Editorial: What are you looking at?

Once upon a time, the world of scientific publishing was relatively simple. An author submitted a paper to a journal, if the paper was within the scope of the journal, it would be peer reviewed and, depending on those reviews, would be either accepted or rejected for publication. If it was accepted, the paper was then published in print. Anyone who wanted to read the paper had to subscribe to the journal or have access to a library that did. If the reader disagreed with the method, analysis or conclusions of the paper, he or she could write a letter to the editor of the journal pointing out the problems with the paper or, preferably, the reader could conduct his or her own research on the subject and publish their findings. This cycle of experimentation and testing of the resulting findings is what makes science self-correcting. Today, things are rather more complex, because the ease of electronic communication and the globalization of research have shattered what was a rigid but well-understood system. This has led to a number of changes in scientific publishing. First, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of journals; some being electronic only, some being electronic and print, some being of long standing and associated with professional organizations, like Lighting Research and Technology, others being new and using new business models. As a result, a determined author can now always find somewhere to have a paper published, even if it means paying for it to be done. Second, there has been a push by many funding bodies to demand easier access to any research they have funded, particularly by public bodies supported by the taxpayer. This explains the existence of the open access options for authors. It also explains the existence of various versions of the same paper being available in electronic form, all connected by the same digital object identifier but appearing at different stages of the approval process, some versions being published prior to peer review. Third, there have arisen a number of online facilities that allow authors and readers to communicate directly without going through a journal. This has the advantage of allowing easy access to conference papers and technical reports that have not been published in journals. This complexity certainly increases accessibility to a wide range of work but it also has the potential to undermine the peer-review process, and it is the peer-review process that provides the assurance of quality in a published paper. Of course, no process is perfect and as any author and editor knows, there are good reviews that are helpful to the author and bad reviews that are not. Despite this, whether or not a paper has been peerreviewed should be treated as a minimum requirement by any reader. When looking at a paper, it is now important to know exactly how it has come to be published when assessing what you are looking at.