Over
the past decade, it has become customary for most peer-review journals
(including APS journals) to ask potential reviewers to declare potential
conflict of interests. Circumstances that may be perceived as conflict of
interest typically include e.g. a close personal or professional relationship
between the reviewer and any of the authors, or mutual involvement in a
contentious dispute on the topic of the manuscript. However, on a much broader scale, we all (as reviewers
and editors) have conflicts of interest, which relate to an ever more precious
and scarcer resource: time. When reviewing manuscripts, we extract time from
our busy schedules for a task that – by its anonymous nature – constitutes
primarily a quiet service to our community by which we pay back what we
ourselves receive when our own manuscripts are reviewed by expert reviewers
providing – hopefully – meaningful and constructive advice and guidance. Such
good citizenship typically yields little-to-no immediate merit for the
reviewers themselves. Some reviewers, however, tend to strive for some indirect
revenue, by suggesting to authors to reference specific papers which – of
course by pure coincidence - happen to be their own. In some instances, this
will be entirely justified, as the authors may have missed to take an important
piece of literature into consideration which just happens to be authored by the
reviewer. In other instances, however, such recommendations will be less
motivated by our surge for scientific accuracy but rather by our vanity. Such
hijacking of what is essentially a pro bono service for self-promotion
constitutes a significant and unacceptable conflict of interest. No-one should
be coerced to cite "paper xyz“, unless it serves the purpose to improve the
scientific valor and accuracy of a manuscript. Authors submitting manuscripts
to AJP-Lung should know that the editorial board and our reviewers work hard to
ensure constructive and unbiased reviews of all manuscripts in a fair and
timely manner that are based on scientific merit alone. In 2014, the average
time to first decision for submitted manuscripts was 22.3 days.
Wolfgang Kuebler, Associate Editor
