Journalology #44: One year on

Hello fellow journalologists,

This time last year I sent the first issue of Journalology to 239 subscribers. Issue 44 is being sent to 2040 subscribers who use 450 distinct email domains and live in 51 countries. Thank you for supporting me in this project over the past 12 months, especially those of you who contributed a testimonial recently. I’m thrilled that so many people, at all stages of their career, find this newsletter to be valuable.

At the outset I failed to anticipate the biggest challenge, which has been to get the emails delivered to the people who signed up to receive them. Many corporate and university email servers have strict anti-spam rules and emails often end up in junk or are not delivered at all.

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The newsletter is phase 1 of my plans for ‘Journalology’. I have lots of ideas cooking away and some of them are likely to see the light of day soon. Watch this space. (This page may give you some hints.)

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I try to write a newsletter every week, but sometimes other commitments need to take priority. Next week I’m at ALPSP and then we have a family get together over the weekend, so you probably won’t hear from me for a week or two.

News

The DEAL Consortium and Elsevier Announce Transformative Open Access Agreement for Germany

Under the terms of the agreement, authors from participating institutions can publish their articles in Elsevier's journals with immediate open access based on a per-article fee charged to their institution, enabling researchers around the world to access and benefit from their results. In addition, institutions will receive discounts on the list prices for their researchers' publications in fully open access Elsevier journals. Participating institutions will also have reading access to virtually the entire portfolio of Elsevier journals on ScienceDirect, the world’s largest platform dedicated to peer-reviewed primary scientific and medical research.

Elsevier (press release)

JB: You can read the contract here. I was naturally drawn to the APC price for the Cell Press and Lancet journals, which is €6450. You may think that APC is high, but it’s almost certainly significantly less than the fully loaded costs, especially for the Lancet portfolio, which publishes relatively few primary research articles. One of the reasons that clinical publishers have been slow to adopt open access is that their journals tend to publish fewer papers than in other fields and their cost base is high (clinically qualified editors are paid higher salaries).

Scientific sleuths spot dishonest ChatGPT use in papers

The authors have since confirmed with the journal that they used ChatGPT to help draft their manuscript, says Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at IOP Publishing, Physica Scripta’s publisher in Bristol, UK. The anomaly was not spotted during two months of peer review (the paper was submitted in May, and a revised version sent in July) or during typesetting. The publisher has now decided to retract the paper, because the authors did not declare their use of the tool when they submitted. “This is a breach of our ethical policies,” says Eggleton.

Nature (Gemma Conroy)

Medical-evidence giant Cochrane battles funding cuts and closures

Cochrane says that the lost NIHR funding — around £4.2 million (US$5.3 million) — does not affect its core income, which was £8.9 million in 2022. However, a more existential threat looms. Around £6.8 million of that core income came from subscriptions to the Cochrane Library, but Cochrane aims to make all its reviews open access by 2025, putting the revenue at risk. Catherine Spencer, Cochrane’s chief executive in London, says that the group is seriously examining how to make that move “in a way that would ensure that Cochrane is viable into the future”.

Nature (Helen Pearson)

JB: The Cochrane Collaboration has been an important organisation in clinical research, and helped systematic reviews to become mainstream. Cochrane has fewer options to make open access financially sustainable than traditional publishers. It would be hard to charge authors (who are members) an APC — a subscribe to open type approach is probably the only way forward, unless it can find backers for diamond OA.

Strike at outbreak-alert service ProMED to end — but tensions remain

Most of the strikers have now signalled that they will return to work on 11 September. Although ISID hasn’t met all of the group’s original demands, the strike action achieved its core goals of raising awareness of staff concerns and attracting interest in support from potential partners, says Liu. He adds that an offer from ISID — as outlined in Maxwell’s e-mail — to host more regular meetings with ProMED staff, and its conversations with potential partners will hopefully address other parts of the dispute.

Nature (Max Kozlov)

JB: The Lancet Microbe ran an editorial on this story.

Why a blockbuster superconductivity claim met a wall of scepticism

With all the question marks hanging over Dias’s research, many scientists are highly critical of the way that Nature handled the LuNH paper and want to know on what basis the journal decided to publish it. Armitage says that it took him only two minutes to find what he describes as “disqualifying problems” — among other things, the form of the raw resistance data in the supplementary figure. Boeri says that Nature should have required the authors to publish the precise chemical composition of their samples so that others had the recipe. And Hirsch says that editors should have first resolved the question about the provenance of the raw data in the retracted 2020 Nature article before even considering the 2023 paper.

Nature (Edwin Cartlidge)

JB: Journals like Nature and Science have two functions: their magazine sections report on the news and their original research sections make the news. This means that occasionally the journalists and manuscript editors, who are all on the masthead, are on ‘opposing sides’. That's why you will see text like: “Of 21 specialists outside Dias’s group who talked to Nature’s news team (which is editorially independent of the journal), only two, both of whom had professional connections to Dias, were positive about his work.” This can create internal tensions, as you might imagine. I never liked the wording (the news team is part of the journal, surely), but it’s important that the journalists can report on news stories, even if that’s uncomfortable for the wider journal and its publisher.

Five years of Plan S: a journey towards full and immediate Open Access

The Plan S mission is certainly not accomplished yet. Looking to the future, we believe there is room for accelerating Open Access even more and making it more equitable. For this, we are working on a “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal, which aims to foster a community-based communication system for open science in the 21st century. This proposal, set to be released within two months, will be followed by a large-scale consultation with the research community. Additionally, we will be commissioning an independent review of the contribution Plan S has made to the Open Access publishing landscape.

Plan S (announcement)

JB: See also 5 Years of Plan S: webinar.

Monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of UKRI’s open access policy

This report, commissioned by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and undertaken by Research Consulting, sets out a series of recommended evaluation questions to assess the effectiveness of the UKRI open access policy. It considers approaches to answer these, their feasibility and expected resource intensity, while accounting for the diversity of practices and stakeholders across the research landscape.

UKRI (announcement)

PLOS earth science authors choose preprints

At PLOS Climate, 33% of published authors who submitted after the partnership went into effect chose to post a preprint using the integration. For PLOS Water authors that number is 47%. Six months after the launch of the integration, EarthArXiv preprints associated with PLOS submissions have already received more than 7,100 views and 3,900 downloads on the platform. This success follows in the footsteps of longstanding partnerships with the servers bioRxiv and medRxiv.

The Official PLOS Blog

Open access strategy: De Gruyter expands Subscribe to Open program to accelerate OA transformation

Academic publisher De Gruyter is implementing the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model at scale to transform its journal portfolio to Open Access over the next 5 years. De Gruyter will gradually transfer about 85% of its currently 320 subscription journals to free online access via Subscribe to Open in close collaboration with journal editors and societies. De Gruyter is the first major academic publisher to use Subscribe to Open as its central open access transformation model.

De Gruyter (announcement)

OUP to launch interdisciplinary research resource

Launching in 2024, the first six Oxford Intersections initially under development are: Racism by Context; AI in Society and Culture; Place and Space; Social Media; Borders; and Food Security.

The topics have been selected because of the critical role of interdisciplinary research in helping policy and decision-makers address the world’s most complex and urgent environmental, cultural, political, and psychological challenges, the solutions of which are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research.

Research Information (announcement)

ScienceOpen implements Scite smart citation badges on 75+ million article records

ScienceOpen and Scite.ai announce a new cooperation to provide greater context around citation information for the academic community. The citation index at the core of ScienceOpen’s discovery environment has been augmented with Scite badges indicating whether those citations are supporting, contrasting, or just mentions.

ScienceOpen Blog (Kevin Jasini)

Frontiers implements new policy to counter ‘Authorship-for-sale’

Under the new policy, requests for authorship changes will only be granted under exceptional circumstances and after in-depth assessment by the Frontiers’ research integrity unit. A ledger of requests will be maintained to identify suspicious patterns and trends among these types of requests. As of today, Frontiers has identified and retracted 38 research papers linked to the practice.

The updated authorship policy is part of Frontiers’ ongoing efforts to foster a culture of academic integrity, responsible authorship, and ethical research practices. The organization remains dedicated to promoting an environment in which the quality and authenticity of research are upheld above all.

Frontiers (press release)

JB: See also the related Retraction Watch article: Frontiers retracts nearly 40 papers linked to ‘authorship-for-sale’.

IOP Publishing appoints Dr. David Gevaux as Chief Editor of Reports on Progress in Physics

IOP Publishing (IOPP) has appointed Dr. David Gevaux as the first Chief Editor of Reports on Progress in Physics. Taking up the post from the 4th of September, Dr. Gevaux will lead on ambitious plans for the journal, as its scope expands to include ground-breaking new research content alongside the authoritative reviews for which it is well known across all areas of physics.

IOP Publishing (press release)

JB: You may remember that a few months ago IOPP announced that Reports on Progress in Physics, a review journal, would start publishing primary research. They’ve now taken the next step of hiring a full time editor to work alongside the academic editor-in-chief. David’s editorial credentials are impressive, with long stints working on various Nature journals. The new journal will likely attract some very good primary research papers. Other publishers take note: if you want to create a ‘flagship’ journal for your portfolio, this is a good way to do it.

Other Nature journal editors have jumped ship in the past to create flagships from scratch, without much success. (I’m thinking of Myles Axton and Min Cho leaving Nature Genetics and Nature Communications to launch flagship journals at Wiley in 2019, which have published relatively few papers since launch, even after a rebrand.) This is a different proposition, however, since the journal already exists and has a strong impact factor.

STM Integrity Hub incorporates Clear Skies' Papermill Alarm screening tool

The Clear Skies Papermill Alarm is a tool that offers a straightforward traffic-light rating system for research papers. A red alert indicates a high-similarity to known papermill-product content, an orange alert suggests a moderate similarity, and a green rating indicates no resemblance to such papers. The Papermill Alarm ratings help publishers direct limited resources to the papers that warrant it. The integration with the STM Integrity Hub pertains to the ‘Public’ version of the Papermill Alarm tool, which was launched in 2022 and is optimized for the general area of cancer research.

STM (press release)

Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR)

Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned. Crossref and ROR are therefore working together to ensure that Crossref members and funders can use ROR to simplify persistent identifier integrations, to register better metadata, and to help connect research outputs to research funders.

Crossref (Amanda French et al)

Community Corner

Since this is Journalology’s first birthday, it seemed appropriate to include a contribution from someone who’s been a subscriber since issue 1. Thank you for your public show of support, Tilly.

If you’re a long-term subscriber and would like to leave a testimonial, you can do so here.

The testimonials help to keep me motivated and also reassure potential subscribers that the newsletter is worth signing up for.

Opinion

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

The Free Press (Patrick T Brown)

JB: The technical term for this is “shooting yourself in the foot”.

MDPI Insights: The CEO’s Letter #3

Judy (Verses) and I resumed our discussion in August, when I visited Elsevier’s office to review current projects, such as our recent agreement with Science Direct and the continued indexing of MDPI journals in Scopus (indexing database owned by Elsevier). We also explored possible opportunities for the future, including a potential collaboration to expand MDPI’s Scilit data infrastructure. This endeavour aims to aggregate and provide access to scholarly metadata encompassing journal articles, conference papers, books, preprints, and more. While these discussions are ongoing, the underlying principle remains that such collaborations drive forward-looking strategies to elevate our services and support for the scholarly community.

It was great that Judy and I acknowledged the merits of 'co-opetition,' a concept based of the belief that fostering cooperation alongside healthy competition can lead to shared advancements for both individual companies and the industry at large.

MDPI Insights (Stefan Tochev)

JB: Wiley and Hindawi worked together for a few years before Hindawi was acquired. I am probably reading too much into this, but...

Does the use of AI tools in academic publisinng represent a new form of ghost authorship?

After the author ran 200 published abstracts through the ZeroGPT AI-detection tool, 59.5% and 79.2% of original and review article abstracts, respectively, showed the presence of AI-generated content. The findings raise a concern as to whether the use of AI in academic writing, if human authors do not declare such use, represents a new form of ghost authorship. This kind of use creates unequal opportunities among authors, especially when the AI-created content cannot be detected by available AI detection tools.

Croatian Medical Journal (Ahmed Khalifa)

AI in Medicine—JAMA’s Focus on Clinical Outcomes, Patient-Centered Care, Quality, and Equity

We seek to engage scientists and other thought leaders advancing AI and medicine across clinical, computational, health policy, and public health domains. We invite authors to communicate directly with the editors about topics they believe can impact health care delivery and to connect with the editors to discuss further the development of your science and our approach to its evaluation; such engagement is critical in this rapidly evolving field. We are committed to including diverse opinions and voices in the journal and urge experts from across the career spectrum and the globe to participate in the discourse. The editors are committed to communicating science effectively to a broad range of stakeholders across our digital, multimedia, and social media avenues.

JAMA (Rohan Khera et al)

JB: This is a traditional ‘call for papers’, made stronger by the fact that JAMA Network has developed a portfolio strategy that gives authors multiple venues to publish in. It’s worth remembering that NEJM AI was announced recently. There will be intense competition across the clinical publishers for the best research in this cutting edge area of science.

Author Experience: Building a Framework for Successful Author Engagement

First, Colleen Scollans of Clarke & Esposito presented the Six Pillars of AX Maturity: (1) differentiate strategy and brand; (2) elevate marketing and invest in MarTech; (3) measure, track, and understand AX; (4) embrace experience design; (5) align editorial and marketing; and (6) build an AX roadmap (Figure). In this segment, the key takeaway was to listen to authors. Authors are often also readers, members, and board members, so demonstrating a positive customer experience and loyalty is important. Keeping things fast and simple and proving clear communication are helpful in putting authors first and ensuring that they have a positive experience.

Science Editor (Becky Fargen)

JB: I have a conflict of interest here, because of my C&E connection, but this was one of my highlights from this year’s Council of Science Editors meeting.

It’s time to increase the momentum behind open access publishing

If increasing article processing costs create a bottleneck, there should be cap on them, as was foreseen under the original draft of PLAN S. It is in any case essential that more transparency is provided on the costs of academic publishing, be it subscription or Open Access based.

The last thing to do would be to change course – but this is exactly what I am afraid is happening. It was therefore very disappointing that in the Council conclusions of 23 May, Europe’s science ministers, while being unambiguous about their backing for Open Access, hardly mention PLAN S, and instead call for the support of ‘not-for-profit open access publishing platforms and models’.

Science | Business (Robert-Jan Smits)

JB: APC price caps, if they ever materialise, should be based on the value that a journal provides. Part of that value is the usage that a journal is able to generate. See issue 33 for more information.

Threads: When My Personal and Professional Words Collided, with a Bluesky Detour

Accessibility to opportunities and content you never would have even known existed is vital to what we do. Without social media, I would not have an eye into conferences I can’t afford the time and/or money to attend.5 I would not know about resources that provide valuable insights into what I should be paying attention to in my job. As one example, I would not have subscribed to the invaluable newsletter, Journalology, written by James Butcher, if I hadn’t learned about it on social media.

Science Editor (Jennifer Regala)

JB: Thanks for the shout out, Jennifer. I’m not a big user of social media (apart from LinkedIn), but I thoroughly enjoyed this article.

Peer review in a changing world

Physics — especially high-energy, nuclear and astrophysics — increasingly happens in large collaborations, which are the only way to tackle the great complexity of big experiments and observations. If a result arises from the analysis of a petabyte-scale dataset that comes from the only instrument in the world capable of gathering it, what does it mean to peer review the publication? Unlike in the traditional model of peer review, where the important checks happen at the journal, much of the scrutiny happens internally to the collaboration, before the manuscript is even submitted. This practice does not make external peer review superfluous, but allows it to focus on the big picture rather than inspecting the methods, a job that requires a high level of familiarity with the details of the project.

Nature Reviews Physics (unsigned editorial)

Journal Club

The role of gender and coauthors in academic publication behavior

As a result of transformative open access publication agreements, journals published by Springer Nature and Wiley became more attractive as outlets for authors in Germany, while Elsevier journals lost some of their attractiveness within Germany due to substantial cancellations by university libraries. Studying 243,375 published articles in economics between 2015 and 2022, our findings suggests that men tend to seek reputation, while women favor visibility through open access, at least at the margin. While authorship in teams can dilute these behavioral patterns, female economists publish more single-authored papers. Overall female researchers appear to contribute more to the public good of open science, while their male colleagues focus on private reputation.

Research Policy (W. Benedikt Schmal, Justus Haucap, and Leon Knoke)

Characterization of Comments About bioRxiv and medRxiv Preprints

In this cross-sectional study, 7.3% of preprints from 2020 had received at least 1 comment (mean follow-up of 7.5 months), with a median length of 43 words. Criticisms, corrections, or suggestions (most commonly regarding interpretation, methodological design, and data collection) were the most prevalent types of content in these comments, followed by compliments and questions…

While some might question whether preprint comments could fulfill the roles usually attributed to peer review, the task of the commenter seems different from that of reviewers. On average, comments are much shorter than peer-reviewed reports (a mean [SD] of 99.3 [213.0] words, much smaller than the reported mean of 477 words for open journal peer review).

JAMA Network Open (Clarissa França Dias Carneiro et al)

Relationship between journal impact factor and the thoroughness and helpfulness of peer reviews

This study used fine-tuned transformer language models to analyse the content of peer review reports and investigate the association of content with the Journal Impact Factor. We found that the impact factor was associated with the characteristics and content of peer review reports and reviewers. The length of reports increased with increasing Journal Impact Factor, with the number of relevant sentences increasing for all content categories, but in particular for Materials and Methods. Expressed as the percentage of sentences addressing a category (and thus standardising for the different lengths of peer review reports), the prevalence of sentences providing suggestions and solutions, examples, or addressing the reporting of the work declined with increasing Journal Impact Factor.

PLOS Biology (Anna Severin et al)

Survey of open science practices and attitudes in the social sciences

Our large-scale survey of scholars in four social science disciplines—economics, political science, psychology, and sociology—indicates that there is widespread support for open science practices. Support for posting data or code is higher than support for pre-registration, although on average, support is greater than 50% even for pre-registration. We find little credible evidence of a difference between the stated support of newer entrants to fields and published authors. There is variation among the social science disciplines, with sociologists reporting less support than economists, political scientists, and psychologists. However, favorability is relatively high even among sociologists.

Nature Communications (Joel Ferguson et al)

Who tweets scientific publications? A large‐scale study of tweeting audiences in all areas of research (paywall)

We find that, although half of the tweeters are external to academia, most of the tweets are from within academia, and most of the external tweets are responses to original tweets within academia. Only half of the tweeted publications are tweeted outside of academia. We conclude that, in general, the tweeting of scientific publications is not a valid indicator of the societal impact of research. However, publications that continue being tweeted after a few days represent recent scientific achievements that catch attention in society. These publications occur more often in the health sciences and in the social sciences and humanities.

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Lin Zhang et al)

Impact of publisher’s commercial or non‐profit orientation on editorial practices: Moving towards a more strategic approach to supporting editorial staff

Publishers could greatly support editors by providing more accessible and diverse training opportunities, as well as fostering a culture of experience exchange, both this study participants and previous research have emphasized. Respondents agreed that the demands of the constantly evolving and competitive publishing industry make continuous learning essential for scientific editors, a skill set with which academics are often not equipped. Unfortunately, heavy workloads and time constraints present major obstacles to professional growth, a fact well documented in prior studies.

Learned Publishing (Katarina Krapež)

JB: I haven’t had a chance to read this paper in detail yet, but at first glance it seems valuable. As tensions between editors and publishers increase, we need more research to better understand the dynamics and requirements of both parties.

Gender Disparities in First Authorship at Three Medical Universities in an Area Affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake

Our findings are consistent with those of previous related studies. Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns, and school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic have also disproportionately affected scientists in the biomedical field (23–26). Female scientists, particularly those caring for children or other family members during the pandemic, have reported a substantial reduction in the time they have available for research (41–43). Consequently, the academic productivity of female scientists has declined (23–26). These results, together with our own findings, collectively suggest that major disasters reinforce existing disparities in academic productivity between male and female researchers.

Kobe Journal of Medical Sciences (Yuko Ono et al)

Transforming scholarly communications: The part played by the pandemic and the contribution of early career researchers (paywall)

A majority of ECRs thought that there had been significant changes in the scholarly system, and a large minority thought that the pandemic was responsible. Most of them wanted a system that was more open in terms of open access and open data, with a third taking personal action to bring about change.

Learned Publishing (David Nicholas et al)

And finally...

Brands are a core part of scholarly communication. I learnt a huge amount about how to create a successful brand strategy from Nicky Borowiec, who led the rebranding work for the Nature Portfolio a few years ago.

Nicky had a near impossible task. There were many people who had (very strong) views on how best to utilise the Nature brand. Somehow Nicky managed to create a cohesive branding strategy for the Nature Portfolio while ensuring that everyone had their voices heard.

[By way of background, first there was Nature Publishing Group, which then become Nature Research, and now is Nature Portfolio. Confusing? Yes, but that wasn’t Nicky’s fault — her job was to sort out the mess that we’d collectively created.]

Here’s how Dean Sanderson, who was Managing Director of Nature Research Group at the time, described Nicky’s work on that project:

Nicky now works for herself and launched her new website this week. If you need support on how to position your flagship journal’s brand alongside your scholarly society’s brand, for example, then Nicky is a great person to speak to. She’s started posting blogs on her website. I especially enjoyed:

I should point out that Nicky didn’t ask me to write this testimonial. I just wanted to support her in the best way that I can — she’s exceptionally talented and is one of life’s “good people” to boot.

Until next time,

James

P.S. If you got this far, please hit reply and send me a brief (one word will do) message, which will help to teach the email servers that my messages are trustworthy.

Journalology

Journalology #44: One year on

News

​The DEAL Consortium and Elsevier Announce Transformative Open Access Agreement for Germany​

​Scientific sleuths spot dishonest ChatGPT use in papers​

​Medical-evidence giant Cochrane battles funding cuts and closures​

​Strike at outbreak-alert service ProMED to end — but tensions remain​

​Why a blockbuster superconductivity claim met a wall of scepticism​

​Five years of Plan S: a journey towards full and immediate Open Access​

​Monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of UKRI’s open access policy​

​PLOS earth science authors choose preprints​

​Open access strategy: De Gruyter expands Subscribe to Open program to accelerate OA transformation​

​OUP to launch interdisciplinary research resource​

​ScienceOpen implements Scite smart citation badges on 75+ million article records​

​Frontiers implements new policy to counter ‘Authorship-for-sale’​

​IOP Publishing appoints Dr. David Gevaux as Chief Editor of Reports on Progress in Physics​

​STM Integrity Hub incorporates Clear Skies' Papermill Alarm screening tool​

​Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR)​

Community Corner

Opinion

​I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published​

​MDPI Insights: The CEO’s Letter #3​

​Does the use of AI tools in academic publisinng represent a new form of ghost authorship?​

​AI in Medicine—JAMA’s Focus on Clinical Outcomes, Patient-Centered Care, Quality, and Equity​

​Author Experience: Building a Framework for Successful Author Engagement​

​It’s time to increase the momentum behind open access publishing​

​Threads: When My Personal and Professional Words Collided, with a Bluesky Detour​

​Peer review in a changing world​

Other opinion articles