It Takes a Village

This issue marks another turning point for JASN. It is the final issue for the current Editors, me as Editor-in-Chief, and our team of two Deputy Editors, the Policy, Letters and Review Editors, and the 15 Associate Editors. Serving as Editor-in Chief for this superb team has been a pleasure. I am the sixth, the first woman, to serve as the lead editor of the journal. My predecessors are an illustrious group—and it has been a great honor.

Consistent with the longstanding traditions of the journal, at completion of our 6-year term, we now, with pride and delight, hand over editorial responsibility to the incoming team ably led by Rajnish Mehrotra, the new Editor-in-Chief of JASN.

For this final issue, we have invited members of our team to provide short editorials on some of the noteworthy challenges encountered during our term. The lead authors of three of these short opinion pieces joined us through our Editorial Fellowship program.

• Gina Gyarmati and Alicia McDonough discuss our Editorial Fellowship program. They summarize what we are learning in our work to create a truly effective peer review process that synergizes the wisdom of the senior members with the insights and energy of fellows early in their careers.¹

• The coronavirus disease pandemic erupted in the middle of our term, creating a public crisis and a tough set of demands on the peer review process. Current Editorial Fellow, Andreas Kronbichler, provides some highlights and lessons learned from that hectic period.²

• Early in our tenure, we recognized that the range of methods applied to investigating the kidney—particularly ‘omics—was undergoing revolutionary changes. These new tools create novel challenges for the peer review process. ‘Omics analyses produce large datasets that pose unique analytic challenges and results that may be opaque. The importance of data sharing has grown, but so has the difficulty. Markus Rinschen has brought needed expertise on ‘omics data to our team. He provides a thoughtful discussion of the promise of ‘omics methods—and the challenges these important developments pose for peer review.³

• An important issue for the JASN editorial team has been how best to contribute to the ongoing work to address the racial and ethnic disparities in the burden of kidney disease. Early in our term, the issue of inclusion of race in the estimation of glomerular filtration rate was of intense concern. Our society partnered with the National Kidney Foundation to address this issue, and after some internal debate, we published society policy statements simultaneously with the American Journal of Kidney Disease.⁴ That was only a start. Don Wesson, who joined us as Deputy Editor for Clinical Research in 2021, wisely recognized that changing the formula for eGFR was only a small step. He has led our efforts to use our pages to bring evidence and perspective relevant to these unsolved problems. He provides wise thoughts on the status of this work.⁵

We hope these thought-pieces will provide some insights into how we have approached the tough job of orchestrating thorough and knowledgeable peer review. The process is currently subject to substantial criticism, with concerns about expertise, bias, and transparency.⁶ We have worked hard to create processes that meet the challenges.

The strength and foundation of our peer review process is the extraordinary volunteer work of hundreds of external reviewers. Their names and our formal yearly thank you will be included on the JASN website. The time, effort, and judgment reflected in these reviews is the cornerstone of our work. For most manuscripts, we complement the knowledge of scientific reviewers with reviewers from our illustrious Biostatistics Board. The methods for quantitative analysis of data, especially big data, are increasingly complex, and we have worked to bring into the review process wise, focused, and appropriately specialized expertise.

Another group I want to acknowledge is our Guest Editors. Our Deputy and Associate Editors are active scientists who publish important studies. The team spends almost 2 hours per week together, discussing and arguing about science, and we develop close and collegial relationships. Members of our editorial team want to be able to submit to JASN, and we all want to be comfortable, so we have a process that judges their work free of bias. Some journals deal with this problem by simple recusals—the author is asked to leave the room. In agreement with my predecessors, I have always considered this to be an unsatisfactory solution. Instead, we use a Guest Editor process that appoints an individual with appropriate expertise and editorial experience. He or she selects the reviewers, summarizes the concerns for the authors, oversees any revisions, and provides the final decision. These recommendations—whether to accept or reject—are always honored. The Guest Editors have provided many hours of hard work, and we are deeply grateful.

Selectivity and Uncertainty

Finally, some words to our submitting authors. We decided from the beginning that we would serve nephrology best by being quite selective. We receive about 100 submissions per month and publish only about ten. Judging importance, validity, and novelty are the core elements of peer review. We ask the following questions of every submission: Do we consider the question important and of interest to our readers? Is the work, as best we can judge, valid and does it employ the best available methods to answer the question? And does the work have sufficient new knowledge to justify publication? The answers to all three questions are always somewhat subjective. Our final decisions reflect a consensus of our team.

One brief side comment: There is much discussion currently about the application of artificial intelligence to peer review.⁷ The JASN editorial team has been paying attention. The current team is not using AI but has relied solely on old fashioned human intelligence, for better or worse. This is the current norm for most major journals, but it may change. I suspect that human judgment will remain central to judging the importance of the question and a key element of the imperfect process of assessing validity, but assessment of novelty may come to rely—at least in part—on these new tools.

Editorial responsibilities—judging the hard work of others—is a job that develops, or at least should develop, some humility. The history of science is replete with peer review mistakes. It is not uncommon for the recipient of an award for a scientific breakthrough to start their award speech by recounting the times when reviewers for prestigious journals failed to recognize the value of their work.

So, to our submitting authors, it was an honor to review your work. For those many rejects, I hope we mostly got it right, but I acknowledge, with apologies, that sometimes we may have gotten it wrong. And to the authors of our accepted papers, we sincerely hope that the tough review process helped you make great papers even better.

Disclosures

J.P. Briggs reports consultancy: PCORI; advisory or leadership role: peer review editor for PCORI beginning September 1, 2022 (paid an honorarium), and the Editor-in-Chief of JASN.

Funding

None.

Author Contributions

Writing – original draft: Josephine P. Briggs.