Journals must adopt high methodological standards

A new editorial by Paul Glasziou “The Role of Open Access in Reducing Waste in Medical Research” published in PLoS Medicine discusses an important issue of minimising the avoidable waste in health research in the context of open access journals.

P. Glasziou writes: “Open access will not in itself fix the problems of poor research question selection, poor study design, selective non-publication, or poor or biased reporting, but these can be ameliorated considerably through appropriate editorial policies and peer review processes. Open-access medical journals must maintain particularly high standards for these processes in order to avoid merely increasing access to a biased selection of (often flawed) research.”

There is a lesson for all of us here – all parties involved in medical research (including researchers, reviewers, journals, funders, research and other professional organisations) must contribute to the improvement of all stages of the research process from its planning, design, conduct to usable publication (for specific recommendations see http://researchwaste.net/).