Blood Public Access Policy Expanded to Include HHMI-Funded Authors
Joel Anne Chasis, MD, and Eleanore Tapscott
Dr. Chasis is Staff Scientist in the Life Sciences Division at the University of California Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Associate Professor in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco. She is also Chair of the ASH Journals Committee.
Ms. Tapscott is the Director of Publishing at ASH.
ASH recently reached an agreement with Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to extend Blood's Open Access option to HHMI-funded scientists. Blood's Open Access option, recommended by ASH's Journals Committee in July 2006 and approved by the Executive Committee, allows authors the option of having their articles deposited into PubMed Central immediately after publication in exchange for an open access fee. This option was developed as a strategy to accommodate public access requirements of funding groups, such as Wellcome Trust, and now HHMI, while maintaining the journal's 12-month publication embargo policy. As with all other open access options available through the journal, Blood will deposit the article into PubMed Central on the authors' behalf, thereby removing the burden from authors to submit their articles.
HHMI's new public access policy, which will go into effect January 2008, requires its scientists to publish their research and supplementary materials in journals that allow free access to the content in a public repository, such as PubMed Central, within six months of publication. The ASH Open Access option therefore exceeds the HHMI requirement by making the article immediately available, rather than at six months.
In line with Blood's current business model, the journal's 12-month publication embargo restricts non-subscribers' access to an issue until 12 months after publication. However, in each new issue, five research articles and all Inside Blood commentaries are immediately available to the public. Twelve months post-publication, all of an issue's content is available to the public. Currently, more than 95 percent of Blood's content is available to the public with no restrictions; it is free to the public.
Blood's Open Access option for HHMI and Wellcome Trust works in conjunction with its participation in another public access activity: the NIH Portfolio Archive Program. To date, Blood has deposited more than 600 articles and all are linked to PubMed Central through their PubMed citations as well. These public access strategies — including allowing authors to post copies of their articles on the author's personal Web site, department Web site, and/or institution's intranet — emphasize ASH's commitment to broad dissemination of content through processes that protect the integrity of the journal article of record and relieve authors from the burden of submitting manuscripts to various repositories while maintaining a sound business model for Blood.
The Open Access option will be available to HHMI authors on Blood's online manuscript submission system effective October 1, 2007, well ahead of the HHMI deadline of January 1, 2008. Accordingly, HHMI will identify Blood as one of the journals that is compliant with its new, mandated public access policy.
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Blood Now Scanning All Accepted Papers for Inappropriate Image Manipulation
With the availability and sophistication of image-processing software, authors are frequently unaware of what kind of image manipulation is unacceptable in a scholarly journal. A recent, infamous case of the paper published in Science by Hwang et al1 brought this issue to the attention of both the scientific community and the lay public. Blood, which started to screen some of the accepted papers in 2006 and now extends its policy to include all accepted papers, is among the first scientific journals enforcing new standards of what is permissible in image manipulation and digital image editing.
In his recent Editorial2, Blood's Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Sanford Shattil, defined the new policy in these words: "Our major goals are to educate our authors and readership about acceptable practices in preparing digital images for publication and to eliminate improperly processed images from our pages. While these are but two of many important goals of Blood's editorial and publishing staffs, we aim to make the digital images that we publish as pure and as eloquent as blood itself."
From the pilot study in the fall of 2006 we learned that about 20 percent of the scanned papers contained at least one image that required further clarification from the authors. These preliminary results prompted the ASH Journals Committee to recommend incorporating image scanning into the Blood workflow and extending it to all accepted papers. The new process was fully implemented in June 2007.
Before implementation of the image scanning, it was necessary to make significant software changes to the Blood Bench>Press manuscript submission and tracking system. Blood is the first among more than 50 journals using Bench>Press to develop such a system.
The image scan is performed on accepted papers containing gels and/or micrographs; papers are not prepublished in First Edition or sent for production until all images pass inspection.
The editorial staff scans high-resolution images using Photoshop and contacts the author when signs of possible inappropriate image editing are found. Authors may be asked to explain discrepancies in the image background and/or supply the original experimental images for comparison. They may also be asked to alter an image and the corresponding legend in the interest of full transparency or to provide the original films for further evaluation. The final decision is in the hands of the Editor-in-Chief.
In addition to the introduction of the physical image scan, Blood has published a set of more detailed guidelines (specifically under "working with gels and micrographs") for authors online; since then, the number of images requiring further evaluation by the Editor and papers with inappropriate image manipulation have decreased significantly. We expect that as our authors become more familiar with the requirements, the number of images that pass the image scan will increase.
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