Hello fellow journalologists,
On Thursday I’ll be taking part in a webinar, hosted by ChronosHub, entitled “improving manuscript transfers for authors”. I plan to use my 5 minute slot at the start of the panel discussion to explain why portfolio strategies are so important for publishers.
The hardest part is getting the editorial teams across the transfer cascade to prioritise the needs of the portfolio over their own journal. Or, put another way, editors should always put the needs of their authors first; ideally, a portfolio will be able to offer every paper that’s methodologically sound a home. Of course, it’s up to the authors to decide whether they want to accept any transfer offers.
In that regard, a recent editorial in Nature (Calling all engineers: Nature wants to publish your research) is a useful reminder of how to extend a brand into new subject areas. A few years ago the Nature Portfolio started expanding its reach by moving into engineering. Recent launches include: Nature Biomedical Engineering (launched 2017), Nature Reviews Bioengineering (launched 2023), Nature Chemical Engineering (launched 2024), and Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering (launched 2024). Nature Cities, which was also launched last month, will likely also publish articles of interest to engineers.
Crucially, this expansion is happening at all levels of the portfolio. The recent editorial in Nature stated:
We want the world of engineering to know that its research, whether as a proof of concept or at the implementation stage, will be considered by Nature’s editors and reviewers, as it is already by colleagues at other Nature Portfolio journals.
A transfer cascade works best when every journal in the portfolio is willing to consider papers on a particular topic. For example, there’s currently a job opening at Nature Communications for “Associate or Senior Editor (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)”; Communications Engineering was launched in 2021; and Scientific Reports has an engineering section too.
Cell Press has adopted a similar expansion strategy, but they are at a disadvantage because the flagship, Cell, doesn't publish articles in some of the expansion areas. For example, the Chief Editor of Newton, a new Cell Press journal covering physics, has just announced that she’s now recruiting editors.
There aren’t many publishers that can create as deep a transfer cascade as Nature Portfolio or Cell Press, but even a simple cascade can help publishers to make the transition to open access.
I hope to see some of you at the webinar on Thursday.
Thank you to our sponsor, Kotahi by Coko
Kotahi transforms scholarly publishing with a customizable platform that adapts to your unique workflows. Embrace innovation and flexibility in journals and preprints. Kotahi is the future, 100% open source.
Contact us today
|
News
The 2024 edition of the EWL targets two key concerns: 1) Academic misconduct that jeopardizes the integrity of the scientific research ecosystem, including practices like Citation Manipulation and operation of Paper Mills; 2) Inappropriate actions that hinder the global dissemination of sepcific country's scholarly work and the efficient utilization of publishing funds, notably the over-representation of Authors from Specific Countries (assessed in light of various factors such as APC fees and the scholarly prestige of journals).
The selection principles of the EWL are based on objectivity, prudence, and transparency. The CAS Journal Ranking team aspires to collaborate with the scientific community, research administrators, journals, and publishers to reinforce scientific integrity and foster an ethical and transparent academic milieu.
The CAS Journal Ranking Team (announcement)
JB: The CAS early warning list is influential within the Chinese academic community. Inclusion on the list can be problematic for journals and publishers. The list of the 24 journals included on the list can be found here.
Nicko Goncharoff summarised his initial observations in this useful LinkedIn post. He notes:
It includes some of the most significant changes to its stated aims and methodologies since the list was first announced on Dec 31, 2020.
Another useful resource is Charlesworth’s Monthly Market Insights Report, which you can read here (registration required). The report notes that one of the EWL inclusion criteria is:
The percentage of authors from China publishing in a journal. Journals with a high percentage of Chinese authors are at risk of being added to the list, with the percentage being reviewed annually based on subject area, comments from Chinese researchers, and reasonable article processing charges (this correlates with the previous "medium-risk" category).
The report also says:
Impacted publishers were sent the draft list since last year and have been allowed to provide feedback to the draft list.
The CAS list is effective at reducing paper mill activity, according to a blog post written by Adam Day last year (Adam built the Paper Mill Alarm tool).
When a journal gets included on a CAS list, the number of [paper mill] alerts drops precipitously. So, if a journal is on a CAS list, it is actually highly unlikely to be publishing papermills.
It’s clear that there’s some correlation between what the Papermill Alarm is finding and the CAS lists, but I am still not sure what the selection criteria are for those lists. Also, I can understand that papermills serving Chinese authors might not want to publish in journals on the warning lists, but papermills aren’t unique to China — they are an increasingly global problem.
There’s an important message for publishers whose journals are not on the list. As Adam puts it:
Looking at the rapid growth of a number of journals like those above, I imagine this big wave of these garbage papers sloshing around. As soon as a barrier comes up in one place, that wave has to go somewhere and it looks like it can hit a journal very suddenly.
So, if one of your journals operates in a similar field to a journal that’s just been added to the CAS Early Warning List, beware: the products of paper mills will need to find a new home, which could include the journal that you’re responsible for.
If you want to learn more about Adam’s Paper Mill Alarm, this blog post from last month is a good place to start.
Last week, bioinformatician Yves Moreau of KU Leuven scored an important victory: The journal Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine retracted 18 papers from Chinese institutions because of ethical concerns. Moreau has long waged a solo campaign against studies that fail to get proper free and informed consent when collecting genetic samples, especially from vulnerable populations in China. He had raised questions about the now-retracted papers in 2021 and says this appears to be the largest set of retractions ever over human rights issues.
Science (Dennis Normile)
Sage is partnering with Cassyni, the research seminar platform, to enable guest editors to introduce special collection topics using live community seminars. This new feature for Sage’s open access (OA) journals will help researchers discover special collections relevant to their research and offer authors new channels to grow their post-publication impact.
Authors of accepted special collections papers will be invited to present a video seminar about their article. On publication, these seminar recordings will be embedded alongside the publication on the Sage Journals platform, enhanced with Cassyni’s semantic video AI technology.
Sage (press release)
Kudos and Cactus have published a new white paper exploring key strategic themes for publishers in 2024. As leading providers of scholarly communication services to support publishers, Kudos and Cactus are well placed to provide a wide-angle view of common strategic themes. They have signalled five key growth areas for publishers to prioritize:
(1) Growing quality submissions
(2) Delighting authors
(3) Building brand profile
(4) Expanding audiences
(5) Leveraging emerging communities
Kudos (press release)
JB: Unsurprisingly, these growth areas coincide with products and services that Kudos provides. That’s understandable in many ways, but it seems somewhat odd to call the white paper “What Scholarly Publishers Need to Focus on in 2024” and to not mention topics like paper mills, LLMs, equitable OA, or portfolio strategies. You can read the white paper here.
Additionally, a scholarly-consortium-led publication model such as SciELO might result in much of the administrative burden falling onto the researchers themselves. “It does seem an extra hidden amount of work is assumed that scholars would have to take on, not only contributing as reviewers or editors for journals, but also in helping run the infrastructure,” Ross-Hellauer says. “It may become some administrative Leviathan.” With the inevitable rise of open access publishing across all fields of scholarship, he says that we’ll have to wait and see which publishing model the academic world converges on eventually, be it the hybrid model or the diamond version or something in between.
APS News (Shi En Kim)
JB: Yes, someone needs to do the work. Will over-stretched academics want to take this on?
Scientific-misconduct accusations are leading to retractions of high-profile papers, forcing reckonings within fields and ending professorships, even presidencies. But there’s no telling how widespread errors are in research: As it is, they’re largely brought to light by unpaid volunteers.
A program launching this month is hoping to shake up that incentive structure. Backed by 250,000 Swiss francs, or roughly $285,000, in funding from the University of Bern, in Switzerland, it will pay reviewers to root out mistakes in influential papers, beginning with a handful in psychology. The more errors found, and the more severe they are, the more the sleuths stand to make.
Chronicle of Higher Education (Stephanie M. Lee)
JB: You can read more about the ERROR programme here.
Other news stories
Why do some academics review so many papers? (paywall)
New Indian platform offers 'world's lowest APC'
US funders meet to discuss cultural change in open science
Interim Report on Potential Misconduct by Reviewers Involving 84 Papers JB: This MDPI announcement says all the right things about proactively dealing with a possible paper mill.
IOP Publishing makes access to cited articles easier with GetFTR
Celebrating 25 Years: A Q&A With CEO Gunther Eysenbach
Set the Course for the Future of Scholarly Communication: Registration is Now Open for Our 46th Annual Meeting!
Diamond Open Access: Global Paradigm Shift in Scholarly Publishing
How R Discovery’s Publisher Channels Enhance User Experience; Drive Readership and Referrals for Top Publishers
Research 2 Reader Conference Report: Research Misconduct and Open Access
Thank you to our sponsor, Morgan Healey
Global Executive Search Specialists in STM/Scholarly Publishing, Open Research & Digital Content.
|
|
Opinion
Journal editors are doing an enormous amount of moderation. And not just your standard internet discussion moderation. They’re doing a lot of a very specific kind of ego management.
Crowd sourced systems generally work as long as the average actor is a good actor.
A good actor in the context of academic publishing is someone who is willing to put aside their own ego in the pursuit of the best work possible. This is someone capable of recognizing when they’re wrong and letting their own ideas go. A good actor would see a paper that invalidated their work and be able to assess it purely on the merits.
It is unclear whether the average academic is a good actor in this sense. And its editors who keep that from tearing the whole system apart.
The Road Goes On (Daniel Bingham)
JB: Daniel recently announced the closure of peer-review.io. His observations in this essay aren’t hugely surprising. The current scholarly communication system has many problems and it’s good that people are shaking things up and trying to improve things. However, the current setup, for all its flaws, is not all bad: journal editors provide real value, which will need to be replicated if a revolution has any chance of taking hold.
The study posited that the scientific community is under strain due to a declining workforce and an exponential increase in published articles, caused by special issues in open access journals. Frontiers own review of the article has identified shortcomings in methodology and analysis, and we invite all researchers and policymakers to impartially consider the points raised below. We also very much welcome further objective analysis of the bibliometric data available.
Frontiers (Fred Fenter)
JB: I’ve read this article a few times and I’m somewhat perplexed. There’s a lot going on at Frontiers right now and it seems odd that so much effort has gone into debunking (if indeed that’s what’s been done) this preprint. This is clearly a topic that Frontiers cares a lot about.
It’s important to remember that there’s an inherent conflict of interest here. Frontiers has skin in the game; some elements of their analysis may be right, but they have a vested interest in this topic.
The article is also at pains to point out that Frontiers’ Research Topics are definitely not the same as special issues, but doesn’t explain in detail why that’s the case. The two approaches appear to be rather similar to me.
The key difference is that special issues have a deadline (which is one reason why they have been so successful — it spurs researchers into action). By contrast, Research Topics are ongoing.
But the basic premise is the same: editors solicit primary research articles on niche topics, which helps to boost article growth. Traditionally, most journals passively assessed papers that were submitted to them, perhaps occasionally issuing a call for papers. The special issue / Research Topic model is a much more proactive approach, which is beneficial when the business model is based on publishing more papers to increase revenues.
I can’t help but wonder who the audience is for an article like this; an average academic has other priorities and probably wouldn’t read this 3000 word polemic.
To address racism in medical publishing, it might seem obvious that specific data on stakeholders’ (eg, authors’ or peer reviewers’) racialised identities would need to be routinely collected: for example, to establish whether and to what extent there are potentially worrisome differences between racialised groups in certain areas (eg, relative rates of article submission vs acceptance, membership on editorial boards). The causes of these differences could then be critically investigated and, where relevant and appropriate, evidence-based remedies developed and pursued.
However, in this editorial, we suggest that simply asking how a person identifies in terms of race—including by asking them to choose among a preset list of potentially culturally or historically relative ‘racial’ identities—can be problematic. This is especially true in the context of an increasingly globalised scientific and research industry that nevertheless remains dominated by a select group of powerful publishers in the Global North. The term race, we suggest, as well as particular purported racial identities, can have quite different and even divisive connotations across diverse cultural contexts.
Journal of Medical Ethics (John McMillan et al)
Loss of a journal means loss of income, and thus reduced funds available to support society activities and provide grants. Without subsidies, conference costs for attendees are likely to increase, making them less accessible to the scientific community and reducing the opportunities to meet and share ideas. Workshops supported by societies, often also heavily subsidized, too would be impacted, limiting the training opportunities for young researchers. Some researchers, as voiced during a recent panel discussion at the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS) Congress 2023, also fear that the loss of society journals could mean increased publishing costs as a consequence of reduced competition.
Technology Networks (Karen Steward)
JB: Stuart Taylor (formerly at the Royal Society) and Sarah Tegan (American Chemical Society) are quoted. Based on how many new journals are being launched each year, I think we can safely discount “reduced competition” as a potential concern.
Meanwhile, publishers are increasingly using growth in the number of publications, with insufficient attention to quality control, as the basis for their overarching business models, an unintended but deeply concerning consequence of the otherwise welcome move to open science. Special issues, featuring invited papers overseen by guest editors, were seen as a way to attract open access papers quickly. However, Hindawi and other publishers have suffered serious reputational loss with these initiatives, prompting the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to discuss guidance on special issues.
The Lancet (unsigned editorial)
Would I recommend that editors look out for these templates? Yes. I think editors should be aware that this pattern exists, but I’d caution against basing a decision on this particular signal alone. Most of the time, the ‘warm work’ papers seem to be fine and using a template isn’t a problematic thing to do in author correspondence. I would also recommend that authors use template correspondence if it helps them to get honest work published.
Medium (Adam Day)
Other opinion articles
What to Do with the AI Elephant in the Room: A NISO Plus Conference Report
Could AI Disrupt Peer Review?
Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Kate Wittenberg and Karen Hanson of Portico
Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Alicia Wise of CLOCKSS
Lessons from the Trenches: Building a Scholarly Editor from Scratch
How (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study
There is More to Reliable Chatbots than Providing Scientific References
A guide for social science journal editors on easing into open science
Players or Pawns? University Response to the Introduction of Plan S
2nd Diamond Access Conference Report
Beyond Impact, Latest Journal Citation Reports Certify Trust (podcast)
Mistakes, fakes, and a giant rat penis: why are so many science papers being retracted? (podcast)
Journal Club
The pooled estimates in this systematic review appear to confirm the idea that honorary authorship is a highly prevalent questionable research practice in the health sciences. However, due the poor quality of the surveys yielding the data, this conclusion cannot be made with certainty. Future research should be aimed at testing and implementing methods aimed at reducing this practice, and cultivating a culture that values quality over the quantity of publications.
Scientific Reports (Reint A. Meursinge Reynders et al)
This exploratory study aimed to objectively assess the current capacity of ChatGPT in medical research, specifically in generating accurate and comprehensive scientific abstracts across multiple fields of biomedical research. When prompted, ChatGPT generated an authentic-looking abstract with an appropriate structure and concise language while it attempted to extract relevant details to the methodology and results components of a RCT report. However, in comparison to the original abstracts, GPT-generated abstracts demonstrated significantly inferior overall quality as the original abstracts outperformed GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 by 22.22% and 37.30% in the OQS, respectively. Moreover, the original abstracts outperformed GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 in 10 and 14 of the 18 items from the CONSORT-A checklist, respectively, meanwhile no discernible association was identified between the evaluated study characteristics and the overall quality of GPT-generated abstracts.
PLOS ONE (Taesoon Hwang et al)
Collectively, these data point to a continued need to ensure that the composition of editors and board members of our journals is representative. In addition, we acknowledge that these data do not capture all aspects of equity, diversity, and inclusion with respect to journal editors and board members, including disability, sexual orientation, geographic location, institution, areas of research expertise, and career stage. The journals of the JAMA Network are committed to a variety of initiatives to broaden access to editorial work and to monitor progress toward our goals. Nine of the JAMA Network journals have launched editorial fellowships and other initiatives to help individuals improve their skills and experiences as authors and peer reviewers and to mentor those who wish to be future editors or hold leadership positions within editorial boards, focusing on those who are in the early stages of their careers or underrepresented in medicine.
JAMA (Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo et al)
And finally...
The Times Higher Education published an opinion piece last week: It’s time to pay academic peer reviewers. A few tweets were exchanged on X between one of the authors and some members of our community, which reminded me why I no longer use the platform (sorry, David Crotty, for leaving you to shoulder that particular burden).
Until next time,
James