ID publishing in the post-COVID era: Retiring CID & JID editors-in-chief look ahead

John Heys

5/31/2022 Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email

In the final part of their conversation with Science Speaks, the retiring editors-in-chief of Clinical Infectious Diseases and The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Robert T. Schooley, MD, FIDSA, and Martin S. Hirsch, MD, FIDSA, whose tenures end this year, highlighted broader trends in ID publishing accelerated or slowed by COVID-19 and how scientific publications in the field can help the world prepare for the next pandemic. They also discussed topics they expect will get more attention in ID publications in the years ahead.

What larger trends did you see emerging in scientific publishing before COVID-19 that were accelerated by the pandemic? Or that the pandemic reversed?

Dr. Martin S. Hirsch: The pandemic certainly has fostered an accelerated internationalization. During the first year of the pandemic, we received more manuscripts from China than we got from the United States. We received over 1,000 COVID-related manuscripts from China alone. In the past, we had always gotten the majority of the manuscripts that we publish from the United States.

Dr. Robert T. Schooley: One thing that was being very heavily discussed, and some of the discussions have slowed down a bit, was the move to open-access publishing. We are trying to determine how to respond to that. I am someone who wants everything that is valid information out there to be available to everybody who needs to read it. If we’re serving the world, which is what I think our journals should be, that’s everyone in the world. We have to find economic models that enable that. Whether we like it or not, it costs money to run a journal and to have things curated, published and all of that. We have to find ways to recover these costs that also facilitate open access to information.

What topics or subject areas do you envision will get more attention in ID publications in the post-COVID era?

Dr. Schooley: One thing COVID did, which I hope continues, is it emphasized the multidisciplinary nature of science. We tend to get locked up in our own areas of science and that can perpetuate dogma. One of the biggest pieces of dogma that I think this pandemic broke was the issue of how respiratory viruses and other pathogens are spread. The dogma had been droplets and fomites, and there was a tremendous amount of resistance in the traditional infection control, public health community about whether or not COVID and other pathogens were spread by aerosols.

It was the aerosol community that came in with really very elegant models and experimental data that showed the impact of aerosols and how they carry infectious pathogens. This made us change the paradigms about masking and thinking about transmission of pathogens, both in hospitals and in the public. This kind of multidisciplinary approach is something that I think is both healthy in terms of bringing new approaches to looking at problems to the forefront and essential as we move forward trying to understand better and improve the world around us.

Dr. Hirsch: The pandemic has certainly pointed out areas that I know will be the subject of a lot of work in the post-pandemic era, such as preparedness for subsequent epidemics and pandemics. A supplement for JID is being prepared now from the NIH about this, and there are other areas like the ethical conduct of research that will receive increased attention, such as should there be volunteer infection studies with pathogens like SARS-CoV-2? And what about issues like equity and access to the fruits of research? We know that the pandemic has affected different populations disproportionately. Low-income countries and low-income areas of the United States have been hit hardest, and should be guaranteed access to new vaccines and anti-infective agents.

There are novel methodologies regarding how to do clinical trials. The randomized control trial has always been the gold standard. There have been innovative approaches tried in the pandemic, and there will be further studies and discussion about how we go forward with clinical trial design. There are other new and emerging viruses, e.g., monkeypox, out there that we will see in the years ahead and still other undiscovered pathogens as well. There’s also the continuing problems about antimicrobial resistance. These are all topics that I know will get a lot of attention in future years.

Looking ahead, how can scientific publications in the field help the world better prepare for the next pandemic or ID-related emergency?

Dr. Hirsch: As we all know, once the pandemic ends, everybody’s going to tend to move on to other things. Although we talk a lot now about preparedness for the next pandemic, once the current one is gone, funding will probably go down as well. The preparedness efforts may well also fall into disrepair. I think what the journals can do, and what the IDSA can do on a larger scale, is to continue to put pressure on governments at local, national and international levels to enhance preparedness and to address other important efforts, such as limiting antimicrobial resistance.

Dr. Schooley: The other thing that we should also recognize both as people who are involved with journals but also as citizens of the world is that we are, in fact, truly citizens of the world. Infectious diseases are, as we saw with SARS-CoV-2 all too well, global in their impact. We need to be global in our approach to looking for and accepting information that has global import.

You may remember, when SARS-CoV-2 was first circulating, there were some who said, “Well, it’s a big problem for China.” How often have we made that mistake? We have to continue to reach out to our international colleagues and make them feel as if they also are constituents of our journals ― that they can publish in and read our journals in ways that will help them shape policy in their countries and have an impact on things that happen here as well. We have to both solicit information from and make sure information is available to the world beyond the borders of the United States.

In the first part of their conversation with Science Speaks, Drs. Schooley and Hirsch discussed COVID-19's impact on their respective publications: how the journals adapted, practices that emerged out of necessity and concerns about misinformation.