Acta Physiologica strives to make the research world a bit fairer

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

When looking at the average citations of our manuscripts, Acta Physiologica's outperforming nations of 2014 are Hungry, Switzerland, England, China and Finland. To many, this may surprise, however, it reflects the globalization of science, which is gradually taking place. The largest proportion of our submissions originates from the United States. The amount of citations going to these manuscripts from the United States is only slightly above our impact factor. Are other countries taking over in science? This would be a far-fetched assumption. The financial resources invested in science are only one aspect of research globalization. There are many others to be considered, such as publishing expenses. Most journals have high entry thresholds for less privileged countries, as substantial costs must be covered by the submitting authors. This does not only hold true for open access journals (where reading is at no expense, in contrast to publishing), but also for several of the journals that are not open access. Often, thousands of dollars must be paid before one's research finally goes to press. Just having your manuscripts reviewed may often inflict costs of around $100, irrespective of your manuscript finally being accepted or not. What is the fairest way to go, free access for the readers or free publication for the authors? Acta Physiologica has a particular policy: publishing is free for all authors, there are no submission fees, and the reading is also at very low or no expense for nearly all of those living in under privileged regions of this world. In fact, Acta Physiologica distributes more licenses via philanthropic initiatives than it sells licenses! Perhaps the fact that publishing is free for all authors is one key for the success that Acta Physiologica has been experiencing over the latest years. Our impact factor has now been well above four for some time, making us a top-notch Journal in physiology. Our submissions are steadily increasing (Persson 2014) at a remarkable rate of almost 100 manuscripts per year. This is an unusual development in physiology publishing. Impact factor mania persists (Alberts 2013, Casadevall & Fang 2014). For most journals, the build-up of the impact factor heavily relies on very few manuscripts that attract vast attention. This does not hold true for Acta Physiologica. Less than 5% of the articles receive more than three times as many citations as the average, no manuscript received over 40 citations. On the other hand, only around one of 10 manuscripts go without any citations, which is a remarkably low fraction. Taken together, it seems that our peer-reviewed evaluation is working very well. As a result, Acta Physiologica publishes a well-balanced variety of scientific findings. Of course, Acta Physiologica is not totally different from other journals in the field. We may have a different spectrum of outperforming nations, and our manuscripts are cited particularly evenly, but when looking at the top cited papers of the last two years (Birder et al. 2013, de Groat & Wickens 2013, Gronros et al. 2013, Kennedy-Lydon et al. 2013, Nyberg et al. 2013, Palei et al. 2013, Phalitakul et al. 2013, Porkka-Heiskanen et al. 2013, Singer et al. 2013, Wei et al. 2013), it is clear that reviews receive more attention than original articles. Although four out of the five top cited items are original articles, reviews are overrepresented. On average, reviews are cited 1.8 times more than other citable items (e.g. regular submissions, certain editorials, etc.). What may be most promising is the increase in downloads that Acta Physiologica has been experiencing over the latest years. We have now reached 200 000 downloads per year. The United States and Europe still make up more than 60% of our readers, but the other regions of the world are catching up quickly. None.