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.
Journalology #58: Lessons learned
Hello fellow journalologists, Scholarly publishing has experienced seismic shifts this year and it’s been challenging to determine the likely implications of generative AI, paper mills, PRC (publish, review, curate) etc. We work in a niche area, but scanning the news wires has been like drinking from a fire hose at times. This week’s issue is no different, I’m afraid. 2000 people subscribed to Journalology in 2023, joining the 700+ who signed up last year. Thank you for your words of encouragement, especially those subscribers who were kind enough to leave a testimonial (it’s not too late to contribute), and to the sponsors who have started to support the newsletter recently. As always, please feel free to forward this newsletter to your colleagues. Share and enjoy! NewsTackling publication manipulation at scale: Hindawi’s journey and lessons for academic publishingOne consequence of what we have learned from the experience of Hindawi is a growing awareness of the vulnerability to manipulation not just of our own workflows but also that of the third-party services we rely on and the downstream platforms that provide services and metrics for scholarly communication more widely. For example, we, like many other publishers, rely on trusted third-party providers to help find recommendations for reviewers. Such platforms often rank reviewer performance and reliability based on the number of reviews an individual has done. If these platforms are infiltrated with bad actors using false or multiple identities, they can in turn infiltrate the reviewer databases of many publishers simultaneously. In addition, downstream services that provide information about author identity or that rely on citations and mining the literature to evaluate researchers will also be impacted. Wiley white paper (unsigned) JB: The integrity problems in the Hindawi journals was one of the biggest stories of the year. Wiley did the right thing and paused publication of special issues in Hindawi journals when they discovered evidence of paper mills. The Wiley share price plummeted as a result and the CEO subsequently lost his job. This white paper is important because it helps the scholarly publishing community better understand what went wrong and how Wiley responded. Well done Wiley for sharing this ‘after action review’. Editors and publishers should read it. There’s a significant risk that other publishers will see what happened to Wiley’s financial performance and will try to brush future problems under the carpet rather than deal with them in an open and transparent way. That would be a disaster for our industry. Prevention is better than cure, of course, and the Hindawi experience should encourage publishers to up their game and be increasingly wary of publishing low quality (or plain fraudulent) work in return for an APC. Reputation is everything and once it’s lost it’s very hard to get back. Frontiers' Research Topic Publishing Program: Pioneering the Future of Scientific PublishingResearch Topics emerged to prepare for the 21st-century pivot in science towards spontaneous academic collaborations, multifaceted global partnerships, the intricate dependencies of multidisciplinary research, and a growing spectrum of technologies and expertise needed to generate new science. Our Research Topics program is a dynamic response to the rigid academic taxonomies of traditional journals that constrain how science can progress.
Recognizing the importance of evolving scientific focuses, Frontiers introduced RTs as a flexible, adaptive, and vibrant publishing venue that caters to dynamically self-organizing research communities. RTs are not what are traditionally known as "special issues."
JB: This article makes the case that Frontiers’ research topics are different from special issues. Presumably it was written with an academic audience in mind (or perhaps future investors?), trying to convince them that the Frontiers’ approach is trustworthy. The article goes on to say: There is no “special” treatment for submitted articles; they must undergo Frontiers’ rigorous and constructive peer review process by appointed editors and community of reviewers empowered by AI, which is far ahead of any other publisher. And then: While Research Topics are intrinsic to Frontiers’ journals, not an add-on as is the case with special issues, they are optional on our partner journal platform You can understand why Frontiers wants to try to get on the front foot and change the narrative about research topics / special issues, as their article output has dropped significantly this year. In the month of October 2022 the Frontiers portfolio published 8516 research articles, according to Digital Science’s Dimensions database. In October 2023 that number fell to 4170 research articles, a decrease of more than 50%. The table below shows the ten Frontiers journals that decreased in output the most in October 2023 vs October 2022 (Dimensions criteria: 'date:[202X-10-01 TO 202X-10-31]' in full data; Document Type is Research Article; Publisher is Frontiers). The drop in revenues will be significant, especially since the company’s overhead increased from 762 staff at the end of 2020 to over 2500 staff now. Put another way, in the first 10 months of 2020 Frontiers published around 29,000 research articles (according to Dimensions) and had 760 staff. Over the same period this year, the organisation published 58,000 research articles and ‘over 2500 staff’. So, all things being equal, revenues doubled, but the overhead cost base tripled or perhaps even quadrupled (yes, there are a lot of assumptions in that statement, but it’s surely true to say that costs have increased a lot faster than revenues, because of the recent downturn in article output). The table below shows the number of open-access research articles published between January and October in 2022 vs the same 10 month period in 2023. (Dimensions Criteria: 'date:[2022-01-01 TO 2022-10-31]' in full data; Document Type is Research Article; Open Access is Gold or Hybrid). The table is sorted so that it shows the top 10 publishers, by article output, in 2022. There is an important caveat. The search criteria run until the end of October each year; it’s possible (perhaps even likely) that not all content published in the later months of 2023 have been indexed yet. So interpret these data with a sizeable chunk of caution. Hindawi saw the biggest drop in output, although maybe some articles have been reclassified as ‘Wiley’, which might explain Wiley’s strong growth. MDPI only grew by 2%, which is significant in itself because output almost doubled between 2020 and 2022 (comparing January to October in those years). It’s not clear to me what’s happened at Frontiers and why their article volumes have dropped so much compared with other publishers. It seems likely, given this week’s article arguing that research topics are distinct from special issues, that Frontiers believes that the academic community has become wary of the special issue editorial model and is trying to distance itself from it. Surge in number of ‘extremely productive’ authors concerns scientistsUp to four times more researchers pump out more than 60 papers a year than less than a decade ago. Saudi Arabia and Thailand saw the sharpest uptick in the number of such scientists over the past few years, according to a preprint posted on bioRxiv on 24 November. The increase in these ‘extremely productive’ authors raises concerns that some researchers are resorting to dubious methods to publish extra papers. Nature (Gemma Conroy) JB: You can download the preprint here. Announcing the launch of SignalsI’m excited to share a product I’ve been working on, Signals 🔴🟡🟢
Signals helps prevent publication fraud. It enables users to gauge the legitimacy of a research article by surfacing robust insights about the authors from article metadata.
Try it out yourself: www.research-signals.com
LinkedIn (Elliott Lumb) The Transformed Agreement: German library consortium and Frontiers announce world’s largest fully open access agreementFrontiers and the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED) have announced the launch of the first transformed framework agreement - a national, fully open access flat-fee deal - for Germany. This landmark agreement is an innovative initiative designed to champion open access to scientific research, and to provide long term budget security for institutions.
Under this agreement, and through a single annual payment from each participating institution, more than 900 German research centers and libraries will be enabled to support their affiliated researchers to publish an unlimited number of peer-reviewed articles across all Frontiers journals and Frontiers’ partner journals. The agreement is Frontiers’ first flat-fee agreement in Europe and will run for three years starting in January 2024.
Frontiers (press release) JB: A flat-fee agreement makes a lot of sense for a publisher when article volumes are decreasing, rather than increasing exponentially as they were this time last year. New community focused recognition program for FrontiersLaunched in September 2023, the pilot program offers participating editors and reviewers the opportunity to redeem recognition points in exchange for article publishing charge (APC) discount vouchers for personal use.
In a significant departure from standard recognition programs, participants will also be able to elect to donate accrued benefits to support a community fund. The fund will be used to issue discounts to researchers from low-income and low-middle-income countries who apply for support.
Frontiers (press release) JB: PeerJ introduced something similar a year ago (see issue 14 of Journalology). The Frontiers pilot is being run on 4 journals; the press release says that the pilot is “expected to run for six to nine months in the first instance with the aspiration to roll it out more widely in late 2024.” This kind of initiative is much needed, in my opinion, and Frontiers deserves credit for experimenting with reward models. “Editors and reviewers from participating journals can find further information in the 'how it works' and FAQs section of My Frontiers”… which (I think) means that the further information is not publicly available, which is a shame. The STM SDG Roadmap Level 2 is launchedToday, STM launched Level 2 of our SDG Roadmap, an applicable collection of tools and resources that publishers of all sizes can use to ensure their work supports and aligns with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
“This Roadmap was crafted collectively by STM members from across the globe,” said Rachel Martin, Global Director of Sustainability at Elsevier and Chair of the STM Social Responsibility committee. “We’re committed to translating these ambitions into tangible outcomes.” While Level 1 offers publishers a foundation for getting started, Level 2 is where you can move from planning to action using the provided tools, templates and actionable blueprints.
STM (announcement) How high-impact papers from Indian researchers are shaping scienceIndia was the world’s third-most-prolific publisher of research papers in 2022, but it was ranked only 153rd for the number of citations it received per paper. Indeed, in 2020, about 30% of papers from India were not cited at all, compared with 20% in both the United States and China. These trends are mirrored in many other low- and middle-income countries whose researchers struggle to get published in high-impact journals.
But despite this challenging publishing environment, some Indian scientists have produced influential, highly cited studies in a number of fields in the past few years. Here Nature highlights several of these key areas of research that have the potential to improve public health and quality of life both domestically and globally.
Nature (Michael Eisenstein) Publications Output: U.S. Trends and International ComparisonsGlobal publication output reached 3.3 million articles in 2022, based on data from the Scopus database of S&E publications. The regions, countries, or economies with the largest volume of S&E publications in 2022 were China, with 27% of global output, and the United States, with 14%. From 2012 to 2022, the global yearly publication total grew by 59%. In terms of growth for these two largest producers, China and the United States had noticeably different expansion in their levels of overall production (growing by 173% and 6%, respectively). National Science Foundation (unsigned report) JB: This graph gives a good representation of the relative strength, by region, for the major areas of STM publishing. The report is packed full of graphs like this and is a useful resource for understanding the global publishing landscape. One for publishers to bookmark. For the love of Science…AdvancesI was honored that my deputy editor colleagues selected me to serve as the chair of the Deputy Editorial Board for several years and then as the first academic editor for Science Advances. The journal grew rapidly. In 2015, our first full year of operation, the journal received just short of 1900 submissions. Nine years later, we have nearly 50 deputy editors and over 350 associate editors, all deeply committed to science. They manage ~20,000 annual submissions with a current acceptance rate of 10.3%; that translates into publication of roughly 2100 highly impactful papers with broad coverage across diverse areas of science. The scientific editors are blessed to be working with a superb team of colleagues at the at Science Advances editorial office. The staff, also deeply committed to science, smoothly manage assignments, reviews, and the entire publishing process for over 400+ new manuscripts per week. Science Advances truly is a well-oiled machine. Science Advances (Ali Shilatifard) JB: Over the years there’s been a lot of focus on the growth of sound science journals, like PLOS One, BMJ Open and Scientific Reports (and publishers like Hindawi, MDPI, Frontiers and BMC of course), but in many ways a more interesting development has been the rise of selective open access journals like Science Advances, Nature Communications, Cell Reports, and JAMA Network Open, which have grown rapidly and captured many of the high quality papers that used to be published in society journals. A topic for another newsletter, perhaps. In the meantime, you may want to take a look at issue 20, which compared the relative strengths of Nature Communications and Science Advances using Dimensions. Cassyni seminars integrated into Dimensions, further connecting research video into the scholarly ecosystemGoing forward, Cassyni seminars will be indexed in the Dimensions dataset. The inclusion of Cassyni’s semantic video knowledge within the Dimensions’ platform unlocks the potential to use research video for benchmarking, analytics and evaluation, significantly increasing its utility and relevance in the scholarly context.
Within Dimensions, users will be able to find Cassyni seminars using a new publication type filter. All seminars will have a complete detail page with associated metadata. As the partnership develops, Cassyni’s enhanced video player will be embedded on the page allowing Dimensions users to watch seminars from within the platform, search the video and navigate slides.
Cassyni (press release) Looking back at 2023Articles published in 2023 have accrued over 31,800 views and over 4,700 downloads over the year – reflecting both the significant visibility of articles published on the platform and the benefits for authors in reaching wider audiences when publishing open access. Wellcome Open Research Blog (Collette McKenny) JB: In total 526 articles were published in Wellcome Open Research, so the average (mean) number of page views per article was 60. If you subscribed to this newsletter recently, issue 33 is worth reading (my favourite of the year, probably). Here’s a relevant quote from that issue: The average OA usage for a Nature article in 2022 was 39,186 article views. The median OA usage across the 2,326 cOAlition S transformative journals was 1287 article views. So each Nature article generated, on average, 30 times more OA usage than the median journal in the data set. Put another way, one Nature article generates, on average, more article views than the entire Wellcome Open Research corpus. Or, alternatively, 60 article views is 2.5% of the median usage across the 2326 cOAlition S transformative journals. tldr; usage of Wellcome Open Research is tiny. Publishing an article is not enough. Researchers want their message ‘Amplified’ too. Do I sound like a stuck record?!? Other news storiesAIP Publishing and ResearchGate announce new Journal Home partnership for their open access journals Nick Ishmael-Perkins joins Chemical & Engineering News as its next editor in chief North–south country collaborations reveal untapped potential Introducing SSP's AI in Scholarly Publishing Community of Interest (CoIN) Emerald Publishing 2023 recap Celebrating a Successful Year at ALPSP! Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) 2023 Year in Review Superconductivity debunker: this physicist exposed flaws in a blockbuster claim OpinionInstagram as a Valuable Scholarly Publishing Social Media Tool: This Platform Is Not Just for Influencers AnymoreAnother important point is that our work is serious business. We are mired in deadlines and editorial policies and Open Access mandates and platform woes. Our editorial boards are burdened with handling submissions and simultaneously hoping for more yet dreading the thought of more. Our authors have so many choices of where to publish before they perish. Dare I say that Instagram can offer everyone a brief respite from the grind and allow for accessibility to content and community in an entirely different way? Science Editor (Jennifer Regala) Food for Thought: What Are We Feeding LLMs, and How Will this Impact Humanity?The provocation I put forward is what happens when we have models growing ferociously in capability, but we decline to train them of the very best sources of human wisdom and instead have them learn on the longer tail of less rigorously curated information, or information that is out of date. What does that do to the risk that these technologies are needlessly rough on humanity? If we succeed in getting the LLMs unhooked from the best sources of information right as they are set to have whole new sets of capabilities emerge and are being integrated into everything, how might that play out? Do we want the tech oligopoly turning to simulations to generate the training data? The Scholarly Kitchen (Stuart Leitch) Valuing a broad range of research contributions through Team Infrastructure Roles: Why CRediT is not enoughTIR [team infrastructure roles] contributions are therefore invisible in research assessment if the focus remains on publications, even when contribution roles are described by the CRediT taxonomy. CRediT is a step forward as it allows for a more transparent recording of contributions, but only for a limited range of research outputs. Contributorship on tangible research outputs, while more transparent, is therefore still insufficient to evaluate all research contributions. The current research assessment system needs to be reimagined so that the entire spectrum of research activities and contributions to the research process are valued. Commonplace (Esther Plomp) JB: This is one of a series of articles about how to change career recognition structures. Links to the other articles can be found in the introductory editorial. Richard Smith | Inspired a GenerationBut, things are no better and things may well be worse and, just like I’ve become very sceptical of medicine, I’ve become very sceptical of journals. I think the whole business of producing a lot of original research and sending it off to practising clinicians on a weekly basis makes no sense whatsoever because they don’t read it and, if even if they did, the idea that they would change their practice in the light of one trial in a particular journal, and when you think that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of research studies being done every year and you send people a small random selection of some of them, makes no sense whatsoever. What I think journals can do is just what the mass media do, raises issues, dig into issues, speak truth to power, expose corruption. But the publishing of science should be another thing all together and there are much better ways to distribute science. Medics Voices (Richard Smith interviewed by Domhnall MacAuley) JB: Richard Smith, the former Editor of the BMJ, is always entertaining and Domhnall is a great interviewer. Don’t binge on Netflix over the holidays. Watch this instead. Richard’s book The Trouble With Medical Journals should be required reading for all biomedical editors. An Interview with Prof. Dr. Liying Yang of the Chinese Academy of SciencesWe appreciate the tremendous contribution that international publishers have made to the advancement of Chinese research. Through the EWL, we aim to remind publishers to strengthen quality control while also focusing on issues that the Chinese research community must confront. We want to avoid situations where a small number of problematic journals could lead to more serious consequences, such as imposing a comprehensive ban on a combination of journals that implicates more journals than those that are known to be problematic. The Scholarly Kitchen (Mary Miskin interviews Liying Yang) Other opinion articlesHow to level the global publishing playing field Experience Karger AI and ChatGPT in Research: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly To fee or not to fee: Charging for deposit to research data repositories Assigning Institutions — New England Journal of Medicine Case Study Pockets of humanity in a world of automated research writing The Evolution of THE Journal: Enhancing the JU Experience for All Constituents And finally...This is the last email of 2023. I think we all need a rest from scholarly publishing news, don’t you? Over Christmas I plan to dip back into Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less to remind myself that I need to spend more time with my family and less time writing newsletters on a Sunday morning. It’s a good book and worth a place on any gift list. Until next year, James P.S. I will be at the APE conference in early January. If you will be attending too please do say hello, especially if we’ve never met before. |
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.
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, When I write these newsletters I try to add value by giving my opinion on the story behind the story. Getting the balance between insight and speculation is hard; I have no desire to create a gossip magazine. Last week I wrote about the new collaboration between JACC (Journal of the American College of Cardiology) and The Lancet and I read the tea leaves wrong. The downside of working for corporates for 20+ years, as I have, is that it can...
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