In times of public crises, including the current Covid-19 pandemic, rapid dissemination of relevant scientific knowledge is of paramount importance. The duration of scholarly journals’ publication process is one of the main factors that may hinder quick delivery of new information. Following initiatives of medical journals to accelerate their publication process, this study assesses whether medical journals have managed to speed up their publication process for Coronavirus related articles. It studies the duration of 14 medical journals’ publication process both during and prior to the current pandemic. Assessing a total of 669 articles, the study concludes that medical journals have indeed strongly accelerated their publication process for Coronavirus related articles since the outbreak of the pandemic: time between submission and publication has decreased on average by 49%. The largest decrease in number of days between submission and publication of articles was due to a decrease in time required for peer review. For articles not related to Covid-19, no acceleration of the publication process is found. While the acceleration of journals’ publication process is laudable from the perspective of quick information dissemination, it also may raise concerns relating to the peer review process’ quality and the quality of the resulting publications.

The quality and integrity of the scientific literature have recently become the subject of heated debate. Due to an apparent increase in cases of scientific fraud and irreproducible research, some have claimed science to be in a state of crisis. A key concern in this debate has been the extent to which science is capable of self-regulation. Among various mechanisms, the peer review system in particular is considered an essential gatekeeper of both quality and sometimes even integrity in science.However, the allocation of responsibility for integrity to the peer review system is fairly recent and remains controversial. In addition, peer review currently comes in a wide variety of forms, developed in the expectation they can address specific problems and concerns in science publishing. At present, there is a clear need for a systematic analysis of peer review forms and the concerns underpinning them, especially considering a wave of experimentation fuelled by internet technologies and their promise to improve research integrity and reporting.We describe the emergence of current peer review forms by reviewing the scientific literature on peer review and by adding recent developments based on information from editors and publishers. We analyse the rationale for developing new review forms and discuss how they have been implemented in the current system. Finally, we give a systematisation of the range of discussed peer review forms. We pay detailed attention to the emergence of the expectation that peer review can maintain ‘the integrity of science’s published record’, demonstrating that this leads to tensions in the academic debate about the responsibilities and abilities of the peer review system.

While problems with cell line misidentification have been known for decades, an unknown number of published papers remains in circulation reporting on the wrong cells without warning or correction. Here we attempt to make a conservative estimate of this ‘contaminated’ literature. We found 32,755 articles reporting on research with misidentified cells, in turn cited by an estimated half a million other papers. The contamination of the literature is not decreasing over time and is anything but restricted to countries in the periphery of global science. The decades-old and often contentious attempts to stop misidentification of cell lines have proven to be insufficient. The contamination of the literature calls for a fair and reasonable notification system, warning users and readers to interpret these papers with appropriate care.

This document presents the Bonn PRINTEGER Consensus Statement: Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for research performing organisations. The aim of the statement is to complement existing instruments by focusing specifically on institutional responsibilities for strengthening integrity. It takes into account the daily challenges and organisational contexts of most researchers. The statement intends to make research integrity challenges recognisable from the work-floor perspective, providing concrete advice on organisational measures to strengthen integrity. The statement, which was concluded February 7th 2018, provides guidance on the following key issues: Providing information about research integrityProviding education, training and mentoringStrengthening a research integrity cultureFacilitating open dialogueWise incentive managementImplementing quality assurance proceduresImproving the work environment and work satisfactionIncreasing transparency of misconduct casesOpening up researchImplementing safe and effective whistle-blowing channelsProtecting the alleged perpetratorsEstablishing a research integrity committee and appointing an ombudspersonMaking explicit the applicable standards for research integrity

In times of public crises, including the current Covid-19 pandemic, rapid dissemination of relevant scientific knowledge is of paramount importance. The duration of scholarly journals' publication process is one of the main factors hindering quick delivery of new information. While proper editorial assessment and peer review obviously require some time, turnaround times for medical journals can be up to several months, which is undesirable in the era of a crisis. Following initiatives of medical journals and scholarly publishers to accelerate their publication process, this study assesses whether medical journals have indeed managed to speed up their publication process for Covid-19 related articles. It studies the duration of 14 medical journals' publication process both during and prior to the current pandemic. Assessing a total of 669 articles, the study concludes that medical journals have indeed drastically accelerated the publication process for Covid-19 related articles since the outbreak of the pandemic. Compared to articles published in the same journals before the pandemic, turnaround times have decreased on average by 49%. The largest decrease in number of days between submission and publication of articles was due to a decrease in the number of days required for peer review.

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Peer review of journal submissions has become one of the most important pillars of quality management in academic publishing. Because of growing concerns with the quality and effectiveness of the system, a host of enthusiastic innovators has proposed and experimented with new procedures and technologies. However, little is known about whether these innovations manage to convince other journal editors. This paper will address open questions regarding the implementation of new review procedures, the occurrence rate of various peer review procedures and their distribution over scientific disciplines or academic publishers, as well as the motivations for editors or publishers to engage in novel review procedures. It shows that in spite of enthusiastic innovation, the adoption of new peer review procedures is in fact very slow, with the exception of text similarity scanners. For now, peer review innovations appear to be restricted to specific niches in academic publishing. Analysing these niches, the article concludes with a reflection on the circumstances in which innovations might be more widely implemented.

The global Covid-19 pandemic has had considerable impact on the scientific enterprise, including scholarly publication and peer review practices. Several studies have assessed these impacts, showing among others that medical journals have strongly accelerated their review processes for Covid-19 related content. This has raised questions and concerns regarding the quality of the review process and the standards to which manuscripts are held for publication. To address these questions, this study sets out to assess qualitative differences in review reports and editorial decision letters for Covid-19 related, articles not related to Covid-19 published during the 2020 pandemic, and articles published before the pandemic. It employs the open peer review model at the British Medical Journal and eLife to study the content of review reports, editorial decisions, author responses, and open reader comments. It finds no clear differences between review processes of articles not related to Covid-19 published during or before the pandemic. However, it does find notable diversity between Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 related articles, including fewer requests for additional experiments, more cooperative comments, and different suggestions to address too strong claims. In general, the findings suggest that both reviewers and journal editors implicitly and explicitly use different quality criteria to assess Covid-19 related manuscripts, hence transforming science’s main evaluation mechanism for their underlying studies and potentially affecting their public dissemination.