Hello fellow journalologists,
It’s been a slow news week, with the biggest story being a vague announcement from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about a new open access policy, which will go live at the start of next year.
I’ll be taking some time off over the Easter break and so issue 72 of this newsletter will arrive in your inbox 2 weeks from now.
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News
Since 2015, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led a bold Open Access policy that prioritizes the access, transparency, and equity of funded research. With a decade of experience and lessons learned, the foundation is refreshing its Open Access policies to address ongoing challenges and advance systemic change in scholarly publishing
- Requiring preprints and encouraging preprint review to make research publicly available when it’s ready. While researchers and authors can continue to publish in their journal of choice, preprints will help prioritize access to the research itself as opposed to access to a particular journal.
- Discontinuing publishing fees, such as APCs. By discontinuing to support these fees, we can work to address inequities in current publishing models and reinvest the funds elsewhere.
- We will work to support an Open Access system and infrastructure that ensures articles and data are readily available to a wider range of audiences.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (announcement)
JB: It’s not clear from the announcement whether the Foundation will mandate that author-accepted manuscript have to be published under a CC BY license. However, they have made it clear that the version of record does not need to be published open access:
Grantees can continue to publish in the journal of their choice but are not mandated to select the Open Access option for the journal’s version of record.
Funders like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, HHMI, and the Wellcome Trust have a large influence on the discourse around open access and scholarly publishing. Representatives from some of those organisations have told me in the past that the filtering function of journals isn’t needed because “we only fund the best researchers”.
In other words, some funders believe that the filtering can be done at the researcher level, and that the “best” researchers (i.e. the ones that the elite funders give cash to) will always produce high quality work.
There may be an element of truth to that claim, but the logic is surely not applicable to every funder and every funded researcher, otherwise this newsletter wouldn’t be covering stories each week of paper mills, image manipulation etc.
[As an aside, an analogous approach has recently been adopted by a group of Italian researchers who have created the Top Italian Scientists Journal. Apparently only researchers with an H-index of over 30 can publish there (no, this is not an April Fools’ Day joke).]
I’ve written in the past about the incredibly low usage of articles published in the Wellcome Open Research repository. The same may well be true for Gates Open Research, which has only published 484 articles since it was announced 6 years ago (plus around 1900 Documents, Posters and Slides).
Plan S released an announcement in response to the new Gates Foundation policy.
The policy refresh anticipates elements included in the
Towards Responsible Publishing (TRP) proposal – most notably its support for the early sharing of preprints and the post publication peer review model. cOAlition S will await the results of the
researcher consultation and other feedback gathered, before taking any decision regarding this proposal, including how to support payments for scholarly publishing.
Publishers that generate most or all of their revenues from a Gold APC model will be watching how this develops with great interest.
The Gates Foundation policy is essentially based on Plan U; its biggest benefit is its simplicity. In the authors’ words:
But because it sidesteps the complexities and uncertainties of attempting to manipulate the economics of a US$10B/year industry, Plan U could literally be mandated by funders tomorrow with minimal expense, achieving immediate free access to research and the significant benefits to the academic community and public this entails. Funders and other stakeholders could then focus their investment and innovation energies on the critical task of building and supporting robust and effective systems of peer review and research evaluation.
The move is latest such event in what seems to be an emerging form of protest: the mass resignation of academic editors.
So far this year, the editors of five journals have resigned together, according to an unofficial tally by the website Retraction Watch. This followed 12 such moves in 2023, a big increase over the preceding years (there were 2 such events in both 2021 and 2022). The tally starts in 2015, although earlier events have been recorded.
Nature (Katharine Sanderson)
JB: This news story does not answer the question posed in the title.
Two BMC journals – part of the Springer Nature stable – have flagged studies a month after 10 editors at one of the journals resigned to protest the publications’ failure to respond quickly to allegations of data fabrication.
As we reported earlier this month, obstetrician-gynecologist and sleuth Ben Mol sent allegations about papers published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women’s Health on Jan. 29, 2024. When BMC had not responded to Mol by February 28, 10 editors quit.
Retraction Watch (Ivan Oransky)
Kalliokoski’s systematic review examined the reliability of a test designed to assess reward-seeking in rats under stress. A reduced interest in a reward is assumed to be a proxy symptom of depression, and the test is widely used during the development of antidepressant drugs. The team identified an initial pool of 1,035 eligible papers; 588 contained images.
By the time he’d skimmed five papers, Kalliokoski had already found a second one with troubling images. Not sure what to do, he bookmarked the suspicious studies and went ahead with collating papers for the review. As the questionable papers kept piling up, he and his colleagues decided to deploy Imagetwin, an AI-based software tool that flags problems such as duplicated images and ones that have been stretched or rotated. Either Imagetwin or the authors’ visual scrutiny flagged 112 — almost 20% — of the 588 image-containing papers.
Nature (Sumeet Kulkarni)
JB: This is weird: “The researchers published their review in January in Translational Psychiatry without telling the journal that it was based in part on papers that included suspicious images.” Why go ahead and publish a systematic review if you suspect that many of the papers included in the review are potentially problematic?
Other news stories
IOP Publishing and IPEM mandate reporting of sex and gender in research (IOP Publishing)
Frontiers’ journals saw large scale retractions—where does that leave the publisher’s reputation with researchers? (The BMJ; paywall) JB: I don't have subscription access to the BMJ’s website and so haven’t read this article in full.
Announcing DataCite’s First Public Data File (DataCite)
ORCID and GitHub Sign Memorandum of Understanding (ORCID)
Tweeting your research paper boosts engagement but not citations (Nature) JB: I linked to the PLOS One paper in last week's newsletter.
Frontiers Names New Sustainability Manager for the SDG Compact (Frontiers)
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Opinion
Compromised publication integrity is often poorly dealt with. Responses to concerns raised about publications are inefficient, inconsistent, slow, opaque and incomplete. Checklists and tools have been developed that can help when assessing publication integrity. Systemic change is needed to improve matters, but requires the key protagonists to invest and engage. It is reasonable to conclude that the current system for dealing with publication integrity is broken, but although this has been recognised for a number of years, there appears little interest in trying to improve matters.
Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand (Mark J. Bolland, Alison Avenell and Andrew Grey)
JB: It’s difficult to disagree with this conclusion. Angela Cochran proposed a solution this week. See next story.
A solution to the problem is for institutions to take responsibility for conducting integrity checks and providing validation to the journals. The many fine companies that are trying to sell publishers the expensive technology solutions should be trying to sell enterprise solutions to institutions.
Might there be a middle ground? The technology tools could be available to individual authors that then have to get the validation and submit it with their paper. This will come with a fee.
I don’t see how journals needing to employ more and more integrity checks and human review of the results is sustainable. As “cheating the system” becomes exponentially easier with the AI tools already at our fingertips, the constant public shaming of journals for not catching issues will continue to erode trust, not only in journals, but also science.
And this is why backing the integrity review up in the timeline is crucial. Trust in science is low, like really low. The US is one election away from potentially losing most science funding
. In corners of the universe, what is true is no longer relevant and many lies are believed as fact.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Angela Cochran)
JB: Well said, Angela. Journal teams (editors and their support staff) are being asked to do more and more, while being accused of being too expensive. “But publishers have huge profit margins!”, I hear academics saying. Surely it should be publishers’ responsibility to clear up the mess?
One solution, which the Gates Foundation seems keen to experiment with, is to rely on review of preprints. The only way that scenario could possibly work is if funders, but especially academic institutions, take responsibility for the work their faculty publishes.
But would that happen in practice? I’d argue that there are too many vested interests in play: institutions will choose to back their faculty; funders only fund good research (or so they think).
This comment, left by Adam Day, the developer behind The Papermill Alarm, on Angela’s post told an interesting anecdote:
The first institution to ask for access to the Papermill Alarm turned out, on inspection, to be a legitimate representative of the institution – a full professor. Inspection of his publications showed a long history of quite blatant image manipulation. I suspect he was running a mill. Now every time an institution contacts me I wonder if they want to deal with fraud or just make it harder to find. Trust is hard to automate.
Academia has very little insight into the nuts and bolts of publishing and why the costs are so high. Partly that’s because many scholars have a poor understanding of how the world of business works, but it’s also because our industry has always been a black box. We need to collectively take responsibility for changing that.
And there is renewed scepticism among some politicians about the wisdom of pursuing net zero at all. Among scientists, there is a naively simplistic approach to translating evidence into action. Publish your research in a high-impact journal. Issue a press release. Hold a press conference. Post some tweets. Record a podcast or video. Prepare a call to action. You do not have to be a Nobel laureate to realise that this strategy is not working. Donald Trump has already said that, if elected to a second term as US President, he will drive forward fossil fuel production, sideline mainstream climate scientists, and overturn rules curbing greenhouse gas emissions. He declares that renewable energy is “a scam business”. The UK Government has U-turned on some of its net zero promises too. The unpleasant reality is that, despite the Paris Agreement, the arguments over the need for climate action have still not been won. That is because climate and health scientists and advocates have no strategy to trigger political change. We do not understand how power is distributed and manipulated. We do not take account of the motivations of those who wield power. We misinterpret the rules and constraints that shape political life.
The Lancet (Richard Horton)
JB: Everyone involved in the SDG Publishers Compact would do well to revisit this paragraph regularly. Creating a corpus of papers vaguely related to the SDGs is insufficient. As an industry we need to better understand how to deliver information in a way that helps policy makes. Scholarly publishing is packed full of people who want to make a positive contribution to global society. Unfortunately, however, good intentions are not enough.
The printing press changed everything, although we know this only in retrospect, The world usually sleepwalks through technological revolutions of historic proportions. So much has already changed in scientific publishing that it is tempting to think we have reached a new equilibrium. In my view it is highly unlikely, although I am not wise enough or bold enough to say when today’s rapid evolution will pause and in what state it will leave the process of communicating research results. I rather doubt it will leave scientific publishing in a form that is recognizable to today’s researchers–or even whether anything like today’s research scientist will even exist as a job title. 150 years ago there was no such job description. An unsettling thought, yes. But periods of historical transition are always unsettling.
Environmental Health (David Ozonoff)
For the 862 journalistic pieces in the current analysis, Nature’s staff journalists and freelance writers interviewed 3,679 sources. Of these, 3,569 (97%) provided their pronouns. These broke down into 2,147 sources (60.2%) who used he/him pronouns, 1,401 (39.3%) who used she/her and 21 (0.6%) who had they/them or other pronouns. These ratios are broadly unchanged from our earlier data.
In total, 3,635 sources gave their geographical location. Of those, 2,865 (78.8%) were based in either North America or Europe, and 770 (21.2%) in the rest of the world. That represents a decrease in regional diversity compared with our previous analysis, which showed that 23.4% of sources were outside North America and Europe.
Nature (unsigned editorial)
Puzzled by Shift+OPEN, Community Action, Opening the Future, and all the rest — or are you stuck in the days of Gold for Gold and APC Prepay? As some parts of our community call for new business models (now with extra equity!) and others mourn the (greatly exaggerated) demise of subscriptions, many of us are looking at the plethora of open access business models and trying to make sense of the ever-increasing list of options.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Tasha Mellins-Cohen)
JB: This is a helpful schema to try to make sense of the plethora of experiments that are being done. Whenever I think of open access business models, I have Annette Thomas’ voice in my head saying “Keep It Simple, Stupid”.
We’re now considering research articles because this is an important, exciting, and growing area of science—but until now, there was no Cell Press journal specializing in applied biology and biobased technology.
As a scientific community, we are growing from looking at biology as a purely descriptive phenomenological discipline to one that you can engineer. That wasn’t true 50 years ago. Trends in Biotechnology started 42 years ago, and in the last 20 years, with genetic engineering tools and bioinformatics, we’re now at a point where we can truly treat biology as an engineering discipline. The field has grown and matured so much that I really think it merits another place for people to publish their research.
Cell Press (interview)
JB: This is a tried and tested strategy. Expand the scope of a review journal, with an excellent impact factor, to include primary research papers. It seems unlikely that Trends in Neuroscience will be doing the same thing any time soon, because Neuron already exists.
Other opinion articles
Navigating the Retraction Minefield in China and Beyond: A Need for Systemic Changes and Increased Focus on Researcher Well-Being (The Scholarly Kitchen)
Why are women cited less than men? (Impact of Social Sciences)
Just make it stop! When will we say that further research isn't needed? (BishopBlog)
The Steep Price of Free Science Access (APS News)
Focusing on the Future: Coko's AI Design Studio and the Journey Beyond PDF Production JB: Conflict of interest: Coko sponsored this newsletter recently.
Improving Manuscript Transfers for Authors (ChronosHub) JB: This is a summary of the webinar that I took part a few weeks ago.
Tedium and creativity in AI ethics (C&EN)
Sense makers: How standards are enabling data reuse in the life sciences (Phys.org)
Some thoughts on eLife’s New Model: One year on (BishopBlog)
Fatal or Harmless? It Depends (The Geyser)
Author Trust: Easily Lost, Hard to Regain (KGL Blog)
Webinars
Next week is a light one for webinars. I suspect many people will be taking some time off over Easter, which is a shame because we could do with a few more empathetic leaders.
The dynamics of funding Diamond Open Access: Opportunities and Challenges. Learnings from the DIAMAS Project and other studies April 2 (SPARC EUROPE)
How to write a paper: Quantitative methodology April 3 (Sage Research Methods Community)
Leading with Heart: The Transformative Power of Empathetic Leadership April 4 (SSP)
How to write a paper: Quantitative methodology April 4 (Sage Research Methods Community)
Journal Club
This systematic review found that retraction was not associated with a reduction in citations of retracted articles. However, publications citing retracted articles as legitimate articles had a high risk of being retracted later. These findings suggest that researchers should verify the status from original sources before citing any references. Additionally, journals and publishers should implement stringent, preferably automated procedures to detect postretraction citations.
JAMA Network Open (Hongmei Zhu, Yongliang Jia and Siu-wai Leung)
We have seen that the use of distinctive terms can be used, at a large scale, to estimate the prevalence of LLM-assisted papers. As a first estimate, this is on the order of 60,000 articles, or slightly over 1% of the scholarly articles published in 2023. It is likely that this estimate could be improved by further investigation of distinctive terms, or by other distinctive characteristics of the papers.
The rate is expected to increase significantly through 2024. Explicit disclosure of the assistance of LLM tools is very rare by comparison, though it should be acknowledged most publishers do not require this for mere copyediting assistance. However, it is difficult to imagine that they are being used solely for this purpose. Authors who are using LLM-generated text must be pressured to disclose this – or to think twice about whether doing so is appropriate in the first place – as a matter of basic research integrity. From the other side, publishers may need to be more aggressive to engage with authors to identify signs of undisclosed LLM use, and push back on this or require disclosure as they feel is appropriate.
arXiv (Andrew Grey)
This article proposed that researchers follow different publication strategies when deciding to submit their manuscripts to scientific journals. We summarized these under the umbrella terms instrumental publication strategy, i.e. researchers are incentivized by extrinsic motivation, and normative publication strategy, i.e. scholars are incentivized by intrinsic motivation. We further argued that academics' perceived pressure to publish or to acquire research funding may affect these publication strategies.
Our empirical analyses of academics working at HEI in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland indicated that scholars do not seem to pursue either strategy exclusively. We found no evidence that researchers stringently follow either an intrinsically or extrinsically motivated publication strategy. However, it appears that the reputation of the journal, publishing open access, and an international specialist audience are particularly important criteria for scholars to select outlets. We interpret this as evidence of the existence of a bandwagon effect, indicating that researchers follow general trends in publishing practices and act according to how they perceive the publishing behavior of others.
Research Evaluation (David Johann et al)
We investigated whether federally funded research scientists considered behavioral misconduct a valid reason for retracting published findings and whether the type of behavioral misconduct involved, the level of the expected scientific impact of the article in question, or the kind of editorial action taken affected their support of retraction. Of the 464 participants who took our survey, we found that researchers largely oppose retraction of a published article or removing an author when scientists commit behavioral misconduct, regardless of the type of misconduct involved. However, there was greater support for retraction when the misconduct was financial as compared to racial or sexual misconduct. Not surprisingly, researchers were more likely to use the published information in question in their own work when its impact was high. Future studies should investigate the extent to which these findings are moderated by researchers’ editorial experience and other demographic factors.
Journal of Academic Ethics (August Namuth et al)
JB: Times Higher Education ran a news story about this paper, which you can read here (paywall).
And finally...
This quarter’s update of the Oxford English Dictionary includes the addition of “bibliometric” to the dictionary.
Until next time (in 2 weeks),
James