A learning experience - second repost - Scientific Copy Editor—final Reader Spandidos Publications Employee Review

**Edit. Now I’m reposting this review, I’ve been away from the company for about a year and a half, and I still feel strongly about all these points. Edits made to paragraphs six, 11, and 15** It has been almost a year since I left this company. A lot of the frustration does subside very quickly after leaving, which I think is the reason for there being no other reviews of this company here despite that vast numbers of dissatisfied ex-employees they have. The fact I've been away from the company for a while should highlight how I am not writing this on a whim, and that I have had plenty of time to cool off since leaving; I just want other people to be able to know the reality of the situation, whatever they make of it. The whole basis of this company is the 'fast and dirty' approach. They publish vast quantities of very poor science that won't get accepted elsewhere. There is little to no filtering of abysmal submissions; they accept everything. Some of the papers my colleagues and I came across during our time there could hardly be considered science, many had questionable ethical considerations, most had little to no valid statistical analysis, and none were peer reviewed. Peer review was introduced during my time there, but it was a far cry from any standard peer review procedure that is acceptable in reputable scientific publications--ie, the journal would ask the author for suggestions of peer reviewers and use those. I have been told the statistic about the shocking proportion of published data that is estimated to be fraudulent; and I've no doubt that Spandidos and other publishers like them are the drivers behind this. We often found clearly tampered-with western blots and other data that were suspicious in our Spandidos papers that were accepted and published. None of us were qualified to address these sorts of issues, which should be picked up during peer review or at some other pre-acceptance stage. As an idea of how rushed the work is, employees are expected to 'edit' 10-15 papers per week; you can compare this to where I now work in a similar role, where we have to edit one paper per week. When I started at Spandidos, there were first readers, who were newer to the company, and final readers. The idea was that the first edit was done by first readers and then it was passed onto final readers who checked everything and made changes that they thought appropriate. However, over time, the two-reads system was dropped and after one person edited a paper nobody else checked or looked at it again. This meant there was no way of checking that people were doing a good job, and many mistakes went unflagged. Regardless, it sounds ridiculous to me now that the papers would only be read by two people with no particular scientific expertise (usually) throughout the entire process, and where I work now the papers undergo many iterations of reads by different people, some of whom edit for style and grammar, others of whom have expertise in the subject and can critically check the paper. This is all after peer review and many editors reading and revising the paper before acceptance. I mentioned above that I made a lot of friends when I was at Spandidos, this is true and it used to be the case that everyone was very kind and we all got along. However, over time, tensions arose between staff as people who little deserved promotions and payrises got them, and very new people would be given more responsibilities than they should have on the basis of the fact that they were happy to do a bad job at editing the papers to reach the targets, and sometimes on the basis of far far more arbitrary reasons... Over time, standards of editing slipped further and further until it appeared that a simple glance over the words was sufficient to say it had been edited. This was on the whole not the choice of the editors, but we were forced to work like that and told to put quantity over quality by management. Of course, maybe this would be more acceptable if the papers were readable to start with, but I often spent many hours trying to decipher meaning from a text that had clearly been poorly translated into English. To move on from the poor quality papers, I will begin on the management. When I worked at Spandidos, there was one 'manager' (the owner and sole shareholder of Spandidos Publications UK Ltd). He had his office in which he stayed safely inside all day with the door closed so he didn't have to speak to any of us employees at all. Toward the end of my time there, he was actually in the office less and less. In fact, he wasn't even in the country. For the last six months of my time working there, he was away working in Greece for about four or maybe even five of them, going away for a long time then turning up for a week or so then leaving again. This didn't really affect our day-to-day lives at the office, but it did show us just how little he 'managed' anyone. Other than that, there was no management for our London office. Just as I left the company, 'journal managers' were implemented, which just meant that someone specific was in charge of monitoring the number of papers edited by the other staff, and it was their responsibility to tell them to speed up. The new journal managers were just other employees like me who were already there, there was no real job description or guidance as to what their role really was, and these managers often did not elicit respect from those they managed. This was not always the fault of the manager, but it was the way in which they were arbitrarily appointed into these roles by one person with questionable aims rather than applying for them and earning them, as well as the fact that roles were ill defined. Spandidos offers little to no career progression. If you're willing to jump through the right hoops you'll get some payrises, and possibly now a new title, but these titles are all essentially meaningless, unfairly distributed, and do not inspire job satisfaction. The turnover of editorial staff at Spandidos is shocking, for the reasons I've already described and so many more. Since I left less than a year ago, there has been a net increase in staff but I know only a handful of those who now work there because so many have left. This sort of turnover (which was always the same during the time I worked there as well) means that the majority of the staff pool at any one time is woefully inexperienced, but also that people feel they are well established after a short time, leading to confusion of status and further tensions. I was allowed no compassionate leave after a death in my family, and I had to work the extra hours at a later date. This was bad because I was told I could go home at the time of asking without being informed that I would have to make up this time later. Some mysteries were never solved during my time at Spandidos, such as why we were never allowed to work from home. Our boss (the same person who is the 'manager' mentioned above in paragraph six, and is the owner of Spandidos Publication UK Ltd) was extremely against the idea for no apparent reason. He would never give any sort of reason, just a no. This unjustified answering was a common trend, and a lot of actions were taken in this company with no particular justification except 'that's how we're doing it'. Spandidos house style was meaningless. None of it had any reasoning behind it, and rather than simplifying the papers and making them accessible, as any good journal should, it twisted sentences into these unpoetic masses of long sentences and outdated words. The pension contribution from the company was the legal minimum, as well as the maternity allowance. While I worked at Spandidos there were a few incidents related to the mental health of one employee, which caused distressing situations for many other employees, some of which were distressed enough to consider or actually leave the company because they were scared or feared for their safety. This went on for a long time with several 'episodes' occurring, although it did get less bad toward the end of my employment. As far as I know, no actual action beyond speaking with the employee and saying their actions were unacceptable, was taken. Sometimes at Spandidos, instructions came from other staff members in Greece who we had never spoken to before. In these cases, the information was often contradictory to other information we had been given, and it was often nonsensical. The person who directly gave the information to us was only ever a messenger, it was clear it was not their message, although it was never explicitly stated exactly where the information came from. Beside this, when we asked for help or feedback we were often given vague and useless answers. All conversations with management by me and other staff at my level aiming to achieve something constructive ended with the same feeling of unfulfillment. Our manager (the same c-level individual as mentioned above in paragraph six) only spoke to those of us who actually went to his office and forced conversation upon him. The conversations usually ended with him saying something vague that meant that implied he would think about it and work on the problem in some way. Needless to say, I rarely heard back from him on the subject after leaving his office, and no problems got solved. Sometimes if I chose to email him instead of speaking in person, he would not reply; or reply to a multi-page email with a single line. Despite the above issues, I don't regret working at Spandidos, although perhaps I stayed there too long. It took a long time for me to be whittled down to the point where I gave up all hope of reaching a light of reason at the end of the tunnel of illogical decisions. If nothing else, it gave me many friends and made me employable at other more reputable science journals, which don't usually take people straight out of their degrees without previous publishing experience, and it gave me the confidence and independence (because we were given no guidance by 'managers') to do my work well and to sharpen my own work management skills. I just want people who are applying to know what they are in for, and if you are happy to work for a journal that has no scientific standards and rips off Chinese scientists and treats their staff unfairly, then I think you will do very well at this company, and get paid a decent wage to do so.