[Vp-integration-subgroup] White paper submitted

[William Waites]

> The reason the working group was put at the title was to avoid an issue of authors arguing about ranking. I have seen those  before,  although not in this group,  and although those are part of human nature, such matters are non productive, 

I agree that disputes over sorting order of authors are tedious and annoying. In computer science we often solve this by simply putting names alphabetically, though user the author list is far shorter than on papers in the bio- and life sciences and because the cultural norm is different there’s less of a tendency to impute meaning to the author order. Maybe explicitly put an asterisk with a note that names are sorted alphabetically.

A disclaimer that says, “the opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the NIH or the IMAG/MSM Working Group on Viral Pandemics as a whole” is also totally appropriate.

I also tend to agree with James that the manuscript will need a good deal of restructuring and distilling down to be publishable, I think that Jonathan made a similar point earlier. I have not had good success with the strategy of submitting large manuscripts to journals with the intention of restructuring after review. One or two other papers that I have been involved with f tried to do this and it did not go well, for fairly predictable reasons.

Remember that most editors and virtually all reviewers are not paid and handle papers as a service to the scientific community. The easier we make their lives, the more likely the paper will be accepted. Submitting a manuscript that we know will need to be restructured is not making their lives easy. As a reviewer it would feel like the authors are making me do their work. (Let’s not get into the weeds about whether this is a good way for scientific publishing to work and save that conversation for over beers one day.)

Actually, CMMID’s COVID-19 working group swings the other way: we have an internal review process that happens before papers get submitted anywhere. This works extremely well and results in work that is already quite polished by the time it goes to external peer review at a journal. I wonder if, separately from this discussion, the IMAG/MSM WG could do something similar. The setup is very different, but it is maybe something to think about.

Best wishes,
-w