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Journalology #22: Delisted

Published about 1 year ago • 11 min read

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Hello fellow journalologists,

Wow, what a week it’s been. On Monday Clarivate announced that 50 journals had been delisted from Web of Science and the next day Retraction Watch revealed that 19 were from the Hindawi portfolio.

Hindawi has 268 journals in its portfolio, but the 19 journals that Clarivate delisted publish 50% of Hindawi’s content, according to Digital Science’s bibliometrics tool, Dimensions. Delisting those journals will almost certainly reduce the number of submissions the Hindawi portfolio receives; like it or not, academics care deeply about impact factors.

For those of you who are not familiar with the backstory, a quick recap may be helpful. In January, 2021 Wiley acquired Hindawi for an eye-watering $298 million. A few weeks ago, Wiley’s executive team hosted a call with investors and revealed that it had suspended the publication of special issues in Hindawi journals, which is likely to decrease Wiley's annual revenues by $30m. The share price dropped by 17%, wiping $400m off the company’s market capitalisation.

There’s a long tail of publishers affected by the Clarivate delisting, but Wiley / Hindawi has the most journals on the list. Only two MDPI journals are included, but one of them, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, was the second largest journal in 2022. It’s unlikely to hold that position in 2023 (this tweet thread is worth reading).

The implications of the Web of Science delisting, and Wiley’s recent dramatic fall in share price, will be far reaching. The Clarke & Esposito team has written a detailed analysis, which will be sent to subscribers of The Brief next week. I don’t want to steal that thunder, but suffice to say every publisher needs to weigh up the desire to grow article volumes in an increasingly competitive OA environment with the knowledge that publishing papers with integrity issues (and going public about those problems) could cause a house of cards to come crashing down.

One of the defining trends of the past decade has been the rise of the “mega journal”. A viewpoint published in JAMA this week provides a good overview of how journals that publish thousands of papers a year are changing scholarly communication. I was responsible for Scientific Reports and Nature Communications at various points in their history, so this is a subject that I’ve been following closely for a while.

This extract rings true:

More important, mega-journals may change medical and scientific publishing at large through indirect effects on other journals. Mega-journals create journal- and publisher-level competition. Broad-scope mega-journals such as PLoS One and Scientific Reports never seriously threatened traditional specialty journals: the latter continued to dominate their specialized niches in both volume and influence. Conversely, some discipline-focused (specialty) mega-journals already publish more articles than all the classic journals in the same field combined. Coupled with lucrative impact factors, their competition may be transformative or lethal for traditional, respectable journals.

Scholarly publishing often moves at a glacial pace. But change does happen and survival is not guaranteed, as the JAMA authors note:

The explosive growth of mega-journals may be accompanied by the fall of some previously prestigious journals. Journals are not permanent: of 27 general medical journals publishing in 1959, only 6 published continuously with the same name until 2009. The half-lives of scientific journals may be shortened in the current shifting environment. What matters is whether journals that publish the lion’s share of the literature endorse and facilitate the best research practices.

In last week's newsletter I asked whether eLife’s funders might be having second thoughts after the recent editorial mutiny. eLife’s Board of Directors subsequently published a public letter of support for the new publishing model and the editor-in-chief. That should put a stop to the mud slinging, but the damage has already been done.

Many academics are still entrenched in traditional ways of working (which are 350+ years old, remember) and may not be willing to risk career progression by publishing in a journal that is likely to see a drop in impact factor once lower quality papers are published after peer review. Indeed, it’s possible that eLife will be delisted from Web of Science if it fails to meet the quality criteria, one of which is peer review. According to the Clarivate website:

The journal must provide a readily accessible, clear statement of its commitment to peer review and/or editorial oversight of all published content. Primary research articles must be subject to external peer review. Types of review that are particular to certain scholarly communities, where they are broadly accepted (e.g., arts or law journals) will be taken into consideration.

eLife will publish papers that would have failed to pass peer review under a traditional model. How will Clarivate deal with that? Presumably Mike Eisen and his team would welcome the opportunity to be delisted, although submissions would likely fall off a cliff if that happens.

eLife claims that its editors will no longer act as gatekeepers, which is somewhat disingenuous. Since the journal doesn’t have the resources to peer review every paper it receives, the editors need to select which papers to send out for review. The editors have been told to select papers based on whether they can “generate high-quality and broadly useful public reviews of this paper”, Eisen told the Nature news team. This is a very odd approach and I can’t see how it would work in practice.

In that regard, Dorothy Bishop made an interesting proposal earlier this week: the eLife editors should select papers to peer review based on reading only the Introduction and Methods section.

The papers that subsequently appeared in eLife would look different to those in its high-profile competitors, such as Nature and Science, but in a good way. Those ultra-exciting but ultimately implausible papers would get filtered out, leaving behind only those that could survive being triaged solely on rationale and methods.

This approach is similar(ish) to the concept of registered reports, where the study protocol is peer reviewed and publication is guaranteed, whatever the outcome of the experiment.

I write these newsletters primarily because I enjoy the process. However, like any author I want to reach a wide readership, so please do forward this email to your colleagues if you think they would enjoy it. This week’s newsletter has been sent to 1071 subscribers, so thank you if you helped to get the total above the 1000 mark last week.

If you joined the Journalology distribution list recently, you can browse the archive of previous newsletters. The following newsletters are likely to have the broadest appeal:

In the summer of 1995 one of my lecturers (Christof Schwiening) excitedly invited me, and a few fellow students, into his office to see something called “a website”. Christof had built a very basic html page to showcase his lab and he was incredibly proud of it. He insisted that the internet would revolutionise science. I distinctly remember thinking: “That’s a stupid idea. It will never take off.”

Editors are trained to be sceptical and my immediate reaction when the ChatGPT media storm hit was to think that this was just another fad. I was wrong. Earlier this week Bill Gates wrote:

The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.

I was struggling to understand how large-language models like ChatGPT work until I read Stephen Wolfram’s explanation. It’s a long and somewhat complex article, but it’s a good read. Highly recommended.

Briefly quoted

​Introducing NEJM AI​

NEJM AI will be an interdisciplinary journal facilitating dialogue among stakeholders invested in using AI to transform medicine. NEJM AI will intentionally pair “pre-clinical” and clinical articles to deliver critical context to both clinicians and non-clinician researchers. The journal will bridge the fast-moving developments in AI, informatics, and technology in medicine with the application of these advancements to clinical practice. NEJM AI will cover the application of AI methodologies and data science to biomedical informatics, connected health, telemedicine, medical images and imaging, personalized medicine, policy and regulation, and the ethical and medicolegal implications of AI.

NEJM (announcement)

​Nature Portfolio to expand with three new journals in 2024​

Nature Portfolio will welcome three new Nature journals in January 2024. Publisher Springer Nature is adding to its SDGs and engineering portfolios by launching Nature Cities, Nature Chemical Engineering, and Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering.

Springer Nature (press release)

​Non-White scientists appear on fewer editorial boards, spend more time under review, and receive fewer citations​

Using a dataset of 1,000,000 papers from six publishers over the past two decades, we find fewer non-White editors than would be expected based on their share of authorship. Moreover, non-White scientists endure longer waiting times between the submission and acceptance of their manuscripts, and upon publication, their papers receive fewer citations than would be expected based on textual similarity. These findings highlight ways through which non-White scientists suffer from inequalities, potentially hindering their academic careers.

PNAS (Fengyuan Liu, Talal Rahwan and Bedoor AlShebli)

​Octopus and ResearchEquals aim to break the publishing mould​

Instead of fully fledged manuscripts, Octopus and ResearchEquals allow researchers to publish individual units of research — from research questions and hypotheses to code, multimedia and presentations. The concept is called modular publishing, and both sites hope to push academics to think beyond conventional publications as the primary unit of scholarly research by breaking the research cycle into pieces.

Nature (Payal Dhar)

​Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table​

Critically, many of us are focused on how we can make the transition to open research in ways that embrace diversity and foster equity from the start. It’s been a fundamental failing of the “old” system and I’m relieved to see that an increasing number of us understand that tweaking that system just won’t do, and that more fundamental change is needed. With this comes the opportunity to rethink what gets shared and when, and how it gets both assessed and credited. It’s an incredible opportunity to build a system that better serves both science and scientists. While there are clearly systemic changes needed in the incentive and reward systems in academia, our work at PLOS demonstrates that meaningful progress can be made by pushing on elements of the current system.

The Scholarly Kitchen (Robert Harington interviews Alison Mudditt

​Why do authors persist in submitting trial reports that do not meet the journal eligibility criteria or AllTrials standards?​

We have found that very carefully assessing each submission in line with the journal eligibility criteria and AllTrials standards, and weeding out suspect and flawed papers takes a huge amount of Editor time and effort. A single manuscript can take 1–2 h to undertake the initial Editor checks. This process entails comparing the trial report with the trial registration entry and the protocol (if available). To do this the documents are lined up, side by side on separate computer screens. Any required clarifications are raised with the authors via email and the response awaited. If manuscripts are rejected, a detailed list of the reasons why is provided along with a request not to resubmit the manuscript unless all the issues can be resolved.

Journal of Advanced Nursing (Jane Noyes)

​Incomplete reporting of complex interventions: a call to action for journal editors to review their submission guidelines​

In this commentary, we present evidence from a recent systematic review of 51 randomised controlled trials published 2015–2020 that inadequate intervention reporting remains a widespread issue and that checklists are not being used to describe all intervention components. In 2022, we assessed the submission guidelines of 33 journals that published articles included in our review and found that just one at the time encouraged the use of reporting checklists for all intervention components. To drive progress, we contacted the editors of the other 32 journals and requested that they update their submission guidelines in response. We conclude by highlighting the waste associated with current practices and encourage journals from all fields to urgently review their submission guidelines. Only through collective action can we build an evidence base that is fit for purpose.

Trials (Mairead Ryan, Tammy Hoffmann, Riikka Hofmann & Esther van Sluijs)

​JAMA’s new editor brings open access and other changes​

This public access approach is also rooted in the principles of equity of who can publish. Open access has focused on mostly making sure there’s equity in what’s accessible to read, but that’s on the backs of sometimes very high fees that authors pay to publish in open access journals. What we’re saying is we believe in open access — and also believe in the value of what we do. We still think people will pay to subscribe to JAMA because there is value in the final version of record, the graphics editors making the figures, the podcasts, the corrections that get posted because things do change over time, that is what that subscription is buying you, all of those pieces.

STAT (Usha Lee McFarling interviews Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo)

​Navigating the complexities of inclusive language​

The EASE Nordic Regional Chapter kicked off its 2023 programme on 14 March, with a presentation entitled ‘Navigating the complexities of inclusive language’ from Emilia Harding, Technical Editor for style at The BMJ, UK. Emilia explored the role of inclusive language in science, including how thoughtful and deliberate choices in wording can help to promote diversity, reduce bias, and ensure that individuals are valued and respected. Relevant challenges in science editing and publishing were discussed and practical tips and resources were provided to help empower participants to have conversations and make decisions about potentially sensitive topics.

EASE

​Banning Words Won’t Make the World More Just​

Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington… The total number of people behind this project of linguistic purification is relatively small, but their power is potentially immense. The new language might not stick in broad swaths of American society, but it already influences highly educated precincts, spreading from the authorities that establish it and the organizations that adopt it to mainstream publications, such as this one.

The Atlantic (George Packer)

​Report from Equity in Open Access workshop 1: the APC debate, reflections and rainbows​

The APC is widely used across publishers of all descriptions, size, background and business type, including for-profits, not-for-profits and charities. The APC cuts across the scholarly publishing landscape to the extent that many confuse an APC as being synonymous with and essential to OA. This is incorrect but understandable given how widespread the APC has become. In the cases of hybrid and fully-OA publishers alike, the APC is often an essential building block for agreements made with libraries. These include most pure-publish agreements (APC bulk-buying) and also include the vast majority of transformative agreements (aka Read & Publish – which have been described to OASPA as the ‘big deals’ of today). In other words, if APCs are inequitable, then so are fully-OA agreements (pure-publish) and transformative agreements (Read & Publish) when these are struck without principles of global inclusion and equity at their core.

OASPA (Malavika Legge)

​Modern Comments and Their Discontents: When an Update Isn’t an Improvement​

We’re not here to complain about Modern Comments. (Well, maybe a little: One of us was a journal copy editor for almost two decades, after all.) Microsoft Word is such a widely used piece of software, and editors are such a small proportion of its massive global user base, that “improvements” to Word at the expense of our finely tuned workflows have always been both infuriating and inevitable.

The Scholarly Kitchen (Bruce Rosenblum and Sylvia Izzo Hunter)

​AI makes plagiarism harder to detect, argue academics – in paper written by chatbot​

An academic paper entitled Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT was published this month in an education journal, describing how artificial intelligence (AI) tools “raise a number of challenges and concerns, particularly in relation to academic honesty and plagiarism”. What readers – and indeed the peer reviewers who cleared it for publication – did not know was that the paper itself had been written by the controversial AI chatbot ChatGPT. “We wanted to show that ChatGPT is writing at a very high level,” said Prof Debby Cotton, director of academic practice at Plymouth Marjon University, who pretended to be the paper’s lead author. “This is an arms race,” she said. “The technology is improving very fast and it’s going to be difficult for universities to outrun it.”

The Guardian (Anna Fazackerley)

And finally...

The downside of writing a newsletter for editors is that every typo and mistake will be noticed. Last week I missed a rather important letter out of the word “public”. It’s small consolation to know that I’m not the first person to make this unfortunate error. The Lancet's website contains 33 articles with the phrase “pubic health”.

Until next week,

James

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Journalology

James Butcher

The Journalology newsletter helps editors and publishing professionals keep up to date with scholarly publishing, and guides them on how to build influential scholarly journals.

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