WAME members:
Recently I visited a virtual library of health magazines of the Latin-American area that offers a "non-official" list of the top authors of the area. I could saw that many of the authors of the list where people involved in the editorial process of the magazine where the articles were published, sometimes as part of the peer review process of other articles, sometimes as part of the editorial committee. I also found many articles that were written by the editor of the magazine.

I talked with some directors and editors of scientific magazines and many of they ignore that question as a problem, with the argument that people involved in the editorial process wrote better articles and also were relevant figures in the science. In my journal, and some other journals, we have very strict rules and we never accept articles from any person related with the editorial process in any way. We consider this question to be an ethical problem; it represents a very strong conflict of interest for the reviewers of the article and for any person who decides whether the article will be published because they decide between an article of unknown authors and the article of a well known author.

What do you think about this problem? Is this a global problem or only a local problem of Latin America? Did you know about any regulations concerning this question?

Rodolfo Soca
General Director, Cuban Journal of Medical Students
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You raise an interesting question. I think there are some ethical concerns with this practice, but some of which can be addressed by a blinded peer review process. In essence if you are an editor, your manuscript submission should follow the same guidelines as with any other manuscripts submitted to your journal. By utilizing a blind peer review process, the manuscript reviewer hopefully will not be able to know who the author(s) are, thus limiting any kind of peer-review bias. Also I have encountered this problem when reviewing abstracts sent to some of the emergency medicine scientific meetings as I have found some my own abstracts and I have chosen to decline the review based on conflict of interest.

As you go into more specialized and subspecialized fields of medicine it becomes difficult to deny the opportunity to publish to members of your editorial board, because as you have mentioned many times these are true experts that can significantly contribute not only to your journal but the general body of knowledge.

Just my 2 cents.

Amado Alejandro Baez
Editor-in-Chief, Internet Journal of Rescue and Disaster Medicine
Editorial Board Member, Internet Journal of Emergency Medicine
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That's also the process we follow at Tobacco Control, but we add another safeguard in that we do not allocate senior editors' papers to one of our regular senior editors, but to someone who is senior in the field but completely outside the routine "inner circle" of editorial decision-making. Editorial decision-making always involves judgment, and while peer review gives editors some basis for an editorial judgment, as we all know, editors need to make final calls on the acceptability or otherwise of papers. So having one of your fellow senior editors—with whom you interact regularly—pass judgment on your work is potentially a soft call. By passing the paper to someone outside the system and having them act as an independent editor, this potential for compromise is reduced.

With specialised areas like ours, not allowing senior editors (who are senior people researching in the area) to publish, effectively cuts them off from a major outlet in a limited spectrum of journals.

Simon Chapman
Editor, Tobacco Control
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I agree that, as described, this may well be an ethical problem. But I also agree that part of the solution is to blind reviewers in such instances, or, as we do, assign another member of the editorial board to handle the review process when, for example, the editor is an author. Better still, you can do both. In this situation it may even possible to blind both the reviewer (by removing the cover page identifying authors) and to blind the authors from the identity of the reviewers. Neither is fool-proof but if steps like this are taken and there is good will all around, journals will not be deprived of the opportunity to publish some good work just because the author happens to be unfortunate enough to be on its editorial board. As I assume is true for most journals, if we were to ban papers from any member of our board, we would lose out on the work of some of the world's leading authorities in our field. That is why they are on our board! Life is never simple...

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I'd like to explain our policy in Gaceta Sanitaria to handle manuscripts, because it also helps when members of the Editorial Board (Associate Editors) are authors. We use (with satisfaction to all parts and with some years of experience) a "double blind" strategy: in addition to having blind reviewers, all the Associate Editors and also the Editor-in-Chief do not know the identity of authors. The journal's assistant blinds the paper and send it to the Editor-in-Chief, who makes the initial decision (rejection or review), and if the paper goes on, assigns the paper to the appropriate Associate Editor, who assigns the external reviewers. All the process is under the supervision of the journal's assistant to control that the paper is not assigned to any of the the authors (which unfortunately occurs from time to time!). We only know the authors' names when a final decision on acceptance/rejection has been made. Of course, even with blinded manuscripts, we may guess the authors, or at least the "group" where the paper originates. If this is the case, the only issue is not to assign the paper to the potential Associate Editor involved in the paper.

Some of the submissions in our journal (as in most journals I think) come from the Editorial Board, and this system has allowed us to manage it quite well. It's only worth to mention that we are a small journal, with 210 submissions per year. One more confession: I had myself a paper rejected from this system one year ago, and the Associate Editor did not know it until the final decision. And I kept myself away from the editorial process until the final decission as well.

Another practice I've seen (at the Am J Epidemiol, does anybody at AJE confirm it?) is to manage the paper without the participation of the Editors involved (maybe external, as in Tob Control?). I remember that AJE includes (or included?) a disclosure when papers from the Editors are published.

Esteve Fernandez
Editor-in-Chief, Gaceta Sanitaria (Journal of the Spanish Society of Public Health and Health Administration)
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I believe that if peer review of papers is done in a blinded way, there isn't any problem in accepting papers from the editorial board.

German Baron
Editor, Revista Colombiana de Menopausia
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