Multicenter research studies and collaborative projects are increasingly being conducted and recognized for their value in advancing research. They offer unique opportunities for researchers to share complementary expertise, models, research, and analytical tools; provide opportunities to increase subject enrollment and diversity, whether preclinical or clinical, meeting criteria for fulfilling sample sizes for powered studies. Multicenter collaborations can also be useful in assessing whether research findings can be replicated or extended to different models of neurological diseases, which may help in derisking the process of selection of candidate therapeutics, validate targets and biomarkers, and improve the translation of research findings in useful clinical tools and therapeutics.
Reporting multicenter research projects often leads to multiauthored publications. The privilege of sharing the successes of high‐impact research can be however dampened for young and mid‐career investigators who strive to publish first‐ and senior‐authored papers so as to provide evidence for independence in research and document their individual research efforts and achievements for academic career advancement or to obtain research funding. Furthermore, the space limits posed by the journals, which are striving to present meritorious research in a concise format, may create challenges in incorporating intricate experimental details in a single paper that could be critical in understanding differences across laboratories or provide sufficient information to assess rigor or allow study replication.
Epilepsia Open is committed in promoting translational epilepsy research. Recognizing the value and also challenges in reporting multicenter collaborative studies, in a transparent and rigorous manner that will also permit individual laboratories and research sites to clearly present their contributions and obtain recognition for their work, Epilepsia Open initiates a new manuscript format for “multicenter original research articles.” These will be reports on research studies with a similar overall objective that are conducted at different but collaborating research laboratories or sites and may include (a) different methodologies but complementary research findings or (b) projects with a similar study design and goals conducted at different sites, which however merit separate publications to improve transparency, data comparisons and interpretation, and inform on replicability of the research. Rather than having a single multiauthored and all‐encompassing manuscript, we will accept for consideration parallel submissions of manuscripts on the specific collaborative project, comprised of (a) site‐specific short original research articles, and (b) an overview manuscript providing the overall scope and study design, present across site comparisons, and provide a critical discussion and synthesis of data and conclusions. Details on the format for each of these articles are included in our updated “Information for Authors” (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb‐assets/assets/24709239/Epilepsia%20Open%20Author%20Instructions%202021‐1611937954.pdf).
To best coordinate this type of submissions and their peer review, authors interested in submitting their research should contact our editorial manager for editorial approval and guidance on the process, prior to submission. If accepted, each manuscript will be cited separately in PubMed. Each site‐specific article will be subject to the reduced article processing charges (APC) of short original articles. The overview manuscript will be published free of APCs. Manuscripts would preferably be submitted simultaneously to facilitate the peer review, and once accepted, they will be published in the same issue of Epilepsia Open. The editors of Epilepsia Open are available for any questions or feedback on the process by contacting epilepsia-open@epilepsia.com.