Judging the judges: the role of journal editors
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In societies with a free and open judiciary system, individuals are permitted to challenge a judge's verdict, ability to remain impartial, and conduct. In the first situation, a higher court of appeal typically handles the matter.1 In the second, the judge is disqualified from overseeing a case if an objective observer raises reasonable questions about the judge's impartiality.2 In the third situation, a governing body, such as a judicial council, hears the complaint. To minimize the likelihood of such events, judges are appointed based on their legal knowledge, prior experience, and a historical demonstration of impartiality and fairness. Although most medical journals and their editors conduct themselves fairly, there are some differences between their practice and that of a judiciary body. In this article, I pose four questions to medical journal editors concerning their impartiality and training as researchers and editors, and the options available to those who disagree with a decision rendered by an editor or editorial board. Are you free? Editorial freedom versus economic and political pressure . Editors must be free to make decisions about journal policy and the publication of manuscripts without coercion.3 This is the basis of editorial objectivity, and the foundation on which the advancement of both human well‐being and science rest.4 Those who choose (or are chosen) to become medical journal editors tend to do so because they believe in and wish to uphold this fundamental principle.3 However, it has become apparent that editorial decisions are not always independent or unfettered. In fact, external and internal pressures partially influence an editor's selection and acceptance of manuscripts. Editors have led themselves to believe that they publish works that address the needs of a principal ‘target’ audience. However, in a study comparing the relative importance of topics selected for publication …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it