Journal and News Scan

The authors analyzed long-term recurrent aortic regurgitation (AR) in 249 patients with aortic insufficiency and reimplantation procedure. Of the cusp repair techniques evaluated in the analysis, only free margin reinforcement and patch repair influenced valve durability, the former positively and the latter negatively. Proportional hazard analysis also identified preoperative cusp prolapse as a significant risk factor for recurrent AR.

Please make sure that you are aware of this recall for testing of System CS100, CS100i and CS300 Intra-aortic Balloon Pumps for electrical testing. 

Overall Action for User
Patients receiving IABP therapy are in critical condition and sudden interruption of therapy could result in unsafe, hemodynamic instability. Maquet/Getinge indicates that the risk-benefit of using an affected CS100i, CS100 or CS300 IABP should be assessed by the medical team for each patient when no alternative IABP or alternative therapy is available. Please adhere to the following instructions when using affected devices as mentioned in the link provided 

The Amsterdam Investigator-initiated Absorb Strategy All-comers Trial report safety concerns identified in early results for the bioresorbable scaffold drug eluting stent. The scaffold group experienced significantly higher rates of device thrombosis than the stent group (3.5% vs 0.9%; p<0.001). It seems that no stent, no matter how sophisticated and costly it may be, will ever match arterial coronary bypass in long term outcomes.

This is a MUST read article on how predatory journals who only make money by charging authors are sidelining ethics and the usual standards of peer review in order to make a profit. 

With the author as their only source of income this neccessarily influences their editorial policies. But many of these journals have been heralded as a new era of open-access in contrast to the subscription publications, painting companies as Elsevier as 'greedy' companies whose subscription fees constantly rise over time. 

This article casts very interesting light on these open-access journals. It does state that not every open-access journal is neccessarily predatory, but the 'author-pays', online-only, model does inherently influence editorial policy in the opposite direction to that of a limited page, impact factor driven standard journal. 

Let us know your views - 

Have you ever paid significant amounts of money to get your paper published ? 

Or are these journals the future and it is right that open-access means all papers are free to readers around the world ?