Wellcome Open Research Author Survey 2019

With the Wellcome Open Research publishing platform close to reaching 500 published articles, we felt this was a good time to revisit how our authors felt about the editorial process, why they chose Wellcome Open Research as their publication venue and what they thought could be changed to improve their overall experience. The key findings from this survey are the focus of this blog post.

Responses

In our last author survey in April 2017, we asked the first 50 submitting authors to let us know their thoughts – this was our first chance to see how Wellcome-funded researchers felt about the publishing platform and it helped us identify areas on which we could act upon and improve. 

In October 2019, we invited 314 submitting authors to answer a very similar survey where we hoped to corroborate the findings we found previously as well as unearth any issues our authors may have had. This time around, we had 100 respondents (a 32% response rate), with 39% of the authors identifying themselves as early career researchers.

Author Experience

We aim to ensure that the submission process and editorial support for authors is fast, efficient and easy to use. Specifically, we have sought to ensure that submission is not an administrative burden; the submission form is a single page designed to make it easy for the corresponding author to add the required metadata and link to authors grants and ORCID IDs. From Our editorial team work closely with authors when handling articles and provide research data support to ensure related data and code are made freely available and can be easily accessed from the data availability section of an article. We are happy that these efforts are reflected by our authors overall experience:

• 95% of authors agreed that the submission process was efficient
• 91% of authors were satisfied with the editorial service and support
• 90% of authors would recommend publishing in Wellcome Open Research to a colleague

Why are researchers publishing with us?

In our last author survey the top reason for publishing on Wellcome Open Research was that researchers wanted to have their article submitted, published and peer reviewed in a timely fashion.

The 2019 survey reaffirms this, with 51% of authors stating that the speed of the process was the most important reason for submitting to this platform. Currently, Wellcome Open Research has a median time of 76 days from the date an article is submitted to when it has passed peer-review and been submitted to Pubmed for indexing. This is quick – the industry average is around 125 days, and our authors realise that the author-led process enables them to be in control and get work published without unnecessary delay.

Authors also continue to find the publication of non-traditional outputs a highly important reason to publish on Wellcome Open Research; 40% of articles that are published on the platform are outputs such as data notes, study protocols, method articles and registered reports.

Interestingly, the 2019 author survey also shows that the open peer review process is becoming a more prominent reason for choosing to publish on this platform. Specifically, some 45% of responses selected that open peer review was a “highly important” factor for them for choosing to publish compared to 31% in the previous survey. Over the past couple of years transparency in peer review has been an emerging topic and there is noticeably more innovation happening in open peer review across the publishing industry. We suspect our open peer review model has gained more recognition and its now a part of our process that authors want to experience. This is reflected by the fact that 76% of authors declared they preferred the open peer review process compared to the traditional peer review process.

Peer Review – improving how authors suggest reviewers

As with our last survey, the peer review process is something that authors have differing opinions on, particularly when it comes to suggesting reviewers.

Wellcome Open Research has an author-led peer review process where the authors are in full control of suggesting reviewers. Once suggested, reviewers are verified by the editorial team against our reviewer criteria to ensure that there are no conflicts of interest. On some occasions, a reviewer suggestion might not automatically pass our review criteria resulting in an individual being rejected as a suitable reviewer.

The survey has shown that although our reviewer criteria is important, there are times where we might need to be more flexible. For example, our current guidelines say that a reviewer must not have co-authored with any of the lead authors in past the three years. However, we also recognise that on occasions a previous collaborator, who has most relevant knowledge, may be the very best person to review the article. This has spurred on a healthy conversation about our peer review process, and we are going to be looking into this in more detail at our next advisory board meeting to discuss how we can make the process more flexible whilst retaining a set of guidelines that can inform the authors more clearly.

One thing that did change from our last survey was the percentage of authors that used our peer review selector tool. In 2017, 48% of respondents used the tool, where as in 2019, 70% of respondents used it to help suggest reviewers for their article. This is great to see, as we had improved the user experience of the referee suggestion page based upon the feedback from our first survey. There are still refinements to make, but we want to get to the stage where authors have all the tools to suggest the right reviewers and can easily communicate with the editorial team about their suggestions.

Conclusion

Author surveys are an important tool to understand our authors experience and what they would like to see improved. It is helpful to harness collective thoughts on certain aspects of the process as it makes it obvious where we need to make changes.

We also received lots of great individual feedback/ideas from authors on how else we can streamline and improve the process, all of which gets taken to the Wellcome Open Research team, where they are discussed and acted upon if we believe they can make a difference.

We thanks those who participated in our survey this time around and indeed we encourage you as a community to leave any thoughts about Wellcome Open Research too by contacting us at [email protected]. 

The full questionnaire can be accessed here. The summary of the results can be accessed here. The raw data from the survey can be accessed here.