Subscribe to newsletter |
Hello fellow journalologists,
I always enjoy hearing from readers and last week a Journalology subscriber sent me a link to a preprint entitled To Be Scientific Is To Be Communist. The authors argue that research done by commercial entities, such as pharmaceutical companies, is not “engaging in properly scientific inquiry”. The authors go on to say:
PLOS has been a driving force in the open research movement over the past two decades, so I was interested to hear from another reader yesterday who sent me a link to this twitter thread.
Unions have an important role in society by advocating for the rights of their members. Here are a few quick observations that the new PLOS Union may want to consider during the collective bargaining process.
(1) The latest set of annual accounts for PLOS (for 2021; the 2022 annual report has not been published yet) state that PLOS generated revenues of $37.7 million in 2021 and incurred costs of $32.5 million (and therefore generated a surplus of $5.2 million). According to Form 990, PLOS had 156 employees in 2021 and the total cost of employment was $19.9m ($128,000 average cost per employee; see page 10 for a breakdown of the costs). The organisation had $16 million in cash and unrestricted investments, which means that if revenues ceased abruptly they would only be able to cover costs for ~6 months before struggling to meet payroll.
(2) When Wiley announced that they were pausing special issues in Hindawi journals because of problems with papermills the company predicted that its revenues would drop by $30 million in the 2023 fiscal year. In other words, it is entirely possible for revenues to abruptly fall off a cliff in fully OA journals; financial reserves are incredibly important.
(3) The PLOS journals published 36,500 articles in 2013, but only published 20,500 last year (the graph below is from Digital Science’s bibliometric tool Dimensions; the y-axis is number of articles). Revenues for 2022 are unlikely to have increased much on 2021, since article volumes were flat, but costs probably increased because PLOS has launched new journals and therefore presumably hired more staff.
Meanwhile, new OA competitors, such as MDPI and Frontiers, are growing exponentially and are creating an increasingly competitive marketplace, making it harder for PLOS and other medium-sized publishers to thrive (the below graph is from Dimensions; the y-axis is number of articles).
(4) I submitted a peer-review report for a PLOS journal on Friday and the user experience was poor. The manuscript tracking system only allowed plain text: hyperlinks disappeared (Grrr…). A best-in-class user experience is increasingly important to attract submissions.
(5) The PLOS management team has to balance the personal financial requirements of their staff, many of whom live and work in one of the most expensive cities in the USA, with the need to invest in new staff and technologies that (a) reduce the risk of publishing ethically dubious research, which could cause a catastrophic loss of revenue; (b) improve the author experience (perhaps by using these six strategies) so that more authors submit to PLOS journals, to increase revenues and improve the organisation’s financial resilience so that it can fulfil its mission. This is a significant management and leadership challenge and the margin for error is small. Open communication between all stakeholders will be vitally important.
Pippa Smart is hosting a Editorial School for Journal Editors over a 4 week period starting on May 31. If you have editors on your journals that need some additional support, this is a great way to improve their knowledge and skills.
Another way to help your editors learn about scholarly publishing is to encourage them to subscribe to this newsletter.
Subscribe to newsletter |
BMC Medicine (Amy Clotworthy et al)
Retraction Watch
The Scholarly Kitchen (Rick Anderson)
Origin Editorial (Jason Roberts)
The Scholarly Kitchen (David Crotty)
The Official PLOS Blog
Times Higher Education (Duncan Money)
Retraction Watch (Ellie Kincaid)
Report: Reproducibility and Research Integrity - Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
TL;DR - Digital Science (Simon Porter)
The Scholarly Kitchen (Emma Watkins)
Science (Jeffrey Brainard)
JB: I took this news story at face value when I read it, but then I looked at the preprint which has significant methodological problems. Reader beware!
Thank you for reading to the end. I plan to start to collect feedback on the newsletter to use in marketing material. If you enjoy the newsletter and would be willing to say something nice about it publicly, please do drop me a line.
Until next time,
James
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.
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, I’ve recently returned from my summer vacation; in this week’s newsletter I’ve tried to summarise the key news stories and opinion pieces from the past 3 weeks. If you’ve been away too, hopefully it will help you to catch up. The newsletter has two new sponsors: ChronosHub and Origin Editorial. I’m able to spend time creating this newsletter because of the sponsors’ financial support, for which I'm very grateful. Thank you to our sponsor,...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Those of us living in the northern hemisphere are now firmly into the summer holiday season. You’re receiving this email earlier than usual because my family and I are about to head off on vacation. You won’t hear from me for a while. If you get Journalology withdrawal symptoms, you can always browse the archives. Thank you to our sponsor, Digital Science Writefull uses AI to automate publishers’ language-related tasks and make these...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, I started off last week’s newsletter with a comparison of the volume of research articles published in the first halves of 2023 and 2024. There were a couple of things that didn't feel quite right to me and with the help of a Journalology reader I dug a bit deeper. Last week I wrote: IEEE Access has dropped by 34% too, for reasons that I don’t understand. My former Nature colleague downloaded the raw data file and found that the...