These are strange times. We are no longer able to go to scientific meetings to learn, discuss, be inspired and meet colleagues and friends. In the meantime, new communication tools have emerged, and it is amazing to see how fast these innovative communication platforms have shaped a new virtual world. Some of these groundbreaking virtual meetings are amazingly good, like the virtual CIRSE summit this year. An unexpected finding is that the number of subscribers to virtual meetings is much higher compared to physical meetings. I wonder what will remain of this new world when we have conquered the pandemic.

Meanwhile there is another scientific revolution going on, completely independent from Covid-19. This revolution is silent and will change our scientific world permanently. I am referring to the way we have been communicating science over the last 350 years. The first academic journals were the Journal des Sçavans followed soon after by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665). The first fully peer-reviewed journal was Medical Essays and Observations (1733). The way we are communicating science and the process of peer-review has a long tradition. Around 2000, BioMed Central (now part of Springer Nature) was founded as the first and largest open access scientific publisher. Parallel to the development of information and communications technology (ICT) and the internet, open access publishing has developed very rapidly in the last two decades, next to the traditional subscription journals. Almost all subscription journals have now established a whole family of open access platforms next to the old “mother” journal; and parallel to this, stand-alone open access journals emerge monthly.

The concept behind open access was already promoted by the American sociologist Robert King Merton who declared in 1942, “Each researcher must contribute to the ‘common pot’ and give up intellectual property rights to allow knowledge to move forward.” I personally think that altruistic motives have little to do with this revolution of open access. It is a contemporary business model that follows online shopping, the internet, social media and the strive for inclusivity. It will only be a matter of time before all scientific publication is open access. The answer to the question if this will improve communication, transparency and inclusivity is not so clear yet – that all has to do with the nature of scientific publishing.

Scientific publishing is not about a scientific truth but about scientific facts. Truth is always contingent on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal, and that truth is always partial and “at issue” rather than being complete and certain. This is what real science should be; always uncertain and open for discussion, embracing new facts and ideas. Science is not the truth, it is the pathway searching for the truth, which also explains the fact that we call it re-search. Recent political developments show that the truth is volatile but the facts are not, and the only way around this dilemma of alternative truth is to base the new truth on alternative facts. In science, alternative facts were always marked as fraud, a deadly sin in publishing science, often followed by expulsion from the scientific community. One of the ways to prevent scientific fraud has always been the peer-review process, already in place for more than 150 years. Although not 100% watertight, it is the best we have. There has always been criticism on peer-review, being non-transparent, patronizing and prejudiced, and this critique is often understandable. Therefore, the introduction of open peer-review in some new open access journals, like in CVIR Endovascular, is an important and irreversible development. It has many advantages, taking away the old criticism, and in my opinion making the published paper stronger and much more interesting, as the peer-review and the comments by the authors are now an integral part of the published paper. (Reekers, 2020) Until very recently I had no doubt that the shift from subscription journals with closed peer-review to open access with open peer-review is an unavoidable and irreversible next step in publishing science, but recent developments have made me very uncertain about this.

In the last couple of years, a new way to publish scientific data has emerged, and this is expanding very fast. I was shocked that many off my colleagues have not yet heard of this, so called, pre-print publishing. Pre-print is actually a platform where you can upload your scientific manuscript for everybody to read. It sounds like those digital platforms where you can upload your own music. But what really worries me is that if you visit one of those pre-print websites, the layout of the paper looks very real, like a medical paper as we all know it. And although, in fine print, it says that the manuscript is not peer-reviewed, the later is easily overlooked. But even more frightening is that these papers also get a permanent DOI number and are therefore citable and can be found through Google Scholar and Crossref. Interesting is also that journal publishers do not count pre-print as a reason to deny or disenfranchise a submission to their journal. Moreover, these manuscripts stay on these sites forever, and can also not be removed after they have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. I did a small random sample of pre-print papers published on these sites, and I could not find any paper that was also published in a peer-reviewed journal later on. I admit my random sample is not real science, but it is for me an indication that we are in a process of accepting and incorporating, non-scrutinized, potentially alternative scientific facts as part of the official scientific record.

With the speed of multiplication on the digital highway, I predict that we will soon have a parallel scientific world with non-peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts, on pre-print sites, containing references from other pre-print articles. When this happens, the scientific truth will be based on non-scrutinized, alternative scientific facts. This will lead to a complete collapse and inflation of science as we know and trust it today. The reality that this is not an unrealistic doom scenario was proven by the current president of the US who has recently touted that hydroxychloroquine is an effective drug to treat Covid-19, referring to a paper on a pre-print site as the scientific proof for his claims. Now 6 months later, this very paper still only exists in pre-print. If we, as doctors, have to base our medical decisions on alternative and non-scrutinized “scientific facts,” we will become, gradually and unnoticed, a bunch of 2.0 quacks, because every medical treatment without good scientific data is no more than a medical experiment.

Not applicable.

1. Jim Reekers. Open access peer-review: Time for closer look. 29 2020. BMC, Research in progress blog. https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2020/04/29/open-peer-review-time-for-a-closer-look/

Download references

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Affiliations

1. Professor Emeritus Interventional Radiology, Amsterdam UMC University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

   Jim A. Reekers

Authors

1. Jim A. ReekersView author publications

   You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

J. Reekers wrote the article. The author (s) read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jim A. Reekers.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

The author declares that he has no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

CVIR Endovascular endorses the unified Springer Nature preprint policy (https://www.springernature.com/gp/policies/editorial-policies) and offers In Review service for authors (https://www.springernature.com/gp/authors/campaigns/in-review).

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Reprints and Permissions

Cite this article

Reekers, J.A. Extra, Extra, read all about it!. CVIR Endovasc 4, 15 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42155-020-00192-5

Download citation

• Published: 12 January 2021

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s42155-020-00192-5

中文翻译：

---

额外，额外，阅读全部内容！

这些是奇怪的时期。我们不再能够去参加科学会议来学习，讨论，受到启发并结识同事和朋友。同时，新的通讯工具应运而生，令人惊讶的是，这些创新的通讯平台塑造了一个新的虚拟世界的速度如此之快。其中一些突破性的虚拟会议非常好，例如今年的虚拟CIRSE峰会。意外的发现是虚拟会议的订户数量比物理会议的订户数量高得多。我想知道，当我们战胜了这场流行病后，这个新世界还会剩下什么。

同时，又发生了又一次完全独立于Covid-19的科学革命。这场革命是无声的，它将永久改变我们的科学世界。我指的是过去350年来我们交流科学的方式。最早的学术期刊是《 Savans杂志》，随后是《皇家学会的哲学交易》（1665年）。同行评议的第一本期刊是《医学论文与观察》（1733年）。我们交流科学和同行评审过程的方式由来已久。在2000年左右，BioMed Central（现为Springer Nature的一部分）成立，是第一家也是最大的开放获取科学出版商。与信息通信技术（ICT）和互联网的发展并行，在过去的二十年中，开放存取出版的发展非常迅速，仅次于传统的订阅期刊。现在，几乎所有订阅期刊都在旧的“母亲”期刊旁边建立了一个完整的开放获取平台系列。与此并行的是，每月都会出现独立的开放获取期刊。

美国社会学家罗伯特·金·默顿（Robert King Merton）在1942年宣布了开放访问背后的概念，他宣称：“每个研究人员都必须为'共同的锅'做出贡献，并放弃知识产权以使知识向前发展。” 我个人认为，利他动机与这种开放获取革命无关。这是一种现代商业模式，遵循在线购物，互联网，社交媒体和包容性的努力。所有科学出版物都是开放获取只是时间问题。对于这是否会改善沟通，透明度和包容性的问题，答案尚不十分清楚，这与科学出版的性质有关。

科学出版不是关于科学真理，而是关于科学事实。真理始终取决于历史和社会背景，而不是绝对的和普遍的，真理始终是局部的和“有争议的”，而不是完整的和确定的。这就是真正的科学。总是不确定且开放讨论，包括新的事实和想法。科学不是真理，它是寻找真理的途径，这也解释了我们称之为重新研究的事实。最近的政治发展表明，真理是易变的，但事实并非如此，而解决替代真理的这种困境的唯一方法是使新真理基于替代事实。在科学中，替代性事实总是被标记为欺诈，这是出版科学中的致命罪恶，常常被科学界驱逐出境。防止科学欺诈的方法之一一直是同行评审过程，该过程已经开展了150多年。尽管不是100％防水，但这是我们拥有的最好的。同行评议一直受到批评，它们是不透明的，光顾的和有偏见的，这种批评通常是可以理解的。因此，像CVIR血管内这样的一些新的开放获取期刊中引入开放同行评审是一项重要且不可逆的发展。它具有许多优点，消除了旧有的批评，而且我认为使发表的论文更强大，更有趣，因为同行评审和作者的评论现在已成为发表论文的组成部分。（偷袭者，

在过去的几年中，出现了一种新的发布科学数据的方式，并且这种方式正在迅速扩展。令我震惊的是，许多同事还没有听说过这种所谓的预印刷出版。预印本实际上是一个平台，您可以在其中上传科学手稿以供所有人阅读。听起来像那些可以上传自己的音乐的数字平台。但是，真正让我担心的是，如果您访问这些预印本网站之一，那么纸的布局看起来就很真实，就像我们都知道的医学纸一样。而且，尽管说精美的文字说该手稿没有经过同行评审，但后者很容易被忽略。但更令人恐惧的是，这些论文也获得了永久的DOI号，因此可被引用，可以通过Google Scholar和Crossref找到。有趣的是，期刊出版商不将预印本视为拒绝或剥夺对期刊投稿的理由。此外，这些手稿永远留在这些网站上，并且在同行评审期刊上发表后也无法删除。我从这些网站上随机抽取了一小部分预印本论文，后来我也找不到在同行评审期刊上也发表过的论文。我承认我的随机样本不是真正的科学，但对我来说，这表明我们正在接受和纳入未经审查的，可能具有替代性的科学事实，作为正式科学记录的一部分。并且在同行评审期刊上发表后也无法删除。我从这些网站上随机抽取了一小部分预印本论文，后来我也找不到在同行评审期刊上也发表过的论文。我承认我的随机样本不是真正的科学，但对我来说，这表明我们正在接受和纳入未经审查的，可能具有替代性的科学事实，作为正式科学记录的一部分。并且在同行评审期刊上发表后也无法删除。我从这些网站上随机抽取了一小部分预印本论文，后来我也找不到在同行评审期刊上也发表过的论文。我承认我的随机样本不是真正的科学，但对我而言，这表明我们正在接受和纳入未经审查的，可能具有替代性的科学事实，并将其作为正式科学记录的一部分。

随着数字高速公路上速度的提高，我预计在不久的将来，我们将拥有一个平行的科学世界，在预印本站点上将有未经同行评审的科学手稿，其中包含来自其他预印本文章的参考。发生这种情况时，科学真理将基于未经审查的替代性科学事实。众所周知，这将导致科学彻底崩溃和膨胀。美国现任总统最近证明了这不是不切实际的厄运情景，他最近吹捧羟氯喹是治疗Covid-19的有效药物，他指的是预印本网站上的一篇论文作为他的主张。现在，六个月后，这种纸张仍然只存在于预印本中。如果我们作为医生，

不适用。

1. 吉姆·瑞克斯（Jim Reekers）。开放访问同行评审：是时候仔细看看了。2020年2月29日。BMC，正在进行研究的博客。https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2020/04/29/open-peer-review-time-for-a-closer-look/

下载参考

不适用。

不适用。

隶属关系

1. 阿姆斯特丹UMC名誉介入放射学教授阿姆斯特丹大学，阿姆斯特丹，荷兰

   吉姆·雷克斯

s

1. Jim A. Reekers查看作者出版物

   您也可以在PubMed Google学术搜索中搜索该作者 

会费

J. Reekers撰写了这篇文章。作者阅读并批准了最终手稿。

通讯作者

对应于吉姆·雷克斯（Jim A. Reekers）。

道德规范的批准和同意参加

不适用。

同意发表

不适用。

利益争夺

作者宣称他没有竞争利益。

发行人须知

对于出版的地图和机构隶属关系中的管辖权主张，Springer Nature保持中立。

CVIR血管内腔室认可统一的Springer Nature预印本政策（https://www.springernature.com/gp/policies/editorial-policies），并为作者提供评论服务（https://www.springernature.com/gp/authors/广告系列/正在审核）。

开放存取本文是根据知识共享署名4.0国际许可许可的，该许可允许以任何媒介或格式使用，共享，改编，分发和复制，只要您对原始作者和出处提供适当的信誉，链接到知识共享许可，并指出是否进行了更改。本文的图像或其他第三方材料包含在该文章的知识共享许可中，除非在该材料的信用额度中另有说明。如果该材料未包含在该文章的创用CC许可中，并且您的预期用途未得到法律法规的许可或超出了许可的用途，则您需要直接获得版权所有者的许可。要查看此许可证的副本，请访问http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/。

转载和许可

引用本文

Reekers，JA Extra，Extra，请阅读所有相关内容！。CVIR Endovasc 4， 15（2021）。https://doi.org/10.1186/s42155-020-00192-5

下载引文

• 发表时间：2021年1月12日

• DOI ：https ：//doi.org/10.1186/s42155-020-00192-5