Introduction
Since its launch 7 years ago, in 2013, New Microbes and New Infections (NMNI) has published a total of 773 of the 1300 submitted papers retrievable in PubMed Central (Fig. 1). NMNI aims to provide access to an international forum for authors reporting facts in infectious and primarily tropical diseases and clinical microbiology that are new in one place and country. Accordingly, NMNI acknowledges contributions from emerging research teams, offering authors the opportunity to publish in their own language, in addition to English; in 2020, two manuscripts have been submitted in non-English languages (French). In the meantime, NMNI has been included in PubMed Central, obviously increasing its visibility and the interest of authors and readers.
Fig. 1.
Submitted manuscripts and editorial outcomes 2016–2020 (Elsevier data).
Editorial structure
NMNI is an online-only journal, meaning that authors can submit their contributions any time and that accepted papers are released by chronological order of acceptance. NMNI reviews papers in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic and Berber thanks to a panel of international editors who are greatly thanked for their kind contributions to the editorial process. Accepted papers are translated into English and published both in the original language version and in English, after the corresponding author has approved the English translation. Papers can be submitted in any of 12 categories with the understanding that papers must report reliable facts in infectious and tropical diseases and clinical microbiology that are new in one geographic region.
Submissions
In 2020, NMNI received 515 submissions, including 202 (39.2%) papers with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as the subject. Of the 515 submitted papers, 190 (36.9%) have been accepted for publication, 101 (19.6%) are still under review, 21 (4%) have been withdrawn and 203 (39.4%) have been rejected (Fig. 1, Fig. 2). Sixty-four (20.4%) of the 313 non-COVID-19 papers are still under review and 129/313 (41.2%) non-COVID-19 papers have been rejected; for COVID-19-related papers, the respective figures are 37/202 (18.3%) and 69/202 (34.1%) including 64 papers having COVID-19 as the subject; versus 117/515 rejected papers (22.7%) including 52/202 (COVID-19-related papers). In addition, manuscripts came from a very much wider variety of countries showing that the journal is sought as a publication venue by an increasing number of authors. Fig. 3 represents the geographical origin of submitted papers in 2020, indicating that NMNI is on the way to achieving its main goal, which is the rapid promotion of discoveries in infectious and tropical diseases and clinical microbiology made by emerging research teams from all over the world.
Fig. 2.
Number of submissions from 2016 to 2020 by article type.
Fig. 3.
Geographical origin of submitted papers in 2020.
In 2020, Iran was the most contributive country with 144 manuscripts, followed by India (54 manuscripts), Pakistan (47 manuscripts) and France (46 manuscripts). The journal continues to make efforts to help authors from countries with cultural and financial difficulties to improve the quality of their scientific production and to share their knowledge with the global scientific community. The Editorial speed from submission to final editorial outcome has decreased from 11.7 weeks in 2018 and 13.4 weeks in 2019 to 10.1 weeks in 2020 (excluding one manuscript which took more than 14 months to be edited) (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4.
Average editorial and publication speed for published articles in NMNI (Elsevier data).
NMNI reports
The current citation rate Cite Score is 2.3, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is 0.602. Our next objective will be to apply to Thomson Reuters for indexing in the Web of Science.
Readership
Online readership of NMNI continues to grow. The most cited paper has 37 citations [1], and was the most uploaded paper in 2020 (69 734 times) and a second paper [2] was the paper that was most shared and commented upon on social networks (87 403 times).
Perspectives
The anticipated change in the Editor-in-Chief in 2021 will give NMNI the opportunity to change the editorial line and take a new step, after 7 years of infancy.
Undoubtedly, 2020 demonstrated the importance of transparency, both in the publishing and editorial world and in other fields of social life, and this keyword must govern the path of NMNI in 2021 and beyond. An updated card indicating the interests of the publisher (Elsevier), the Editor (Editorial board) and the author (most often, authors) in publishing or rejecting one manuscript, will be enforced: as well as the list of rejected manuscripts with the reason for rejection. Furthermore, automatic control of this tripartite declarative plan in the future may further increase the transparency of our editorial activities.
Breaking the barriers that colleagues may encounter when submitting a manuscript is the goal of NMNI. The language barrier is real, and we must be proud to work on editing and publishing manuscripts in non-English languages. This possibility, however, is too often ignored by potential authors. This must be corrected by more forceful advertising by the publisher Elsevier. We propose the immediate addition of such advertising to the journal's front screen, and further ways must be found of making this known. Likewise, the money barrier will have to be further broken down by the addition of publicity regarding official waivers offered by the consortium of publishers, to which the publisher Elsevier adheres. Lowering official prices, which are currently incomprehensibly high compared with prices practiced by high-impact journals, must be explored.
These are some of the pathways to be followed during 2021, taking into consideration lessons from the COVID-19 crisis, which clearly affected the publishing–editing world and the publisher Elsevier in particular.
conflict of interest
There is no conflict of interest.
Author contributions
GG, PEF and MDR contributed to study design and implementation, data analysis and manuscript writing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
References
- 1.Million M., Gautret P., Colson P., Roussel Y., Dubourg G., Chabriere E. Clinical efficacy of chloroquine derivatives in COVID-19 infection: comparative meta-analysis between the big data and the real world. New Microb New Infect. 2020;38:100709. doi: 10.1016/j.nmni.2020.100709. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
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