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Journalology

The Journalology newsletter helps editors and publishing professionals keep up to date with scholarly publishing, and guides them on how to build influential scholarly journals.

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Journalology #100: Have cake, will eat it

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, When I started this newsletter back in August 2023 I wasn’t sure I’d make it to issue 10 let alone issue 100. And yet, by some miracle, here we are. There have been times when I wished I’d never started writing Journalology, generally at 6 am on a Sunday morning when there’s a blank sheet in front of me. However, looking back over 100 issues, it’s been an enjoyable and educational experience. I learn something new every week; hopefully you...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, This newsletter is on the cusp of hitting the three figure mark. It’s almost as exciting as the turn of the millennium. (Are these available outside of the UK? If not, the title of this newsletter will make no sense at all.) Thank you to our sponsor, Digital Science Writefull uses AI to automate language and metadata tasks and make these scalable. Writefull’s Manuscript Categorization API automatically scores and categorizes manuscripts by...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, I took some time off recently to celebrate a significant wedding anniversary, so we’ve got 2 weeks’ news to catch up on. Grab a coffee and skim through the newsletter; a lot has happened in the past fortnight. I’m able to invest time and energy into the newsletter because of the sponsors’ financial support. Thanks are due to Digital Science and Scholastica, which are sponsoring the next four issues of the newsletter. Please do read their...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Last week I included a table of Glassdoor scores for some of the largest publishers, with the caveat: N.B. the publishing teams are included in each society’s rating, rather than split out. IOP Publishing, the publishing arm of the Institute of Physics here in the UK, has its own rating on Glassdoor, which I somehow missed when I was putting together the table. Here’s the updated table, with the Institute of Physics (rating = 3.3) removed...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, It’s been a relatively quiet news week. Maybe publishers are keeping their powder dry ready for the Frankfurt Book Fair next week? Or perhaps everyone has been spending all their time telling the world how they published the seminal Nobel prize winning work? Regardless, it won't take you long to skim through this newsletter, which will likely be a relief, especially if you’re on your way to Frankfurt. If you're using the Book Fair to...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, A few hours after hitting the ’send’ button on last week’s newsletter I saw a tweet about Heliyon — a broad-scope journal published by Elsevier and hosted on the Cell press website — being put ’on hold’ for indexing by Web of Science. That piqued my interest because I had just started drafting an article about Heliyon and Cureus, the two journals that grew the fastest in 2023, for the Digital Science Dimensions blog. I naturally wanted to...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Many of us took part in Peer Review Week, which ends today. The sheer scale of the number of events was overwhelming (see here). You can watch my own contribution, alongside Danielle Padula from Scholastica, on YouTube by clicking the play button below: We talked about how the role of a journal editor may be affected by advances in technology. (My 8-year-old son was very impressed that I’m a ’YouTuber’, but he complained: “I didn’t...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Are scholarly publishers a force for good? Many academics certainly don’t perceive commercial publishers that way. This week we consider whether (with apologies to Stephen Sondheim): We ain’t no delinquents, We’re misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good! The same topics come up again and again in this newsletter: open access equity, research integrity, peer review, reproducibility and so on. This week is no different. There’s a...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, This week I attended the ALPSP annual conference and met some Journalology readers at the event, which was lots of fun. The quality of the presentations and panel discussions was excellent; the organising committee and wider ALPSP team did a fantastic job. I’m still reflecting on what I learned, in particular what the future might hold for small society publishers in an open access world where scale wins. The star of the show was...

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Before we kick off another bumper issue I want to quickly revisit the lead story from last week: the discussion of the subscribe-to-open (S2O) model. Last week I said that EDP Sciences “would cease S2O on one of its journals” and linked through to a 2023 press release. However, I hadn’t clocked that in June 2024 the same journal, Radioprotection, announced that it was moving back to S2O. This might suggest that the S2O model worked as...