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Journalology

Journalology #41: Gender equity

Published about 1 year ago • 17 min read

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Hello fellow journalologists,

This morning my family and I sat in front of the TV cheering on the England Lionesses in the final of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. My 7-year-old son plays soccer every week for West Kirby United FC, which is one of the largest junior football clubs in the UK with over 90 teams playing each week. Only a handful are all-girls teams, but that’s changing rapidly and today’s match will only accelerate that trend.

Gender equity is a common theme in these newsletters. There’s a constant stream of new papers that demonstrate gender imbalances in scholarly publishing. For example, this week The Lancet published Author gender representation of journal reviews and editorials on lymphoma (2017–22). Eliza A Hawkes explained the methodology as follows:

We selected the most prominent clinically oriented internal medicine, oncology, and haematology journals that have published at least one lymphoma review, commentary, or editorial during the study period, including the official journals of the American Medical Association (JAMA and JAMA Oncology), American Society of Clinical Oncology (Journal of Clinical Oncology), and the American Society of Hematology (Blood). These specific types of articles are most commonly requested by journal editorial boards of accomplished experts, but the process of author selection lacks transparency due to the solicited nature of the articles and, unlike The Lancet Group, few academic medical journals have specific gender diversity targets.

The findings were unsurprising, but that didn’t stop The Lancet’s editors from publishing them (as a Correspondence article, presumably to avoid this short research paper being counted as a citable item).

Our findings show that across all article types, in all eight journals analysed, women comprised the minority of authors. Women represented 345 (31%) of 1121 authors across 607 articles. Whereas 79% (range 50–100%) of articles included at least one male author, only 45% (7–78%) included at least one female author. 55% of the analysed articles were written exclusively by men, whereas 21% were all-women. Moreover, only 12% of review articles, arguably the most authoritative articles and where editorial preferences exert strong influence, were written exclusively by women compared with 42% all-men authorship. In one journal, a single female author (of a review) was included over the 5-year study period (among 30 total authors).

Journal editors have an important role to play to even out gender imbalance, especially with regards to commissioned content. Lancet journals have published their DEI commitments, which have a strong focus on gender equity. For example, the Lancet group publishes the gender balance of its editorial boards:

In 2019 Jocelyn Clark and Richard Horton asked What is The Lancet doing about gender and diversity?

For authors published in The Lancet, we examined Articles (unsolicited) and Series and Commissions (mostly commissioned) separately, recognising as editors we have more influence over the authorship of commissioned content… For Series and Commissions at The Lancet in 2017, 34% of authors were women, and among the 46 corresponding authors, 12 (26%) were women and one (2%) was from a LMIC. Among our largest specialty titles, proportions of women authors in Series and Commissions were 38% (The Lancet Oncology), 34% (The Lancet Infectious Diseases), and 23% (The Lancet Neurology); an external review found 34% of Lancet Commissioners were women.

What gets measured gets done. Auditing published content is time consuming, but provides valuable insight that needs to be shared publicly (ideally, every year). Commissioning editors should keep track of their activities in real time to ensure that the authors that write for their journals represent all viewpoints. This sounds easy, but in practice it often takes a lot more effort to identify diverse authors. There’s a positive feedback loop in play: people who publish frequently are easier to identify and are more likely to get commissioned by editors.

This newsletter has subscribers from all of the major publishing houses. Please use the snippets from the articles that I share with you each week to prompt and encourage your colleagues to improve your journals’ equity footprint. Together, we can make a difference.

News

​Introducing the Hybrid Open Access Dashboard (HOAD)​

HOAD provides interactive charts and tables for exploring the openness of over 12,500 hybrid journals included in 400+ transformative agreements. These are derived from curated and publicly available cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool data.
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Users can also explore variations in open access adoption among different countries. The view on the top productive countries shows that lead authors from the United States, China, and India published open access in hybrid journals to a much lesser extent compared to their European counterparts. In contrast, countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Germany have achieved substantially larger open access shares, likely due to the wide implementation of transformative agreements.

Plan S (Inke Achterberg and Najko Jahn)

JB: My heart sinks when I see a Plan S announcement in my news feeds; I generally end up grumpy and frustrated after reading their articles. But not this time. This dashboard is incredibly useful for those of us who are tracking how scholarly publishing is changing. I will be referring to HOAD for many years to come.

​IOP Publishing introduces free ethics statement checker to support authors and speed up the submission process​

IOP Publishing (IOPP) has partnered with TaskAdept, a leader in improving publication ethics by driving forward standards of ethics and data statements with a free online ethics statement generation tool: EthicsGen. The tool supports authors to create correctly worded ethics statements to speed submissions through peer review and match the statement criteria of an author’s journal of choice, freeing precious time to concentrate on research. The statements will make it easier for reviewers to read and assess the content.

IOP Publishing (press release)

JB: This tool is simple to use and could be helpful for researchers working in all areas of research.

​New Plain Language Summaries of Publications Unlock the Latest Medical Research for Patients, Healthcare Professionals and Policymakers​

Patients, policymakers, caregivers and primary care physicians can now keep up to date with the latest medical articles through clear, jargon-free summaries. Launched by Taylor & Francis, Plain Language Summaries of Publications (PLSPs) are peer reviewed, open access articles written for non-specialist readers, so everyone can benefit from new research findings.
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Many Taylor & Francis journals already support authors to include plain language summaries alongside their research papers. However, as standalone articles, PLSPs provide much more space to explore the significance of published research, as well as enabling graphics, video and audio content to support understanding. Researchers are also encouraged to bring in additional co-authors for the PLSP who themselves are patients or caregivers.

Taylor & Francis (press release)

JB: PLSPs are a new article type. Authors can submit a PLSP on any paper that’s been published, with this caveat: “Written permission from the original article’s lead and/or corresponding author, and its publisher (unless the original article is published by Taylor & Francis or one of its imprints.” Surely no permission is needed for articles published under a CC BY license, though.

I couldn’t find any instructions about whether the journals will accept papers created with the help of large language models (LLMs).

PLSPs are published open access and so I did some digging to find out what the APC is. See screen grab below.

This initiative is likely aimed at pharmaceutical companies and their communication agencies that want to create a plain language summary for clinically relevant papers. £3925 is a lot of cash for a PLSP.

I worry that PLSPs will end up being created for all the positive clinical trial results and not the negative ones. In many ways I’d rather see LLM-generated plain language summaries for every paper (with appropriate quality control), rather than only having PLSPs for papers where the sponsor is willing to pay an APC.

​Mohammed Yahia (1982–2023)​

We at Nature were saddened to hear of the sudden death of our former colleague Mohammed Yahia at the age of 41. Mohammed joined what would become Nature Portfolio in 2010 and was the launch editor and latterly the executive editor of Nature Middle East. Besides spearheading the launch of Arabic-language editions of both Nature and Scientific American, he played a leading part in the inception of Nature Africa and Nature Italy. He left to take up a new position as editor-in-chief of Chemical & Engineering News this month. He will be remembered as a passionate and committed journalist and an outstanding and pioneering mentor and educator. Our thoughts are with his wife and young family.

Nature (unsigned)

JB: I never had the chance to meet Mohammed in person, although I heard many good things about him from colleagues over the years. It’s always a shock when news like this breaks. I’m now older than my father was when he died; I really feel for Mohammed’s young family.

​ALPSP Launches Special Interest Groups for the Scholarly Publishing Community​

International Trade Association, ALPSP, is pleased to announce the launch of a range of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for its members and the wider scholarly publishing industry. The new initiative aims to encourage engagement and knowledge sharing amongst like-minded scholarly communities. Each Special Interest Group will be led by a number of leaders and will take place virtually at regular intervals throughout the year. The groups will tackle relevant issues in scholarly publishing, suggest solutions and create a space for networking where experiences and case studies can be shared.

ALPSP announcement

​Of Meetings and Members: The Interconnected Future of Conferences and Scholarly Societies​

Societies’ marketing materials frequently describe the value of conferences as a form of scholarly communication, and researchers seem to agree. Respondents to Ithaka S+R’s 2021 US Faculty Survey named attending conferences as an important way they keep up with new research in their field more often than any other method, including reading journal articles. Other studies have found that the majority of conference attendees learn new information and ideas while attending.

Ithaka S+R (Dylan Ruediger, Jessica Pokharel, Alex Humphreys, Laura Brown, Lindsey Potts)

​PubMed Update: Proximity Searching Now Available for Affiliation Search Field​

A standard search in the affiliation [ad] field searches across all author affiliations on a citation. For example, a search for Cleveland[ad] AND Clinic[ad] can find these terms split between multiple authors’ affiliations on the same citation.
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With this update, you can now use a proximity search to search for multiple terms appearing in the same affiliation. For proximity searches in the affiliation field, an N value of 1,000 or less will search for the double quoted terms together within the same affiliation, rather than spread across any affiliations on the record.

NLM Technical Bulletin (anonymous)

JB: I often use PubMed instead of other bibliometric tools because the search functionality is so much better.

​Chaos and Questions: New Public-Access Policies Put Journals in Flux​

Y.S. Chandrashekhar, MD (University of Minnesota, MN), editor-in-chief of JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging, said “it’s a highly chaotic environment” for publishers and journal editors right now. “Journals are going to completely change,” he told TCTMD. “The future is very, very uncertain.”
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The push for open-access research has been decades in the making, and there is near universal agreement that having access to the most up-to-date data translates into better care for patients. Still, some journal editors have concerns with the new approach from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)—expected to go into effect in 2026—because it may come with unintended consequences, throwing the current subscription-based model into flux.

tctmd (Michael O’Riordan)

JB: This news feature provides a good summary of some of the tensions in scholarly publishing, with a focus on clinical journals.

Community Corner

I’ve been reluctant to include a testimonial from any of my former colleagues, but at some point I had to bite the bullet. I was fortunate to work with many talented editors on the Nature journals, some of whom subscribe to this newsletter.

I joined Nature Publishing Group in 2008 as Publisher of the eight Nature Clinical Practice journals, which had launched a few years earlier. It would be fair to say that the launches had not gone as planned: the financial performance was well behind target and most of the impact factors were in the low single digits.

We rebranded the journals to Nature Reviews, improved the production values, and empowered the in-house editors. The journals have gone from strength to strength and one of the best performing journals is Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, which has been led for the past 6 years by Diana Romero. Nature Clinical Practice Oncology’s final impact factor in 2011 (before the rebranding) was 8.000; Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology’s latest impact factor is 78.8. Impact factors aren’t the defining feature of success, but our strategy certainly worked.

Thank you leaving this testimonial on the community wall, Diana.

Opinion

​The benefits of Open science are not inevitable: monitoring its development should be value-led​

If open science is understood as not just an optimisation by improving information flows, but as part of a wider transformation, comparable to how scientific journals changed the social and technological basis of science in the 17th century, then it would be wise to adopt a monitoring framework that captures various aspects of the change. Monitoring should therefore include the effects and broader social implications, especially those relevant to the values and principles as expressed in the UNESCO OS Recommendation

Impact of Social Sciences (Ismael Rafols, Ingeborg Meijer and Jordi Molas-Gallart)

​All Things Must Pass​

That said, dissatisfaction with the existing scholarly publishing system is growing amongst researchers, libraries and other key stakeholders who highlight the high costs, obscure pricing models and unfavourable business practices amongst their chief dissatisfactions. This dissatisfaction has manifested itself in many ways – ranging from emails from researchers to library staff criticising ‘legacy publishers’ and sharing their frustration in committee meetings, to an open letter to Library Directors signed by 100-plus academics expressing their desire to see academia turn away from large commercial publishers as well as several high-profile editorial journal board mass resignations.

Research Information (Andrew Barker and Elaine Sykes)

​The Corporate Capture of Open-Access Publishing (paywall)

The answers, we propose, lie somewhere in that overlooked, undervalued middle ground of nonprofit or fair-profit university-press publishing, mission-aligned with the academy. Many of those presses have been leaders in findings ways to meet the goals of providing both equitable access to knowledge and equitable participation in the creation of new knowledge. These are the publishers that universities should protect, invest in, and make deals with. Perhaps an international network of university-based publishers, libraries, and other public-knowledge providers could work together, balancing paid-for and open research content in a way that is sustainable rather than extractive, and that still values the research itself.

Chronicle of Higher Education (Sarah Kember and Amy Brand)

​How I used weaponized laziness to build better collaborations​

Getting all 99 members of the JUMP Consortium to visit the main CRediT website and click through 14 pages seemed unlikely to go well. This was a problem of bad user-interface design, and a perfect use case for weaponized laziness. Enter: Google Sheets.
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We created a shared spreadsheet of contributors, with one row per member. In addition to the standard biographical information we always need (such as names, affiliations and ORCID identifiers), our spreadsheet included columns with definitions for each of the CRediT contribution categories that authors could select using checkboxes. We added columns to remind authors to provide their funding or conflict-of-interest declarations or both, as well as ‘magic’ columns that allowed the user to, for instance, decide authorship order and sort accordingly.

Nature (Beth Cimini)

JB: The template can be found here.

​How bibliometrics and school rankings reward unreliable science​

But all of this is a game of whack-a-mole. Any approach to solving this problem cannot succeed without tackling the incentives themselves. A good place to start is by deflating the importance of citations in the promotion, funding, and hiring of scientists. The hope is that this effort would dovetail with publishers distancing themselves from models that require more and more volume to grow profits. At the same time, if we must replace bad metrics with better ones—which is not necessarily the case, and any metric really can be gamed—universities and funders could find ways to reward behaviour such as data sharing and correcting the record.

BMJ (Ivan Oransky, Adam Marcus, and Alison Abritis)

​Is There Gender Equity in Science Editing?​

Gender inequity on editorial boards has inevitable consequences in terms of scholarly publishing. For instance, underrepresentation of female editors may lead to a consideration that the journal is not open to all authors, which may eventually discourage women from participation in science. Besides, female scientists would miss out on the benefits of editorial board membership (e.g., opportunities for intellectual growth and networking), which may in turn interfere with their career development.

Science Editor (Ilke Coskun Benlidayi)

​Title Race​

At JAMA and the JAMA Network, we settled on recommending 100 characters (with spaces) for research and long reviews, and 60 characters for shorter pieces. Ultimately, for the title to do its job of inviting readers in, it’s important for it to be concise, specific, and informative and contain the key points of the work. This will also help the title be discoverable by search engines and understandable to those scanning reference lists.

Science Editor (Stacy L Christiansen)

​Predatory journals entrap unsuspecting scientists. Here’s how universities can support researchers​

A few authors revealed experiences that cross into the realm of cybercrime: demands to pay the article-processing charge (APC) a second time; incessant calls, e-mails or messages on social media; and intimidation. Two responses even mentioned physical threats by journal representatives. One author wrote that they were “bullied repeatedly by phone calls and e-mails” to pay an APC for an article that was published without their consent. I felt helpless when confronted with these testimonies and requests for help.

Nature (Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri)

​AI and Publishing: Moving forward requires looking backward​

We are asking the wrong questions. A good example is this article which asks whether publishers should be concerned that ChatGPT wrote a paper about itself. The article goes on to discuss ‘other ethical and moral concerns’, asking “Is it right to use AI to write papers when publishing papers are used as a barometer of researcher competency, tenure, and promotion?”.
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I would rephrase the question to: “Is it right that publishing papers are used as the primary assessment tool of researchers?” The singular driver for almost all of these questionable research practices is the current emphasis on the published article as the only output that counts. The tail is wagging the dog.

TL;DR (Danny Kingsley)

​Generative AI, ChatGPT, and Google Bard: Evaluating the Impact and Opportunities for Scholarly Publishing​

My group within Wiley Partner Solutions designs and develops intelligent services that leverage advanced AI, big data, and cloud technologies to support publishers and researchers in open access and open science environments. To identify both benefits and risks of generative AI for our industry, we tested ChatGPT and Google Bard for authoring, for submission and reviews, for publishing, and for discovery and dissemination. I hope that our findings will inspire you to find fresh ideas for using Generative AI, and will stimulate further conversation about this new and controversial but potentially beneficial tool.

The Scholarly Kitchen​ (Hong Zhou)

​In Defense of Endogeny​

We are writing in defense of endogeny because it can also exist at journals which have been begun by faculty with the mission of advancing a field of study that has been marginalized in their discipline and within which they are the pioneering experts. In such cases, it is understandable that the editors would be among the authors. We want to draw attention in particular to journals that have as their primary mission to give voice to minoritized scholars whose works are systematically excluded because they challenge the status quo. These scholars face institutional barriers that keep them from attaining the visibility and from building the bodies of scholarship they need to thrive in the academy. The journal can serve as a nurturing space for them and their scholarship, with editors and reviewers who share their critical perspective and desire to see the field grow. One might say that encouraging endogenous growth is one of the main reasons such journals are founded.

The Scholarly Kitchen (Christopher A. Barnes, Reem Khamis, Yvette D. Hyter, and Betty Yu)

​The Discussion section: kill it or reform it?​

In sum, my view is that, when used properly, the Discussion section serves two purposes. It communicates succinctly the import of the reported results in relation to a priori hypotheses, and it provides an opportunity to consider new ideas stimulated by the results. In practice, the Discussion is often misused. People play down results they don’t like, over-interpret those that accord with their preferred theory, and engage in HARKing. But to say you should get rid of the Discussion because it is misused is like saying we should all give up cars because some people drive too fast and cause accidents.

BishopBlog (Dorothy Bishop)

​Navigating the Sustainability Landscape: A New STM Roadmap Provides a Guide to Embedding Sustainability in Publishing​

For academic publishers, there are two broad ways to support and drive the SDG agenda. The first is to make sure we are responsible businesses. This means implementing policies and a workplace culture that will foster diversity, act on climate, and address inequalities. The second aspect is to be a catalyst of change through the content that is published, providing platforms to debate sustainability issues, foster interdisciplinary research, and ensure a wide dissemination of knowledge. Both elements are reflected in the SDG Publishers Compact, launched in 2020 as a joint initiative from the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the United Nations. Its 10 concrete action points orient around both internal and external activities that will promote awareness and action to achieve the SDGs. To date, just over 300 organizations from all parts of the sector –trade, education, and academic — have signed up.

The Scholarly Kitchen (Rachel Martin)

Journal Club

​A new tool for evaluating health equity in academic journals; the Diversity Factor​

In this paper, the concept of a Diversity Factor was proposed as a supplemental metric of measuring a journal’s contribution to the research landscape, focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion, and impact on the studied community or population. Analysis of the data under the lens of the key elements of a proposed Diversity Factor reveal unsurprising results. Female authors and authors from LMICs are sorely underrepresented. While trends are improving for both demographics, several obstacles still stand in the way. Academia is becoming more and more centralized especially in high-income countries. As it does so, it becomes more difficult to penetrate, especially when considering the trends of self-citation.

PLOS Global Public Health (Jack Gallifant et al)

JB: The dataset, which includes over 7000 clinical journals, can be found here. Times Higher Education wrote a story about the paper:‘Diversity factor’ metrics proposed (paywall)

​Care to share? Experimental evidence on code sharing behavior in the social sciences​

This study provides a large-scale assessment of researchers’ code sharing behavior upon request. With an overall sharing rate of 37.5%, our descriptive results align with previous research and demonstrate that code sharing is not common even among researchers who use publicly available observational data. Contrary to our preregistered hypotheses, framing our request positively did not increase code sharing among researchers. Conversely, we find higher code returns among researchers who received the negatively framed request alluding to the replication crisis’ ramifications.

PLOS ONE (Daniel Krähmer, Laura Schächtele, Andreas Schneck)

​Global visibility of publications through Digital Object Identifiers​

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) play a critical role in the accessibility and discoverability of online publications, but their availability is not equally distributed across the world. Our analysis of the top 200 DOI prefixes registered with Crossref reveals a dominance of large publishing houses from high-income countries in North America and Europe, with limited representation from the Global South. This has significant implications for global scholarly communication, including the visibility and adoption of metrics and indicators, and the need for alternative solutions and infrastructures. Therefore, we urge the scholarly community to address these issues by promoting the availability of DOIs globally and fostering a more inclusive and equitable scholarly communication system.

Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (Houcemeddine Turki et al)

And finally...

This week’s newsletter is being sent to 1914 subscribers. It would be great to break the 2000 barrier by this time next week; if you enjoy these newsletters please do encourage your colleagues to subscribe. So far only 44 people have cancelled their subscription since Journalology launched; a good chunk of those resubscribed using a different email address, which suggests that most subscribers think this newsletter is useful. Anything you can do to spread the word would be hugely appreciated.

Until next week,

James

P.S. Despite what the text says below, I don’t live in Seattle. Legally, I need to include an address in the newsletter and the one shown below is the address for ConvertKit, which is the software I use.

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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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