Want to hear more about upcoming issues? Sign up for NAPGO’s newsletter below.
Notes from the Editor
Welcome to North American Proceedings in Gynecology and Obstetrics (NAPGO).
Our inspiration for founding this journal stems from the data on how many papers and projects in obstetrics and gynecology are submitted and subsequently rejected every year. Not only are thousands – if not millions – of labored hours are wasted, but also the information that was gathered through that labor is lost.
How can we regain that lost information so that all of academia is able to access relevant research? To start, we have to see where the issues are in the current publishing system.
When a researcher decides to publish, there are two routes to get their manuscript out into the world. One way to publish is to compete with other researchers for the nominal article publication slots available every year at subscription-based firms. While these firms publish great work, an overwhelming majority of articles go unpublished. Data shows that these firms publish approximately twenty five percent of the articles submitted every year. So, what happens to the other seventy-five percent not published? The work then begins to weave its way through the second route available to publish an article: the open access format. This typically means the researcher must pay an exorbitant price for publication. In 2021, that price can be upwards of $5,000 per article, which is cost-prohibitive for many researchers working on a limited budget. Such a hefty fee also contradicts the purpose of open access journals, which is to reduce the barriers to accessing pertinent information. If researchers cannot afford the publication fee, the public cannot access the information. In other words, both routes to publishing have significant, and often insurmountable, obstacles for researchers.
The difficulty of publishing an article laid out above begs the question: What are the numbers? How many articles go unpublished, thereby how much information is lost every year?
Admittedly, it is difficult to calculate how many researchers do not publish for lack of funds. However, it is fair to assume most of these researchers submitted manuscripts to the large firms with the hopes of being selected for publication with no fee. This means most would be captured in the large publishing firms’ seventy-five percent rejection rate. Looking at what registers in the field of obstetrics and gynecology in PubMed for 2020, there are approximately 25,000 articles published. This number appears to hold out year after year. If we assume the seventy-five percent rejection rate holds across all journals, there are approximately 75,000 articles a year rejected and facing obscurity.
The current data is somewhat bleak. But we started NAPGO with the intention of changing the academic publishing system. How can we give well researched papers and projects a voice that can be distributed across the world? There is good work out there in the open access forum. Yet, there are not enough open access journals, particularly in obstetrics and gynecology. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals there are only six open access journals addressing the field of obstetrics and gynecology in the United States; four of which are owned by large publishing companies.
The average physician in the field is not even aware of the open access journals that do exist because the journals do not attempt to market their publication offerings. Their social media presence is scant and their involvement in conferences and academia is all but absent. Breaking with the limited marketing of other open access journals, visibility and connectivity are top priorities for our NAPGO publishing house. Not only do we want to publish quality work otherwise lost to obscurity, we want to promote these works for all obstetric and gynecology physicians to see what is happening in the field. Similar to other journals of integrity, we hold ourselves to high publishing standards. The means every article will undergo rigorous peer-review, be indexed on Google Scholar, and be assigned a referenceable DOI for your curriculum vitae. But we also want to pivot back toward the original goal of open access journals: allowing all interested parties to read high-quality research with as few barriers as possible. As such, we put significant effort into promoting each publication – active social media presence, increasing website traffic, etc.
Researchers put tremendous effort into their work and should be published accordingly. If you have a vested interest in making sure all consumers have access to your work, please submit so NAPGO can assist you in achieving that goal.
I look forward to reading your work.
Rocco A Rossi, M.D., M.A.
Editor-in-Chief
North American Proceeding in Gynecology and Obstetrics