Industrial quality assurance programs rely on sorting between items which fulfil or do not fulfil the expectations of the item's developers or producers.
Scientific quality controls rely on different strategies: While industrial products can be measured or weighed, scientific work is much more difficult to judge. Therefore, the scientific community relies on the judgement of accuracy and suitability of methods, originality of questions asked, interpretation of the results, and discussion of the scientific perspective. All these qualities can only be assessed by experienced, thoughtful, and dedicated scientific specialists called “Peers.”
The process of “Peer Review” has been dealt with in my 2013 editorial earlier.[1]
Although Open Access (OA) publishing and peer review do not necessarily go together,[2] the rejection rate during the year 2016 in this journal was around 45%, a fact sometimes not happily greeted by the rejected authors. For the authors of the accepted articles in this journal, however, another mechanism of OA publishing comes into play: the fee which has to be paid for publication. In 2017, our publisher charges authors a fee of € 1,250 with a discount of 50% for members of the German Society for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. The amount of this article-processing charge (APC) is in line with other comparable OA journals.
As an editor, one has to bear in mind that the reputation of a journal nowadays is not only measured by the quality of its peer review but also by the infamous “Impact Factor.” This journal is already listed in PubmedCentral, Web of Science Core Collection, and in DOAJ. Its inclusion in the Web of Science “Emerging Sources Citation Index” means that it is in the process of being tracked for receiving an Impact Factor and while we cannot give a definite timeframe for a positive decision from that group, we are working to make this a reality. If this could be achieved, the aforementioned scientific quality control would have worked well.
