Collection, curation, and quality: The editor's responsibility

The role of journals in the recording and dissemination of science and scholarly information has been a topic of discussion throughout the life of Learned Publishing, and it does not look like it is going away anytime soon. The responsibility of journals – and editors in particular – has increasingly come into the spotlight, especially with the rise of apparently fake news and article retractions (RetractionWatch, 2016), as well as the well-documented rise of journals which do not conform to accepted western standards. Adding to all of this are extensive discussions over the so-called reproducibility crisis in science, raising concerns about the influence of articles reporting non-replicable (and potentially dangerous) findings (see Fanelli, 2018). Several articles recently published in this journal raise issues over trust and integrity in the scholarly environment and within journals. Issues covered include the publishing decisions made by researchers which show how the pressure to publish can overcome the desire to publish well (high quality articles in high quality journals; Kurt, 2018; Shehata & Elgllab, 2018). This is exacerbated by too few (high quality) journals to accommodate the output of research – rising by 22% in some regions according to the most recent data emerging from both Scopus and Clarivate (see Fig. 1). So perhaps it is worth asking again about the level of responsibility of editors. Should editors be accepting and publishing more widely, or more narrowly? Should we be increasing the filtering of research, or widening our collections? In one of the plenary sessions at the recent SSP conference in Chicago, Safiya Noble made the point that if you are not published, then you are not part of the scholarly record. She argued that this has led to the exclusion of some sections of the global population (based on race, location, sex, etc.), which would advocate for more inclusive publications. However, this flies in the face of the more selective (and high impact) strategies of both journals and indexes which promote the promise of “the best of the best” to researchers and remain the most desired target for authors. The current response to over-submission (usually from the large and high-impact journals and publishers) is to offer a cascading system whereby the top quality articles are retained in the high-impact journal with others redirected into lower impact (usually open access) journals which supposedly have lower quality control thresholds (Björk & Catani, 2016). This raises three important questions for editors and publishers alike: