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Open access (OA) publications have changed the paradigm of dissemination of scientific research. Their benefits to low-income countries underline their value; however, critics question exorbitant publication fees as well as their effect on the peer review process and research quality.This study reports on the prevalence of OA publishing in orthopaedic research and compares benchmark citation indices as well as evidence quality derived from OA journals with conventional subscription based orthopaedic journals.All 63 orthopaedic journals listed in ISI's Web of Knowledge Journal Citation Report (JCR) were examined. Bibliometric data attributed to each journal for the year 2012 was acquired from the JCR. Studies that fulfilled the criteria of level I evidence were identified for each journal within PubMed. Individual journal websites were reviewed to identify their open access policy. A total of 38 (60.3 %) journals did not offer any form of OA publishing; however, 20 (31.7 %) hybrid journals were identified which offered authors the choice to publish their work as OA if a publication fee was paid. Only five (8 %) journals published all their articles as OA. There was variability amongst the different publication fees for OA articles. Journals that published OA articles did not differ from subscription based journals on the basis of 2012 impact factor, citation number, self citation proportion or the volume of level I evidence published (p 0.05).OA journals are present in orthopaedic research, though in small numbers. Over a third of orthopaedic journals catalogued in the ISI Web of Knowledge JCR® are hybrid journals that provide authors with the opportunity to publish their articles as OA after a publication fee is paid. This study suggests equivalent importance and quality of articles between OA and subscription based orthopaedic journals based on bibliometric data and the volume of level I evidence produced. Orthopaedic researchers must recognize the potential benefits of OA publishing and its emerging presence within the field. Further examination and consensus is required in orthopaedic research to generate an OA system that is robustly regulated and maintains research quality.

Beyond explicit reviewer commentary, editors may rely on other metrics when evaluating manuscripts under consideration for publication. One potential, indirect measure of merit may be the ease or difficulty in identifying reviewers willing to review a given paper. We sought to determine whether reviewer decisions to agree or decline to review a manuscript are associated with manuscript acceptance. Original Research submissions to “Radiology” from 1/1/2008 to 12/31/2011 were studied. Using Student’s t tests, we studied the association between the ratio number-of-reviewers-declining:number-of-reviewers-agreeing to review manuscripts (“decline:agree ratio”) and editor decision to accept or reject the manuscript. A subgroup analysis of papers in which all four invited reviewers agreed to review the paper (“universal agree-to-review group”) was performed. Pearson’s correlation was used to study decline:agree ratio and accepted manuscript citation rate. Original Research manuscript acceptance rate at Radiology was 14.5% (780/5375). Decline:agree ratio was similar between accepted and rejected manuscripts (0.87 ± 0.84 versus 0.90 ± 0.86 respectively, P = 0.35). “Universal agree-to-review” papers were accepted at similar rates to other papers (15.7% [22/140] versus 14.5% [758/5235] respectively, P = 0.69). Higher decline:agree ratios corresponded to lower manuscript citation rates (r = 0.09, P = 0.048). Our study, based on the lack of correlation between agreement to review rate and acceptance rate to Radiology and the direct correlation between agreement to review rate and manuscript citation rate, suggests that reviewers may have a preference for manuscripts with greater potential scientific relevance, but that reviewer motivation to agree to review does not include the expectation of manuscript acceptance.

This year has produced a great number of excellent papers that should have a significant effect on our approach to and management of a wide diversity of spinal problems. I hope that my comments on each paper will cause people to read or reread them. Do not just skim the abstract, as inevitably abstracts have to summarize the whole paper, and important conclusions in the paper itself may not surface in the abstract. An important contribution that the European Spine Journal makes to surgical education and the daily practise of spinal surgery is the review article. They mainly deal with extreme topical issues. This year I particularly enjoyed those, which dealt with the nonoperative treatment of thoracolumbar burst fractures, Scheuermann’s disease, adult scoliosis, and clinical studies in spinal surgery. Despite reviewing some 2,700 references, and selecting some 17 eligible studies for review, the authors van der Roer et al. [27] claim that there was no scientifically sound evidence from high-quality randomized trials comparing the effectiveness of operative or conservative treatment of unstable traumatic thoracolumbar fractures, because such studies had not been done. However, this is a paper that deserves close study, as although it was my impression from the paper that the surgically treated had less pain in the long term, the lack of any clear difference may make surgeons considering surgery or not, to weigh both surgical factors and nonsurgical factors more carefully. Will a patient with a scar on his back and a plate perhaps extending to L3 be as good in the long term compared with a patient with a satisfactorily healed single segment in some kyphosis? What is the social and psychological effect of having had a major operation on the spine, and the possibility of another operation to remove the plate? The paper, which follows this review is by Agus et al. [3]. Although the study was performed with only 35 patients, the follow-up was for 6 years, and it was an excellent analysis of the results of treating conservatively, unstable burst fractures, which were neurologically intact. They discuss the concept of instability and using the Denis classification, treated both 2 column and 3 column fractures, but without facet fracture or facet dislocation. The short time of hospitalisation, only 3–8 days, and the use of bracing for comfort, not for maintenance of position, and the lack of any indication in the final results that kyphosis was a factor in clinical result, all rather undermines the usual suggested reasons for surgical intervention in unstable fractures. There was an increasing deformity at final follow-up, of kyphosis, and anterior and posterior vertebral height loss, but this does not affect the result, and as others have commented canal compromise dropped from around 45% average to 20% average, in both 2 and 3 column fractures. It would seem reasonable that in any general orthopaedic setting, without specialist spinal surgeons, a strong case can be made for conservative treatment of these fractures, as in relatively inexperienced hands surgery has the potential for significant complications.

We performed a bibliometric search covering a 1-year period to evaluate the number and the scientific "weight" of nuclear medicine papers published from European as compared with other countries. The scientific impact of our discipline was evaluated according to the impact factor of each publication, and we also aimed to identify those countries and topics that are making the principal contributions to the development of our discipline. To this end, a search on MEDLINE (PubMed) was run to find all peer-reviewed articles published between April 2002 and May 2003, using isotope definitions as search terms. A total of 3,292 publications were identified. Of these, 650 were of no nuclear medicine interest, 229 were reviews and 82 had no country specified. In absolute numbers, Europe leads research in nuclear medicine (939 papers, 38.9%) followed by the USA (608 papers, 25.2%). Among European countries, Germany is the nation that is currently making the greatest contribution to the scientific production of nuclear medicine in Europe. Articles concerning the use of nuclear medicine in oncology account for more than one-quarter of all published nuclear medicine papers.

Recent years have seen enormously increased interest in the comparative evaluation of research quality in the UK, with considerable resources devoted to ranking the output of academic institutions relative to one another at the sub-discipline level, and the disposition of even greater resources dependent on the outcome of this process. The preferred methodology has been that of traditional peer review, with expert groups of academics tasked to assess the relative worth of all research activity in 'their' field. Extension to institutional evaluation of a recently refined technique of journal ranking (Discipline Contribution Scoring) holds out the possibility of 'automatic' evaluation within a time-frame considerably less than would be required using methods based directly on citation counts within the corpus of academic work under review. This paper tests the feasibility of the technique in the sub-field of Business and Management Studies Research, producing rankings which are highly correlated with those generated by the much more complex and expensive direct peer review approach. More generally, the analysis also gives a rare opportunity directly to compare the equivalence of peer review and bibliometric analysis over a whole sub-field of academic activity in a non-experimental setting.