of Project Deal with Wiley not only allows Wiley to create new Open Access journals during the contract period at will (reminder: Wiley gets EUR 2750 APC per article published, also in new journals, and from the author perspective it is "free" as it is covered in the national deal - a dream contract for Wiley and a sure way to make sure that Wiley can drive competing OA journals out of the market in any discipline they wish), but even the creation of a new open access "flagship interdisciplinary journal (and potentially sister journals at the subject level)" is part of the contract of Project Deal with Wiley. It stipulates that this new OA journal "will publish top-tier scholarship from the global research community and serve to deliver open science innovation and proof that open access publishing can thrive as a publishing format for the best in global research" (Source: contract of Project Deal with Wiley). So new journals are being created by Wiley, all costs / APCs covered by the contract with all German science institutions, without Request for Proposals or a tendering process. One could argue that existing Open Acess publishers such as Plos or JMIR Publications (which has a European office) with 20 years of experience may be better or at least equally well-positioned candidates to launch new OA journals and provide "proof that open access publishing can thrive as a publishing format" (perhaps they already have done that for the past 20 years?), but they never got the chance to even bid for this opportunity. In our assessment this is not only not fair, but also illegal (violating procurement and antitrust and competition laws) and is anti-competitive. In the case of Project Deal one does not have to dig deep to identify the motivation and conflicts of interests of those behind Project Deal: Gerard Meijer and Horst Hippler (former President of the German Rectors' Conference, and chief architect and negotiator of Project Deal) are named in the contract of Project Deal with Wiley as securing themselves the positions as "founding members of the advisory board for the flagship journal (...) and shall work with Wiley to establish a top flight global editorial board". Again, we are talking about public tax money funding this endeavor, not tendered, and national top science administrators securing themselves key positions in a quasi-government supported megajournal (or series of journals). In the Western world, there should be free competition in the market and disentanglement of such interests. In principle, all publishers, German or European should have been able to bid for the establishment of such a journal series. It is unbearable that this was not a tendered process with OA publishers being able to bid. (end of side note)

While as small publisher we may survive losing all our German authors to the legacy publishers making "transformative deals" with Project Deal, similar contracts are made throughout the EU and (with expansion of Coalition-S globally) in other parts of the world, we will lose authors institution by institution and country by country. In the next couple of years, you will see a rapid decline of full open access publishers, who will all be acquired by large legacy publishers. And who is then there to keep the APCs at a reasonable level if the big 5 have a monopoly?

In order to ensure a fair competition, libraries must employ proper procurement/bidding processes for any type of agreement that includes a central APC coverage or subsidy (and new journals/OA platforms), and ensure that smaller native OA publishers can equally compete for these licenses/agreements (or new journals/OA platforms), so that manuscripts from their institution are equally or perhaps even preferably submitted to native OA publishers first. I also propose that Coalition-S spends some time not only to think about criteria for "transformative agreements", but also develops hard guidelines for any library, funder, or consortium that makes a transformative agreement with hybrid/legacy publishers to mandate that they must also close agreements with native open access publishers covering their APCs by default, and centrally administering payments to these publishers. Perhaps we need a Coalition of Full Open Access Publishers to lead such negotiations on the publisher side, and to develop the software infrastructure for APC payments).

The current model of transformative agreements rewards publishers with legacy subscription content with large contracts, covering APCs for all authors from an institution or even country. Legacy publishers with subscription content like Wiley, Springer-Nature, Elsevier have a strong negotiation position and can blackmail the scientific community with their subscription content: "we won't give you access to this legacy content with a reasonable price unless you direct further manuscripts of future authors to us, which will also dry out our OA competition". In the current system, libraries are actually misusing public tax money to help legacy publishers to transition to OA (and it remains to be seen if this transition will actually be completed).

This is not only unfair but also illegal under the anti-trust, competition and procurement laws (directing public funds to large commercial publishers without proper bidding process that includes smaller publishers), and hopefully the courts and competition agencies will wake up soon and realize that Plan S and many "read and publish" deals such as Project Deal, Bibsam etc are illegal and are a threat to fair and open competition. These concerns are well known and have been raised repeatedly (e.g. by OASPA), but those responsible for these policies just shrug their shoulders and seem to accept that their policies are destroying an emerging ecosystem of OA publishers that are outside of the "big 5" commercial publishing corporations.

OA publishers might start suing libraries and consortia that make deals with large publishers without procurement process, that throw money at legacy publishers without matching their contributions to existing OA publishers, or giving them a chance to bid for new journals, or a chance to survive by funding their APCs. We are speaking with first-hand knowledge - we have been sending emails to these consortia/libraries begging for similar deals, so far with little success.

Existing OA publishers such as Plos or JMIR Publications have in some areas superior journals (for lack of a better metric, e.g. higher impact factor), lower costs (APCs), and superior turnaround times and author services, and innovative products (e.g. in our case, inexpensive and innovative overlay journals for preprints). It is a scandal to focus on transformative deals, throwing public money at legacy publishers, only because of their size and ability to hold the scientific community hostage with their legacy content (and in some cases impact factor, as Clarivate and Scopus [owned by Elsevier] continue to be biased against OA journals, refusing to index many of them).

I have many questions - what do you think?

How can librarians ensure that OA publishers are included in these deals and are not going to be the pioneers who die with the arrows in their back?
How can native/full OA publishers get together and put pressure - legal pressure if needed - on libraries and consortia that are striking transformative deals like these to not selectively encourage publication with legacy publishers?
As OASPA seems to be ineffective in advocating on behalf of full OA publishers (as OASPA is now dominated by large commercial mixed-model publishers who are part of these transformative deals), is there a need to create a new organization or negotiation group of full OA publishers / academic societies who can negotiate as a group and - if necessary - take legal action against libraries/consortia which act in an anti-competitive way?

(Added Jan 13, 2020) A policy suggestion for consortia and libraries negotiating variants of "read and publish agreements" / transformative agreements (TAs) with legacy/hybrid publishers which cover APCs of that publisher: Consider what the deal means for faculty/students who want to publish with a different full open access journal/publisher rather than your favorite legacy publisher. Can they do it if they have no research funds, or are you implicitly redirecting their manuscripts to the all-paid TA publisher? Before closing TAs, you may want to ensure that either (1) an institutional OA fund exists that allows the reimbursement of APCs for faculty/students for all journals/publishers that fulfill certain criteria (and these criteria must match the criteria for legacy-publisher journals covered by the TA), or (2) library carefully selects journals and publishers they want to support with APC coverage, based on reproducible "hard" criteria (e.g. all full open access journals in PubMed) that are independent of the publisher size (please don't only make deals with the large OA publishers and think you covered the OA aspect with that - there is a long tail of small OA publishers) and closes deals with these publishers alongside with the TA (and promotes these publishers internally in the same way as the TA publisher), or 3) a bidding / public tender process is initiated for the "publish" component, open to all open access publications, which then gets the exact same conditions as the publish component in contracts with big legacy publishers. While I am not a legal scholar, I would think that these measures (especially 1) would ensure a more fair process and protect the library to a certain degree from being accused of being anticompetitive and from legal challenges.

Gunther Eysenbach

Publisher, JMIR Publications

Update Jan 10th, 2020: Springer and Project Deal have now finalized their monopolist contract.

Update Jan 13th 2020: @SylvieVullioud pointed me to an analysis by Mark McCabe who writes (Pay it forward, Appendix H) "in such an OA Big Deals world, the legal and economic arguments in support of antitrust activity would likely be far more persuasive. As mentioned previously, good theoretical and empirical support for a case is just a necessary condition for the initiation of an investigation. Active participation by the injured parties is also required to push things forward.".

Impact Factors 2016 in Medical Informatics: JMIR and JMIR mHealth lead with top impact Factors

2017-06-15T10:26:00.004-04:00

Clarivate (formerly the IP Division of Thomson Reuters) has released its' impact factors for 2016, which reflect how often papers published in 2014-2015 were cited in 2016. The impact factor of the Journal of Medical Internet Research has risen to an unprecedented impact factor of 5.175. JMIR is making history, as never before did a journal in the Medical Informatics discipline have an impact factor of >5! JMIR is ranked #1 in the Medical Informatics discipline, and #4 in the large Health Sciences + Health Services research category. JMIR has a significantly better impact factor than its competitor journals which include JAMIA, Plos One, BMJ Open, PeerJ etc.

At the same time, JMIR's newer sister journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth has an inaugural impact factor of 4.636, which is a stunning success. It would be ranked #2 behind JMIR in the medical informatics category (however, Clarivate only included it in the Health Sciences + Health Services research category).

Medical Informatics Category - Ranking by 2016 impact factor

Health Sciences & Services Category - Ranking by 2016 impact factor

Impact Factors 2013 for Medical Informatics Journals released (July 2014)

2014-07-30T11:17:00.001-04:00

(Toronto, 29 July 2014) Today the 2013 journal impact factors (JIF) were released by Thomson Reuters.
For the fifth year the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR, www.jmir.org), the flagship journal of JMIR Publications, is once again ranked as the leading (#1) journal in its discipline, with a 2013 impact factor of 4.7, out of 25 leading medical informatics journals. These results hold even if the impact factor is corrected for journal self-cites. The impact factor 2013 measures how often articles published in the last 2 years (2011-2012) were cited in 2013, and is (for better or worse) an important metric for academics when deciding where to submit their best work.
To put this in perspective, an impact factor of 4.7 is roughly the impact factor of Annals of Medicine, a well respected general medicine journal. JMIR would be on rank 17 of all general medical journals (NEJM, JAMA, The BMJ etc), if it were listed in the general medical journal category.
This also once again puts JMIR clearly ahead of the runner-up, JAMIA, published by the BMJ Group for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), which has an impact factor of 3.9. Another important Open Access (general medical journal) competitor, Plos One, is continuing its decline and has now an impact factor of 3.5. Elsevier's International Journal of Medical Informatics is ranked 4th with 2.7. JMIR's impact factor also once again puts it ahead of all 48 specialist journals of the BMC series (published by Springer's BiomedCentral), including BMC Med Inform Decis (1.5), and ahead of all 47 Hindawi journals regardless of discipline (Hindawi and BMC are well-known Open Access publishers). Schattauers Meth Inform Med (1.1) and Applied Clinical Inform (0.3) are at the bottom of the field in the medical informatics category.

JMIR is also ranked #4 in the large health care sciences & services category (which lists 85 journals), ahead of respected journals such as Health Affairs.
Equally remarkable is the fact that JMIR is now the largest journal among all medical informatics journals, with 285 articles published in the period for which the 2013 JIF was calculated. Only Stat Med (which is a statistics journal) has published more articles than JMIR. Since 2012, JMIR is the only peer-reviewed journal that is publishing daily (every weekday), and expects to publish over 500 articles in 2014 alone, including articles in a dozen new sister journals.

Once again, this is a major achievement for a small publisher, which was founded independently by a leading academic in the field, Prof Gunther Eysenbach (an elected Fellow of the ACMI), who in the late 90ies saw an emerging field and helped founding and shaping it by giving leading scholars a platform to disseminate their work in journals and conferences. "Our success has not only defined and given credibility to a new field of research, which we called "medical Internet research" (and which others now call digital health, participatory medicine or health 2.0), but has also put pressure on traditional publishers in the field to make more research open access", Eysenbach says in a statement released Tuesday. "We also welcome that other publishers are now entering the field with similar journal titles related to Internet interventions and digital health, which is a sign that the field has matured and that the success of JMIR has inspired others.".
Despite the fact that JMIR came out in the JIF ranking on top in the past 6 years, Eysenbach remains very critical of giving too much weight to the impact factor, and says that "Despite the importance of the impact factor, we are actually not making our decisions based on Impact Factor considerations. More important is a fit with the field and innovation - we are not a traditional medical informatics journal, but have a very applied and also patient/consumer-oriented focus, in that we are less interested in papers that report innovations for clinicians - these are referred to our new sister journals." He recommends that clinical informatics papers should be submitted to JMIRs new sister journal JMIR Med Inform, which focusses on traditional medical informatics topics as well as emerging topics like big data in medicine. Eysenbach continues to educate his authors that the obsession with the impact factor should not guide their decision to insist on publication in the original JMIR: "Unfortunately, it takes many years for new journals to get indexed, and I agree with the DORA statement which says that over-reliance on the impact factor is harming innovation and progress. New emerging areas of research such as serious games or mhealth/uhealth, for which we have created sister journals, are not yet covered by the SCI/JIF, which is years behind. We have published seminal works in our sister journals such as JMIR mHealth, where individual articles have attracted significant citations, but which will have to wait for an impact factor for a few years. We urge our authors to make a decision on where to submit not solely on the basis of the impact factor, and to consider our sister and partner journals as well. We are confident that once indexed by SCI they will come out on top of the field as well.", says Eysenbach.

JMIR Publications, the leading publisher for digital health, continues to grow, now has offices in Toronto and Hongkong, and publishes a dozen journals at the intersection between health and technology/innovation, including JMIR Research Protocols, JMIR Serious Games, JMIR Medical Informatics, interactive Journal of Medical Research, JMIR mHealth and uHealth, JMIR Mental Health, JMIR Human Factors, JMIR Rehabilitation and Cyborg Technologies, Medicine 2.0, and others. Other titles such as JMIR Public Health, JMIR Cancer, JMIR Bioengineering and JMIR Nanomedicine are in preparation. JMIR Publications also produces the leading academic conference series in Internet research, social media, and mhealth (Medicine 2.0: www.medicine20congress.org). JMIR Publications was a cofounder of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) and is committed to highest quality and ethical standards, as well as quick turnaround times. JMIR Publications was the first open access journal in the field, was the first journal implementing open peer-review and was the first journal publishing Article Level Impact Metrics based on social media ("Twimpact Factor") alongside its articles. JMIR Publications continues to innovate and is involved in a new startup TrendMD, an novel academic discovery and dissemination platform for publishers and academic authors (www.trendmd.com).

On the JASIST Haustein paper on tweets and citations

2013-12-11T08:45:00.000-05:00

A new paper in JASIST by Stefanie Haustein, Isabella Peters, Cassidy R Sugimoto, Mike Thelwall, and Vincent Lariviere (Tweeting Biomedicine: An analysis of Tweets and Citations in the Biomedical Literature) looks at Tweetations (citations in tweets to scholarly articles).

It proposes to use Twitter as tool to measure "social impact". Sounds familiar? Then because it is because I wrote about this 2 years ago in my seminal paper "Do Tweets predict citations?" (with one of the authors of the JASIST papers having been the peer-reviewer). The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) - probably the journal which is the highest tweeted journal - was in fact the pioneer in collecting what is now known as altmetrics (Disclosure: I am the founding editor and publisher of JMIR).

This is what I wrote at http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/:

"The true use of these metrics [twitter metrics] is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.

"It should be noted that prediction of citations is not necessarily the end goal, and that lack of correlation is not necessarily a failure, because it is clear that these metrics add a new dimension of measuring impact."

http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/

While in the case of JMIR, I did see an association - there was a dichotomous relationship between highly tweeted articles and highly cited articles, I never expected this to hold true across all disciplines and journals. The JASIST paper does not contradict my earlier paper. In fact, the JASIST authors found statistically significant correlations between tweets and citations, just like I did:

"Correlations between Twitter coverage and Twitter citation rates with traditional bibliometric indicators for journals were positive and significant, with rates between .223 and .312. Comparing formal citations and Twitter citations for all papers published in 2011, we found a low but positive correlation of .183, which suggests that, although both indicators are somewhat related, they mostly measure a different type of impact.". (Haustein 2013)

I agree with this. Although the authors miss an opportunity to discuss my JMIR paper in this context, where I found a Spearman correlation of 0.22 and wrote:

It should be stressed again that one should neither expect nor hope for perfect correlation. Tweetations should be primarily seen as a metric for social impact and knowledge translation (how quickly new knowledge is taken up by the public) as well as a metric to measure public interest in a specific topic (what the public is paying attention to), while citations are primarily a metric for scholarly impact. Both are somewhat correlated, as shown here, but tweetations and citations measure different concepts, and measure uptake by or interest of different audiences (Figure 12). The correlation and mutual interaction between these audiences is illustrated in Figure 12 with bidirectional arrows. (Eysenbach 2011)

Moreover, I feel that Haustein and colleagues were sloppy in their data acquisition (unexplainable omissions of important journals such as JMIR, Plos, BMC journals) and missed an opportunity to dig deeper into the data (which were, by the way, provided by altmetric.com, rather than collected by the authors).

first, they excluded JMIR articles, where an association has previously been found, and also other important journals (possibly all electronic-only journals, which have articleIDs rather than page numbers), which renders some of their data (table 1, table 2, fig 1) invalid.
secondly, they did not look beyond Spearman correlation coefficients and missed an opportunity to analyze the data in the way I did, which is to get rid of the noise by dichotomizing the data (highly tweeted/highly cited vs lower tweeted/cited). Social media signals are messy, and signals can be missed if you don't look at them carefully.

Because of these serious omissions, I do not agree with the overall tenor of the article that implies that tweets are only about humorous or funny articles and are useless to measure aspects of scholarly impact.

First, and perhaps most disturbing, for some unexplained reason they excluded the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) (without saying this in their methods, but in an email to me they explained it with "problems in their matching process") as well as other major journals such as Plos [UPDATE: it looks like they inadvertently excluded ALL electronic-only journals as these have an article identifier rather than page numbers, and they failed to map these against altmetrics data]. This is more than just a minor oversight, because JMIR is probably the most tweeted journal, and the first and only journal where a association between highly tweeted articles and highly cited articles was previously found (Eysenbach 2011), and Haustein and colleagues are certainly aware of this earlier work. Plos One is the largest medical journal in the world, and was omitted as well. BMC journals (another large open access publisher) are nowhere to be found. Haustein and colleagues claim that Nature is the highest tweeted journal (13.000 tweets for articles published between 2010-2012), while our internal data show that JMIR has attracted approximately the same number of tweets (and far more on a per-article basis). Plos articles (and in fact open access articles in general) are much more widely tweeted than articles from subscription journals, so their inadvertent omission of electronic journals introduces a huge bias. Haustein et al present the top 15 highly tweeted articles of the entire PubMed-indexed literature, but if they would not have omitted JMIR, at least 4 JMIR papers should have been among them (see JMIR Top Articles and figure below, compare these to their table 2 below).

Incidentally, my paper "Can tweets predict citations" has attracted over 1300 tweets to date (and is also highly cited), while the top tweeted article in their entire dataset has 963 tweets (see their table 2). This cannot be explained by different data collection methods, because altmetrics.com shows similar tweets for JMIR papers compared to the ones we collected (shown below).

I find the exclusion of the journal where a strong association has previously been found a disturbing oversight which may have altered their overall conclusions. Not only would it have changed their table of the 15 most tweeted articles, but also their figure 1. In the corrected figure 1 (below) I added where JMIR would be, with a coverage rate of 99.7% of articles being tweeted and a mean of 33 tweets per article. It should also change their overall conclusions, as it is obvious that in certain areas there is much more value to tweets as an early indicator for scientific impact than they acknowledge.

If JMIR is missing from this dataset, then what else is missing? Where is Plos One in all this, the medical journal which publishes the most articles? Plos journals are nowhere to be found in their paper, and this omission cannot to be explained by their exclusion criteria. The apparent unexplained omission of data (including the most tweeted journal - JMIR - and the journal with the most articles - Plos One -) is disturbing and in my view justifies a retraction or correction. The authors acknowledged in an email to me "technical problems", and usually this would require them to correct or retract the paper, if discovered after publication.

Secondly, there are problems with the analysis, and I think the JASIST authors missed a major opportunity to do a thorough "by journal" analysis, rather than just looking at all articles as a whole. Ideally, they would have (with attribution) replicated the algorithm and analysis I did with JMIR for all other journals out there, using the metrics I used: Rather than "total tweets", which are a function of time and which need to be seen relative to similar articles from the same journal, I defined the twimpact factor and twindex, defined as the number of tweets within the first 7 days after publication (TWIF7) and the rank percentile compared to the 20 previous articles published in the same journal (TWINDEX). I proposed these metrics for the exact reason because raw tweet counts are useless if they are not adjusted at least for time and journal. Most importantly, the JASIST authors did not stratify by journal, but looked at "disciplines", which is a stunning oversight, given the major confounding effect of the journal. Nobody ever argued that there is a linear correlation between tweets and citations across ALL articles in the scientific literature. As depicted in Fig 12 at http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/, the journal is a major confounder because things like journal visibility, journal marketing and journal accessibility are major variables influencing how often an article is tweeted, which these authors did not adjust for. For example, I would expect that open access journal articles attract more tweets than non-open access articles. Secondly, they only look at linear rank correlations (which were not very strong even in the JMIR dataset, Pearson correlation 0.22 for JMIR), while I dichotomized the data and wanted to see if highly tweeted articles are predictive for highly cited articles (this is a major difference in the analytical approach), which is how we should look at how the social media signal can be used.

What needs to be done is to look at the most highly tweeted articles of a specific journal, and then check whether they are more likely to be highly cited articles in that journal compared to other articles in that same journal. This is what I did (and I would expect this to be true for some other journals other than J Med Internet Res, especially in the medical informatics discipline).

The Spearman correlation coefficient in my dataset for JMIR was 0.22 (between tweets and Web of Science citations). They actually found higher, statistically significant correlations of 0.265 for the Lancet and 0.280 for Nature Biotechnology (Haustein, personal communication), indicating that if they would do a proper within-journal analysis, they might have been able to see similar results to what I found, for some journals. A proper analysis would mean including all articles, not just the tweeted ones (they did a shortcut by not including non-tweeted articles in some of their analyses), using Google Scholar citations instead of WoS citations (which I found to be better correlated), and using the twimpact factor, i.e. tweets within the first 7 days of publication (which adjusts for time), and the Twindex (which adjusts for journal and seasonal effects), and dichotomizing results into highly tweeted/highly cited articles.

Conclusion

While the Journal of Medical Internet Research was the first journal collecting and displaying tweets (since 2008), most journals today do so. This certainly shows that both readers and publishers find value in these metrics, although all journals except JMIR still use relatively meaningless raw tweet counts rather than adjusted metrics such as the Twimpact Factor.

In my 2011 paper (which authors of the JASIST paper fail to discuss) I suggested that tweetations are a "timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.". I specifically referred to these metrics as social impact metrics, rather than as a replacement for citation metrics, which is in some cases weakly correlated with citations, but fundamentally measures something differently. It does not make sense to assume (and I never heard anybody suggesting it) that there is a universal correlation between tweets and citations, although for some journals there may be, if their articles generally attract a sufficient number of tweets. By not looking beyond the Spearman correlation coefficient of unadjusted tweets to unadjusted citations, the authors of the JASIST paper missed a major opportunity to answer the question how the data look like for other journals, if the same carefully devised methodology and metrics are used as I used for JMIR. The omission of JMIR articles and probably also other journals (PLOS One?) from their dataset are further major concerns.

Fig 12 from the Eysenbach 2011 paper

Update 1 (11/Dec/2013): Haustein and colleagues now confirmed in an email to me that they not only excluded JMIR (the journal with the most tweets per article, around 13.000 tweets to articles published between 2010-2012, which would constitute about 4% of the tweets they looked at) because of "technical issues", but also Plos One (the worlds largest medical journal, which I believe publishes 30.000 article this year), or all BMC journals (the largest publisher of open access articles). I suspect that their "technical problems" is an omission of articles that have article identifiers (e...) instead of page numbers, as is the case for all electronic-only journals, because they did a sloppy mapping of altmetrics vs Web of Science data. If this would be the case, this would exclude all electronic and/or open access articles, which would introduce a serious bias, as I suspect it is mainly OA articles that are tweeted . Asked whether these errors wouldn't justify a retraction or at least a correction of the paper, they told me they wouldn't because "it would not change the general picture or the conclusions". It's always interesting to come across scientists who know the conclusions before looking at the data... What I do know is that their tables and figures are not worth much without including the most tweeted journals.

Update 2 (11/Dec/2013): I was trying to think of an example to illustrate the differences in the analytical approach - Haustein et al. used Spearman correlation coefficients (ranking articles by tweets, and ranking articles by citations, expecting that every rank matches on a global article level), while I in my JMIR paper dichotomized the data (highly tweeted vs less tweeted, trying to predict the most highly cited articles in a journal), adjusted by journal. I did this because I did not expect a linear correlation between tweets and citations, but I do think the fact that an article is highly tweeted has predictive power for how well an article does in terms of citations, relative to other articles in the same journal.
Why do these different analytical approaches yield different conclusions? An example may illustrate how absurd their approach is: Consider the correlation coefficient between the number of chocolate bars eaten per year by any specific person in the world, and body weight (e.g. make a table with two columns for each person: Number of chocolate bars eaten, and weight. Then rank them by each criterion and see if any given person is on the same rank by both criteria). The Spearman correlation coefficient of this would be very low on a global level, because people don't only get fat by eating chocolate, and different countries have different "normal weights" and eating habits (in some countries chocolate may not be drug of choice), not to talk about the different age groups included in the table. This is basically what they did - look at a "global" correlation. But now stratify the data where you look at a country-level or even city level, adjust by age, and group all people of the same age who are the top 25% chocolate eaters (25th percentile). Are these people more likely to be in the top 25% percentile of weight within their age group and city? I am sure they will be - the "odds" to be in this higher weight group will be much higher for the top chocolate eaters. In any tweet/citation analysis, the data must be adjusted (stratified) by journal. In my tweets vs citation analysis (for one specific journal), I found the odds ratio to be 11, i.e. highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be in the highly cited group. This is a pretty strong association, even though the initial correlation of unadjusted data was low (Spearman correlation coefficient in my dataset: 0.22). Now, the Spearman correlation coefficients in their data was higher for some journals, yet they conclude tweets are useless to identify scholarly important papers. With tweets being sparse events (and the majority of articles not getting many tweets, which introduces a considerable "noise" at the bottom-end of less tweeted articles) the correlation coefficient is expected to be low. But this does not mean that highly tweeted articles don't have any correlation to high scholarly impact.

Unscientific spoof paper accepted by 157 "black sheep" open access journals - but the Bohannon study has severe flaws itself

2013-10-05T12:09:00.000-04:00

This week, the journal Science has published a news article about the apparent lack of proper peer-review at many open access journals.
The author, contributing Science reporter John Bohannon, concocted a spoof paper with scientific problems, which ended up to be accepted in 157 out of 304 open access journals.
As the editor and publisher of a leading open access journal (Journal of Medical Internet Research JMIR - not to be confused with JIMR = Journal of International Medical Research, published by SAGE which accepted the spoof paper), which is ranked #1 by impact factor in its Thomson Reuters category (ahead of journals published by Elsevier, BMJ, etc.), I too was a target of this spoof, having received several emails from this fictitious author trying to ~~bribe~~ get me to accept his article. For the record: I didn't even send it out for peer-review as it was out of scope. Oddly enough, these emails and my journal don't even show up in Bohannon's data appendix and in his denominator. Also, Bohannon writes he excluded journals which charge a submission fee, but yet, his data appendix of 314 lists several journals that do charge submission fees. If they were excluded, why do they show up in his data appendix? Was our journal excluded, even though he did send me the paper by email and tried to convince me to accept it by paying money?
Bohannon's data are inconsistent, and this article would not have survived peer-review, not only because it is scientifically unsound (making sweeping conclusions without a control group, and sampling a non-random sample of questionable publishers) and ethically questionable (he never even got back to me apologizing for the spoof or even disclosing that the paper he sent me was a spoof), but also because of obvious inconsistencies in the data. Ironically, this paper is about lack of / failure of peer-review, yet this "study" itself is not peer-reviewed (and it would have been unpublishable in a serious, peer-reviewed journal). Despite circumventing peer-review, it is widely disseminated through press-releases (bypassing the usual "scientific" process).
While I appreciate that this study generated a list of open access publishers which have low-quality or no peer-review (see below), it should also be said that the overarching implied conclusion - that open access as a business model is flawed, or that OA journals are of generally lower quality than subscription journals, is outrageous.
What bothers me most is that we can't even refute/replicate this study (by also sending the spoof paper to subscription journals) as no ethics board in the world would approve such a blatantly unethical "study" (using deception and wasting the time/resources of hundreds of journals and academics), so it remains what it is - a piece of bad, sensationalist journalism, unfortunately published in a journal called "Science", implying a scientific study.

Among other problems described above, Bohannon fails to point out that ...

1) legitimate Open Access publishers are the main victims of the scammers and fraudsters that call itself OA publishers but are nothing more than criminal organizations.

2) The "journals" tested here are largely criminal organizations from Beall's list (this is a list if questionable OA publishers. Long before Beall, I started my own list in 2008 by blogging about questionable/unethical publishers like Bentham or Dove, which sure enough also ended up accepting the spoof paper). Anybody who wants to have a list of legitimate OA publishers can easily consult the list of OASPA members (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association), an organization I co-founded out of the exact same concerns around quality. While I think OASPA can and should do more to ensure quality of its members, I do think being an OASPA member is a pretty good predictor for being a legitimate publisher. I hope however that OASPA is taking swift action against some of its members which published the paper, including Dove and Sage (I am not involved in the membership committee, and unfortunately, Dove recently became a member of OASPA, despite my previous concerns. I would advocate a 2 year membership suspension, after which the OASPA membership committee should submit a test paper to see if the peer-review process has improved).

3) well-known problems with peer-review (reviewers and editors missing critical errors in a manuscript) are not a problem of OA journals specifically. Spoof papers, fraudulent or poor papers, or pharma-sponsored papers have all been accepted by subscription-based journals before.

4) the article implies all "author-pays" OA journals have a conflict of interest by making more money if they accept more articles, ignoring the fact that the simple solution would be institutional memberships with OA journals or submission fees (payable regardless of the outcome). At JMIR Publications, we have experimented with these business models and hope that the scientific community will be increasingly open to such innovative models (we wish that more universities and departments would become institutional members supporting the work of JMIR - institutional membership leads to an article fee waiver on a per-paper basis). There are many possible business models of gold OA beyond "pay on acceptance".

It is foolish to extrapolate these findings of a few black sheep publishers and scammers (mainly based in Nigeria and India, whose journals are generally neither in PubMed nor have an impact factor) to an entire industry. This would be as logical as concluding from Nigerian wire fraud emails that all lawyers who take a fee-for-service are scammers!
There are only two well-known publishers on this list - Sage and Elsevier (the largest publisher of subscription based journals), and it is not without irony that these publishers are primarily publishing toll-access journals (see Appendix).

Gunther Eysenbach MD MPH FACMI
Editor/Publisher, JMIR Publications

Screenshot from http://scicomm.scimagdev.org/ showing where most of the bank accounts of the seemingly "International" or "American" journals that accepted the spoof paper lead to - the vast majority being in India and Nigeria.

Update 7-October-2013:

I made our email exchange with the fake author aka Bohannon available online. JMIR has a submission fee which needs to be paid at the end of the submission process (otherwise the submission is flagged as "incomplete" and the editor doesn't even see it in the submission queue), but we do have a waiver policy for authors from developing countries. I am not arguing here whether or not JMIR or its sister journals like i-JMR (which has a broader scope) should have been included or not in the sample, but the fact that neither JMIR nor the email exchange shows up in the data appendix to the Bohannon study raises several issues and questions:

If JMIR is not listed in the spreadsheet, and the emails are also not included in the data appendix, what else is missing from the data provided by Bohannon? Were there any other journal editors contacted?
If I would have accepted the paper sent to me by email, waiving the submission fee on grounds of being from an author from a developing country, would JMIR have been suddenly included in the list of journals which accepted the paper?
It seems a bit like the inclusion/exclusion criteria were not set a-priori but were made up as he went along (which is a rather unscientific approach). It is clear from our website and submission process that we charge a submission fee, why did he attempt to submit the paper anyways? And why does he later write that these journals were excluded?
There is a bit of an ethical issue here if he submits a flawed paper by email and communicates with me under a false identity, and never debriefs me saying that this was part of an investigation. In fact, any Ethics Board would probably require that a study involving fraud/deception at least debriefs study participants (some may even require retrospective informed consent).

APPENDIX - Publishers and throw-away/crap journals which have accepted the spoof paper

(Source: Data Appendix from Science 4 October 2013: vol. 342 no. 6154 pp. 60-65 DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60/suppl/DC1)
AVOID THESE PUBLISHERS/JOURNALS

publisher	journal_URL	journal_name
Scientific Journals	http://www.scientific-journals.co.uk/index.php?p=1_12	Journal of Pharmaceuticals
International Scientific Publications	http://www.scientific-publications.net/open-access-journals/ecology-and-safety/	Ecology & Safety
KEJA Publications	http://www.kejapub.com/ijpbr/	International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biological Research
Engineering and Technology Publishing	http://www.jomb.org/	Journal of Medical and Bioengineering
International House for Academic Scientific Research	http://www.ijamsar.iserp.org/	International Journal of Advanced Medical Sciences and Applied Research
Indian Society for Education and Environment	http://iseeadyar.org/ijdad/archives.html	Indian Journal of Drugs and Diseases
International Journals of Scientific Research	http://ijscience.com/Advances_in_Biological_Sciences/default.htm	Advances in Biological Sciences
Electronic Center for International Scientific Information	http://ecisi.com/ijarr/	International Journal of Agriculture: Research and ReviewÂ¬â€ Â¬â€
PharmaInterScience Publishers	http://www.pharmainterscience.com	International Journal of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences
Pharmaceutical Research Foundation	http://pharmresfoundation.com/japr/	Journal of Advanced Pharmaceutical Research
Macrothink Institute	http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/jbls	Journal of Biology and Life Science
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology	http://www.waset.org/publications.php	International Journal of Medical, Pharmaceutical, Biological, and Life Sciences
Signpost e Journals	http://www.journals.academicpursuits.us/index.php/SOAJ_BPS	Signpost Open Access Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences
Internet Scientific Publications, LLC	http://www.ispub.com/journal/the-internet-journal-of-herbal-and-plant-medicine	The Internet Journal of Herbal and Plant Medicine
Bentham open	http://www.benthamscience.com/open/tobcj/index.htm	The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal
Scientific Research Publishing	http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojrad/	Open Journal of Radiology
JK Welfare & Pharmascope Foundation	http://www.ijrps.pharmascope.org/	International Journal of Research in Pharmaceutical Sciences
Innovative Scientific Information & Services Network	http://www.isisn.org/Biosciece_Research.htm	Bioscience Research
Scienpress Ltd	http://www.scienpress.com/journal_focus.asp?Main_Id=73	International Journal of Health Research and Innovation
Academic Research Publishing Agency	http://www.arpapress.com/jpcs/index.aspx	Journal of Pharmacy and Clinical Sciences
Center for Enhancing Knowledge	http://www.cekinfo.org.uk/EIJST	European International Journal of Science and Technology
Asian Economic and Social Society	http://www.aessweb.com/instructions-to-authors.php?id=5003	Journal of Asian Scientific Research
Segment Journals	http://www.segmentjournals.com/ejournal.php?id=3	Biological Segment
International Network for Applied Sciences and Technology	http://www.inast.org/jpbr.html	Journal of Plant Biology Research
Science and Engineering Publishing Company	http://www.seipub.org/acs/	Advances in Chemical Science
British Association of Academic Research	http://www.bjmhs.baar.org.uk/index.php	British Journal of Medical and Health Sciences
Global Journals, Inc. (US)	https://globaljournals.org/GJMR/medical-research/menu-id-1250/	Global Journal of Medical Research
Medwell Online	http://medwelljournals.com/journalhome.php?jid=1815-9362	Research Journal of Pharmacology
Electronic Center for International Scientific Information	http://ecisi.com/ijarr/	International Journal of Agriculture: Research and Review
GKS Publishers	http://www.researchinbiotechnology.com/index.php/rib	Research in Biotechnology
eJournals of Academic Research & Reviews	http://www.ejarr.com/ejbs/index.aspx	eJournal of Biological Sciences
Narain Publishers Pvt. Ltd	http://www.npplweb.com/wjsmro/	World Journal of Surgical Medical and Radiation Oncology
Biomedical Informatics Publishing Group	http://www.bioinformation.net/journal/aboutus.htm	Bioinformation
ScienceHuB	http://www.scihub.org/AJMDS/index.html	American Journal of Medical and Dental Sciences
International Journal of Advanced Technology and Engineering Research	http://www.ijater.com/	International Journal of Advanced Technology and Engineering Research
Maxwell Scientific Organization	http://maxwellsci.com/jp/j2p.php?jid=AJMS	Asian Journal of Medical Sciences
BioInfo	http://www.bioinfo.in/contents.php?id=24&page=aim	International Journal of Drug Discovery
African Journals Online	http://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajbr	African Journal of Biomedical Research
World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society	http://wseas.org/wseas/cms.action?id=4011	WSEAS Transactions on Biology and Biomedicine
Scientific & Academic Publishing	http://www.sapub.org/journal/aimsandscope.aspx?journalid=1103	International Journal of Cancer and Tumor
Euresian Publications	http://www.environmentaljournal.org	Universal Journal of Environmental Research and Technology
Innovare Academic Sciences	http://www.ijaponline.org/	International Journal of Applied Pharmaceutics
Radiance Research Academy	http://www.ijcrr.com	International Journal of Current Research and Reviewâ€šÃ„Â®Research and Review
OMICS Publishing Group	http://www.omicsonline.org/medchemhome.php	Medicinal Chemistry
Kobe University School of Medicine, Kobe	http://www.med.kobe-u.ac.jp/journal/	Kobe Journal of Medical Sciences
Modern Scientific Press	http://modernscientificpress.com/Journals/IJBioMed.aspx	International Journal of Modern Biology and Medicine
Dove Medical Press Ltd	http://www.dovepress.com/drug-design-development-and-therapy-journal	Drug Design, Development and Therapy
Science Journal Publication	http://www.sjpub.org/sjmct.html	Science Journal of Medicine and Clinical Trials
Scientific Research Platform	http://europeanjournalofscientificresearch.com/	European Journal of Scientific Research
Basic Research Journals	http://basicresearchjournals.org/medicine/mmsh.html	Journal of Medicine and Clinical Sciences
Victorquest Publications	http://www.ijthmjournal.com	International Journal of Traditional and Herbal Medicine
Independent Publishing house	http://www.theprofesional.com	Professional Medical Journal
Science & Knowledge Publishing Corporation Limited	http://scik.org/index.php/ejbls/	European Journal of Biological and Life Sciences
International Research Journal	http://www.ssmrae.com/review/hhome.php	International Research and Review
Sage	http://www.jimronline.net	Journal of International Medical Research
Deccan Pharma Journals	http://www.deccanpharmajournals.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16&Itemid=11	Deccan Journal of Medicinal Chemistry
World Science Publisher	http://worldsciencepublisher.org/journals/index.php/JOS	Journal of Science
InTech Open Access Publisher	http://www.intechopen.com/journals/international_integrative_medicine	International Journal of Integrative Medicine
Sphinx Knowledge House	http://www.sphinxsai.com/framesphinxsai.htm	International Journal of PharmTech Research
World Academic Publishing	http://www.jlsmr.org/	International Journal of Life Science and Medical Research
Society of Education	http://www.soeagra.com/abr/abr.htm	Advances in Bioresearch
Global Advanced Research Journals	http://garj.org/garjmms/index.htm	Global Advanced Research Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences
Association of Pharm innovators	http://www.jbiopharm.com/index.php/ajbps	Asian Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences
ARPN Journals	http://www.arpnjournals.com/jabs/index.htm	Journal of Agricultural and Biological Science
International Journal of Current Research	http://www.journalcra.com/	International Journal of Current Research
Centre For Info Bio Technology	http://www.cibtech.org/jms.htm	International Journal of Basic and Applied Medical Sciences
e-journals	http://www.shankargargh.net/index.php	International Research Journal of Medical Sciences
Scholarly Journals International	http://scholarly-journals.com/sjm/index.htm	Scholarly Journal of Medicine
Science Park Journals	http://scienceparkjournals.org/jam/about.htm	Journal of Medicine and Radiology
International Journals of Multidisciplinary Research Academy	http://www.ijmra.us/about_us.php	International Journal of Engineering, Science and Mathematics
PBS Journals	http://pbsjournals.com/ajmcs/	Asian Journal of Medical and Clinical Sciences
Trans Stellar	http://www.tjprc.org/journals.php?jtype=2&id=51	International Journal of Medicine and Pharmaceutical Sciences
David Publishing	http://www.davidpublishing.org/journals_info.asp?jId=1164	Journal of Life Sciences
International Journal of Life Sciences Biotechnology and Pharma Research	http://www.ijlbpr.com/submitmanuscript.html	International Journal of Life Sciences Biotechnology and Pharma Research
The Sims Institute Press Ltd	http://www.jexpclinassistreprod.com/	Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction
Lifescience Global	http://www.lifescienceglobal.com/journals/journal-of-cancer-research-updates	Journal of Cancer Research Updates
International Scholars Journals	http://internationalscholarsjournals.org/journal/ijocr	International Journal of Oncology and Cancer Research
International Research Journals	http://www.interesjournals.org/JMMS/index.htm	Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences
BioMedSciDirect Publications	http://www.biomedscidirect.com/aboutjournal.php	International Journal of Biological & Medical Research
Pelagia Research Library	http://pelagiaresearchlibrary.com/der-pharmacia-sinica/index.html	Der Pharmacia Sinica
Discovery Publishing Group	http://www.discovery.org.in/md/Aim_Scope.htm	Medical Science Journal
Wudpecker Research Journals	http://www.wudpeckerresearchjournals.org/WJMP/Index.htm	Wudpecker Journal of Medicinal Plants
Herald International Research Journals	http://heraldjournals.org/hjmms/index.htm	Herald Journal of Medicine and Medical Science
Industry Research Collaboration Center	http://airccse.org/journal/IJBB/ijbb.html	International Journal on Bioinformatics & Biosciences
Cosmic Journals	http://cosmicjournals.com/ijear.html	International journal of Education and Applied Research
Pharmacie Globale	http://pharmacie-globale.info/	International Journal of Comprehensive Pharmacy
CSCanada	http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/ans	Advances in Natural Science
Hikari Ltd.	http://www.m-hikari.com/cems/index.html	Clinical and Experimental Medical Sciences
International Journal of Pharma and Bio Sciences	http://www.ijpbs.net	International Journal of Pharma and Bio Sciences
Journal of Chemical, Biological and Physical Sciences	http://www.jcbsc.org/	Journal of Chemical, Biological and Physical Sciences
International Digital Organization for Scientific Information	http://idosi.org/gjp/gjp.htm	Global Journal of Pharmacology
Open Access Science Research Publisher	http://www.openaccessscience.com/index.php/journals/ijmap	International Journal of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants
Association of Physiologist, Pharmacists and Pharmacologists (APPP)	http://www.njppp.com/	National Journal of Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology
Science Instinct Publications	http://www.sciipub.com/index.php/forum/2-international-journal-of-pharmacology-and-toxicology-science	International Journal of Pharmacology & Toxicology Science
Science Target	http://www.sciencetarget.com/site/index.php/about-ijhmp	International Journal of Herbs and Medicinal Plants
Society for Science and Nature	http://scienceandnature.org/Journal_IJABR.php	International Journal of Advanced Biological Research
Society of Applied Sciences	http://www.ajebs.com/	Asian Journal of Experimental Biological Sciences
Erudite Journals Limited	http://eruditejournals.org/ejmmsr/index.htm	Erudite Journal of Medicine and Medical Science Research
Scholar Science Journals	http://ijbr.ssjournals.com/index.php/journal	International Journal of Biomedical Research
International Research Journals	http://resjournals.com/ARJ/Index.htm	Agricultural Science Research Journal
Greener Journals	http://www.gjournals.org/GJMS/GJMS%20Home.html	Greener Journal of Medical Sciences
Global Research Online	http://www.globalresearchonline.net/	International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences Review and Research
PharmaInfo	http://jpsr.pharmainfo.in/issue.php?page=37	Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research
The RibeirâˆšÂ£o Preto foundation for Scientific Research (FUNPEC)	http://www.geneticsmr.com/	Genetics and Molecular Research
International Association of Journals & Conferences	http://www.iajc.org/journals.html	International Transaction Journal of Engineering, Management, & Applied Sciences & Technologies
Photon Foundation	https://sites.google.com/site/photonfoundationorganization/home/international-journal-of-medicinal-plants	International Journal of Medicinal Plants
Praise Worthy Prize	http://www.praiseworthyprize.com/IREBIC.htm	International Review of Biophysical Chemistry
SAVAP International	http://www.journals.savap.org.pk/journal.html	Academic Research International
BioIT international Journals	http://bipublication.com/IJPA-pharmacy_journals.html	International Journal of Pharmaceutical Applications
Interscience Open Access Journals	http://www.interscience.in/ijppt.html	InternationalÂ¬â€ Journal of Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Technology
Advanced Research Journals	http://www.arjournals.org/index.php/ijaps	International Journal of Advances in Pharmaceutical Sciences
SJournals	http://sjournals.com/index.php/SJMS/index	Scientific Journal of Medical Science
International Institute for Science, Technology and Education	http://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/ALST	Advances in Life Science and Technology
Silicon Valley Publishers	http://www.ijastnet.com/update/	International Journal of Applied Science and Technology
GVGS	http://www.rjpbcs.com/	Research Journal of Pharmaceutical, Biological and Chemical Sciences
Online Research Journals	http://onlineresearchjournals.org/JMMSR/index.htm	Online Journal of Medicine and Medical Science Research
Wilolud Journals	http://www.wiloludjournal.com/ojs/index.php/cjpharm	Continental Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences
e3Journals	http://www.e3journals.org/journal.php?jid=3	Journal of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Research
International Journals of Engineering & Sciences	http://www.ijens.org/ijbas.html	International Journal of Basic & Applied Sciences
Global Research Journals	http://www.globalresearchjournals.org/journal/jppr	Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacological Research
Pharmaceutical and Biological Society	http://ajphs.com/	Asian Journal of Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences
World Academy of Research and Publication	http://www.warponline.org/viewjc.php?id=j1	International Journal of Chemical and Environmental Engineering
Textroad Journals	http://www.textroad.com/Pharmaceutical%20and%20Biomedical%20Sciences-Scope.html	Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences
Research Publisher	http://researchpub.org/journal/jbpr/jbpr.html	Journal of Biochemical and Pharmacological Research
Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research	http://jocpr.com/	Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research
Power Control Optimization	http://www.pcoglobal.com/gjto.htm	Global Journal of Technology and Optimization
Medipoeia Publication	http://www.japsonline.com/	Journal of Applied Pharmaceutical Science
Master Publishing Group	http://www.ijbs.org/	International Journal of Biomedical Science
Bioflux	http://www.aab.bioflux.com.ro/	Advances in Agriculture & Botanics
American Journal of PharmTech Research	http://www.ajptr.com	American Journal of PharmTech Research
The Faculty of Medicine, University of Nis	http://wwwserver.medfak.ni.ac.rs/Acta%20Facultatis/Instructions.htm	Acta Facultatis Medicae Naisensis
SERSC	http://www.sersc.org/journals/IJBSBT/	International Journal of Bio-Science and Bio-Technology
Xinnovem Publishing Group	http://www.bmjournal.in/journal.php	Biomirror
Sciensage Publications	http://www.sciensage.info/jasr	Journal of Advanced Scientific Research
PharmTech Publications	http://www.onlinepharmacytech.info/	Journal of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology
INSInet Publications	http://www.ajbasweb.com/	Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences
E Business Navigators	http://www.biolmedonline.com/	Biology and Medicine
Global Academic Society	http://www.ijsr.in/abour_journal.php	Indian journal of Scientific Research
Medknow Publications	http://www.jnatpharm.org/	Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals
Elsevier	http://ditonline.info/index	Drug Invention Today
Bio Tech Systems	http://www.btsjournals.com/Pages/default.aspx	Journal of Biotech Research
OmniScientia	http://www.jnrt.info/	Journal of Nephrology and Renal Transplantation
Global Researchers Journals	http://www.grjournals.com/Default.aspx?tabid=6537	Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology Advances
Sooraj Publications	http://www.ijcsr.co.in/	International Journal of Chemical Sciences and Research
Green Earth Research Foundation	http://www.gerfbb.com/	GERF Bulletin of Bioscience
European Journal of Chemistry	http://www.eurjchem.com/index.php/eurjchem/index	European Journal of Chemistry
Hygeia	http://www.hygeiajournal.com	Hygeia
Trendz Publications	http://www.itpsonline.net/index.php	Journal of Innovative trends in Pharmaceutical Sciences
Indo Global Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences	http://www.iglobaljournal.com	Indo Global Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences
International Journal of Research in Pharmacy and Chemistry	http://www.ijrpc.com	International Journal of Research in Pharmacy and Chemistry
Pharma Science Monitor	http://www.pharmasm.com	Pharma Science Monitor
IJSAT Publishers	http://www.ijsat.com	International Journal of Science and Advanced Technology
Sadguru Publications	http://www.sadgurupublications.com/Journal.aspx?PageID=19	Journal of Current Chemical & Pharmaceutical Sciences
International Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences	http://www.ijcps.com/	International Journal of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences
IRPN	http://www.ejournalofsciences.org/	International Journal of Science and Technology
University Ss Kiril and Metodij	http://www.mjms.ukim.edu.mk/	Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences
International Journal of Research in Pharmacy and Science	http://www.ijrpsonline.com/	International Journal of Research in Pharmacy and Science
Journal of Medical Research	http://valleys.co.in/	Journal of Medical Research

JMIR's Fast-Track Experiment (Innovations in Scholarly Publishing: Part 1)

2011-07-12T10:02:00.013-04:00

As (to our knowledge) the first journal in the world, the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) started in 2007 to offer a "paid fast-track" (FT) option, where authors pay an extra fee if they require an extra-speedy handling of their manuscript.
JMIR's fast-track package consists of two components:

a) we make an initial editorial decision within (currently) 3 weeks after submission
b) after acceptance, we publish the paper within 4 weeks

FT can be purchased at any time during manuscript handling process.
As we made part of the the source code available for OJS, some other journals have started to adopt similar policies, although the details of their policies vary widely.

We see several advantages of this model. First, authors often have deadlines to meet, such as a grant submission deadlines, end-of-grant deadlines (by which grant money needs to be spent), deadlines for promotion & tenure applications, PhD defense deadlines, etc. From our authors who have used the FT option we know that the FT track is widely appreciated, and almost 25% of all authors make use of it. Guaranteeing a rapid decision by the journal is a considerable advantage over the current system, where authors are subjected to unpredictable journal turnaround times.
Secondly, even for authors not in hurry or with insufficient funds who are not opting for the FT, the FT revenue stream helps to keep other fees down. All authors pay a lower Article Processing Fee than what we would have to charge without the FT option.

Thirdly, we think that our FT offering may create a competitive environment where journals become more accountable in regards to their turnaround times, and not only compete for the highest impact factor or the best authors, but on other metrics such as the shortest turnaround times. All this would - in our opinion - help to transform the often sluggish process of scholarly communication and accelerate scientific progress.

Obviously, speeding up processes must be done without sacrificing quality and integrity. Some of the principles we have implemented are

all reviewers have the same instructions, reminders and turn-around times (2 weeks) for all manuscripts - fast-tracked or not
reviewers are blinded, i.e. do not know whether or not a manuscript is fast-tracked
on the decision page, where editors see the reviewer comments and make a decision, the editor also does not see if a manuscript has been fast-tracked or not
fast-tracking at the decision-making level (promise a) is achieved by sending aggressive email reminders to the editor to assign more reviewers. Editors are asked to make sure that within the first week of submission, at least 2-3 reviewers have agreed to review the paper, so to achieve a rapid decision editors spend more time monitoring reviewer responses and assigning more reviewers if needed.

As other experiments of scholarly innovations which we are undertaking, the experiment is closely monitored, and (to enhance public trust) our peer-review statistics are fully transparent (these are real-time statistics, so they change on a daily basis. The following data cited below are based on the peer-review results as of 2011-07-12, a snapshot is available at WebCite).

To summarize what these data - based on 689 submissions (incl 156 FT submissions) and almost 1000 completed reviews - tell us:

Fast-tracking works (line 1.3). Fast-tracked articles are on average (median) published over 100 days earlier than non-fast-tracked articles (median time from submission to publication for FT articles 182 days, non-FT: 303 days). Note that these times still may appear long, but these figures include the time authors need to revise their manuscripts (which is on average 3 months per revision)
No evidence for lighter peer-review of fast-tracked articles (line 4.3a): While cynics have speculated that money-greedy publishers/editors may take shortcuts and favor fast-tracked articles and make decisions in the absence of a sufficient number of reviews, the data at JMIR speak a different language. In the past 4 years or so we sent a total of 519 manuscripts for peer-review, with FT articles receiving MORE peer-reviews (1.96 reviews per article) than non-FTed articles (1.88 reviews). Come to think of it, this is not so surprising, because editors work harder to assign a sufficient number of reviewers, assigning 5.29 (FT) versus 4.50 (non-FT) reviewers to each submission (line 4.1)
No evidence for preferential treatment of fast-tracked articles (line 3.1): There is also no evidence for an editorial bias - the acceptance rate of articles which have been sent out for peer-review are virtually the same for both tracks: 63% (FT) versus 61% (non-FT).
FT articles are not rated better by reviewers (line 4.7): If reviewer recommendations (which are made on a scale of A-E) are converted to a numerical scale 1-5, then the mean reviewer recommendation of FTed articles is 2.8 - exactly the same as "normal" articles (it should be stressed that reviewers are blinded regarding the FT status).
FT articles are more often sent out for peer-review (line 2): Articles which are not within the scope of the journal are not sent out for peer-review - 85.9% of FT articles and 72.3% of nFT articles were sent out for peer-review, indicating a higher proportion of articles which are "out of scope" among the "normal" submissions. Again, it is probably not surprising that FT'ed articles are more often within scope (if someone pays a FT fee he is more likely to make sure that the manuscript is within the scope of the journal, often through pre-submission inquiries). Also, at JMIR it is possible to request fast-tracking of an article after acceptance (to speed up the production process), which also biases these numbers (obviously, all accepted manuscripts were peer-reviewed). Some authors may also wait until the "within scope" decision has been made and peer-review has started before they fast-track the paper.
The quality of the peer-reviewers is the same (line 4.8a): After peer-review has been completed, the editor may rate the quality of the review on a 5-point scale. There are no differences here: The mean rating is 4.19 for FT'ed article reviews, and 4.10 for non-FTed. We recently also started to ask authors to rate the quality of reviews, but with only 4 ratings in the FT track the sample size is too small to draw any conclusions at this time.

These are preliminary data, but overall they confirm that it is possible to accelerate the publication process without compromising quality, introducing biases, or affecting the integrity of the process. Further evidence could be generated by directly comparing quality metrics (e.g. the number of citations) between FTed and nFTed articles (we don't have time for this, but if anybody is interested in this, we are happy to share the list of FTed articles).

As a next step we are planning to refine the system so that peer-reviewers who have submitted a review on time will receive credits which they can use for the FT fee if they submit something to JMIR or iJMR (we did experiment with paying reviewers directly but the overhead costs for administering these micropayments is too high). This will create a microeconomy with incentives for reviewers ("if I review your paper on time, I'll be guaranteed a more speedy decision-making for my paper when it's my turn to get reviewed") which we hope will accelerate knowledge dissemination and scientific progress.

Next (coming soon): Innovations in Scholarly Publishing Part 2: Preliminary Results of JMIR's Open Peer Review Experiment

Impact Factors of Medical Informatics Journals 2011

2011-06-30T08:47:00.004-04:00

(Toronto, June 29th, 2011) The new JMIR (Journal of Medical Internet Research) Impact Factor for 2010 (released in June 2011 by Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports) has further increased to an unprecedented 4.7 (5-year impact factor: 5.0). Never before in the history of the impact factor had a journal in the medical informatics category such a high impact factor. JMIR remains the leading journal in the health informatics category, clearly outranking other journals like the runner-up, the J Am Med Inform Assn (JAMIA) (IF 3.1, 5-yr IF 3.9), the Int J Med Inform (IF 2.2, 5-yr IF 2.2), the J Biomed Inform (IF 1.7, 5-yr IF 1.2), or Method Inform Med (IF 1.5, 5-yr IF 1.2).

JMIR also remains the #2 journal in the health sciences & health services research category, with the top journal in that discipline (Milbank Q) having almost the same impact factor as JMIR (IF 4.8). JMIR outranks journals such as Health Affairs (IF 3.8) or Med Care (IF 3.2).
JMIR also outranks established public health journals such as Am J Prev Med (IF 4.1) or the Am J Public Health (IF 3.9) - this is an interesting observation because JMIR has a clear "public health" angle due to the large number of studies evaluating web-based or mobile behavior change programs.
Finally, as an open access journal, we also take pride in the fact that our papers receive more citations than open access articles published in a "generic" open access outlet such as PLOS ONE (IF 4.4). JMIR's impact factor is also higher than all 35 BMC journals except the two BMC flagship journals BMC Med (IF 5.7) and BMC Biol (IF 5.2), which are ranked 12th and 8th in their disciplines. Except for two PLOS Biology journals (PLOS Biol and PLOS PLoS Computational Biology), JMIR remains the only open access journal taking the #1 spot in its discipline.

While everybody in the publishing industry recognizes the limitations of the impact factor as a metric for quality of a journal, these numbers (in addition to our other metrics such as views or tweets, published at http://www.jmir.org/stats/overview) provide an important validation of our editorial work, and of the work of the authors deciding to submit their best work to JMIR to achieve maximum exposure, visibility, and recognition.
We also know from emails and conversations with fellow scientists that JMIR has been and continues to be an inspiration for those seeking to establish new journals independently of large publishers. With the creation of iJMR and other journal-spin offs, JMIR will broaden its publishing activities in 2011 and beyond.
Thank you - once again - to all authors, reviewers and editors for helping us to maintain our status as the leading journal in our fields and one of the the leading open access publishers!

ABOUT THE JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH (http://www.jmir.org)
----------------------------------------------------------
The "Journal of Medical Internet Research" (JMIR; Medline-abbreviation: J Med Internet Res), founded in 1999, was the first international scientific peer-reviewed Open Access journal in eHealth and Health Informatics and has quickly established itself as the leading journals in this field.
The journal has now more than 50.000 readers per month, is subscribed by more than 45.000 TOC alert subscribers, and publishes about 50-60 high-quality papers per year. Leading ehealth research institutions and departments are institutional members of JMIR (http://www.jmir.org/membership/viewall), enabling their faculty and students to publish in JMIR free of charge, while other authors pay our article processing fee from their grants (similar to how they budget for conference presentations and travel).
JMIR focusses on patient/consumer-centered, participatory approaches, innovative methods, and applications with public health impact, as opposed to hospital information systems and clinical informatics. With a 2010 ISI impact factor of 4.7 and a 5-year impact factor of 5.0 JMIR has established itself as THE leading peer-reviewed journal in the field of "ICT in health". As of 2011, JMIR is listed #1 in the medical informatics category and #2 in the health services research category of Thomson/Reuters Journal Citation Reports (JCR 2010, released June 2011).
Due to its open access policy, the journal has a broad readership, including policy makers, health care practitioners, academic researchers (including medicine, social sciences, and engineering), and even patients/consumers.
JMIR will publish applied research in the areas of consumer health informatics, mobile communication, and public health informatics, in particular if mobile or web-based methods are employed. A rigorous evaluation preferably with clinical outcomes is usually a prerequisite for acceptance - technical papers with only formative evaluation or other papers not fitting the scope of JMIR should be submitted to iJMR (interactive Journal of Medical Research) instead.
As one of our unique features JMIR tries to publish in "Internet speed", achieving minimal editorial turnaround times of sometimes only a couple of days or weeks between submission and publication. Selected papers are published for open peer-review before formal acceptance.
The journal is freely available at http://www.jmir.org.

ABOUT THE IMPACT FACTOR
The Impact Factor, published annually by Thomson/Reuters in the Journal Citations Reports, is the most widely used metric for the influence and importance of a scholarly journal. The impact factor 2010 was calculated by counting the number of citations received in 2010, citing articles published in 2008 and 2009, divided by the number of articles published in that journal in 2008 -2009. In other words, an impact factor of 4.7 means that on average an article published in JMIR in 2008 or 2009 received 4.7 citations in 2010. The five-year impact factor takes articles published between the years 2004-2009 and is the average number of citations received in 2010. In other words, articles published in JMIR in 2004-2009 were cited on average 5.0 times in 2010.

A Call to Arms from Wikipedia Doctors

2011-02-02T08:16:00.003-05:00

A group of doctors, scientists and medical students who write Wikipedia's medical articles and are involved in the Wikiproject Medicine have issued a "call to arms", calling on their peers to join them in their efforts to provide consumer-friendly medical knowledge free to the world at large.

In a paper published on January 31s, 2011 in the peer-reviewed, openly accessible Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR, the leading journal in health services research and health informatics), they argue that the possibilities to use Wikipedia as a tool for worldwide health promotion are under-appreciated, citing its unique global reach and examples of how the Internet encyclopedia is used in humanitarian projects [Heilman et al. Wikipedia: A Key Tool for Global Public Health Promotion. J Med Internet Res 2011;13(1):e14].

The 19 authors are all members of Wikipedia's project that manages the health-related content. They note that both doctors and patients commonly seek health information online. Patients usually turn to search engines like Google for health-related queries, and previous research by these authors has shown that Wikipedia appears among those results in around 75% of cases.

Wikipedia's medical content broad and fairly accurate

Based on a review of existing studies of Wikipedia's medical content, the paper concludes that Wikipedia has articles on an incredibly wide range of medical topics with few factual errors, although most of Wikipedia's articles are only in the earliest stages of development and the readability needs to be improved.

"With more than 20,000 articles on health and more than 6,000 drug-related articles, there has never been more freely accessible health information on the Internet thanks to Wikipedia. But now we need more experts to expand these articles and to make them more accessible to the general public at the same time," says Dr. Michaël Laurent, the article's corresponding author.

Although critics have questioned Wikipedia's open editorial policy and examples of errors have been widely published, the authors point out that the encyclopedia has developed multiple strategies to prevent damage to its articles (including the use of vandalism fighting software, automated correction scripts, page protection, edit filters, blocking and banning).

Calling all doctors to contribute

Since WikiProject Medicine was founded by one of the authors (Dr. Jacob F. de Wolff) in April 2004, more than 200 editors (ranging from laypeople and students to doctors, nurses and professors) have registered at the virtual 'doctor's mess', where Wikipedia's medical content is discussed and coordinated. Over the years, the project has developed guidelines about writing good medical articles and finding reliable medical references. "Wikipedia lends itself very well to evidence-based medicine," the article notes.

The group suggests that physicians may contribute to Wikipedia for several reasons, including the intellectual challenge to summarize a medical topic for the general public and the satisfaction that comes from editing an important source of medical information, watching the articles grow and rise among Google results, often outperforming review articles in leading medical journals.

Citation:
Heilman JM, Kemmann E, Bonert M, Chatterjee A, Ragar B, Beards GM, Iberri DJ, Harvey M, Thomas B, Stomp W, Martone MF, Lodge DJ, Vondracek A, de Wolff JF, Liber C, Grover SC, Vickers TJ, Meskó B, Laurent MR
Wikipedia: A Key Tool for Global Public Health Promotion
J Med Internet Res 2011;13(1):e14
URL: http://www.jmir.org/2011/1/e14/
doi: 10.2196/jmir.1589
PMID: 21282098

Source: Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org)

This is a JMIR press-release and can be freely redistributed under the Creative Commons by-nd 3.0 License. This means you can copy & paste the text above into any medium you like (if paper based, you need to preserve the hyperlinks by spelling out the URLs), as long as you give credit to the source, create no derivative works (which includes editing or changing the press release), and include these license conditions, i.e. this license text must be included.

Open Access Week: webinar about the Journal of Medical Internet Research

2010-10-19T09:08:00.009-04:00

To celebrate Open Access weeks, we have created a Webinar (slideshare presentation with audio track), chronicling the 12 year journey of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, one of the pioneers in this area. The talk focusses on the publishing innovations contributed by the JMIR team.
Enjoy!

Slideshare presentation

Open Access Publishing - The Journal of Medical Internet Research

View more webinars from eysen.

First PKP award for editors to Gunther Eysenbach, publisher of JMIR

2009-08-12T10:32:00.008-04:00

In my capacity as founding editor and publisher of the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), and open access advocate since over a decade, I am proud to have been honored with the first-ever Public Knowledge Project Community Contribution Award for editors.
The award was given to me (totally surprising - I didn't now anything about it!) at the 2nd PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference in Vancouver, July 2009, by John Willinsky, initiator of the PKP (Public Knowledge Project), for editorial/publishing excellence and the significant contributions I and the team at the epublishing and open access research group at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation made to open science and open access publishing. Contributions of my group include not only major code development over the past 7 years, laying the foundation for many OJS plugins as well as the Lemon8 XML typesetting software, but also leadership, advocacy, innovation, and excellence in open science, reflected by the prominent standing of JMIR as one of the leading independent open access journals.
OJS originally suffered (and to a certain degree still suffers) greatly from the fact that it was developed without the real life input of publishers/editors, so when I decided to use OJS as a publishing platform in 2002, a tremendous amount of work was required to fix bugs and to customize the platform. Over the years, I invested around $350.000 in developer salaries to make this happen. Two of my former staff members (MJ Suhonos and Juan Alperin), who gathered their first experiences in publishing in my lab, developed publishing plugins and tools to support the new business processes I created, and fixed some of the more severe OJS usability issues. They are now both working for PKP.
It is good to see that my efforts as champion for openness in science & medicine (also reflected in my capacity as a founding member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and the services my lab to new journal startups, which include hosting, copyediting and article XML production) are recognized by others, especially if this recognition comes from someone whom I deeply admire (John Willinsky).
Big players in the open access field (which shall not be named) are in the news all the time, but what is often forgotten is that there are pioneering open access journals out there which were created long before these giants entered the scene. And none of the big players has bothered to share much of their code with the open access publishing community. The plaque he gave me will have a special place on my office wall, right next to my Tom Ferguson award.

Meanwhile, we continue to customize OJS and have developed some novel approaches which completely integrates the XML production process into the OJS platform (we are the only journal where this has been achieved). These changes go beyond a simple plugin structure, and unfortunately we do not have the funding or manpower to support documentation and sharing of these changes as open source. What we do offer is however to host journals on the modified platform and to support the article production process for new journals, especially those requiring NLM-XML markup (interested editors/publishers should contact me).

Open Access journal JMIR rises to top of its discipline

2009-06-20T07:32:00.002-04:00

I am still shaken and thrilled by yesterdays' big news: The Open Access publication Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), which I created 10 years ago, has now established itself as THE leading peer-reviewed journal in the field of ehealth, or as I prefer to put it, for "health and health care in the Internet age". Yesterday, on June 19th, 2009, the Impact Factor rankings for 2008 were published by Thomson Reuters (Impact Factors are the most important metric for the influence of a journal, reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles). The Impact Factor for JMIR in 2008 is now an amazing 3.6 (up from 3.0 last year, and 2.9 the year before). This has to be seen against the background that medical informatics journals are typically not cited very well and have typical impact factors between 1-2.
Perhaps the biggest news due to its high symbolic value is that JMIR is now the top, number one ranked journal in its discipline, and has finally officially overtaken JAMIA, the official Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (2008 IF 3.4), which has been on the #1 spot in this discipline for decades. For a small, independent, low-budget journal this is a major achievement and truly a David vs Goliath situation. AMIA is probably the most influential scientific society in the medical informatics field, and its journal JAMIA enjoys significant backing by the association. JAMIA is owned and published by Elsevier. I may be wrong on this (leave a comment!), but to my knowledge this is the first time in history that an independent Open Access journal takes the top spot in its discipline, overtaking the long-term top journal in a JCR (Journal Citation Reports) category. I am surprised by this myself - I would have never thought that JMIR could overtake the venerable JAMIA in terms of impact. I know that the Impact Factor has its problems as a metric, but Impact Factors continue to be a valuable measure of a journal’s quality for authors, librarians and societies, and the high impact of JMIR sends a clear message to traditional publishers as well as to societies in terms of what Open Access publishing means for impact.
JMIR is now ranked the top (#1) journal in the medical informatics category (out of 20 journals), and second (#2) in the health sciences & services category (out of 62 journals), by Impact Factor.

For further information see
http://www.jmir.org/announcement/view/24

I want to thank all readers, supporters, authors, reviewers, and editors for their support and/or editorial work they've put into the journal.

The new top position in the field means that we will be getting even more submissions, and that I will require even more help. I thank particularly those who have taken on "associate editor / section editor" responsibilities, actively guiding papers through the peer-review process (published JMIR papers acknowledge the section editor at the bottom of each article).

JMIR is continously seeking more academic section editors. Please contact me if know of any individuals who might be willing to take on editorial responsibilities. For those health informatics researchers at Medinfo2010 in South-Africa next year, we will be holding an editorial board meeting to discuss strategic issues.

For those prospective authors considering to submit a paper to JMIR due to its high impact, I urge you to make the Impact Factor not the sole and driving factor for submitting a paper to us. Our aim is to be selective in what we publish and - as a general rule - we will not consider highly technical, but only those with a considerable impact ("BMJ quality"). Our focus remains on topics related to patient empowerment through ICT (information and communication technologies) and web-based approaches, although mhealth and ubiquitous computing applications are also within scope. We also focus on patient/consumer-centered, participatory approaches, innovative methods, and applications with public health impact, as opposed to hospital information systems and traditional medical/clinical informatics. If your research falls into these categories, or if you plan a review or opinion paper in these fields, then we welcome your submission.

Best wishes

Gunther Eysenbach
Editor/Publisher, J Med Internet Res (JMIR)

"Swine Flu" vs "H1N1" terminology - tweets show that people do not adopt the new term

2009-05-21T11:33:00.000-04:00

In a previous post I already gave an example of the kind of research we are doing using the Infovigil system - an infodemiology/infoveillance system, which we are developing in cooperation with public health agencies *.
As described in this article, one of the applications of infodemiology (aside from identifying emerging epidemics) is to measure and track knowledge translation and dissemination. When the WHO as well as public health officials around the world dropped the terminology "swine flu", replacing it with "H1N1", on April 29th 2009, I was interested to see whether and how quickly this terminology would be adopted by the public - and ideal test case for a question which could be answered by infodemiological methods.

Figure: H1N1 term (red) versus Swine Flu/Swineflu (blue) terms in tweets (yellow: both). (c) Gunther Eysenbach, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-by V2)

The figure above depicts the terminology used in tweets during the first 3 weeks in May, as a proportion of all tweets containing either "swineflu", "swine flu", or "h1n1" (including hashtags). On May 1st, less than 10% of the tweets contained only H1N1 (but not swineflu or "swine flu") (red), and 7% contained both concepts (H1N1 and [swineflu or "swine flu"]) (yellow).
As could be expected, the adoption of the term H1N1 gradually increased during the first week of May, and peaked on May 8th, when 24% of all tweets contained only H1N1 (and not swineflu or swine flu), while the term "swine flu" (or swineflu) alone was used in "only" 63% of the tweets. However, since then, the "swine flu" term experienced a sudden "revival", with the "swine flu" (or swineflu) term alone again used in 74-79% of the tweets, and "H1N1" hovering around 16-20%, without any clear trend of the term's use increasing.

We are still analyzing what happend around May 8th/9th to cause the trend to reverse (suggestions welcome). One working hypothesis is that interest in the epidemic (and the number of tweets) has declined significantly since around that date, so the nature and content of tweets has changed as well.

Comment: As a public health researcher, I am sympathetic of the reason for the name change and disappointed (but not surprised) by the publics' (in particular journalists') reluctance to adopt the name change. Studies have shown over and over again, that terminology matters: one of my favorite studies shows that changing the diagnosis "chronic bronchitis" to "smokers lung" actually encourages people to stop smoking (Brandt et al., 1997). The WHO had good reasons for suggesting a terminology change: The inherent threat in using the term "swine flu" is that people translate this into the wrong preventive behaviour (such as avoiding pork). If opinion leaders (in particular the media) would have adopted the name change, then - I assume - the public would have had an easier time to follow.
But I guess it is true what people say about change: Only as babies in our wet diapers we embrace change. It is the same reluctance to change which prevents new medical and scientific evidence to penetrate into medical practice and into the consciousness of the public in a timely manner (it takes years to change medical practice even if new research findings are out). And it is this reluctance to change which we hope to visualize with our line of infodemiology work which focuses on knowledge translation questions.

---

* Infovigil is NOT funded by Google and has no relationships to Google Flutrends - they gladly took our ideas but didn't collaborate.

Reports on Twitter Fueling H1N1/Swine Flu Fear and Misinformation Are Vastly Overstated

2009-05-20T09:18:00.000-04:00

Is Twitter fueling panic and misinformation? (Image Source: Posible caso de influenza , (C) Hello32020, licensed under CC-by license)

Recent media reports (e.g. on CNN and USA Today) suggest that microblogging sites such as Twitter are fueling an epidemic of misinformation, disseminating rumor and speculation about the H1N1 (Swine Flu) outbreak.
As infodemiology scholar these media reports struck me as largely anecdotal, not based on systematic evidence.
Using the infovigil system (which allows archiving and analysis of tweets and other sources on the Internet) we decided to address this issue more systematically.

Number of Tweets collected by the Infovigil system between May 1st and May 18th, 2009, containing the keywords or hashtags H1N1, swineflu, or Swine Flu (Image Source: Gunther Eysenbach, University of Toronto, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license V2.0 CC-by)

My student Cynthia Chew and I just finished a preliminary content analysis of 400 randomly selected tweets (sent during the first weeks of the outbreak), and found that her data do not support the notion of twitter spreading misinformation. As she wrote in her abstract submitted to the Medicine 2.0'09 conference in September in Toronto, she found only 7/400 (1.75%) cases of misinformation in tweets.
News posts were the most common type of information shared (46%) followed by public health education (19.18%) and H1N1-related humour (18.25%). 36.75% of all posts quoted news articles verbatim and provided URLs to the source.
Take that, CNN and USA Today!

Gunther Eysenbach MD MPH
Senior Scientist, Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, Director, Consumer Health Informatics, Public Health Intelligence & Infoveillance Group

Patient empowerment and power distance, health care safety and plane crashes

2009-05-07T16:06:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading a fascinating book chapter "The ethnic theory of plane crashes" in Malcolm Gladwells book Outliers. Malcolms argument is that

The single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes is not the plane, it's not the maintenance, it's not the weather, it's the culture the pilot comes from. Planes are flown safely when the pilot and co-pilot are in open and honest communication. And in cultures where it is difficult for a junior person to speak openly to a superior, you have lots of plane crashes.
(Source: CNN Interview with Gladwell)

As summarized by Rob Verger:

Gladwell explores two plane crashes—one Colombian (Avianca Flight 52) and another, South Korean (Korean Air Flight 801)—and how the culture of the pilots perhaps contributed to each disaster. He focuses on how well the pilots communicated with each other and with air traffic control. Poor communication in these examples, he argues, has to do with something called a culture’s Power Distance Index (P.D.I.)—the term and concept come from psychologist Geert Hofstede—which is a measurement of “how much a particular culture values and respects authority,” as Gladwell defines it. Countries with a high P.D.I. generally value being more deferential towards authority, and thus not contradicting a superior (the U.S. and New Zealand both have a low P.D.I.). Gladwell argues that since both Colombia and South Korea rank towards the top of the P.D.I. list, the subordinate members of their cockpit crews were unable or unwilling to speak up as assertively as they should have about safety concerns.

Gladwell retells the story of Korean Air, which in the 1990s was plagued by a series of plane crashes. Investigators discovered that when Koreans spoke to each other in Korean, they "were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy." That meant that they were hesitant to challenge a superior directly. According to Gladwell, a number of plane crashes are the direct consequence of "power distance", resulting in miscommunication and eventually disaster.

As a health care researcher and patient advocate I was intrigued by the concept of power distance and the notion of measuring relationships between culture and safety.
And of course, being a professor in health policy and ehealth, I started thinking about the relationship between health care culture and quality/safety of care.

I would argue that in health care, the relationship between patient and health care professional is sometimes akin to the relationship between pilot and copilot. Patients need to speak up and need to be engaged to utter concerns or preferences to avoid disaster. Power distance, which is "the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally" is a barrier often impeding patient-doctor commmunication.

I also hypothesized that power distance is an inverse predictor for patient empowerment: The more consumers accept that there is and that there should be a "power distance" between patients and doctors, the less advocacy in terms of patient rights and access to information will take place, and public policy will be slower to adopt an empowered patient model.

To test this hypothesis, I correlated data (total scores) from the Euro Patient Empowerment Index, which scores patient rights, information access and financial incentives on a health policy level, with Hofstede's Power Distance Index - and found a surprisingly high inverse correlation between the two metrics.
Countries with a high Power Distance Index such as Poland also tend to have low Patient Empowerment scores, while countries such as Denmark, where there is less "fear of authority", also score high on the patient empowerment metric.

What does this all mean for health care policy? Well, if you believe Gladwell's argument that power distance is a predictor for aviation disasters, then it is very feasible to make the analogous argument in health care: that high power distance and low patient empowerment is often a cause for miscommunication with disastrous outcomes in health care.
And obviously there is a relationship to my other research area, ehealth, in that the Internet and the virtues of Medicine 2.0 (participation and openness, collaboration and disintermediation/apomediation) are powerful antidotes to reduce the power distance in health care between patients and doctors, but also between health care professionals (e.g. junior and senior doctors).

I am intrigued by these relationships between culture, policy, and health care quality, and I am trying to get my head around how to do further research in this area.

To avoid "ecological fallacies", such studies presumably must be undertaken at the individual level. So perhaps what we need to develop next is a patient empowerment index that can be administered at the individual rather than policy level, and which can be used to study relationships between empowerment and outcomes.

Medicine 2.0'09 Abstract Submission Now Open (and: Awards!)

2009-04-15T14:40:00.000-04:00

Today, the Medicine 2.0'09 conference opened its abstract submission system for presentation proposals for this years' conference (Sept 17-18th. 2009, Toronto). The deadline is May 15th, 2009.

Also announced were a few attractive Medicine 2.0 awards for best paper presentations, one sponsored by the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), one sponsored by the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR).

The annual Medicine 2.0'09 conference is all about social networking and Web 2.0 applications in medicine health, health care, as well as in biomedical research. Other than some commercially dominated "Health 2.0" tradeshows, this conference distinguishes itself by 1) having an academic focus, with an open call for presentations, published proceedings and peer-reviewed abstracts (although there is also a non-peer reviewed practice and business track), and 2) being the only conference in this area which has a global perspective and international audience (last year there were participants from 18 countries).

The program in 2008 was outstanding, with internationally renowned speakers, a philosophy of "openess", and a very nice atmosphere for networking.

This years' program promises to be even better, so I'll see you in Toronto in September...

How to cite twitter, how to cite tweets, how to archive tweets

2009-04-05T11:12:00.001-04:00

As twitter and microblogging is gaining momentum as a social phenomenon, a number of researchers start wondering how to cite tweets (for example here) and how to cite a whole thread (series of tweets).
A related issue is how to digitally preserve and archive tweets. For example, using twitter search, one can currently only search a few months back, older tweets are not retrievable. And while it is difficult to imagine that twitter won't be around for a while, it is not certain that the site still exists in 5, 10 or 20 years, making it impossible for future scholars to access the same information the author accessed.
A third related issue is dynamically changing content on twitter. For example, it doesn't make much sense to cite a search URL like http://search.twitter.com/search?q=twitter, because obviously the content is changing all the time.

For all these reasons, the WebCite tool comes in handy (http://www.webcitation.org) [3]. WebCite, which is endorsed by hundreds of scholarly journals, is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (other members include for example the Internet Archive/Wayback machine) and works with libraries to make scholarly important digital material (including cited webpages, websites, online datasets etc) permanently accessible and "citable".

Here is how I use the WebCite tool to cite and archive tweets:

1. If I want to search all tweets by a given user, or tweets matching a hashtag or keyword, I use the search interface at http://search.twitter.com/ (or advanced: http://search.twitter.com/advanced) to generate a query searching for the username, a given hashtag etc, for example http://search.twitter.com/search?q=eysenbach

If I want to cite a specific tweet, I simply enter the entire tweet into the search interface, for example "http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Wondering+about+copyright+and+twitter.+Who+owns+intellectual+property+%2F+ideas+posted+on+twitter%3F+".
This is a workaround, as archiving the direct URL of the post (http://twitter.com/eysenbach/statuses/1457158115) currently seems to fail (http://www.webcitation.org/5foQZ3stR) (WebCite is working on this).

2. Copy and paste the search URL ( http://search.twitter.com/search?q=eysenbach) into the archive form of WebCite under "URL to Archive [url]:" and enter your email adress under "Your (citing author) E-mail Address [email]:", so that WebCite can email you a success/failure notice.

If you use WebCite regularly to cite other webpages etc., add the "WebCite this" bookmarklet to your browser. You can then archive any URL by just clicking the bookmarklet on your browser without having to navigate to the archive form of WebCite.

3. You're done! Cite the tweet or tweet thread as follows:

Eysenbach G (03-04-2009). wondering about how to archive my tweets (and friends' tweets) locally - any solutions out there? Retrieved from twitter.com, archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5foXLx2sm

or

[Multiple authors]. How to cite tweets. Search result retrieved on 2009-04-05 12:08pm from http://search.twitter.com/search?q=how%20to%20cite%20tweets, archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5foMuVHgy

As a side note, forget the APA or NLM styles [2] on how to cite blogs and websites. These citation styles leave out the most important aspect of citing a webpage or blog (which can change every minute or - in the case of twitter - every second), which is to archive it and to cite a permanent, archived snapshot - at least if the intention is that the reader sees the same as the author when he cited the tweet or series of tweets. In addition to the original URL, always cite the WebCite URL which links to a stable snapshot of the cited page.

For example, a URL like http://search.twitter.com/search?q=twitter is showing a different result every second. Only by "freezing" and archiving the result, (http://www.webcitation.org/5foXx28BB) the URL can and should be cited.

Limitations
Currently, the WebCite team is working on a few fixes, to make archiving and citing of tweets easier.

A current limitation is that the "show conversation" links in search results do not work if the search results are archived by WebCite (see e.g. http://www.webcitation.org/5foMuVHgy), presumably because javascript is used to retrieve that additional information.

Secondly, archiving the direct URL of a microblog (http://twitter.com/eysenbach/statuses/1457158115) and webciting the twitter homepage of a user works insofar that WebCite creates an internal copy of that page, but it doesn't diplay very well in the WebCite frame (appears for a few seconds and then disappears: See e.g. http://www.webcitation.org/5foQZ3stR or http://www.webcitation.org/5foR9anu2. (any hints on why this is - my guess is some javascript magic on these pages-, and how it can be fixed, are welcome). Thus, use the workaround of using the twitter search interface to archive tweets from a specific user or a specific hashtag, as described above.

Thirdly, the twitter search interface currently only allows the display of max 100 microblog entries (tweets) on one page, so that one WebCite snapshot has to be taken per search results page.

Fourthly, there is an urgent need for a tool allowing researchers to prospectively monitor and archive feeds from twitter, which is also something WebCite is working on (there are relations to the Infovigil [3] project, which allows advanced analytics such as trendanalysis, geographical coding, and links to polls).

Copyright
Ok, this question always comes up.. Using and archiving webpages should be covered under fair use clauses if the intent is scholarly communication. Twitter itself raises some interesting copyright issues, including the question if tweets reach the standard for copyrightability.

------
References
1. Eysenbach G, Trudel M. Going, Going, Still There: Using the WebCite Service to Permanently Archive Cited Web Pages. J Med Internet Res 2005;7(5):e60 URL: http://www.jmir.org/2005/5/e60
2. Patrias, K. Citing medicine: the NLM style guide for authors, editors, and publishers [Internet]. 2nd ed. Wendling, DL, technical editor. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US); 2007 [updated 2009 Jan 14; cited Year Month Day]. Available from: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/citingmedicine
3. Eysenbach G. Infodemiology and Infoveillance: Framework for an Emerging Set of Public Health Informatics Methods to Analyze Search, Communication and Publication Behavior on the Internet. J Med Internet Res 2009;11(1):e11 URL: http://www.jmir.org/2009/1/e11

Article Processing Fees and Open Access journals

2008-11-24T14:50:00.000-05:00

Stephen [WebCite] has just blogged about the Libertas Academica table on Article Processing Charges [WebCite] (which by the way seems to be swiped -without attribution- from the Biomed Central comparison table [WebCite]).

What I am missing in both tables is an overview of what journals are actually offering for these costs. For example, PLoS One* has no copyediting process, and also seems to skip the final proofreading step common at most other journals (galleys are not sent to the author for final approval).
As a result, some authors decry the quality of their published work. For example, John Logsdon [WebCite] writes

There was no opportunity given for making corrections to proofs. I have already identified an issue with one of the tables that would have been corrected in proof had there been an opportunity.

On the same page, Banoo Malik offers an insightful comment:

I contacted the production staff and they mistakenly gave it the citation year of "2007" not 2008. Thus, my first primary-authored paper will likely NEVER appear in anyone's eTOCs,
(...)
Obviously you get what you pay for. Cheap production costs yielded some production oversights. I can appreciate how many hours and effort a copy editor and production staff spend on these seemingly small details now since I followed up on a few points myself. [WebCite]

On the same page, Andrew Staroscik writes:

I am unhappy with parts of the BMC process. I agree that the pros outweighed the cons but I also had an issue with proofing. The BMC process did not have a copy editing step! There are typos in the published version of our paper that I and the other authors did not catch until it was tool late.

Is having a competent copy editor look over the proofs really a particularly costly step in the process? [WebCite]

The answer to the last question - at least from my perspective as publisher of JMIR - is a clear "yes". JMIR charges a $1500 Article Processing Fee, but spends most of this budget - hundreds of dollars - for every article to clean it up before publication, to standardize the reporting, and to improve language issues. Bringing an article into the final form, including checking all the references, crosslinking them to DOIs, PMIDs, PMCIDs etc. is - even though a semi-automatic process - a very timeconsuming and expensive undertaking.

This is what authors often don't realize when looking at APF comparison tables such as those published above: There are considerable differences between journals on how much time and costs they spend on the actual production process, which justify different article processing fees.

The notion that the "ONLY major cost in running a journal is the time spent by the editorial team and reviewers" [WebCite] is - at least for how I run my journal - not accurate.

In fact, JMIR is spending most of the article processing charges on external contractors - copyeditors, XML typesetters etc. There are several copyediting and proofreading steps in the production process, which not all journals seem to employ. I invite authors to critically assess what they get for the money instead of just looking at the article processing fee. JMIR staff and external contractors spend on average 10-20 hours to bring a manuscript into its final form.

And open access journals not charging any Article Processing Fees are almost guaranteed to skip these steps. Many won't even have XML versions of the articles (i.e. no submission to PubMed Central), because creating them is very expensive.

So I would encourage academic authors considering to submit articles to an open access journal to not only ask how much the article processing fee is, but also what they get for their money.

---
Correction notice: Edited 25/11/2008. I am taking back (and have removed) my original remark on "superficial" [WebCite] peer-review. More correct and value-neutral would have been to say that some journals have a leaner ("hassle free) [WebCite] peer-review process than others (for example, editors may decide to accept an article without sending it out to external reviewers).

eHealth (web-based behavior change programs) in the Toronto Star

2008-11-17T15:57:00.000-05:00

Today, the Toronto Star published an article about Web-based behavior change programs [Pigg, Susan: Monitoring your vices online. Toronto Star, 17.11.2008, URL:http://www.thestar.com/article/537988. Accessed: 2008-11-17. (Archived by WebCite(R) at http://www.webcitation.org/5cOtvqnhO)] - with a picture of me in front of my whiteboard in my office. I talked to the reporter about the pros and cons of online-ehealth programs, such as those which we are currently publishing in the JMIR Theme Issue on Web-Assisted Tobacco Interventions (the Toronto Star article has a broader scope though). I mentioned the problem of attrition - many users are starting to use these programs enthusiatically, but stop using it after a while. But there are ways to tackle the attrition problem: Social networking probably make sites more sticky and engaging, and create peer-pressure to return. In addition, personal health records (and PHR platforms like Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault), sensors, Ubiquitous/pervasive computing, smart appliances and smart home-care devices will make it easier for users to aggregate and manage automatically tracked data (rather than having to enter information in online diaries etc). Of course, this raises certain privacy issues...

As you pour that glass of wine or two when you get home tonight, you might want to think about the price you're paying for the daily ritual of taking the edge off.

That drink – which, admit it, is usually two or three as you ease into the weekend – costs you about $2,000 a year. It's adding up to at least 100 extra calories a day and, if you're an average-sized, 50-year-old woman, about 15 pounds of unflattering weight over 12 months.

In the course of a year, you will have downed some 520 drinks and been under the influence of alcohol 1,161 hours. That means your throat is often inflamed, your liver and pancreas are under stress and you are boosting your chances of developing some cancers.

That's not your doctor talking. That's checkyourdrinking.net.

If you think you may have a problem, rest assured there are thousands of others just like you. They're in cyberspace as well, doing online self-assessments and then spending hours in social networking sites debating with like-minded people. Their concerns? Is there a better way to cope with stress? Do their dark days now rate as full-fledged depression? Is their weight off the scales?

There has been a virtual explosion the last few years in so-called eHealth sites, which help people tackle everything from insomnia to anxiety attacks and gambling addictions. But, increasingly, they are being used by companies – usually as part of employee assistance programs – to boost productivity by reducing absenteeism, sick days and disability claims.

"None of these programs is meant to replace a physician or offer (medical) diagnoses," says Estelle Morrison, director of program development at Ceridian Canada, which runs employee assistance programs on behalf of many major Canadian companies. "They are meant to educate people and make them more self-aware and knowledgeable so they can go to the right people and get the help they need.

"We now see employers understanding that if they don't start to provide some very important support to their employees, they will be in quite a mess in the next few years because of aging baby boomers who are struggling with health issues, in terms of employee absenteeism, in terms of labour shortages, in terms of (the health effects of) people working 24/7.

"These are issues that are impacting the mental health, the productivity and the availability of staff – and employers are now seeing the bottom-line cost of that."

In the U.S., companies are offering "incentives" – gift cards, running shoes, health-club discounts, cash awards of up to $1,000 – for employees who undertake "health risk assessment" surveys aimed at pinpointing and minimizing their risky habits. In Canada, Morrison says, cash incentives are more seen as "rewarding" bad behaviour, so "we've had a lot of iPods."

The assessments usually include 50 to 75 questions ranging from your cultural background to whether you wear seat belts.

"They're being very, very aggressive in the United States about getting these kinds of systems in place," says Dr. David Goldbloom, a senior medical adviser for Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Goldbloom says he was surprised to see the number and sophistication of "behavioural health" programs during a recent health-care conference in Arizona. "There were tonnes of examples of companies that are working very hard to make this more a part of their workplace, but also competing with each other: who's got the healthier workplace?"

Toronto-based V-CC Systems Inc. launched its online behavioural change programs in Canada in 2000 and now offers its services to many companies. It also has partnerships with agencies such as the Canadian Cancer Society, which uses its online smoking-cessation programs, says Rachel Fournier, the company's director of business development.

V-CC is one of the few eHealth sites that offer some free behaviour-change surveys and programs around drinking, obesity, anxiety, smoking and depression, as well as access to its online forums. (Far more comprehensive programs are available through company assistance programs for employees.)

What makes the programs so popular, say experts, is that they are anonymous and available 24 hours a day in the privacy of your home. With traditional assistance programs that offer counselling, there is always the fear the information will leak back to your boss.

Rick H., a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, uses the V-CC site most days, offering personal perspective and advice online. "I think it's very helpful to people who are starting off and trying to find a path. It gives them some tools to get them started, but I don't think it's for maintaining long-term sobriety. They tend to hang around a month and then move on.

"I like to think that some of them make it, but I know, from being a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for two years, that only about 5 per cent make it to five years sober on the first try.

"But there's always value if somebody has hope."

What started as online self-assessments and expanded into online self-help groups is evolving in a new generation of eHealth programs. These are so tailored to individual circumstances that they could significantly reduce at least some serious outcomes, such as, say, drinking or poor diet escalating into costly diabetes and cardiovascular problems or depression – which costs an average per case of $10,000 and 40 lost days at work – spiralling out of control.

"I think it's very important that we continue to do research and evaluate the impact of these programs," says Dr. David Ahern, a U.S. physician who is doing just that kind of research on behalf of the Boston-based Health e-Technologies Initiative.

"But I am much more of an optimist about the benefits of these programs than the downside. I think they have tremendous potential to help improve health and the quality of health care."

The downsides, says Canada eHealth expert Dr. Gunther Eysenbach, include getting people to stick to the programs, especially if they have to keep tedious daily online logs of their habits and behaviour. There are also the privacy risks of cyberspace, he notes.

While the smoking programs have proven among the most successful – some research shows about a 10 to 12 per cent quit rate – weight loss is trickier, says Eysenbach.

"With weight loss, there's just an intrinsic paradox that you make people sit down at a computer to lose weight when you should actually be sending them out onto the street to do some exercise."

A more active intervention is starting to happen, with programs that can now be used on mobile devices and "smart devices" that, in time, Eysenbach believes, will make it much easier for people to keep track of behaviour that poses a risk to their health.

He predicts it won't be long before your car will keep track of how much you have driven and whether you should, for the sake of your heart, start riding your bike. Or your fridge will be telling you it's time to stop snacking.

Or put down that drink.

Also mentioned - in a sidebar to the article - is JMIR:

Dr. Gunther Eysenbach runs the Toronto-based Journal of Medical Internet Research and has spent 10 years monitoring and studying the value of online health initiatives and behavioural change programs. See jmir.org.

Open Access journal JMIR funded by SSHRC's Aid to Scholarly Journals competition - finally!

2008-11-17T11:47:00.000-05:00

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada has just announced that the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) (which I publish) will receive a $90.000 grant over the next 3 years. In the decision letter the agency writes that the adjudication committee "recognized the quality of the journal and saw that it was making an impact on the field." It "judged the editor-in-chief to be highly competent, the reviewers to have been well-chosen and the publication plan presented to be entirely sound and reasonable."
The SSHRC is funding 142 journals over the next 3 years under their Aid to Scholarly Journals 2008 competition, selected among 186 funding proposals.
In 2007, JMIR has already won a SSHRC grant for Open Access journals.

The editorial board and publisher is thrilled about this decision. Only 4 years ago, at the last SSHRC competition, JMIR was discouraged to submit a proposal, because it was an Open Access journal - 4 years ago, SSHRC did not consider to fund journals with no "subscribers" (the number of paying subscribers was seen as a quality criterion for an academic journal).
The policy change at SSHRC - to fund Open Access journals - is partly a result of intense lobbying of JMIR and others - see for example the submission by Gunther Eysenbach in response to the SSHRC-CFHSS Consultation on Open Access to Publicly Funded Research (2005) (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5cP2FNrRb)

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread (and forgets to say where this idea came from)

2008-11-11T20:50:00.000-05:00

See also: Robert Lemos. Sick Searchers Help Track Flu. MIT Technology Review, Nov 12 [Archived in WebCite]
----
I am currently in a mild state of shock. A couple of years ago - when Google.org was just created and Larry Brilliant was appointed CEO of Google.org, I was trying to collaborate with them regarding my research on the correlation of searches on Google and Flu symptoms (published in 2006 here: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1839505). My hope was that a visionary guy like Larry would be open to a collaboration to explore my idea, the correlation between Internet searches and disease outbreaks (most notably influenza).
Larry Brilliant explained in his 2006 TED presentation (after which he was made executive director of Google.org) that his TED wish was an early detection system of disease outbreaks through Internet monitoring of published reports. The "idea" to analyze and aggregate media reports was not original - it was directly "inspired" by Ron St John's GPHIN (another project made in Canada) - but at least he gave GPHIN credit. Monitoring and aggregating what people publish (new items, Internet postings etc) is what I called "supply-based" infodemiology / infoveillance. However, what Larry Brilliant was not thinking about at that time, and what was (and is not) a part of GPHIN or other infoveillance system was what I call "demand-based infodemiology" (infoveillance), i.e. automatically analyzing what people are searching for on the Internet. At the time Larry became CEO of Google.org I was already working (and publishing / speaking) about this.
I was hoping that Google.org would perhaps be open to fund this project, or to share data.
What I did not expect is that they just go ahead and do what I proposed themselves, without ever getting back to me!
Today the NYT reported that Google.org has -- mmh, let's say "adopted" my idea, without giving any credits to its origin.
In the past 12 hours, at least half a dozen people who know about my infodemiology work have emailed me and asked "Hey, isn't this what you were doing, why aren't you on that paper?".
The NYT even goes so far to (wrongly) report that "Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track the emergence of a disease.". Wrong - apparently this reporter didn't do his homework or checked the published literature. In fact, I started doing this line of research about 4-5 years ago - in 2003, and talked about this at the CDC and on various conferences (e.g. at AMIA, in 2006 - where my paper "Infodemiology: Tracking Flu-Related Searches on the Web for Syndromic Surveillance" won the Distinguished Paper Award, and in 2007, on a joint panel organized by John Brownstein from Healthmap.
Healthmap by the way just got a few millions from Google.org.
The google.org team led by Dr Brilliant (according to the NYT article) even managed to get a paper accepted in Nature (while I haven't been as lucky, see below). Their paper
"Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data.
Jeremy Ginsberg ,Matthew H. Mohebbi, Rajan S. Patel, Lynnette Brammer, Mark S. Smolinski and Larry Brilliant is here.
Google.org obviously has every right to use and publish their data, and perhaps it is a case of "great minds think alike" (though I have not seen any presentation or publication from them which precedes mine), but I wonder how outside researchers who submit proposals and suggestions to Google.org can be certain that they don't just steal the ideas? Google.org has not the structure and level of accountability as traditional funding agencies or charities - in fact, it is set up as a company. As an academic, my currency is reputation and getting credit where credit is due. It would have been so easy in this case!

-------------
The following is my slidedeck of my "infodemiology" and "infoveillancve" experiments, which I have been conducting since 2004. The slides were presented at various AMIA meetings, at the CDC, at a NCI/NSF workshop, and in other places. For the record: The terms infodemiology and infoveillance were created by me!

Eysenbach: Infodemiology and Infoveillance

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: medicine health)

Here is a presubmission inquiry letter I sent to Nature Medicine in October 2005 (the editor said this is not something they would consider publishing. Apparently, after 3 years and with authors from Google.org and the CDC on the paper, the situation has changed!):

Research Letter

Using Google for Syndromic Surveillance: Web Searches for Flu Symptoms as Predictor for Influenza Outbreaks

Editor,

We are considering submission of a short paper (500-800 words, with 1 figure) entitled

Web Searches for Flu Symptoms as Predictor for Influenza Outbreaks

An increasing proportion of people in industrialized countries are using the Internet to seek health information (1), often before they visit a health professional. An interesting question is whether tracking health information seeking behaviour of populations over time can be used for public health purposes, particularly syndromic surveillance, which has been defined by the CDC as “surveillance using health-related data that precede diagnosis and signal a sufficient probability of a case or an outbreak to warrant further public health response”. While most syndromic surveillance systems rely on data from clinical encounters with health professionals, monitoring for example sick-leave prescriptions, house calls, hospital- or pharmacy-based data (2), we explored whether an automated analysis of trends in Internet searches can be useful to predict outbreaks such as influenza epidemics. We analyzed data from the Canadian flu season 2004/2005 over a period of 33 weeks from week 41/2004 (Oct 3-9) to week 20/2005 (May 15-21), comparing Fluwatch data on the number of influenza lab tests for Influenza A or B conducted in sentinel laboratories (“lab tests”), the number of lab tests testing positive (“cases”), and the number of cases of influenza like illness (ILI) reported by sentinel physicians with clicks in Google on an sponsored link triggered by influenza-related keywords. In our analysis, search engine clicks were a better predictor for flu cases than ILI reported by sentinel physicians. These data suggest that for diseases where consumers are likely to consult the Internet first before they visit a physician, tracking Internet search behaviour may be a valuable method complementing traditional methods of syndromic surveillance.

Response

Decision on presubmission inquiry NMED-PI29222

From: medicine@natureny.com
To: geysenba@uhnres.utoronto.ca
Date: Oct 31 2005 - 2:09pm

31st Oct 2005

Dear Dr. Eysenbach,

Thank you for asking us to consider your proposed article "Web Searches for Flu Symptoms as Predictor for Influenza Outbreaks" (NMED-PI29222). We have given the paper our careful consideration but sadly have decided that submission to Nature Medicine would not be appropriate.

We receive a great many presubmission inquiries and given the very limited space in our journal we are only able to invite formal submission of a few of these. Thus, the competition is fierce. In choosing which to invite we consider the likely broad appeal of papers, the level of advance they offer over previously published work and whether or not they adequately address subjects that will interest and be accessible to both scientists and clinicians within the biomedical research community. In this case we were not persuaded that your proposed article would compete well with the others that we have received. In making this decision we do not intend a criticism of the work -- indeed we are sure that others in your field will find it of significant value -- but merely question its appropriateness for Nature Medicine.

Nevertheless, thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to consider your work. I am sorry that we cannot be more positive and hope you are soon able to interest an alternative journal in your work.

Sincerely,

Clare Thomas, PhD
Associate Editor
Nature Medicine

This email has been sent through the NPG Manuscript Tracking System NY-610A-NPG& MTS

My paper was also turned down at the BMJ, CMAJ, JAMA, Lancet, and Science. In all but one case (CMAJ) the editors did not even send it out for peer-review. Here is the Science rejection letter.

From: Debbie Dennison [ddennison@science-int.co.uk]
Sent: November 4, 2005 7:14 AM
To: geysenba@uhnres.utoronto.ca
Cc: cash@science-int.co.uk
Subject: Decision on your Science manuscript 1122097 Eysenbach

4 November 2005

Dr. Gunther Eysenbach
Centre for Global eHealth
Fraser Elliott Bldg, 4th fl
University Health Network
190 Elizabeth St
Toronto ON M5G2K5
CANADA

Ref: 1122097

Dear Dr. Eysenbach:

Thank you for submitting your manuscript "Tracking Web Searches for
Syndromic Surveillance" to Science. Because your manuscript was not given a
high priority rating during the initial screening process, we will not be
able to send it out for in-depth review. Although your analysis is
interesting, we feel that the scope and focus of your paper make it more
appropriate for a more specialized journal. We are therefore notifying you
so that you can seek publication elsewhere.

We now receive many more interesting papers than we can publish. We
therefore send for in-depth review only those papers most likely to be
ultimately published in Science. Papers are selected on the basis of
discipline, novelty, and general significance, in addition to the usual
criteria for publication in specialized journals. Therefore, our decision
is not necessarily a reflection of the quality of your research but rather
of our stringent space limitations.

We wish you every success when you submit the paper elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Caroline Ash, Ph.D.
Senior Editor

Debbie Dennison
Editorial Assistant
Science International
Bateman House
82-88 Hills Road
Cambridge
CB2 1LQ

Phone: +44 (0)1223 326500
Fax: +44 (0)1223 326501

Reference:

1. G. Eysenbach. Infodemiology: Tracking Flu-Related Searches on the Web for Syndromic Surveillance. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2006; 2006: 244–248 : http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1839505

Founding the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association

2008-10-14T10:00:00.000-04:00

Today is Open Access Day (Accessed: 2008-10-14. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5bZ5360OL). After many months of discussions and work we used this symbolic date to launch the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). I (being publisher of the Journal of Medical Internet Research) am involved in founding this important organization (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5bZ5Qwdxu), and serving on its interim board. There has been some heated debates on how the bylaws should be structured, in particular vis-a-vis some concerns that one publisher group would "overwhelm" and outvote another publisher group, given that the agenda and priorities of "scholar publishers" (the subgroup I am representing) may not always be aligned with those of commercial/professional OA publishers.
OASPA has some important missions. One is to set standards and keeping the standard of OA publishing high (e.g. by creating and enforcing a code of conduct, which includes for example standards against spamming). Another is advocacy work for gold-OA publishing. A third one is education - helping newcomers in the business to set up and maintain successful open access journals - something the epublishing and open access research at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation - which I direct - has been doing for many years now.

Announcing The Launch Of The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, Oaspa

Posted at 10:05AM Tuesday 14 Oct 2008
Press Contact:

Caroline Sutton

Tel/skype: +46 (0)18 495 1126

Cell: +47 90 69 05 06

Caroline.Sutton@co-action.net

ANNOUNCING THE LAUNCH OF THE OPEN ACCESS SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION, OASPA

14 October 2008, London. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, announces its official launch today in conjunction with an OA Day celebration hosted by the Wellcome Trust in London. The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.

From having first emerged as a new publishing model over a decade ago, OA publishing has become an embedded feature of the scholarly publishing landscape: The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists over 3500 peer-reviewed journals; a growing number of professional organizations offer OA publications; university libraries increasingly support OA publishing services; funding organizations support and encourage OA publishing; and a long tail of independent editorial teams and societies now publish their titles OA. Professional OA publishers such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have been in business for over five years, while some scientist/scholar publishers (editorial teams operating independently of a professional publisher) have published their OA journals for a decade or more. Moreover, a number of traditional publishing houses are now engaging in Open Access activities, the recent acquisition of BioMed Central by Springer and the SAGE-Hindawi partnership being two cases in point. By bringing together those who share an interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA journals publishing, it is hoped that success in these areas can be achieved more quickly to the benefit of not only OASPA members, but more importantly, for the scholarly community that OA publishers serve.

Membership in OASPA is open to both scholar publishers and professional publishing organizations, including university presses and for profit and non-profit organizations. Members are expected to demonstrate a genuine interest in OA journals publishing by having signed either the Berlin or Budapest Declarations and must publish at least one full OA journal. Other individuals and organizations who support OA journals publishing or who are interested in exploring opportunities are also welcome. Membership criteria and an application form can be found on the OASPA website, www.oaspa.org.

The founding members of OASPA represent a broad spectrum of OA publishers and include: BioMed Central, Co-Action Publishing, Copernicus, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Eysenbach), Medical Education Online (David Solomon), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), SAGE, SPARC Europe and Utrecht University Library (Igitur). Representatives from each of these publishers will form an interim board until a first General Meeting is held during 2009.

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Open Access Scholarly Publishers' Association, OASPA, is launched today 14 October 2008 in response to long-time informal discussions among Open Access publishers, and aims to represent the interests of OA journals publishers globally. For more information about the organization, visit the OASPA website at: www.oaspa.org.

The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. It funds innovative biomedical research, in the UK and internationally, spending over £600 million each year to support the brightest scientists with the best ideas. The Wellcome Trust supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and wellbeing.

Open Access (OA) scholarly publication refers to the dissemination of peer-reviewed manuscripts containing original research or scholarship immediately upon publication, at no charge to user groups, without requiring registration or other restrictions to access.

OA publications also allow users to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship...."

Medical Blogging: Impact and Ethics

2008-09-24T15:26:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, Ivor Kovic and colleagues published the paper "Examining the Medical Blogosphere: An Online Survey of Medical Bloggers" in the Medicine 2.0 Theme Issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
What I found most amazing about the results of his survey among medical bloggers is that a whopping 66% of those bloggers have received media coverage in mainstream media. Clearly, medical blogging is an "important vehicle to influence medical and health policy".

The potential impact of blogs on mainstream media and - eventually - policy has not escaped the attention of Public Relations professionals, who, in many instances, target bloggers as opinion leaders first. Bloggers - and especially medical bloggers - have therefore, in my opinion, a special responsibility for fact-checking and following other journalistic "best practices".

In the light of this I reflected on the presentation of Kevin Clauson (with Joan Dzenowagis from the World Health Organization) on Risk 2.0: The future of connected health at the Medicine 2.0 congress in Toronto, a few weeks ago.

Kevin Clauson at Medicine 2.0, Sept 5th 2008

Participants at Medicine 2.0 voting for questions posed by the speaker

Clauson used an interactive device to poll the congress audience. He asked the audience a few questions, among them whether they thought that it would be ethical for a blogger to post a blog entry that is "influenced by (but omitted mentioning of) a public relations professional". What I found surprising here was that 25% of the participants actually thought that this was not a problem! (I think it is!)

25% of the participants thought a blog "influenced by (but omitted mentioning of) a public relations professional" is ok

Clauson also cited results from the Healthcare blogger survey which say that 29% have been contacted by a PR professional, and 52% of those have posted at least one entry based on the info provided by the PR professional (the degree of disclosure is not known and would make an interesting research project).

Clauson's slide citing the Healthcare blogger survey

Also interesting was the fact that 56% of the Medicine 2.0 audience felt that, when it comes to advertising, blogs should be held to the same (ethical) standard as biomedical journals, and 21% even thought the standard should be higher. On the other hand, 23% thought the standards should be lower.

Voting results on "should blogs be held to the same (ethical) standard as biomedical journals?"

I think these results clearly show that some consensus building towards ethical standards for medical blogs is required, as well as some research on the quality and adherence to best practices.

The paper by Ivor Kovic and colleagues on "Examining the Medical Blogosphere: An Online Survey of Medical Bloggers" is an important first step in that direction.

Further information
Media Coverage on Kevin Clauson's and Joan Dzenowagis' Risk 2.0 panel at Medicine 2.0:

Digital Healthcare & Productivity (http://www.digitalhcp.com/2008/09/09/health20risk.html)

http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2008/9/15/Health-20-Technology-Brings-New-Risks-to-Health-Care-Facilities.aspx?topicID=55

http://www.markle.org/weekly_digest/weeklydigest_vol.7_issue34.pdf

Patient involvement through YouTube at the Medicine 2.0 conference

2008-09-19T11:03:00.001-04:00

One of the most inspiring presentations at the Medicine 2.0'08 conference was a presentation by Luis Fernandez Luque, which included a YouTube video by a patient, Lauren Parrot, specifically recorded for the conference.

I think involving patients via YouTube in this conference was a phantastic idea. The video from laurenvparrot , which was played in the plenary, was very inspiring and touching.

I am wondering how we can harness this idea for Medicine 2.0'09, perhaps in a more systematic way. Perhaps we can pose some specific questions for patients and invite YouTube submissions, which will be presented/exhibited at the conference? This would enable patient-involvement without creating traveling costs etc.

Perhaps we can also find a sponsor for a "Patient 2.0" award...

If somebody has ideas for specific questions / discussion points for patients/consumers, please post them here or on the Medicine 2.0 Social Network discussion board.

Pictures from FlickR showing Luis Fernandez Luque presenting the YouTube video from Lauren Parrot, specifically recorded for the Medicine 2.0 conference.

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Originally uploaded by eysenbach

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Originally uploaded by eysenbach

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Originally uploaded by eysenbach

Date for Medicine 2.0'09 set

2008-09-19T11:03:00.000-04:00

After the immensely successful Medicine 2.0'08 conference on Sept 4/5th, 2008, we have now set the date for the next Medicine 2.0'09 conference: Sept 17-18, 2009 (same venue, i.e. the MaRS Centre in Toronto).
Please make a note in your calendar. See also Important Dates (http://www.medicine20congress.com/importantdates.php) for a tentative schedule of submission deadlines etc. for next year. Hope to see you again in Toronto!

Please help us to promote next years' conference. At the bottom of the Sponsors page (and at the bottom of this blog post) there are revised banners for next years' conference. Please post them on your blog, websites, and in your emails, linking back to http://www.medicine20congress.com - thank you!

Medicine 2.0 Photos on Flickr

2008-09-06T18:39:00.000-04:00

Just published: Over 800 photos from the first international Medicine 2.0 congress, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/30211781@N04/sets/72157607120617918/

All pictures are (c) G. Eysenbach, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike, so feel free to use them.

Thanks to all participants and especially the speakers for making the congress such a resounding success. With almost 200 participants from 19 countries, the congress was sold out. The feedback from the evaluation forms was overwhelmingly positive and there seems to be a real enthusiasm to do another congress next year (in fact, with the exception of two respondents, who were "unsure", ALL participants answered the question on whether there should be another Medicine 2.0 congress with "yes")... The congress brought together a broad range of innovators, researchers, opinion leaders, bloggers, business leaders, and others.

If you missed Medicine 2.0.08, make sure to join the Medicine 2.0 social network on crowdvine, and preregister here for Medicine 2.0.09 (do not preregister again if you already preregistered for Medicine 2.0.08).