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 #62: Going platinum
Hello fellow journalologists, In the last two issues of this newsletter I did a deep dive into the article output of Frontiers (issue 60 and issue 61). I’m not planning to delve any further in this week’s newsletter, but I did want to wrap things up by summarising some of the messages that Journalology readers kindly sent to me last week. I am not the only one who is fascinated by what went on at Frontiers it seems. The big unknown is why Frontiers’ article output from China dropped so quickly at the start of 2023. A couple of readers suggested that it could be because three Frontiers journals were named in the CAS Early Warning Journal List in January 2023 (CAS is the commonly used acronym for the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences). However, that can’t be the underlying reason because three Frontiers journals were also included in the 2021 CAS warning list at a time when article output was growing fast. [If you want to remind yourself about the CAS warning lists, these two articles from The Scholarly Kitchen are a good place to start: An Early Look at the Impact of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Journals Warning List An Interview with Prof. Dr. Liying Yang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences An updated version of the CAS warning list is expected soon, I understand.] I’ve spent 20+ years working on selective journals. I’ve got very limited experience of ‘special issue’ publishing models, which is perhaps why I didn’t consider that the downturn could be due to Frontiers altering their commissioning strategy. A sizeable chunk of Frontiers’ research articles come from special issues, which are commissioned. One Journalology reader suggested that the publisher may have deliberately put the brakes on commissioning special issues with guest editors based in China, which would likely reduce primary research submissions from China. Frontiers might have wanted to do this if they were worried that the proportion of papers published from China was becoming too high, risking delisting from key indexers. This intuitively makes sense so me, although the timing still feels odd. Why would Frontiers scale rapidly by hiring hundreds of new staff in 2022 only to then slam on the brakes, making 600 colleagues redundant with all the negative consequences that follow? I suspect that the full story will emerge over time, but for now let’s shelve this topic and move on to other news. NewsRoyal Society of Chemistry and TIB co-create next generation Open Access consortium modelBeginning in 2024, the four-year agreement bridges the gap to 2028 when the Royal Society of Chemistry plans to transition all its fully RSC-owned journals to Open Access.
The RSC Platinum consortia model in Germany is a new community Open Access model, co-designed by the RSC and TIB, enabling participation from all academic and research institutions, including non-publishing institutions.
The four-year agreement provides unlimited publishing services (submission, peer-review, hosting, indexing, promotion, etc) supporting authors and readers at 77 institutions in Germany. Authors at participating institutions can read and publish in all RSC journals without any author-facing charges. From 2028, under a renewal of the model, all content will be fully Open Access and authors from participating institutions can publish without author charges.
Royal Society of Chemistry (press release) JB: This quote from the RSC’s Sara Bosshart in today’s announcement suggests that there’s some kind of subscribe-to-open element to it: At the heart of the model, is the potential for participation from all types of institution, including those that don’t publish. We hope that the success of this collaborative model in Germany will serve as a template by which we can develop similar models in other countries to ensure the costs of publication in an OA world are distributed across relevant stakeholders and not the sole-responsibility of research-intensive institutions – or individual authors.” I followed up with Sara on LinkedIn this morning, who responded: Hi James Butcher, yes, there is a community element to the pricing structure, so the more institutions that participate, the better the overall rate for all participating institutions. For those of you who don’t get involved in library consortia negotiations (you lucky things), here’s a quick primer. A key problem with transitioning library consortia from a subscription model (pay to read) to an open-access model (pay to publish) is that some institutions within the consortia will end up paying a lot less and some institutions will pay a lot more. Research intensive institutions, which publish a lot of articles, will have a larger bill to pay if a publisher’s portfolio flips to open access, as the RSC intends to do in 2028. Other institutions, which don’t publish much research, have historically been paying to read the content, and so will be financially better off if the publisher flips all of its articles to open access. Unsurprisingly, this can cause significant tensions within a consortium; after all, no one wants to pay more, especially if someone else is paying less. It sounds as though this deal makes it attractive for institutions that ‘consume’ rather than ‘produce’ to participate in the RSC deal. The model is called the “RSC Platinum consortium model”. Does anyone else remember the RSC’s Gold for Gold model from 10+ years ago? Ah, those were the days. Open access models were so much simpler back then. German startup Morressier snaps $16.5M Series B funding to transform scholarly communicationsMorressier, the Berlin-based startup fortifying the integrity of scholarly communications, has successfully closed a Series B funding round, raising $16.5 million. The round was led by Molten Ventures and saw participation from existing investors, including Redalpine, Owl Ventures, and Cherry Ventures. Morressier’s latest investment comes on the heels of its $16 million (€15 million) Series A round announced in May 2021, with plans to allocate additional funds for strategic acquisitions.
Morressier is dedicated to providing societies and publishers with transformative workflows for scholarly communications. Headquartered in Berlin, with offices in London and Washington DC, Morressier envisions a world where all scientific outputs are traceable and trustworthy. The company serves as a crucial ally for academic societies, institutions, and publishers in their pursuit of research integrity.
Tech Funding News (Jason Matthews) JB: At the start of last year Morressier partnered with IOP Publishing “to develop an integrated, state-of-the-art platform that will streamline the peer review and journal submission process”. For decades publishers have had to choose from the same manuscript tracking systems (e.g. Editorial Manager, eJP, ScholarOne etc.). There are now more options to choose from including Kotahi and Opus Journal. Morressier’s platform may well be the best funded, however, which will be a significant advantage. There's a long history of failed attempts to build peer-review systems (summarised here); the community will be watching how these new tools develop with interest, since being able to provide a good experience for authors, editors and peer reviewers is a competitive advantage. Science’s fake-paper problem: high-profile effort will tackle paper millsUnited2Act’s statement is the outcome of a summit last May that was convened by COPE and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), based in Oxford, UK. Researchers, research-integrity analysts, publishers and funders attended the meeting, and produced five areas that need action, enshrined in the statement. Each point has an associated working group, which will: improve education and awareness of the problem; conduct detailed research into paper mills; improve post-publication corrections; support the development of tools to verify the identities of authors, editors and reviewers; and ensure that the groups across publishing that are tackling the issue communicate. Nature (Katharine Sanderson) JB: I covered United2Act in last week’s issue, but somehow managed to miss this Nature news story, which provides useful background. Unethical studies on Chinese minority groups are being retracted — but not fast enough, critics sayMoreau and a few other researchers have alerted publishers to 96 papers over the past half-decade, and raised questions about genetic databases that hold data from minority ethnic groups. Ethical concerns are particularly acute in forensic science because the field has close connections with law enforcement, Moreau notes. So far, however, only 12 of the 96 flagged papers have been retracted. In most cases, decisions on whether to retract a paper are still pending — some more than three years after Moreau raised his concerns. He adds that he has found hundreds more articles that he has yet to challenge. Journal editors say that investigations can be lengthy because they are complex. But Moreau says that “the inordinate delays by many publishers in issuing decisions amount to editorial misconduct”. Nature (Dyani Lewis) We have amended our Special Issues criteriaIn the humanities and social sciences, it is an established model for some journals exclusively to publish thematic issues under guest editors. These journals are often scholar-led and diamond open access. DOAJ has no wish to exclude such journals from the index, so we have listened to and consulted with the community. As a result, we have removed this restriction in order to avoid unjustly penalising reputable journals following this publishing model. All other aspects of the new policy remain in place. DOAJ News Service (announcement) Sociology journal’s entire editorial board resigns after Springer Nature appointed new leadershipThe entire editorial board of a sociology journal has resigned after they say that the publisher, Springer Nature, installed new editors-in-chief without consulting the board — but Springer Nature says they tried unsuccessfully to engage the board on planning going back at least five years.
In December 2023, senior editors of the journal, Theory and Society, learned Springer Nature “had opted for a ‘completely different view’ of the journal going forward,” according to a message shared on a listserv for the American Sociological Association and published on the blog Scatterplot. The 10 senior editors subsequently resigned, they told their colleagues, but didn’t offer additional details.
Retraction Watch (Ellie Kincaid) JB: It would be easy to see this as another mass resignation protesting against commercial publishers, but it’s worth reading the article in full to get the complete story. For-profit publishing giants ‘big winners’ of open access pushOver this period, the number of open-access publications increased tenfold from about 194,000 to 1.9 million annually – a compound growth rate of 21 per cent, the paper adds.
However, while the arrival of new players showed the overall market had become “more competitive”, the trend in the “high-end market” of open-access journals – those indexed by the Web of Science, which also grew tenfold, from 65,434 in 2008 to 640,169 in 2020 – showed a “shift in market concentration” towards larger publishers.
Times Higher Education (Patrick Jack) JB: Is this news? In an increasingly open access world scale wins. We can expect more market consolidation in the years to come, with the largest publishers increasing their market share. Open-access papers draw more citations from a broader readershipThe authors also found that “green” open access—in which authors deposit journal-accepted manuscripts in public repositories when published—has a greater citation diversity advantage than those published as “gold” open access, whose authors pay publishers a fee to make them immediately free to read. Huang speculates that might be because a green paper may appear in multiple repositories—institutional and discipline-based—whereas gold papers tend to appear in only one, the publishers’ website. “People might be able to find a paper more easily when it’s available in multiple places” and then cite it, Huang says. “That remains something we need to study further.” Science (Jeffrey Brainard) An open approach for classifying research publicationsWe introduce an open approach to the algorithmic classification of research publications. This approach builds on a methodology we developed more than a decade ago. While this methodology was originally applied to closed data from proprietary sources, we now apply it to open data from OpenAlex. We make available a fully open classification of publications. The research areas in this classification are labeled using a new labeling approach, and the classification is presented visually using the VOSviewer Online software. We also release open source software that enables anyone to reproduce and extend our work. Leiden Madtrics (Nees Jan van Eck and Ludo Waltman) JB: OpenAlex has rapidly become an important part of scholarly publishing infrastructure. The approach this new tool takes is not novel, but now the data are available for anyone to explore. Kudos launches major SDG studyThe Real World Change study will explore the attitudes and needs of researchers, universities, funders, and policy makers. You will understand how funding is being allocated to SDGs, and how this might map onto publisher innovation in services relating to accelerating progress against the SDGs. Survey findings will be synthesized and analysed alongside desk-based research, with recommendations provided around how best to engage with the opportunities arising from SDG-related funding. A snapshot of key survey results will be publicly shared in a white paper and related speaking engagements, where your sponsorship will be publicised. The complete data set and full recommendations will only be made available to sponsors. Kudos (press release) JB: This week Kudos also published this announcement: Influential publishing organizations continue to choose Kudos SDG initiatives, with BMJ, Brill, Cabells, CrossRef and and Wiley all partnering with Kudos (joining Springer Nature, SAGE, Royal Society of Chemistry, American Chemical Society and American Society of Civil Engineers). Other news storiesDana-Farber retractions: meet the blogger who spotted problems in dozens of cancer papers Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) now available on the Scopus Organizational Profile OASPA members pass the 1m articles annual output milestone for the first time in a calendar year EASE launches new regional chapter for Germany Wiley reopens plagiarism case about dead researcher’s work The open-science movement for sharing laboratory materials gains momentum Research and Scholarly Forum at London Book Fair, March 14 Exclusive: Elsevier journal COPE threatened with sanctions will retract four more articles Canadian Science Publishing goes live on OA Switchboard AIP Publishing Makes Initiative for Open Abstracts 2023 Hall of Fame Up-Dated ICMJE Recommendations (JB: the annotated PDF shows what's changed) Nature journal starts research replication push OpinionIs Email an Important AI UI for Publishing?Utilising email as an interface for AI opens up some very interesting possibilities. AI can, for example, automatically categorize incoming emails based on content, highlight priorities based on urgency or relevance to specific tasks, or even extract and summarize key information. Or AI could go further and facilitate our work by integrating with systems to enable 'machine events' such as updating the state or status of a object in a workflow platform, initiating the next stage of a process, automatically validating any documents that are attached to the email etc. Robots Cooking (Adam Hyde) JB: I really enjoyed this article. I hadn’t considered the benefits of email in this way before. How journal communities can ensure reproducible social scienceResearch in business and management aims to provide sound and credible evidence upon which business and policy leaders can base their decisions. But to what extent can we trust the scientific results? The answer depends on whether the results are transparently documented (reproducible) and whether they are robust and broadly applicable (replicable). While replicability is ultimately an empirical question, to be explored in further studies, reproducibility is a matter of scientific rigour, and provides the groundwork for replicability. In our recent article, Reproducibility in Management Science, we wanted to explore these issues by (for the first time) estimating the reproducibility of a broad range of almost 500 studies in Management Science, a leading academic journal in business and management. Impact of Social Sciences (Miloš Fišar et al) Weighing the Cost: Open Access Article Publishing Charges, Waivers, and Society MembershipThe data show that there have been increases in submissions and accepted manuscripts received from members, and it may be inferred that individuals are joining ACG in lieu of paying the $500 APC. As it stands, the current waiver program allows ACGCRJ to publish more articles than before its inception while maintaining financial solvency. Science Editor (Neen LeMaster, Morgan Huntt, Claire Neumann) JB: The acronym ACGCRJ stands for ACG Case Reports Journal. Here's the backstory: … the ACGCRJ APC was set at USD$500 and is waived for corresponding authors who are ACG members, authors whose submissions are transferred from another ACG journal, and authors whose submissions were initially received prior to January 1, 2022, when the APC was rolled out. Society publishers should read this article, which provides a lesson on how publishing can become a benefit of membership. This approach wouldn’t necessarily work for all article types (Case Reports tend to be short with lower costs of publication), but the principle is sound. Are open bibliometric data sources better than proprietary ones?Last year we tasked scidecode science consulting to carry out a study on the impact of Plan S on scholarly communication. We required that the results of work have to be disseminated with an open licence, including the data. Therefore our partners at scidecode had to make sure that the bibliometric data they used in their impact study was open and also good enough to carry out the needed analyses.
To assess this, scidecode science consulting conducted an interesting experiment with the aim to prove that the quality of bibliometric references from open metadata sources is at least as good, if not better, as that provided by commercial entities.
Plan S sOApbox (Nora Papp-Le Roy) JB: The choice of wording is interesting here: “with the aim to prove” suggests an inherent bias towards showing that open is better than closed. I’m more likely to trust an assessment that has an open mind about possible outcomes, rather than a closed view of what might be true. You can read the study here: Choosing a data sample provider for our study on the impact of Plan S. How efforts to assess university contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals fall shortI’m not saying the SDGs aren’t important. I’m saying the opposite: they are too important to use as a vanity project. If universities want to assess their contribution to the SDGs, they should seek to understand the actual SDG targets and indicators, and then weigh up how their missions and investments align. If they can then evidence any genuine contribution towards meeting those actual targets, then all well and good. But don’t just tell me how many papers you published whose keywords align with the SDGs. We need to make sure that by showcasing our contributions to the SDGs we aren’t compounding the very problems we’re trying to solve. Impact of the Social Sciences (Elizabeth Gadd) JB: This article is written with universities in mind, but it could equally well apply to publishers. If you work on your organisation’s SDG programme you should read this. Other opinion articlesAI and the Future of Image Integrity in Scientific Publishing Increasing Crossref Data Reusability With Format Experiments Crossref DOIs, persistent discovery, and the digital preservation of 7.5 million items Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Stephanie Orphan of arXiv #PIDfest - Bringing the PID Community Back Together Again! Promoting reproduction and replication at scale Let’s Be Cautious As We Cede Reading to Machines If generative AI is saving academics time, what are they doing with it? What new data can tell us about the essential role of social science to innovation Journal ClubHistorical Assessment of Three Extinct Portable Peer Review and Cascade Peer Review ModelsThree experimental paid peer review TPSs [third-party service] (Axios Review, Peerage of Science (PoS), and Rubriq), as discussed next, were either not met with success or were not widely accepted or adopted, so these peer review experiments were short-lived. In all three cases, the general objective was for authors, editors, journals or publishers to outsource peer review—at a cost or a price—to a private company, a TPS, which would then identify suitable peer reviewers who would conduct peer review and make a judgment and decision on the paper. When this service was ordered by authors, the revised paper and peer reports would then be submitted to a journal, all in the hope of improving and/or speeding up peer review ibres (Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva) JB: This is a useful overview of the failed experiments to offer paid peer review via intermediaries. Those of us who have been working in the industry for a while will remember these initiatives; this article provides a useful reminder of what was being offered and insights into why they didn’t work. Comparison of effect estimates between preprints and peer-reviewed journal articles of COVID-19 trialsIn this study, we analyzed the consistency in treatment effect estimates between RCTs first available as a preprint and subsequently published in a peer-reviewed journal. We found only trivial discrepancies between COVID-19 preprints and subsequent journal articles in most pharmacological treatment RCTs. Nevertheless, some outcomes were added and deleted in the journal articles compared with the preprints and one trial showed a change in the direction of effect between preprint and subsequent journal article. BMC Medical Research Methodology (Mauricia Davidson et al) JB: Editors of clinical journals will be interested in this paper, which suggests that the main findings included in the preprint and version of record were relatively consistent, which is reassuring. And finally...Last week I posted some thoughts on LinkedIn about how people working in editorial roles often feel less valued now than they have done previously (the same can be said for staff working in publishing, production and other ancillary roles). These thoughts have been percolating for a while, but this is the first time I articulated them in public. I’ve pasted the text below for those of you who didn’t see the LinkedIn post. Is editorial expertise truly valued by scholarly publishers? I’m increasingly of the opinion that the answer is often “no”. I’m not alone. At the recent Academic Publishing in Europe conference in Berlin a common theme in the coffee break conversations was that many publishing companies care more about quantity than quality, and are hiring accordingly. Technologists are taking the helm. They’re tasked with making the publishing process faster and doing more with less. Speed, efficiency and cost control are what matter most. Editorial traditions, honed over decades, are perceived to be part of the problem. Corporate executives’ primary concern is delivering double-digit revenue growth, and in an APC economy that means publishing more articles. Editorial staff who raise concerns about research integrity will not be popular in the C suite. In OA business models authors are the customers; authors want to be published fast; the customer is always right. Editorial checks and balances slow things down. Publishing expertise is synonymous with old-school thinking. AI is the future. Editors are the past. This is nonsense, of course. Editors play a vital role because without reputation there is no revenue. Once a brand is damaged it’s almost impossible to repair (just ask Hindawi). We can all agree that scholarly publishing is slow and inefficient. Change is needed, powered by technology, but we mustn’t lose sight of the core editorial values that underpin success. --- Yesterday, The New York Times published an opinion piece entitled “Boeing Made a Change to Its Corporate Culture Decades Ago. Now It’s Paying the Price.” Here are some excerpts that have parallels with our industry: “What got lost in all this shuffling is a corporate culture that once prized engineering and safety, replaced by one that seemed to be more focused on delivering profits over perfection.” and... “What Boeing has missed, as it tried to dump costs and speed production, was the chance to ensure that safety was a cultural core and a competitive advantage.” --- How can we champion editors’ crucial leadership role? How can we make CEOs understand that a culture of editorial quality is a competitive advantage and vital to long-term commercial success? How can we train editors to think commercially, while maintaining their independence and integrity? Does any of this resonate with you? If so, leave a comment below. We should have this conversation in public, not just whispered over coffee at a conference. Much of the value is in the comments, which you can read here. It’s not too late to join the discussion. Until next time, James |
Journalology
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, Many of us took part in Peer Review Week, which ends today. The sheer scale of the number of events was overwhelming (see here). You can watch my own contribution, alongside Danielle Padula from Scholastica, on YouTube by clicking the play button below: We talked about how the role of a journal editor may be affected by advances in technology. (My 8-year-old son was very impressed that I’m a ’YouTuber’, but he complained: “I didn’t...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Are scholarly publishers a force for good? Many academics certainly don’t perceive commercial publishers that way. This week we consider whether (with apologies to Stephen Sondheim): We ain’t no delinquents, We’re misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good! The same topics come up again and again in this newsletter: open access equity, research integrity, peer review, reproducibility and so on. This week is no different. There’s a...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, This week I attended the ALPSP annual conference and met some Journalology readers at the event, which was lots of fun. The quality of the presentations and panel discussions was excellent; the organising committee and wider ALPSP team did a fantastic job. I’m still reflecting on what I learned, in particular what the future might hold for small society publishers in an open access world where scale wins. The star of the show was...