Bioelectronics @ TU Delft

From Flits, the newsletter of the faculty of EEMCS of Delft University of Technology:

"Wouter Serdijn has successfully won the chairmanship and organisation of BioCAS 2013 for TU Delft. The annual IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS) Conference is the premier forum for bringing together scientists, engineers, medical researchers, and health care practitioners to drive these advances and share in cross-cutting research at the interface between circuits, systems, biology, and medicine."

The complete organizing team comprises international established and future leaders in the field, a.o. Firat Yazicioglu, Gianluca Setti, Tor Sverre Lande, Sylvie Renaud, Andreas Demosthenous, Ralph Etienne Cummings, Pau-Choo (Julia) Chung, Marion de Vlieger, Marijn van Dongen, Mark Stoopman and Senad Hiseni.

"In today’s global village, access to the latest and
greatest advancements in science and engineering is only affordable to
one percent of the world population. Imagine what discoveries and
inventions could be made if instead everybody would have access to this
information. Open CourseWare is one of the ways to make the right
progress in this direction."

Wouter Serdijn, TU Delft Open CourseWare ambassador, since today

Link: http://ocw.tudelft.nl/

Today I learnt that the junior author of the manuscript submitted to my journal, of which I reported in the blog below, had sent in the cover letter on the senior co-author’s behalf, without the senior co-author knowing it. If true — the whole situation becomes quite confusing and blurred, I feel — then the senior author is not to blame for the whole situation but his junior co-author.

Soon thereafter, I indeed received an apology letter from the junior author, basically begging for forgiveness and asking to withdraw the manuscript submitted on her behalf. In my imagination I am picturing the senior co-author, who must be the supervisor of this young, inexperienced, junior co-author, with a whip in his hand and an angry expression under his eyebrows and the young author bursting out in tears and trying to see the screen clearly while typing that email message to me. Not an easy thing to decide on (to withdraw or not).

I am still mulling it over.

Wouter

Today I wrote the following email letter to an author who just submitted a manuscript and an accompanying cover letter to "my" journal: 

Dear [Author’s Name],

I noticed in your cover letter the three names you suggested as prospective reviewers for your manuscript submitted to [My Journal]. A quick investigation reveals that these three people have all served as co-authors on prior publications co-authored by you and thus have a conflict of interest if they accept the review of your manuscript submitted to [My Journal].

I believe suggesting reviewers that have a conflict of interest cannot be considered good scholarly behavior and is even unethical. I have been lining towards rejecting your manuscript immediately, however this would harm the career of your current co-author, [Name Co-Author], which is not my intention.

From your cover letter I can also read that you are currently an associate editor for [His Journal]. I must admit that this worries me, as members of the editorial boards of highly reputed journals that use peer review should be members in good standing and thus refrain from creating and/or benefitting from conflicts of interest. I am pretty sure the Editor-in-Chief of [His Journal], [Name EiC], will agree with me.

In the interest of your co-author I will proceed with the review process of your manuscript. However, I hope you can assure me that this will never happen again.

I expect an acknowledgement of receipt of this message and, if possible, an explanation and/or reassurance.

Sincerely,

Wouter A. Serdijn, PhD, F-IEEE
Editor-in-Chief
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I: Regular Papers"