Journalology #3: IRL vs TW & LI

Hello fellow journalologists,

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IRL vs TW & LI

Last week I attended the annual ALPSP conference, the first in-person industry meeting I’ve attended for a few years. It was great to see old friends again and to have interesting conversations with new people.

I stopped using Twitter about 5 years ago after reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. I can’t say I missed Twitter and so it is with some trepidation that I’m dipping a toe back into the social media waters. Every newsletter writer needs to promote their wares online, you see. My Twitter handle is @journalologist. Please be kind.

Editorial wisdom

Some people collect stamps, comics or gnomes. I collect quotes.

I’ve started sharing some of my favourite quotes from editors on Twitter and LinkedIn. Since we’re now at the end of Peer Review Week, here’s one from Richard Smith. Unfortunately, there aren't many editors with Richard’s wit and wisdom around these days.

Author experience

When I started my career in scholarly publishing we edited with a pencil and cared primarily about readers, who paid subscriptions to access journals. Now, algorithms are being used to correct manuscripts and publishers’ primary customers are authors, who pay APCs.

Yesterday, Colleen Scollans, Michael Clarke and I published “Author Experience (AX): An Essential Framework for Publishers”, which explains why the move to open access has shifted publishers’ priorities from readers to authors.

Author experience (AX) refers to the ways in which an author engages with a publisher’s brand from the first moment of interaction (e.g., submission marketing) through the author’s entire experience with the publisher’s brand. By brand we don’t just mean logos and marks, but rather the more intangible identity of an organization that defines how people perceive of and engage with its products and services. Think of AX as the sum of all author interactions with your brand in their unique role as an author. Most importantly, AX tells you how authors feel about your brand. It is a barometer of an author’s propensity to publish with you, engage with your services, and recommend you to colleagues.

Editors have always cared about their authors, of course. I would argue strongly that they need to continue to care about their readers. Perhaps I’m stuck in my ways, but for me journals are valuable because they are a curated collection of articles that editors have selected for their readers. We will lose something important if technology teams’ main focus is on improving “author journeys” and driving as much traffic as possible to marketing pages designed to woo authors. The reader experience (RX?) matters too.

Scholarly publishing principles

I’m ashamed to say that I’d never heard of “Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing” until this week. The first version of the document was produced in 2013 and the latest version is the fourth revision, which you can read here or here.

As you might expect from a document that was created by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME, it covers the most important areas. Indeed, it’s a relatively short document considering how wide the scope is.

How many editors and publishers will read (or even be aware of) this document? When an academic takes on the editorship of a journal, how are they made aware of their responsibilities?

Will they revisit the Principles regularly to check how their journal is performing against this version of “best practice”? What can we do as a community to make sure that editors and publishers have a thorough understanding of what “best practice” is?

Does statistical peer review improve papers?

Statistical peer review is expensive in terms of time and treasure (stats reviewers often expect, heaven forbid, to be paid) and so relatively few journals engage professional statisticians to review their papers. In my experience, many academics have a limited grasp of statistics, so does ‘amateur’ statistical peer review improve papers?

A recent paper in Royal Society Open Science tried to answer one aspect of that question.

We found that manuscripts with both initial low or high levels of statistical content increased their statistical content during peer review. The availability of guidelines on statistics in the review forms of journals was associated with an initial similarity of statistical content of manuscripts but did not have any relevant implications on manuscript change during peer review. We found that when reports were more concentrated on statistical content, there was a higher probability that these manuscripts were eventually rejected by editors.

Data sharing does not increase error correction

Funders are increasingly expecting their grantees to share underlying data sets. This is overwhelmingly regarded to be a Good Thing, although the costs of data sharing are likely to be considerable. With that in mind, the community needs to be sure that the return on investment is sufficient.

A Brief Communication in Nature Ecology & Evolution assessed whether sharing data made retractions more likely.

We found no evidence that the number of yearly retractions increased after some journals adopted mandatory open data policies; changes in retraction rates over time mirrored those in journals with less stringent open data policies or no policy at all

The authors go on to say

Requiring code alongside data and destigmatizing error correction among authors and journal editors could increase the effectiveness of open data policies at helping science self-correct.

Quality costs money

Those of us who work in scholarly publishing in a professional capacity have collectively done a truly awful job of explaining to the academic community how much it costs to run a journal and why. Time and again I see (presumably) well-meaning people quote studies that many of us know are not reflective of reality. For example, take this essay from a librarian from McGill University.

Publishing a journal requires money, but that amounts to only 10 to 15 per cent of what publishers charge authors to make their work open access. Author fees are disproportionate with publishing costs, and correlate to the journal’s prestige, impact and profit model.

I’ve spent a considerable portion of my working life looking at financial accounts for journals and I’ve never seen a journal with total costs that are 10-15% of revenues. Yes, my viewpoint is unusual, since I’ve worked almost exclusively on journals that have in-house editorial teams (i.e. high overhead costs), but I simply don’t believe that number even for journals whose editors are employed by academic institutions.

The costs of publishing are considerable, and are more likely to increase, rather than decrease, in the future as research becomes more complex and publishers invest more in improving reproducibility, detecting research fraud etc.

As an industry we have to engage with the communities that we serve to help them to understand the costs of publication. Many publishers (and editors) are too worried about a social media backlash to put their heads above the parapet and to try to explain the reality of the situation. I certainly fell into that camp not so long ago (and perhaps still do!).

Jobs in scholarly publishing

Many subscribers to this newsletter work for scholarly publishers, so a recent post in The Scholarly Kitchen (Beyond the “Accidental Profession”: Bringing More Structure, Equity, and Respect to Scholarly Publishing Employment) should be of interest.

Improving employment structures for embedded publishers is just one of the issues that the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) Joint Task Force on Career Progression, established in spring 2022, aims to address. This ambitious effort includes all scholarly publishing professionals – non-profit, commercial, embedded, and independent — and the opportunity for clarity it offers for embedded publishers like the university presses the two of us work at is only part of the picture.

This next point is incredibly important. As an industry we have to attract new talent and explain to early career researchers why they should consider building a career in publishing.

New entrants to publishing are often frustrated by the idiosyncratic, inconsistent, segmented, and insular nature of the job market. This is true of commercial and non-profit, trade and scholarly publishing alike. They are baffled by the opacity surrounding the skills necessary to enter and advance in the profession, frustrated by the relative scarcity of formal training opportunities, and demoralized by compensation decisions that do not have clear bases in evidence.

And finally…

I want to create a newsletter that’s useful for editors (and their publishers). Please do send me your honest feedback so that I can create a format that works for you (james@journalology.com).

If you think your colleagues might benefit from these newsletters please forward it on to them and encourage them to sign up here: https://journalology.ck.page

Until next week,

James

P.S. If you write editorials for your journal, I highly recommend you read this book which was written by one of the top political speechwriters in the UK.

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