Hello fellow journalologists,
This week’s lead story comes off the back of a tip from a Journalology reader. I monitor the news wires each week, but it’s impossible to pick up everything. Tips are always welcome. Just hit [reply] to one of these newsletters. Contributions are gratefully received.
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News
JB: I confess that ResearchHub had fallen off my radar. I vaguely remember seeing this press release in June last year (ResearchHub raises $5m to help scientists monetize their research), but I had discounted it as another scholarly collaboration network.
ResearchHub was co-founded by Brian Armstrong, one of the founders of cryptocurrency platform Coinbase (Armstrong’s net worth is $13.2 billion, according to Forbes). Last week ResearchHub (not to be confused with ResearchGate) launched its own journal.
Anyone that publishes great content on ResearchHub will earn the cryptocurrency,
ResearchCoin (RSC), as a reward. Once earned, RSC allows users to create bounties that reward other scientists for completing research-related tasks. So far, our community is using the RSC they earn to compensate others for conducting peer review, answering scientific questions, and sharing feedback. Our end goal is to build an academic town square where valuable contributions are recognized and rewarded in a democratic, evidence-based fashion.
Will researchers, which tend to be a conservative bunch, flock to a platform that’s based on a cryptocurrency? You can see the current price of ResearchCoin here and read about how researchers can use ResearchCoin (and potentially generate cash from it) here.
Many of the research integrity problems that we face as an industry are exacerbated by poor identity management. ResearchHub has its own identity verification process.
It’s easy to discount new initiatives like this one, especially if you’ve worked in scholarly publishing for a while. Hands up if you remember Google’s journal Distill, which closed its doors in 2021. And how about Academia.edu’s foray into journal publishing? It launched the first of 12 journals in 2022, which have published 299 articles between them (full statistics here).
Disruption is hard, for all the reasons that Gabe Stein laid out in his excellent 2022 article. Will ResearchHub Journal be able to change academic culture? Will researchers want to associate themselves with a platform created by a billionaire cryptocurrency tech bro? It seems unlikely, but disruption is expensive and the people behind this new journal are serious players in Silicon Valley. One to watch, perhaps.
The backbone of our AI initiatives is actually Snapp, a home-grown submission to accept system supporting more than a thousand journals and 1.4 million submissions. Altogether, we have more than 65 AI initiatives that improve quality, speed, and efficiency of the publication process, where they help researchers understand and apply scientific insights. Let me give a couple of examples. "T-REX", is our transfer recommender. And with "T-REX", we are automating the cascading and transfer process. In 2023, we made about 800,000 transfer recommendations. And with "R-REX", we help guide authors to other suitable journals in the Springer portfolio and keep them publishing with us. Another example is our fake text detection tool called "Geppetto", which can identify nonsense content and hence protects the integrity of our publication. But all technology would be nothing without our people.
Frank Vrancken Peeters (transcript of investors call)
JB: This is the first investors’ call since the IPO. There’s a lot of interesting information in the following documents:
What struck me as I read the transcript was what the investors didn’t ask. There were no questions about mass retractions, about the sword of Damocles hanging over Cureus (Springer Nature’s fastest growing journal), or about the industrial action earlier in the year. The executive team was given an easy ride, perhaps because the financial picture looks so good.
Finally, it’s worth contrasting this extract from the investors’ call transcript with the approach taken by ResearchHub, which compensates academics (through ResearchCoin):
Because I do think one of the big benefits of AI is actually to reduce the strain on the academic community .. We don't pay peer reviewers and, we mostly don’t pay editors, so helping them to do their work more easily with us is actually a positive.
The embattled mega journal Cureus has closed six of its so-called “academic channels,” which it bills as low-cost publication platforms that “will turn your organization into a publishing powerhouse,” Retraction Watch has learned.
The move follows a joint investigation in May by Science and Retraction Watch that found several organizations critics described as dressed-up paper mills had their own channels at the medical journal.
As we reported in September, indexing for Cureus, which is published by Springer Nature, was recently put on hold by Clarivate’s Web of Science, apparently due to quality concerns.
Retraction Watch (Frederik Joelving)
JB: I wrote about Cureus for the Dimensions blog a couple of months ago. Click here if you missed it.
The United States still has the highest concentration of Highly Cited Researchers in the world with 2,507 in 2024. This amounts to 36.4% of the group, though this share has gradually declined – from 37.5% in 2023, 38.3% in 2022, 39.7% in 2021, 41.5% in 2020, 44.0% in 2019 and 43.3% in 2018.
Mainland China maintains its second position again this year, with 1,405 Highly Cited Researchers (20.4%), marking a significant rise from 17.9% in 2023, 16.2% in 2022, 14.2% in 2021, 12.1% in 2020, 10.2% in 2019 and 7.9% in 2018. Mainland China has more than doubled its share of the Highly Cited Researchers population since 2018.
The United Kingdom, with 563 researchers (8.2%), is in third spot again this year, followed by Germany (332), Australia (313), Canada (206), the Netherlands (185), Hong Kong (134), France (126) and Singapore (108), which joins the top 10 this year, replacing Italy.
Clarivate (announcement)
JB: You can explore this year’s list here and previous years’ here. The most important part of the announcement can be found right at the end:
ISI analysts will continue to apply additional filters to flag and investigate anomalous publication and citation patterns. As a result of recent refinements, many candidates did not pass our stringent evaluation and selection criteria. This number increased from 500 in 2022, to more than 1,000 in 2023, approaching 2,000 in 2024. These figures can only be described as sobering and they highlight the need for deep qualitative review alongside any quantitative assessments in analyzing the research literature.
Sobering indeed. Using citations to measure an individual academic’s performance (especially for reward and recognition) is problematic in many ways, but the dataset is interesting nonetheless.
Today, the MIT Press is releasing a comprehensive report that addresses how open access policies shape research and what is needed to maximize their positive impact on the research ecosystem.
The report, entitled “Access to Science & Scholarship 2024: Building an Evidence Base to Support the Future of Open Research Policy,” is the outcome of a National Science Foundation-funded workshop held at the D.C. headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on September 20, 2024.
MIT Press (announcement)
JB: You can read the report here.
While there has been a substantial fall in the number of submissions from China, where we know there is a strong dependence on the Impact Factor, our submission trends are broadly as they were elsewhere. Some countries, such as the UK, have even shown significant increases. The fact that we are still receiving submissions from other countries such as Italy which rely heavily on the Impact Factor is also an encouraging sign.
The following graph shows the number of submissions received by region between November 1–15, 2024, as compared to the same period in the previous two months:
eLife (unsigned announcement)
JB: The final decision to delist eLife from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) was made public on November 12, so it’s perhaps a little premature to declare that everything is OK based on data from November 1-15, although I understand the need to get on the front foot and reassure authors. The article states:
We have been alerting authors at key parts of the process about Web of Science’s decision in October and have been pleased with the overwhelming majority of them wishing to continue with their submissions.
Will eLife be able to avoid the same fate that other delisted journals have experienced? Could it be the exception that proves the rule? The jury is still out, in my opinion. Time needs to pass before we can be sure which way this will go.
A Journalology reader emailed me last week to point out that since eLife’s editors do not apply an editorial threshold when deciding which papers they send out for review (or at least that’s what they say), even if submissions drop significantly revenues may not drop in a parallel fashion; the editors could continue to send the same numbers of papers out for review. So it has some built in financial protection, compared with a traditional journal to a drop in submission volumes, if that happens further down the line.
Many of the patterns evident in the data for this year’s Nature Index Science Cities supplement will be familiar to watchers of global science trends over the past decade. China’s research output in the journals tracked by the Nature Index continues to grow strongly, demonstrated by Beijing extending its lead at the summit of the science cities ranking to almost double the Share of the second-placed city. The fact that this second place is now taken by Shanghai, pushing New York into third, only reinforces this trajectory.
Perhaps a more interesting development in the science cities data this year is the clear emergence of China’s provincial capitals. From Chengdu in the west, to Hefei in the east, these cities — lesser known in the West — are now rubbing shoulders in the top 30 with long-established scientific centres in Europe and North America.
Nature Index (Simon Baker)
JB: The supplement contains an article for each of the major subject areas:
Other news stories
AIP Publishing Now Providing Manuscript Tracking Notifications through WeChat
AIP Publishing Announces Launch of New Open Access Journal: APL Engineering Physics JB: APL Computational Physics was announced in October; APL Electronic Devices was announced in September; the first articles for APL Quantum were published in February. The other spin off journals from the Applied Physics Letters brand listed in the website include the following journals (an example of how society publishers are extending their core brands at pace):
Exciting First Results with ORCA OA Usage Reporting for Extrica
OASPA is ‘wayfinding’ through 2024 and beyond
GeoScienceWorld Appoints Matt Hudson as Director of Publishing and Publishing Services
JMIR Publications Integrates With Web of Science to Recognize Peer Reviewers
Seven Years and Counting: ChemRxiv's 2024 in Review
Altmetric now tracks clinical impact of research
Introducing MetaROR: An open peer review platform for metaresearch
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Opinion
For example, Average Citation Contribution in October, November, and December were consistently the lowest, suggesting that less exposure time has a detrimental impact on Average Citation Contribution. However, articles published in the first 8 months of the year did not correlate directly to exposure time compared to each other, with unexpected upticks in June and August, and, perhaps most surprisingly, January achieving only the fifth highest Average Citation Contribution (tied with May).
Science Editor (Duncan A MacRae and Maya Workowski)
JB: The dataset used in this study is from one publisher, Lippincott. Eyeballing the data, it looks as though articles published in Q4 perform worse overall, which is unsurprising. Publishing an article in January does not improve the number of citations it receives, according to this analysis.
As the scientific community in the United States and around the world processes the results and implications of the 2024 US presidential election, it is vital to have forthright conversations—including varied opinions and views—about the road ahead.
Science does not have an editorial board that speaks for the views of the journal. Rather, we publish editorials that are the opinions of their authors (see statement at the bottom of the journal’s
masthead). Over the coming months and into the new administration,
Science intends to publish viewpoints from a variety of voices that we hope will spark productive discussions—within and outside of the scientific community—about the future of science in the United States and beyond. These opinions may prompt strong responses, but hopefully fruitful debates. That is our goal. As always, we welcome readers’ engagement in the effort.
Science (H. Holden Thorp)
I just wonder how much of the discussion was devoted to how public and researcher trust in journal article publishing can be restored without concerted action by all market players to create standards of trust and integrity for their industry. Publishes have shown that they can act in concert in the past. Their accomplished really important things with collaborations like CrossRef and Chorus. They are currently doing really important work on integrity.But we all have to ask if it is enough and if it is fast enough? And will it result in enforceable trade standards which all participants in the ecosystem can trust?
David Worlock Blog
Other opinion articles
Standard Terminology for Peer Review: Where Next?
Rethinking Reviewer Fatigue
Combatting the Paper Mill Phenomenon: Connecting Editors with Automated Fraud Detection
Supply Chain of Writing Fools
Wayfinders #4: a deep-dive into S2O / Subscribe to Open JB: a recording of this webinar is now available.
Three ways I can support you |
And finally...
When Ian Green told me that he was going to quit his job as an editor on Nature Communications to travel the world and write novels I was impressed and alarmed in equal measure. It seemed like a high-risk strategy to me. This week his fourth novel, Extremophile, was listed in the Financial Times' Best books of 2024: Science fiction.
In the near future, punk rockers Charlie and Parker join a group of radical eco-protesters who’ll stop at nothing to save the world from climate apocalypse, treading the line between activism and crime. The novel is clear-eyed about the peril our planet faces, but leavens the mood with a sparky, iconoclastic energy.
Another book for your Christmas list, perhaps?
Until next time,
James
