+44-7897-074717Editorial - Journal of Public Health Policy and Planning (2017) Volume 1, Issue 2
Data first: professional, professional and professional.
Yue Zhang*Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, The First Clinical College of Harbin Medical University, China
- Corresponding Author:
- Yue Zhang
Department of Rheumatology and Immunology
The First Clinical College of Harbin Medical University, China
Tel: 8613802448056
E-mail: toronto101@163.com
Received date: October 24, 2017; Accepted date: October 30, 2017; Published date: October 31, 2017
Citation: Zhang Y. Data first: professional, professional and professional. J Public Health Policy Plann. 2017; 1:25.
Copyright: © 2017 Zhang Y. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Editorial
Anti-fake-peer-reviewing practices are worldwide challenge. For instance, 107-articles retraction was executed by Springer Nature for 524 Chinese medical doctors in 119 university/- affiliated hospitals. However, two years ago, after two largescale retractions, China Association of Science and Technology issued its “5-Not” publication code covering anti-fake-peerreviewing practices. Recently, many authors involved in this scandal have been seriously punished, either fired by institutions or disqualified for the candidate list of academicians in Chinese Academy of Sciences. Ironically, some hospitals celebrated by issuing one announcement that they have not got caughtalthough they have been brought up to flashlights by last two large-scales retractions; thus it seems not so professional. In our view, to make one blacklist and strict editing [1,2] is helpful but better professionalism is must to prevent publication-malpractice scandals.
China expects most medical doctors to be physician scientists but lacks deep research training tracks. Most hospitals lack the position and promotion track for biomedical research staff scientists, but independent professionals may advance science in ways clinician faculty-run labs cannot thus bridge hospitals’ basic-translational-clinic research gaps [3]. The institutes face China's Discipline Research Ranking system, which use academics’ institute-as-first-affiliation publications to assess hospitals’ research performance. Presidents in hospitals urge notoriously busy medical doctors for more publications. Currently they either exploit graduate students as cheap labours or outsource research to companies. The latter risks future scandals: what happens now, small companies come easy to bankrupt but raw data is increasingly demanded by journals, so “faked” companies emerge to claim services as theirs. Ideally, it is helpful to mix the work of medical doctor faculties and professional staff scientists.
This large-scale retraction co-relates to “top” levels of grants: 28 National Natural-Science Foundation of China and 4 National key projects like 973. We doubt if their approvals were professional with “the feasibility”, “the originality or innovation” and “research team or institution qualification” since they even relied on “faked” peer-reviews alongside around 20-30% of contents found either plagiarism or data faking: how they were qualified for grantees? We suggest that the policy of grant authority could be data-first rather than news/reporters-following, to be more professional, serviceminded, letting independent evaluation systems including first “originality or innovation” double-blinded assessment followed by judging research team and institution qualifications, politically-independent, disinterested and less ad-hoc referees’ harshly-assessing proposals with self-claimed “C.O.I”, “competence”, and “availability”.
Another part of scandal is the companies for “the editing” or even “publication-outsourced package” services in China, although everyone knows that there is fake review process is going on in some publishing companies around the globe. So far, we are surprised that the punishments for such companies for these events are not clear for the public. Of certain, we cannot break the bottom-line just for the making-profits of the companies. To the end for both the moral and laws, we aware that every researcher should behave as a correct person to eradicate this fake review process with defined professionalism and we do support our own endeavours as far as this issue concerned to any journal.
This strategy is probably meaningful for anti-fake-peerreviewing strategy for most science and research communities in different countries.