[Vp-integration-subgroup] White paper submitted

[Jacob Barhak]

Thanks William,

Your support on the issues I raised are appreciated.

You and several others like James, Jonathan, Sheriff , and John want to
restructure and modify the paper more. Yet you all agreed it is suitable
for submission. This means it is suitable for review.

The only one who actually made changes is Sheriff and it took him a long
time - over a week after everyone else approved.

And my question is, what benefit beyond what we wrote so far a rewrite will
it get us? Is it worth the delay? How long will it take?

There is a positive compounding effect if things get published quickly - do
you really want to lose it in the name of some perfection that was
undefined?

This paper was supposed to be finished by February and this is almost May
now - if we keep rewriting things - the major points will not change - yet
distribution will be delayed- my projection is if we go that path, things
will get published next year - many months of delay that would have a
chance to influence the public.

More than this, can you achieve consensus among all authors after rewrites?
Can you do it quickly?

Only a round of approvals among all contributors took many weeks - how long
will take one round of many rewrites?

Will you personally contribute the time to handle all the changes and
integrate them or is it someone else's responsibility? Each and every
contributor should ask themselves that question. It is a real time sink and
I am not sure how many are ready to take it upon themselves.

If you now tell the group that you are willing to reformat the paper and
achieve consensus within a few weeks and submit it, I will support it and
follow your lead - yet I want to see actions.

And about editors. In the case of Cureus - there is a fee that John and I
were supposed to pay that includes editorial services and open publication
as well as speedy registration in PubMed. I have fulfilled editorial roles
in the past, and I always made sure to provide proper review - you can see
many examples here:
https://groups.google.com/g/public-scientific-reviews

I expect any editor to at least do their work and provide proper review. In
this case the editor failed. There is no proper indication of what is wrong
and clear instructions on how to improve things towards publication. It
would be nice if the editor fixes his response, yet since there is no
guarantee it will happen, we need to move forward.

Currently the consensus point defaults to James needing to decide if he
submits to iScience. If not, then we need to decide on a target venue again.

And unless someone commits the effort to quick restructuring and
achieving consensus and submission in a short time, you are all stuck with
me or someone else pushing it based on the consensus we achieved already.

William, I am outside the academic system - I have no reason to publish in
Journal - in fact I was avoiding those for years since they waste time and
provide litte value beyond a conference publication where you discuss the
paper with people.

Nevertheless, I think what we collected here is very valuable and should be
advertised. It was agreed at the beginning that this should go to a Journal
and I am trying to fulfil this consensus. Yet in my mind, as long as we do
not lose integrity and correctness, style does not matter, and the quicker
we do this the better.

Hopefully this long text will lead into quick action.

                  Jacob


On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 3:09 AM William Waites <wwaites at ieee.org> wrote:

> > 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
>
>
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