By Grainne McNamara,

Research Integrity/Publication Ethics Manager at Karger, Silver sponsor of the

ALPSP Conference and Awards 2022 

At Karger Publishers,

we have over 130 years of experience connecting healthcare practitioners,

researchers and patients with the latest research and emerging best practice,

covering the whole cycle of knowledge. As a publisher in the health sciences

with a broad audience, we have always centered the needs of our readers by

tailoring our content to them. Complementing our long history of publishing

journals and books for clinicians, researchers, and patients, in 2021 we

launched the online blog The Waiting Room. In 2022 the Waiting Room Podcast launched, bringing breaking research to patients,

caregivers, and the general public in easy-to-understand, jargon-free formats. Also

this year, we made it possible for

authors to submit plain language summaries in our journal Skin

Appendage Disorders with their articles. These provide interested readers

with easy-to-understand descriptions of the latest research in this field of

dermatology. In all these

developments, we are acutely aware of the great responsibility that comes with

communicating health science research to a general audience.

 

At Karger Publishers,

we employ a rigorous peer

review process

and are transparent

about the evaluation criteria for articles that we publish. However, with increasing

digitalization comes big challenges, as information can be disseminated, but

also misinterpreted, at speed. With these challenges come opportunities to do

better, and we asked ourselves: How can we do more for our community?

 

At Karger, we are open

for Open. We have embraced the Open Science movement – in thought and action. Since 2021 all our

research articles have been published with a data availability statement,

directing readers to the location of the dataset(s) underlying these findings

and providing thorough guidance to authors on the how and why to share their

data. However, we see data availability statements as just the beginning.

 

Well-established

reporting guidelines exist for almost every study type and provide a structure

for authors, reviewers, and readers to understand what is, and should be,

reported in an article. As such, adherence to community-standard reporting

guidelines, such as CONSORT or PRISMA, has been the expectation for all our

journals for many years. As a health sciences publisher, we know that case

reports are an early stage but crucial part of evidence-based medicine decision

making. That is why we have eight

specialty Gold Open Access journals dedicated exclusively to communicating case reports.

For case reports to be their most responsibly influential and effective, clear

and transparent reporting, again, is crucial. That is why, as of September

2022, completion of the CARE checklist is a requirement for all submissions to these

journals. We believe that by improving the consistency and transparency of case

report reporting, we underscore the importance of transparency in health

sciences research.

 

We present breaking

research findings every day to our growing community and take great care in the

trust placed in us by readers as a publisher of health sciences. We recognize

that the ultimate guarantee of the reliability of a finding is its

reproducibility - that is, the ability to find the same result again and again.

We also know that transparency and detail of methodology are significant

barriers to the reproducibility of a result and that adherence to reporting

guidelines can improve the clarity of an article. That is why we recently

expanded our guidance to authors on the use of reporting guidelines and

endorsed the Materials Design Analysis Reporting Framework, as part of every

journal’s reproducibility

policy. We believe that by

centering the reproducibility of methodology and reproducibility of results in

our publications, we are progressing the conversation around

reproducible-by-default health sciences research.

We could not make

these steps towards reproducibility-by-default without the support of our

community of outstanding editors and reviewers. We aim to

recognize and support our

community of experts in a variety of ways. This includes providing

training for the next generation of peer reviewers as well as interactive discussion webinars on the latest topics in peer review and

reproducibility. We also benefit from the cross-publisher organizations, such

as COPE and ALPSP, that facilitate conversations on best practices in

reproducibility.

 

At Karger, as we expand

our portfolio of

research communication, we grow, in step, our focus on reliability and trust in

those findings. By empowering researchers, institutions, funders, and policy

makers to maximize impact in health sciences, we are taking strides toward our

goal to help shape a smarter, more equitable future.

Karger was a silver sponsor of the ALPSP Conference and Awards held in Manchester UK in September 2022.  The 2023 ALPSP Conference will be 13-15 September 2023.