Hello fellow journalologists,
Two years ago I quit my corporate job and started work on Journalology. Many friends and colleagues thought I’d gone slightly mad.
If you want to know more about the person who sends you these emails every week, Science Editor has just published the transcript of a conversation I had with Jonathan Schultz earlier this year.
We discussed why I decided to leave Springer Nature, how editors and publishers differ in their approach to scholarly publishing, my ambitions for Journalology, and some of the recent trends in the industry.
Thank you to our sponsor, Cassyni
Give your authors a platform to share their research and tell the story behind it: papers with seminars see 122% more usage.
Schedule a demo to see how publishers are using Cassyni seminars to build journal communities, delight authors and grow submissions.
|
News
Our journals allocated more resources to the pre-screening process of newly submitted articles, including checks for scope alignment. During the initial screening phase, our editors were dedicated to directing each paper to the journal whose scope best matched the submitted work. Simultaneously, comprehensive revisions to the scopes of some journals have been undertaken to ensure seamless integration of all sections within their respective subject fields.
MDPI (announcement)
JB: MDPI released its annual report on Friday and I’ve spent the past few days trying to better understand what happened there last year.
Annual reports always provide a somewhat biased view of how an organisation is doing, but they can also provide useful information that wouldn’t otherwise be available.
For example, according to the report, submissions increased from 603,300 in 2022 to 655,200 in 2023, an increase of 8.6%. However, the number of “peer-reviewed articles published” fell by 5.3% (from 295,200 in 2022 to 279,500 in 2023). Here’s the graph from the report:
This suggests, at first glance, that MDPI made a conscious decision to tighten up its editorial criteria and publish fewer papers, since submissions grew but published articles fell.
However, that’s unlikely to be the complete explanation because one of the biggest stories of last year was the delisting of 50 journals from Web of Science (see issue 22 of Journalology), including MDPI’s the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH), which at the time was the second largest journal in the world.
The delistings aren’t mentioned in the MDPI 2023 annual report, of course, although 8 pages are devoted to showcasing the JIFs for each of the MPDI journals. Every organisation cherry picks the stories it wants to include in public-facing marketing material. That’s why annual reports and quarterly earnings reports need to be considered carefully.
In that regard, I queried Digital Science’s Dimensions to create the below table, which shows the 10 MDPI journals that shrank the most in 2023. The search was restricted to Articles.
Unsurprisingly, the output of IJERPH fell sharply once the journal was delisted, but it wasn’t the only MDPI journal to publish fewer articles in 2023 than in 2022. Other journals shrank considerably too and it’s not clear why that is. Perhaps MDPI tightened up its journals’ editorial inclusion criteria or perhaps authors decided to submit elsewhere. The 8.6% increase in submissions suggests the former is more likely than the latter. Author satisfaction continues to be very high too, according to the report:
For completeness, here’s a table showing the 10 MDPI journals that grew the most (in absolute terms) between 2022 and 2023 (IJMS = International Journal of Molecular Sciences, which is now MDPI’s largest journal). So it’s not all bad news for MDPI. Note, however, that the size of the deltas in this table are less pronounced than in the previous table.
I wanted to get a sense of how the portfolio as a whole is doing. The below graph shows the delta in Article volumes between 2022 and 2023, sorted from the journal that grew the most to the journal that contracted the most. I’ve removed the labels (journal names) from the x-axis; each vertical column represents one journal. The very large bar dropping precipitously on the right hand side is IJERPH.
Eyeballing this chart it’s clear that the vast majority of journals published roughly the same number of Articles in 2022 as they did in 2023. It’s worth reminding ourselves why that is. According to Dimensions, 428 MDPI journals published at least 1 Article in 2023. Of those:
- 259 journals (61%) published fewer than 100 articles
- 359 journals (84%) published fewer than 1000 articles
- 69 journals (16%) published more than 1000 articles
In other words, most of MDPI’s journals are rather small and their change in article output wouldn’t be seen on the above graph.
MDPI’s total output is powered by a small number of journals. The 69 largest journals (which each published more than 1000 Articles last year) collectively contributed 85% of MDPI’s total output in 2023 (204k of the 283k Articles).
Worryingly for MDPI, 42 of the 69 largest journals (61%) published fewer Articles in 2023 than they did in 2022. The drop in total output is not just due to the delisting of IJERPH.
It’s worth noting that only 10% of MDPI authors are from North America. MDPI does not have an office in the USA, but does have one in Toronto. 37% of authors are from Asia Pacific; 36% from Europe; 10% from North America; and 10% from Africa and the Middle East.
If there’s one thing we learnt from the events of the past few years it’s that publishers that are entirely dependent on APC revenues are high-risk, high-reward businesses.
Hindawi and Frontiers saw significant drops in article output (and therefore revenues) in 2023, after unprecedented growth in previous years. MDPI has weathered the storm better than its closest competitors, but it still faces significant challenges, especially now that some funders are moving away from supporting APC transaction models.
One thing that’s missing in this year’s report, that was included last year, was the number of staff employed by MDPI. The 2022 report said there were “6750 hard-working colleagues across MDPI’s global offices”. I suspect the number was lower last year, since article volumes have dropped, but that’s pure speculation as there’s no mention of staff numbers in the 2023 report.
The average rating on Glass Door is 2.2; only 22% of employees would recommend MDPI to a friend. The sample size is small relative to the size of the company, but it may explain why page 17 of the 2023 annual report is devoted to describing the activities of the new Global HR Committee. Annual reports are written for employees too.
Another statistic that leapt out me was that MDPI has 295,693 Academic editors on its Editorial Boards.
That’s a huge number and shows how industrialised academic publishing has become. It wasn’t that long ago that all journals were run by editorial boards that knew each other personally. The journals were created for communities and run by communities. That’s often not the case now, especially for some of the largest journals.
MDPI published 285,244 articles in 2023, according to its annual report, which means that some editorial board members didn’t handle a single paper. Indeed, it seems likely the majority of editors only handled a small number of papers in the calendar year.
I can’t, in good faith, criticise MDPI for this approach. It wasn’t that long ago that I had management responsibility for Scientific Reports, which also has a huge editorial board.
That doesn’t mean that I like the model, though. It’s impossible to have any degree of consistency in editorial decision making with editorial boards of that size. It’s also impossible to train hundreds of thousands of editors so that they fulfil their roles appropriately, or, indeed, to interact with them in any meaningful way. Editors should be much more than mere administrators and arbiters of the peer review process.
Having said that, the scale of these editorial boards should encourage proponents of the PRC (publish, review, curate) model, which would need huge numbers of academics to act as ‘curators’ to make PRC work in practice. With the right reward system in place, perhaps enough academics would be willing to take part. Is PRC the natural end point for an industrialised approach to publishing?
Some of the best known databases, such as the Web of Science and Scopus, are proprietary and offer pay-to-access data and services supporting these and other metrics, including university rankings and journal impact factors. But in a declaration posted today, more than 30 research and funding organizations call for the community to commit to platforms that instead are free for all, more transparent about their methods, and without restrictions about how the data can be used.
Science (Catherine Offord)
JB: Many organisations published announcements related to the Barcelona Declaration, which looks to be a significant development.
During the latest hearing, Republicans went a step further to suggest that not only did Collins and Fauci influence prominent biologists, but that they also encouraged journals to publish research supporting the natural-origin hypothesis. This accusation is based on e-mails that Wenstrup says the subcommittee obtained showing communication between top journal editors and government scientists. Thorp forcefully denied this line of questioning.
Nature (Max Kozlov)
JB: You can watch a video of the hearing here: Academic Malpractice: Examining the Relationship Between Scientific Journals, the Government, and Peer Review - United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
Holden Thorp also supplied written testimony.
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is cutting off certain publications from advanced access to its embargoed journal articles. News outlets that report for physician readers will no longer meet criteria for embargoed access, Dawn Peters, director of strategic communications & media relations at NEJM Group, said in an email to MedPage Today.
MedPage Today (Kristina Fiore)
JB: The NEJM has been upfront about why it’s limiting access to some news outlets: it doesn’t want them to be able to easily compete with its own publications that summarise clinical news. This will appear churlish to some, but from a commercial perspective it makes complete sense.
The NEJM Group doesn’t have a large portfolio of journals that can act as loss leaders for the flagship in a full flip, open-access scenario. My guess is that The NEJM Group is aiming to be for clinicians what the Harvard Business Review is for corporate executives: the go-to place for high-value specialist news and opinion. Why give competitors an advantage by granting them advance access to the primary research that the NEJM journals provide?
The obvious answer is because it would be better for patients, as clinicians would get the latest news from a wide range of outlets. If a commercial organisation like Elsevier introduced a similar embargo policy, everyone would be up in arms. The Massachusetts Medical Society, which owns the NEJM Group, is a not-for-profit, but that doesn’t prevent it from looking after its own interests, in the same way that the American Chemical Society recently introduced a charge for a CC BY license on author-accepted manuscripts. The idea that “for profit is bad” and “not-for profit is good" is far too simplistic a way of viewing the publishing landscape.
DOAJ has commissioned Gold Leaf to consult with the community to ensure that the data collected by the service is relevant, necessary, and useful. All global stakeholders and users of DOAJ, regardless of location, are encouraged to participate in the survey,
which can be found here.
Gold Leaf will collect feedback with the survey and then follow up with individual interviews for a select group of volunteers. The survey should take about 10-15 minutes to complete.
DOAJ and Gold Leaf will publicly share the headline results from this consultation and email them to each participant who has asked for them.
Gold Leaf (announcement)
JB: See also: DOAJ’s community consultation. Tell us what you think!
The facts that we have selected for the label include publisher and funder names, the journal’s acceptance rate and the number of peer reviewers. The label also shows whether the paper includes a competing-interests statement and an editor list, where the journal is indexed and whether the data have been made publicly available. Averages for other participating journals are listed, for comparison.
Nature (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
Established by Liverpool University Press in 1979,
International Development Planning Review (
IDPR) is published Open Access under our LUP Open Planning ‘Subscribe to Open’ agreement, meaning that there are no APCs (Article Publishing Charge) for authors. When an author contacted us to enquire how much the journal APC was on 20th December, and supplied the following website as part of our conversation with them –
https://idpr.org.uk/index.php/idpr/index – we became concerned.
This was a clone of the journal’s own homepage – containing the journal branding, requesting (and accepting) submissions, and displaying content. The content seemed to be nonsense, and had not been taken from our site, but the site was very convincing. Our concern was not that genuine IDPR content was being scraped, but that someone posing as the editor of the journal was accepting papers and liaising with authors.
Liverpool University Press Blog (Clare Hooper)
Other news stories
Vote for the theme of Peer Review Week 2024
New Peer Review System Migration Toolkit from Scholastica
KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. Launches 2024 Editorial Compensation Benchmark Study
Thank you to our sponsor, The Editorial Hub Ltd.
The Editorial Hub Ltd is a professional, reliable and global editorial service provider for academic journals, societies and publishers.
We deliver high-quality and expeditious work, meeting the deadlines and requirements of our clients. We are a trusted and valued partner for those needing editorial assistance.
Get in touch
|
Opinion
“Funded Manuscript” functions as a roll-up term for the manuscript versions of a publication. The versions of note relative to the 2025 policy are the preprint and accepted manuscripts. The 2021 policy required that one of these, the accepted manuscript, be available open access. The 2025 policy requires that both the preprint manuscript and the accepted manuscript be made available open access. This is a doubling of the compliance mandate for the availability of manuscripts.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe)
JB: In the last issue of this newsletter I wrote the following, which I now know to be incorrect:
It’s not clear to me what “including any subsequent updates to key conclusions” means. Does the author accepted manuscript (AAM) need to be published under a CC BY license too? If so, that's not spelled out specifically in the policy, as far as I can tell. There’s no mention of the Rights Retention Policy, which will be a relief to many publishers.
Last week I attempted to catch up on 2 weeks worth of reading in a short period and I misread the new Gates policy in my rush to get the (delayed) newsletter out. Lisa’s analysis is excellent and is well worth reading in full, if you haven’t already done so. She starts her article with this sentence:
This essay explains and compares the 2021 and 2025 policies, argues that the rollout of the new policy led to misunderstandings, and details possible implications for grantees, readers, and publishers.
The rollout definitely confused me and I didn’t help matters by confusing some of you, for which I apologise.
The concept of honest signaling offers a promising framework for verifying research integrity in a manner that complements existing tools aimed at detecting misconduct. By focusing on behaviors that are costly in terms of time and effort and indicate a researcher’s commitment to ethical practices, this approach not only helps identify instances of integrity but also encourages a culture of openness and engagement within the scientific community. Operationalizing indicators of “honest signaling”, while challenging, presents an opportunity to foster transparency and accountability in academic research, ensuring that it remains a pursuit marked by ethical conduct and genuine discovery.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Tim Vines and Ben Kaube)
JB: I like the idea of amplifying the benefits from behaving “honestly” rather than focusing so much of our attention on detecting bad actors. My potential COI here is that Ben is co-founder of Cassyni, which is sponsoring the newsletter this week.
The figure above shows the estimated annual value of the scholarly journals market over a 5-year period. In 2022, we estimated it to be $10.7bn, rising to $10.8bn in 2023. We estimate the long-term average growth of the market to be 2.3% per year. The years following COVID saw above-average growth, and the lower growth in 2023 likely represents a correction back to long-term averages. Our estimate for 2024 is based on mathematically projecting prior year’s data.
Delta Think (Dan Pollock and Heather Staines)
JB: The last STM market sizing report (which dates back to 2021) estimated the 2021 revenues to be $9.51 bn. Estimating market size is as much an art as a science and there’s no right answer, especially since the transition from subscription to APC models has muddied the waters considerably.
So how does the global retraction rate look when excluding journal breaches, serial offenders, and China? It certainly looks healthier. Starting off at 2.8 retractions per 10,000 papers in 2014, it grows to 6.7 in 2019, and then declines to 3.1 in 2022. In other words, once accounting for breaches, serial offenders, and China, the world looks the same today as it did eight years ago.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Christos Petrou)
JB: This is well worth reading not least because it’s a useful reminder to always delve beyond the headline numbers. Yes, retractions have been increasing, but not universally in all subject areas and all regions.
I’d argue that it’s hard to meaningfully measure retraction rates over time because editorial and publishing standards tend to change over the years. Publishers are probably more willing to retract papers now than they were a decade or two ago, and they also have better tools to detect fraud.
Increasing retraction rates should be seen as a good thing, not a bad thing, if it meant that we were getting better at spotting papers with research integrity issues. Indeed, publishers with very large outputs that have very low retraction rates are probably not acting in the best interests of the community.
Other opinion articles
Preprints, Journals and Openness: Disentangling Goals and Incentives
How PhD students and postdocs can win the citation game without becoming cynics
"Reasonable Costs" @ Year of Open Science 2024
Structure peer review to make it more robust
Thank you to our sponsor, ALPSP Awards 2024
The judges are looking for exciting products or projects that are challenging the status quo and transforming the industry. Applications are welcomed from any area of the scholarly publishing industry.
- ALPSP Impact Award
- ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing
The finalists for both awards will be showcased in a lightning session at the ALPSP Conference in September. The winners will be announced at the ALPSP Awards Dinner on 13 September.
Submit your entry!
Closing date: 30 April 2024.
|
And finally...
This week Mark Huskisson shared a link on the OPENCAFE listserv to We So Loved Open Access, a book that was published at the end of last year. As I was flicking through it I came across this passage in Ginny Barbour's chapter.
It’s not every day that you discover that you’ve been written out of history. Admittedly, my contribution to PLOS Medicine was shortlived, but I was there at the beginning too.
I remember well the rambling meetings at PLOS that had no agenda, no chairperson, and that finished at 23:00, UK time (most of the team were in San Francisco and the entire company attended every meeting, even if it had no relevance to their day job). Abandoning ship and going back to The Lancet was one of the best decisions I ever made. PLOS is much better organised now, my friends who work there tell me.
Until next time,
James