NOF Newsletter

Dear members of NOF

Happy New year to everyone.

In March 2020 the world changed radically – also for those who do oral research. Many have been unable to carry out projects as planned, been compelled to be creative with regard to teaching methods and have been unable to attend conferences and exchange research findings with colleagues.

Hopefully, things will soon change. Please note that NOF and CED/ IADR, will arrange a conference in Brussels, Belgium September 16 -18, 2021. Save that date! For those of you who have not been in Brussels before, we promise you that a visit to this city is a great experience. The congress venue (SQUARE) is situated in the historical and cultural heart of Brussels close to the main tourist attractions (Manneken Pis, Royal Palace, Royal Museum etc).

This will be a hybrid congress, i.e., the set-up will enable participants unable to attend the congress physically, to follow the proceedings.

Regardless, whether you plan on attending the congress virtually or physically, we strongly encourage you to submit your abstract – see the website for further information, www.ced-iadr2021.com

For young researchers – please note:

NOF TRAVEL STIPENDS

The Scandinavian division of IADR (NOF) offers travel stipends to young researchers attending the 2021 Oral Health Research Congress, Brussels, Belgium. Applicants for the NOF travel stipends must submit an abstract for presentation at this meeting. The selection of stipend recipients will be based on a competition between the best abstracts. A scientific committee will be responsible for the selection.

Please submit your abstract for the Brussels meeting via the congress online abstract submission system and choose “NOF Travel Stipend”.

The applicant must be a member of the IADR/NOF. Winners will be informed during summer 2021.

THE NOF HATTON AWARD COMPETITION

Young researchers are invited to enter the Nordic HATTON AWARD COMPETITION. The objective of the award is to encourage and reward outstanding young dental scientists. There will be two Nordic winners in this competition. Each winner will receive a stipend of € 1000 will have the opportunity to compete in the world-wide IADR/Unilever Hatton Competition at the  100^th General Session & Exhibition of the IADR & 5^th Meeting of the IADR Asia Pacific Region, Chengdu, China, on June 22 – 25, 2022. Winners’ expenses in connection with attendance to the 2022 IADR conference (airfare, hotel and meeting registration) will be covered by NOF.

Applicants for the Nordic HATTON AWARD COMPETITION must submit an abstract for presentation at the meeting in Brussels, Belgium (choose “NOF Hatton Award”). Only members of the IADR /NOF may participate in this competition.

If the competition cannot be held physically due to continued COVID-19 issues it will be held online.

More information: www.iadr-nof.com

The applicant must be a member of the IADR/NOF. Winners will be informed during summer 2021.

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Warning against preprints of manuscripts

The board has received an inquiry from a member who found himself in an unpleasant situation. We have taken a closer look at this case – and find that it may be appropriate to inform all our members about the following:

In some dental scientific journals, authors are invited to preprint their manuscript free of charge. The invitation to do so may occur as part of the submitting process, but authors can also submit preprints of their manuscripts on their own accord to preprint servers. Examples of these are www.medrxiv.org, www.preprints.org, www.researchsquare  etc. Preprints are not evaluated and validated by reviewers, nor are they accepted for publication in any scientific journal, but are given a DOI-number (Digital Object Identifier).

Preprints may be issued with a note like “This is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports that have not undergone peer review. They should not be considered conclusive, used to inform clinical practice, or referenced by the media as validated information” (example from Research Square).

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy,  publishers like Wiley, Springer, Elsevier and others state that preprints are not regarded as publications and consequently do not disqualify such manuscripts when submitted. However, Quintessence publishing Company is conspicuously absent from this list. It is also worth mentioning that prestigious medical journals, like New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet accept preprints.

One might believe that all journals published by the above publishers adhere to the same guidelines in regard to preprints. Thus, Elsevier specifically declares that it “does not view the following uses of a work as prior publication: publication in the form of an abstract; publication as an academic thesis; publication as an electronic preprint”.

Springer, on the other hand, appears less clear: Whereas the BMC journals state that “posting a manuscript on a preprint server or an author’s personal or institutional website does not constitute previous publication”, the Journal of Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery express that “submission of a manuscript implies: “that the work described has not been published before; that it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else.” The latter formulation is obviously open for interpretation.

Likewise, Wiley states that it: “… believes that in communities where non-commercial preprint servers exist, journals should allow for the submission of manuscripts which have already been made available on such a server”. However, at least one of the dental journals produced by Wiley, our own European Journal of Oral Sciences, expressly state in their instructions to authors: “This journal will not consider for review articles previously available as preprints on servers such as ArXiv, bioRxiv, psyArXiv, SocArXiv, engrXiv, etc. In this context should be noted that EJOS is not owned by Wiley, which only produces the dental journal on EJOS’ instructions/conditions. The same is probably the case for other dental journals.

Due to such divergent editorial policies, unfortunate authors may find themselves in a situation that their work is summarily rejected by some dental journals because the preprint is regarded as a publication. An important aspect in this context is that preprints are given a DOI-number and therefore cannot be removed or erased – even if the manuscript is rejected after it has been evaluated by a dental journal. It is also important to know that preprints are searchable and therefore appear in checks for plagiarism.

To our knowledge there is no available overview of which dental journals will accept or reject a manuscript that has been pre-printed. In order to avoid the above predicament, authors are strongly warned against pre-printing their manuscripts, because this would seriously restrict the choice of journals that will subsequently accept and evaluate a submission.

January 1, 2021

G. Strand,

President