Transparency of manuscript reviewing is important and therefore some journals have started to use open review.
In
all the medical BMC journals, reviewers are asked to sign their
reviews and the pre-publication history of each paper is posted on
the web with the published article.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/peerreview/
The comments of reviewers, and the replies by the authors may be informative for the readers of the published paper. All relevant considerations cannot be included in the final report, for example, because of space limitations. Therefore the reviewer comments and replies by authors are of additional interest to those readers who are seriously interested in the topic.
However, in the case of rejection the BMC policy is semi-transparent. Although the reviewer comments are made available as net versions (below), the refutations of the reviewer comments are not.
Since the comments of reviewers and the replies by authors are important when considering the validity of a scientific paper, I am briefly describing the reviewer comments and their counter-comments for the paper below.
************************************
In
April 2009, I submitted my manuscript
“Zinc lozenges may
shorten the duration of colds: a systematic review”
to
the journal “BMC Infectious Diseases”
I received three reviewer comments:
Referee
1:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/imedia/1286410906279031_comment.pdf
Referee
2:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/imedia/3538566202829538_comment.pdf
Referee
3:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/imedia/1956627467294205_comment.pdf
The
manuscript was rejected on the basis of these three reviewer
comments:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/BMC_InfectDis_Reject.pdf
Since reviewer 1 did not point out any flaws in my manuscript, and reviewers 2 and 3 did not point out problems that could not be corrected or replied to, I revised the text and wrote replies addressing the reviewer concerns:
Replies
to Reviewer 1
comments:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/BMC_InfectDis_Reviewer_1.pdf
Replies
to Reviewer 2
comments:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/BMC_InfectDis_Reviewer_2.pdf
Replies
to Reviewer 3
comments:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/BMC_InfectDis_Reviewer_3.pdf
Thus, these comments and replies describe which kinds of issues have been explicitly considered in addition to the text published in the final paper. The rejection letter stated “Please note that this decision applies across the BMC-series of journals. Therefore, if you were to submit your revised manuscript to another journal within the BMC-series, your submission should also be accompanied by a full covering letter.”
On
18 August 2009, I asked the BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders
journal to look at my replies (above) and consider my manuscript.
On
7 October 2009, I received a rejection letter, but the letter
suggested that I should make some changes and they were ready to
assess the manuscript again.
On 21 October 2009, I resubmitted
the manuscript to BMC ENT Disorders, but since I could not get
information about the status of my manuscript, I finally withdrew it
on 19 Nov 2009.
The process with BMC took 7 months.
Then
I submitted the manuscript to PLoS ONE, which rejected it
without any reviewer
comments:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/PLoSONE_Reject_1.pdf
However,
the arguments of PLoS ONE editor were not
valid:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/PLoSONE_Replies_1.pdf
Although
I pointed out the errors in the arguments, the PLoS ONE editor did
not accept my manuscript for a reconsideration. So, I used the
possibility to appeal and the manuscript was sent to a second PLoS
ONE editor. The second PloS ONE editor also rejected the manuscript
but suggested ways to improve
it:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/PLoSONE_Reject_2.pdf
I
improved the manuscript and wrote replies to the second PLoS ONE
editor's
comments:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/PLoSONE_Replies_2.pdf
However,
the editor rejected the manuscript with the main reason that I was
the only author of the paper:
my main worry remains the
decision to carry out a systematic review with no
co-reviewer”:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/PLoSONE_Reject_3.pdf
However, I had already replied to this issue in my Replies_2 above, yet the editor did not present any counter-comments to my replies.
Then
I submitted my manuscript to Clinical Epidemiology of the DOVE
press, which rejected it on the basis of 3 reviewer
comments:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/ClinEpidemiol_Reject.pdf
However, the reviewers did not point out problems that could not be corrected or replied to.
Then
I submitted the manuscript to Clinical Pharmacology, another
journal of the DOVE press, with replies to the Clinical Epidemiology
reviewers:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/ClinEpidemiol_Replies_1.pdf
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/ClinEpidemiol_Replies_2.pdf
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/ClinEpidemiol_Replies_3.pdf
Clinical
Pharmacology rejected the manuscript on the basis of 2 new reviewer
comments:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/ClinPharmacol_Reject_1.pdf
The editor wrote that “provided that these points are satisfactorily addressed, we would be happy to consider your manuscript for publication.”
One
reviewer simply stated that there was no novelty, without giving any
reference where similar ideas had been previously
reported:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/ClinPharmacol_Replies_1.pdf
The
second reviewer commented on some other manuscript, not my
manuscript:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/ClinPharmacol_Replies_2.pdf
However,
my manuscript was rejected without the editor giving any reasons for
his dissatisfaction to my replies to
reviewers:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/PPH/OR/ClinPharmacol_Reject_2.pdf
When I asked the DOVE Press production coordinator about these puzzling reviewer comments, I received an email stating that the reviewer 2 comment (above) indeed did not appear to be related to my manuscript, and he promised to find out what was the actual reason for rejection by the Clinical Pharmacology editor.
***
“Dear
Dr. Hemila,
Thank you very much. You're right, the reviewer
comment does not appear to be related to your paper. I have asked my
colleague to look into how this has happened. She will also write to
that reviewer and ask for the original comments specific to your
paper. I have also written to Prof. Frankel and asked him to revisit
your manuscript in the light of these details and if the paper is
still to be rejected, to let me know what the reason was so that I
may inform you. At this time we are unlikely to have an answer until
early January. Merry Christmas!
Sincerely, Peter Fogarty,
Production Coordinator, Dove Medical Press Ltd”
***
However,
January began and ended, and so did February etc. but I did not get
any information about the rejection of my manuscript.
My
manuscript was finally published:
Hemilä
H.
Zinc lozenges may shorten the duration of colds: a systematic
review.
Open Respiratory Medicine Journal
2011;5:51-58
http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/1874306401105010051
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136969
Supplementary
files:
http://benthamscience.com/open/tormj/articles/V005/supplementary-material/2011_00000005_00000001_51TORMJ.zip
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136969/bin/TORMJ-5-51_SD1.zip
List of
references with links to the references if such are
available:
http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hemila/Zn/TORMJ_Refs.htm
Although
the paper above shows strong evidence that zinc lozenges can shorten
the duration of colds,
most of the zinc lozenges on market
are not effective.
Either they contain too little zinc or they
contain additives such as citric acid which bind zinc.
See an
analysis of the zinc lozenges on market in the USA:
http://coldcure.com/html/zinc-lozenges.html
Column “Zinc compound (mg) expected after reacting with
other lozenge ingredients & mg iZn” shows the amount of
expected free zinc.
Harri
Hemilä
harri.hemila@helsinki.fi