Author's Toolkit

A tool from Current Medical Research and Opinion, Volume 26, Issue 8, 2010:

"Biomedical journals have seen steady increases in submissions recently, partly owing to the introduction of legislation requiring clinical trial results reporting and to industry sponsors’ policies that encourage publication of even early phase studies. Meanwhile, new journals continue to launch every week, providing an ever greater choice of places to publish research. Both factors present challenges when trying to find the right journal for an industry-sponsored study, particularly when authors and publication planners are reticent about communicating with journal editors and some editors may seem wary of direct approaches.

There is already plenty of guidance for authors on writing good manuscripts. In this article, we discuss the Authors’ Submission Toolkit, a new resource for authors that tackles practical questions about manuscript preparation and the submission process that are incompletely addressed in existing guidance documents. The toolkit has been produced through the Medical Publishing Insights and Practices (MPIP) initiative, a project co-sponsored by members of the pharmaceutical industry and the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) to enable open communication between authors and journal editors and to increase trust, transparency, and integrity in the process of peer reviewing and publishing industry-sponsored research.
We hope that the toolkit will provide useful and relevant information for authors, such as how to initiate appropriate collegial dialogue with journals and to help ensure that good research is being published in the right place. The toolkit summarizes tips and “best practices” to increase awareness of editorial requirements, journal selection, submission processes, publication ethics, peer review, and effective communication with editors, much of which has traditionally been seen as mysterious to authors. We also hope that the toolkit will help to increase confidence in disclosing the role of professional medical writers as legitimate contributors to the process.

Finally, we hope that this initiative will help to increase trust between journal editors and the teams who produce industry-sponsored research: industry investigators, authors, publication planners, and medical writers."