Hello fellow journalologists,
This week’s issue of Journalology covers the STM Trends 2028 report, a new journals programme from Harvard University, and a preprint that suggests that preprints get a citation advantage.
Thank you to our sponsor, Digital Science
In late 2023, Digital Science fully acquired Writefull, which provides AI-powered language and metadata solutions to streamline every stage of the publishing workflow - including triaging, copy editing, quality control and quality assurance.
We recently published a blog post about the American Chemical Society’s pilot of Writefull Revise, Writefull’s pre-submission language service for authors. ACS is trialling this solution to support their authors and help reduce language barriers to publication.
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News
This year’s STM Trends edition imagines a future in which AI has become an essential part of the fabric of research and scholarly publishing. We see a blended workforce with humans and machines working together to advance trusted research, building a vast network of knowledge that links articles to research data, experiments to code, authors to institutes and funders, and scholarly works to podcasts. Content is produced and consumed by both humans and machines, traditional peer-review is supplemented by automated checks, and trust is a quality that flows between nodes in the scholarly network.
But this future is not a technical utopia: Papermills and pirates attempt to exploit technology for their own gain, and fissures appear in the global scholarly network. And, for some, the world has just become too complex and it’s time to go back to basics. In this hyper-complex system, how do we ensure accountability, transparency, ethics, and equity? How do we preserve the Human Factor?
STM (announcement)
JB: You can view the infographic here. Todd Carpenter wrote up a summary of the report to coincide with it being showcased at the STM Conference in Washington, DC last week. Back in 2020, STM produced Tech Trends 2024. There’s no mention of paper mills, image manipulation etc. That’s not a criticism. It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
The study authors extracted citation data from 308,243 papers published by journals of the American Physical Society (APS) between 1990 and 2010 that had accumulated more than 5 citations each. Information about the referees of these papers was not available, so the authors used an algorithm to create imaginary reviewers, which rated papers on the basis of an algorithm that was trained on citation data from the APS data set. Using the review scores that these papers received in real life (a score of 1 being poor and 5 being outstanding), the study authors compared how closely the imaginary reviewers’ scores correlated to the actual scores the papers received.
Nature Index (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
JB: This falls into the category of “terrible ideas”.
The BTAA Libraries, CDL, and Lyrasis already partner in a host of related areas including collective funding programs for Diamond OA initiatives, increased adoption of persistent identifiers, and support for robust OA infrastructure services that enhance discovery and access. The Global Summit has inspired us to go further together – to pool our efforts and combine our strengths to help realize the potential of Diamond OA as a critically important pathway toward open scholarship. We see this work as a necessary companion to other substantial commitments and investments that our organizations are already making to transform the scholarly publishing landscape and increase access to the results of scholarly research.
Big Ten Academic Alliance (announcement)
JB: Diamond OA will require significant investment to create high quality publication venues (I deliberately didn’t use the word ’journal’). I welcome this kind of initiative because the only way institutions will appreciate the costs involved in scholarly publishing is if they have to pay them out of their own pockets.
Harvard Library is launching a new initiative called the Harvard Open Journals Program (HOJP), which will help researchers advance scholarly publishing that is open access, sustainable, and equitable. HOJP will provide publishing services, resources, and seed funding to participating Harvard researchers for new academic journals. All journal articles will be entirely free for authors and readers, with no barriers to publish or to access.
The program is a direct response to faculty interest in alternatives to the article-processing-charge model, in which journals charge author-side fees to publish papers open access. It also supports federal requirements that publications resulting from publicly-funded research be open access.
Harvard Library (announcement)
JB: Will researchers working at Yale or Oxford want to submit to a Harvard journal, run by Harvard academics? Yes, the brand is best in class, but editorial independence is a key ingredient for top journals too. Good research often involves international collaborations. Parochial publishing, even by top institutions, will struggle to take off. Just look at Wellcome Open Research.
Since our announcement last month that we were joining Taylor & Francis, we’ve been hard at work with the T&F team to implement author service integrations and improvements. The first of those – a supported service allowing authors to transfer to PeerJ – is already up and running.
T&F’s Transfer Team are a specialist group of editors who help authors find the right journal for their research. We’ve been working with them to identify journals in the T&F portfolio that could offer an opportunity to authors, whose initial submission is rejected for scope reasons, to find a home at PeerJ. As well as analyzing the submission to ensure a good fit with PeerJ, the team at T&F provide a supported submission process to authors who choose to transfer, handling the bulk of the submission process at PeerJ.
PeerJ Blog (announcement)
JB: Wow, that didn’t take long. This gives some indication of the importance of transfer cascades for scholarly publishers. Taylor & Francis acquired PeerJ because it believes it can drive transfers to it. PeerJ never grew as fast as PLOS One or Scientific Reports because it was not part of a transfer cascade.
Following the conclusion of a successful pilot, Cambridge University Press is expanding the rollout of Cassyni journal seminar series to more journals in their portfolio. The series enable Cambridge to grow researcher communities around its journals, and supports authors in increasing the reach and impact of their published research.
This expansion builds on the success of the
Fluid Mechanics Webinar Series [
https://cassyni.com/s/fmws/seminars] run jointly by the
Journal of Fluid Mechanics, the Leeds Institute for Fluid Dynamics, the University of Cambridge and the UK Fluids Network. The series brings together a community of more than 2000 subscribers from around the world and holds regular seminars about breakthrough papers in the field of fluid mechanics. The seminars are free to attend, and AI-enhanced recordings of the 65 previously held seminars have been published with DOIs on the Cassyni platform.
Cassyni (press release)
JB: This week CUP also won an award for inclusive research publishing at the 2024 IPG Independent Publishing Awards.
You are being invited to take part in a global-wide survey that seeks to assess the potential advantages and disadvantages associated with the open science agenda within the broad research landscape. The open science agenda, which promotes accessibility, transparency, and collaboration in research, has gained prominence in recent years and we are keen to uncover insights into how individuals with responsibilities in various stakeholders perceive the agenda.
University of Sheffield (Zuzanna Zagrodzka)
JB: This paper provides the background: Accelerating the open research agenda to solve global challenges.
Other news stories
ASAPbio Announces New Executive Director, Board Leadership
ASAPbio long term crowd lead recruitment
Infra Finder: Your Hub for Finding Infrastructure Services Enabling Open Research and Scholarship
REPORT: 2024 AI A to Z Primer
Announcing Publisherspeak UK 2024
SSP Welcomes Newly Elected Board Members for 2024-2025 Term
ASPET and Elsevier Announce Publishing Partnership
Elsevier Appoints Dr Kieran West MBE as Executive Vice President of Strategy
ResearchGate and Trans Tech Publications announce Journal Home partnership
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.
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Opinion
Funder metadata tends to get into scholarly databases in two ways. It can be provided by publishers when registering a work for a DOI, or it can be inferred from analyzing an article’s Acknowledgements section.
Unfortunately, the funder metadata field is an optional value at DOI registration, so it is often left blank. OpenAlex uses Crossref as a major building block in its dataset, with the general consequence that if Crossref doesn’t have it, OpenAlex won’t see it. By contrast, Dimensions analyzes an article’s Acknowledgements section using natural language processing to infer funders and enrich the metadata coming from Crossref. It also has agreements with publishers to obtain additional funding information.
Open ISU (Eric Schares)
JB: Eric Schares is always worth listening to. If you use bibliometric tools read this. OpenAlex is an important initiative, but the commercial tools have cleaner datasets. For now at least.
The most potentially contentious innovation from the workshop is the final one discussed by the participants and shared here, the “two strikes and out” idea. It will be interesting to see if the idea of restricting the number of times a paper can be submitted to any journal, before it effectively becomes void, is either desirable, workable, or fraud-proof. It would certainly require industry collaboration and technological capabilities to support such a move. And would it be regarded as being in some way prejudicial toward certain authors or global regions? These considerations notwithstanding, it was certainly fun to end the workshop with such a hot topic for discussion and further debate!
Science Editor (Tony Alves et al)
JB: Sorry, everyone, but I can’t see this being implemented any time soon.
The genius behind Robert Maxwell’s genius was Ivan Klimes, who died on April 20 2024 in Oxford. As Publishing Director at Maxwell’s Pergamon Press, he was the mastermind behind the so-called “salami slicing“ of journals to create new specialised outlets for the rapidly growing subdivision of disciplines in the sciences, especially in the life sciences. His broad range of scientific interests ensured the coverage of new topics as well as the commissioning of review articles and books, which brought researchers up-to-date, and in a position to review all aspects of controversial topics. The great monument to Ivan’s work at this time lies in the continuing market dominance of Elsevier, the final home of the Pergamon Press titles that he had created. The debt that they owed him was never acknowledged by the seller of these journals, or indeed by the buyers.
David Warlock (personal blog)
JB: Calling Robert Maxwell a genius feels wrong on so many levels.
Principal investigators and their institutions must prioritize investments in advanced technology for real-time, proactive checks before publishing. This approach not only helps in correcting unintentional image duplications, but also in learning to avoid such issues in the future. Moreover, it’s crucial for taking decisive action in the rare instances of discovering genuinely manipulated data in their research.
Equally, publishers should consider automating their review processes to safeguard image integrity before publication. Investing in these tools reduces the risks of reputational and significant financial harm, while also ensuring that the public has access to trustworthy scientific literature.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Dror Kolodkin-Gal)
To address this urgent need, we are calling for funding to develop an open source application that can deconstruct arbitrary PDF files into structured HTML and XML. This is not a trivial task and would require a substantial investment over an initial 2-year development period. The process however, will require ongoing maintenance until the day no PDFs are submitted anywhere, as authors will continue to find ways of using PDF to represent content in nuanced ways - requiring ongoing refinement of conversion processes.
We are reaching out to the readers of this blog, who are well-connected and understand the importance of this project, to help us identify potential funding sources.
Robots Cooking (Adam Hyde)
JB: PDFs are easy for users to create and for servers to host. Structured content is far harder (and more expensive) to create. Preprints historically have been ‘quick and dirty’. Is it better to try to create structured content from a PDF or expect users to get it right from the outset. Surely the latter is better than the former, especially if preprints are the future of publishing? Quality, speed, cost. You get to pick two, not all three.
Some researchers have asked why Nature published Dias’s second paper in March 2023, when questions were being asked about the first one. Others have asked why the retraction notices didn’t spell out that there has been misconduct.
It’s important to emphasize that it’s Nature’s editorial policy to consider each submission in its own right. Second, peer review is not designed to identify potential misconduct. The role of a journal in such situations is to correct the scientific literature; it is for the institutions involved to determine whether there has been misconduct, and to do so only after the completion of due process, which involves a systematic evaluation of primary evidence, such as unmodified experimental data.
Nature (unsigned editorial)
JB: Last month, COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) updated its guidelines on how research institutions and journals should cooperate with regards to research integrity and publication misconduct cases.
Other opinion articles
An Interview with Gaelle Bequet of ISSN International Centre (ISSN IC)
Ask Athena: Maps With Disputed Territories
Open Publishing Fest Lifetime Achievement Award: Interview with Lars Bjørnshauge
Elevating Scholarly Publishing through Collaboration: Insights from Publisherspeak US 2023 Part 1
Elevating Scholarly Publishing through Collaboration: Insights from Publisherspeak US 2023 Part 2
What can publishing open access with Sage do for you?
Are Academic Publishers Ignoring the Theft of Ukrainian Fossils?
Leveraging the ocean of opportunities to drive value to research communities
Thank you to our sponsor, ALPSP Annual Conference 2024
The second hybrid ALPSP Conference this September brings together the scholarly community, both in-person and virtually.
The conference provides a friendly forum in which to share information and knowledge, learn about new initiatives, and engage in open discussion on the challenges and opportunities facing publishing today.
Hilton Manchester Deansgate, Manchester, UK, 11-13 September 2024.
Thanks to our conference sponsors, Publishers’ Licensing Services (Platinum) and Karger (Silver).
Book your place
Early bird rates end 31 May 2024!
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Journal Club
We use a novel dataset known as Open Science Indicators, produced by PLOS and DataSeer, which includes all PLOS publications from 2018 to 2023 as well as a comparison group sampled from the PMC Open Access Subset. In total, we analyze circa 122'000 publications. We calculate publication and author-level citation indicators and use a broad set of control variables to isolate the effect of Open Science Indicators on received citations. We show that Open Science practices are adopted to different degrees across scientific disciplines. We find that the early release of a publication as a preprint correlates with a significant positive citation advantage of about 20.2% on average. We also find that sharing data in an online repository correlates with a smaller yet still positive citation advantage of 4.3% on average. However, we do not find a significant citation advantage for sharing code. Further research is needed on additional or alternative measures of impact beyond citations. Our results are likely to be of interest to researchers, as well as publishers, research funders, and policymakers.
arXiv (Giovanni Colavizza et al)
JB: I haven’t had a chance to read this paper in detail yet, but this sentence from the Discussion is worth remembering:
Additionally, the observational nature of our study precludes definitive conclusions about causality. The observed citation advantage might be influenced by other factors not accounted for in our analysis, such as the intrinsic quality of the research or access to research funding.
20% of papers in the sample were preprinted and those had “a significant positive citation advantage of about 20.2% (±.7) on average”. Is that because preprinting helps boost citations or because authors are more likely to preprint research that they believe will be impactful?
And finally...
The best journal editors are able to lead and inspire researchers with the written word. This week we saw a wonderful example of that in action with Holden Thorp’s editorial in Science. His article on Substack (How I decided to disclose my autism diagnosis) is well worth reading too.
Until next time,
James