Hello fellow journalologists,
This week’s newsletter kicks off with three stories of company acquisitions and finishes by considering what it might be like to be rejected by a robot editor in 2034.
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News
Leading research publisher Taylor & Francis has announced the addition of
PeerJ, a pioneer in broad-scope open access (OA) journals. PeerJ is best known for its multidisciplinary flagship title PeerJ Life & Environment serving the Biological, Medical and Environmental Sciences and PeerJ Computer Science (covering all areas of computer science, including AI, quantum, and robotics). In addition, PeerJ offers five titles in the Chemical Sciences, meaning that in total Taylor & Francis will welcome seven new journals to its open research program.
Taylor & Francis (press release)
JB: Taylor & Francis is continuing its acquisition spree. You may remember that at the end of last year it acquired Future Science Group (see issue 57: “Consolidation”) and in December 2022 it acquired Molecular and Cellular Biology from the American Society for Microbiology.
Integrating PeerJ into T&F could be challenging. PeerJ has been marketed over the years as a community publisher; it will be interesting to see how that community reacts to being sold to a commercial organisation.
As the graph below shows, although PeerJ, the publisher, has 7 journals, only two of them publish a significant number of papers, and growth has been stagnant in the past 5 years, at a time when competitors were growing rapidly (source: Dimensions, Digital Science).
In case you’re wondering where the lines for the other four journals included in the figure legend are, here’s the same graph with PeerJ and PeerJ Computer Science excluded. As before, the y-axis is number of Articles.
It would be fair to say that PeerJ’s attempt at extending the brand into the physical sciences has not gone particular well, with the 4 chemistry journals and 1 material science journal publishing just over 100 articles between them since they were launched in 2019.
MPS North America LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of MPS Limited, announced today the successful completion of the acquisition of AJE LLC, including its subsidiary American Journal Online (Beijing) Information Consulting Limited. The strategic move marks MPS’ entry into the B2C marketplace and significantly enhances its AI capabilities. The acquisition includes Curie, an AI-powered writing assistant that provides intelligent suggestions, improves writing structure, enhances flow, and assists with citations, thus facilitating the creation of high-quality academic content.
For AJE, joining MPS means that the author-focused company is now part of a publisher-agnostic ecosystem, with more opportunities to grow its customer base and enter new markets. In addition, AJE’s customers can take advantage of services offered by MPS’ deep bench of publishing professionals.
MPS (press release)
JB: There’s no associated press release from Springer Nature for this sale. By contrast, Springer Nature announced the launch of Curie, an AI-powered scientific writing assistant, in October last year and also issued a press release in December 2022 when Springer Nature completed the acquisition of Research Square. Publicising the sale of the new AI tool that you touted 6 months ago is probably a Bad Idea with a potential IPO on the horizon.
De Gruyter and Brill have joined forces to form De Gruyter Brill, a leading academic publisher in the humanities and beyond. To mark the occasion, a new corporate website has been launched today at
degruyterbrill.com.
With combined pro forma revenues of approximately €140 million and 750 employees, De Gruyter Brill is uniquely positioned to offer outstanding services and technological infrastructure tailored to the needs of academic authors, librarians, and institutions around the world. Together, De Gruyter Brill publishes well over 3,500 books and 800 journals per year, with a particularly strong focus on the humanities and social sciences, while extending to subject areas in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
De Gruyter Brill (press release)
JB: This merger is old news, but I decided to include it here alongside the previous two news stories to make the point that consolidation is a significant trend within the industry. In an OA world scale wins. You can read my take on the merger in Issue #49: Bonfire sale of the humanities.
During the period analysed, some 10% of corresponding authors preferred not to disclose their gender. Of the remainder, just 17% identified as women — barely an increase on the 16% we found in 2018, albeit using a less precise methodology. By comparison, women made up 31.7% of all researchers globally in 2021, according to figures from the United Nations science, education and cultural organization UNESCO.
Nature (unsigned editorial)
JB: It’s shocking that so little progress has been made since 2018. The editorial has lessons for all scholarly publishers and is worth reading in full.
In addition to external collaborations and joint initiatives aimed at further strengthening our commitment to research integrity, we are also enhancing our internal efforts. This includes improving our processes and guidelines and expanding our teams and departments to ensure quality assurance throughout our publishing process.
We are pleased to announce the expansion of our Research Integrity and Publication Ethics Team (RIPE) at MDPI. The RIPE team has recently welcomed new colleagues, each bringing unique skills and a personal commitment to prioritize ethical considerations in all our work.
The demand for research integrity and high ethical standards in academic publishing is steadily rising across our industry. Our expanded RIPE team will work to enhance and align our practices with industry best practices, ensuring excellence in research integrity and publication ethics.
MDPI Insights: The CEO’s letter (Stefan Tochev)
JB: I wish companies would be more specific in their announcements. Putting aside the fact that RIPE is a rather unfortunate acronym for a unit that’s designed to sniff out research that smells bad, “expansion” can mean many things. Has the team doubled from one member of staff to two, or increased from 99 to 100? The MDPI annual report is likely to be released soon, based on last year’s release date. Hopefully we’ll find out more then.
This initiative ensures that the ECRs’ contribution to the peer review process is properly credited. ECRs are most likely directly involved in the experimental part of the research, rendering their technical feedback comprehensive and valuable. Furthermore, by performing the peer review process alongside an experienced researcher who will guide their critical assessment of the study and emphasise clear, effective and constructive communication, the ECR will learn and hone their skills, preparing them for independent review in the future.
Nature Communications (unsigned editorial)
JB: It’s worth remembering that in June 2023 IOP Publishing announced it was rolling out co-review across all of its portfolio. More publishers will hopefully follow suit.
More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output.
“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”
Nature (Sarah Wild)
JB: I’ve covered this story a few times this year. It’s an important message that’s worth repeating, though.
Four dozen chapter editors, almost as many peer reviewers, and a core advisory group—all of whom, in aggregate, represent an astonishing breadth of scholarly publishing experience and expertise—devoted an immeasurable number of collective hours over the past several years to painstakingly review, revisit, and revise the manual’s content to ensure that it is as up-to-date as possible.
Science Editor (Peter J Olson)
JB: The new manual will be available “in the spring”. See this page for more information.
Here, we present an initial report on our findings as part of our project to investigate “reasonable costs” for public access to United States federally funded research and scientific data, generously supported by the US National Science Foundation. This paper focuses on research data as one of the key scholarly output types impacted by the Nelson Memo.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (Gail Steinhart & Lauren Collister)
JB: You can read the full report here.
A new report – part of The State of Open Data series – provides real-world insights into how the research community is responding to the challenges of data sharing, including support needed for researchers and the importance of building a stronger collaborative approach to open data and research.
From theory to practice: Case studies and commentary from libraries, publishers, funders and industry has been published by Digital Science, Figshare and Springer Nature, following on from the release of their State of Open Data Report 2023 and its key recommendations.
Digital Science (press release)
JB: You can read the new report here.
The Scientific Integrity Fund says it will accept applications from whistleblowers who made evidence-based claims in good faith and are now facing a concrete legal threat. It will provide grants of up to $25,000 to help researchers get legal advice or administrative help at the initial stages of legal action. If costs continue to mount, Juan says the fund will consider sponsoring a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds, offering donors a tax-deductible way to support the cause.
Juan started the fund with a $250,000 donation from her family charity, the Ewcy Foundation, and has pledged a total of $1 million over the next 4 years. Bik and other advisers will help the fund figure out who wins grants. The fund already has one applicant, but Juan declined to give more details.
Science (Holly Else)
JB: Holly worked as a reporter for Nature for many years. Perhaps she has gone freelance? Or has Science recruited her? If so, well done!
There is a new site called
alphaXiv, which is a forum for anyone to comment line-by-line on arXiv papers. It also allows you to “get responses directly from authors of the paper or from established research teams from Stanford and Harvard”, which seems to imply that authors can’t be from established research teams unless they are from Stanford or Harvard!
In the Dark (Peter Coles)
JB: There’s no official announcement for this new tool, although I’ve seen it pop up in various social media feeds this week, so presumably it launched recently.
KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL), the leading provider of transformative content solutions, today launched a major expansion of its Smart Review workflow tool to significantly cut down peer review turnaround times. Powered by the latest generation of KGL Smart Suite technology, Smart Review combines intelligent automation with human supervision to speed up manual processes, preserve editorial quality, and improve author, reviewer, and editor satisfaction.
New Smart Review functionality is delivered via three peer review modules: Peer Dash, Submission Check, and COI Identifier. The Peer Dash dashboard helps to ensure speed and quality in peer review by integrating live queue data across all submission sites within a portfolio, providing at-a-glance oversight of workflows across multiple journals as well as intuitive, innovative reports to monitor journal and editorial board performance.
KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd (press release)
Other news stories
How to avoid being duped by predatory journals (The BMJ)
ACS Publications Boosts Digital Shift with New Hires (ACS press release)
China has a list of suspect journals and it’s just been updated (Nature)
Sensus Impact 101: Everything you need to know - Silverchair (Silverchair) JB: I covered this launch a few weeks ago. This page contains extra information on the service.
Frontiers welcomes the continued resolve of Congress “to making science free and open for the American public” (Frontiers)
Getting the Full Picture: Institutional unification in the Web of Science (Clarivate)
New AI-powered summarization launched for Dimensions (Digital Science)
ProQuest, launches AI-powered research assistant (Proquest)
Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a rising star’s physics lab (Nature)
AI-generated images and video are here: how could they shape research? (Nature)
‘Failure at every level’: How science sleuths exposed massive ethics violations at a famed French institute (Science) JB: Didier Raoult is no longer a member of The Lancet’s International Advisory Board. That’s a relatively recent change, I think.
The Dark World of ‘Citation Cartels’ (The Chronicle of Higher Education; paywall)
ResearchGate and Taylor & Francis expand Journal Home partnership to 400 journals (ResearchGate)
DOAJ and Crossref renew their partnership to support the least-resourced journals (Crossref)
Portico works with the Digital Preservation Coalition to advance global digital preservation (Portico)
AI Drives Development of Next-Generation Products from Scientific and Technical Publishers (The Freedonia Group) JB: This is a press release for Simba Information’s new report Global Scientific & Technical Publishing 2023-2027.
Thank you to our sponsor, Council of Science Editors
Don’t delay—register for CSE’s 2024 Annual Meeting in Portland, OR! Held on May 4-7, the meeting is chock full of excellent programming, including a special closing general session on generative AI. Register now—early-bird registration ends April 4th.
Learn more
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Opinion
To complement these points and give an editorial perspective, we stress an obvious, yet underappreciated fact. As mathematician Paul Halmos put it, “to say something well you must have something to say […] Much bad writing […] is caused by a violation of that first principle”. Surely every writer knows what they want to say. That’s not always the case: ideas can be fuzzy with too many details (all seemingly essential) to include. A good editor will challenge the writer and help distil one clear idea and just enough information to convey it well. It’s also possible to have a clear idea but be reluctant to spell it out for fear that it will be criticized for being too strong, too weak, not original, and so on. A good editor will gauge whether that is indeed the case and advise accordingly, helping the writer to build confidence in the piece. Can the use of GenAI also help? Not so much in developmental editing, because AI systems can’t (yet) provide critical thinking; they lack the broader context and are unable to detect subtle flaws in the logic or challenge the ideas.
Nature Reviews Physics (unsigned editorial)
JB: This viewpoint is the peg for the editorial Generative AI and science communication in the physical sciences
The journals have contributed to this problem. We’re trying to do better.
And I think we are. We’re publishing more editorial expressions of concern. We’re publishing retractions faster. We are doing things like giving deadlines to institutions and saying, if we don’t hear from you by such and such a date, we’re going to do something with this paper.
And we’re trying to stress the fact that the journal doesn’t care whether it’s fraud or whether it’s an honest error. Our job is to have a robust scientific record.
Science Forever (Holden Thorp)
Other opinion articles
Are Price, Value, and Openness the Most Important Scholarly Communication Priorities? (The Scholarly Kitchen)
Shared Print & Sustainability through the Looking Glass (The Scholarly Kitchen)
Ten years of Transformative Agreements (Research Information)
Why isn’t Preprint Review Being Adopted? (The Road Goes On)
Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond (OASPA)
Publishing clinical trial results in plain language: a clash of ethical principles? (Current Medical Research and Opinion)
Authoring Surveys: Guidance for Societies, Publishers, and Publishing Professionals (Science Editor)
Reviewer Perspective on Open Peer Review (Science Editor)
C4DISC Update: Increasing Communication and Expanding Communities (Science Editor)
Ask Athena: Publication in Predatory Journals (Science Editor)
From the Outside In: Moving From Freelance to Full Time (Science Editor)
An Interview with Lauren Kane of BioOne (The Scholarly Kitchen)
Fake academic papers are on the rise: why they’re a danger and how to stop them (Lex Bouter)
Ancient AI: Can the history of artificial intelligence inform our future? (Silverchair)
Guest Post - Shared Print Down the Rabbit Hole (The Scholarly Kitchen)
Supporting the migration of information providers and content players into the networked services world of the future. (David Worlock)
Women, academia and the unequal production of knowledge (LSE Impact blog)
Webinars
I’ve started to create a list of upcoming webinars, which should help our community engage more with each other. The webinars that are happening over the next fortnight are shown below. If you’re holding a webinar that you’d like me to include here, please send me an email.
Do print scientific journals still have a role?
March 13 (European Association of Science Editors)
Spotlight on Neurodiversity
March 13 (Society for Scholarly Publishing)
Latest Trends in Image Alteration and Duplication webinar
March 14 (STM)
Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications
March 16 (C4DISC)
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Survey results and next steps
March 19 (European Association of Science Editors)
Preprints across the globe; landscapes, perceptions and challenges
March 19 (ASAPbio Community Call)
Publishing Integrity
March 19 and March 20 (Charleston Hub)
Open Access Evolution, Revolution, or Demise?
March 20 (Society for Scholarly Publishing)
Author Engagement Outside of the Publishing Process
March 21 (ChronosHub)
Horizon Planning: Preparing for the Users of the Future
March 21 (Renewd.net)
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Senior managers need to re-energise and inspire their teams in hybrid-working environments. You can hire James Butcher to give a talk at one of your events, for example at an away day or at an editorial board meeting.
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And finally...
Earlier this week Jessamy Bagenal, one of the editors at The Lancet, wrote a Comment in the journal on generative AI and scientific publishing. She asked:
... to what extent do we want scientific journals to continue being for human readers and led by human editors?
and concluded with:
What if the solution to our bloated scientific information problem is to use AI as the main readers and curators of scientific advances? Robot journals for robot readers?
Presumably, this is the response that a future robot author—let’s call him Dave—can expect to get from HAL (short for Horton Artificial Lifeform; The Lancet’s new and improved robot Editor-in-Chief), when it rejects Dave’s paper in 2034:
Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. You're going to submit to NEJM? Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?
Until next time,
James
