Editor's Note

Abstract

Ramathibodi Medical Journal (RMJ) have just been indexed in ASEAN Citation Index (ACI)¹ in November 2018. This is such a rewarding achievement for us, Editorial team and staffs. With this achievement, we are inspired for improvement of our journal to better serve our reader, authors, and academic community.

Recently, Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in conjunction with Springer™ have published the guideline for dealing with Systematic Manipulation of the Publication Process.² What is this? Our readers may wonder. This come from infamous case of “Tumor Biology” Journal from Springer. On April 20, 2017. The journal retracted 107 articles³ which is the highest simultaneous number of retractions in history. The reason was “fake peer reviews” which is a type of systematic manipulation. Similar to many journals, Tumor Biology encourages authors to suggest potential reviewers; in this case, the authors used this loop hold to either made up fake reviewers, or false email addresses of real scientists. Manuscripts sent to these fake reviewers or false emails invariably received positive reviews that helped get the paper accepted.

In this COPE guideline, they not only address “fake peer reviews” but also other type of systematic manipulations. This guideline will help editors in various fields to review possible loop hold in their review process and revise the process. This also includes Ramathibodi Medical Journal (RMJ). We are aware of this kind of problem and currently revising our review process to make sure that we will always on the standard practice.