Hello fellow journalologists,
We’re in the final month of 2024 and there’s still no sign of Frontiers’ annual progress report for 2023. There’s a page dedicated to the latest impact data, though. Oh well, there’s always next year.
The biggest story of last week was an announcement from the Indian government about the One Nation One Subscription agreement with 30 international publishers. Meanwhile, the furore around Clarivate’s decision not to award eLife an impact factor continues.
Many of you are likely doing end-of-year appraisals with your manager or team. High performers need to be stretched, encouraged and challenged; the Journalology coaching programme can help you and your team have an even greater impact in 2025.
Thrive in 2025: join the Journalology coaching programme
We’ll work together to clarify your strategic vision and map out a plan to create journals that are impactful editorially and commercially. I can help you to identify blind spots and to avoid errors that have either a real or an opportunity cost.
At the end of your coaching journey you’ll have clarity on the priorities for your journal or portfolio, and a roadmap for motivating your team and influencing a wider group of stakeholders.
|
News
Some 30 major international journal publishers have been included in One Nation One Subscription; all of the nearly 13,000 e-journals published by these publishers will now be accessible to more than 6,300 government higher education institutions and central government R&D institutions.
The publishers include Elsevier ScienceDirect, Springer Nature, Wiley Blackwell Publishing, Taylor & Francis, Sage Publishing, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and BMJ Journals.
Researchers and students will be able to access journals through a national subscription managed by the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET), an independent organisation under the country’s University Grants Commission (UGC).
Research Information (unsigned)
JB: This accompanying opinion piece provides some useful context: One Nation One Subscription: boon and bane?. You can read the official press release here.
The company “Springer Global Publication” – which is not affiliated with Springer Nature – has published dozens of papers cloning the websites of journals officially published by Elsevier, Springer, the American Medical Association and more. The company had advertised a variety of services on its website, including finding a writer for research papers, editing manuscripts, developing research proposals, analyzing data and managing the peer review process. This collection of services is a classic attribute of a paper mill.
Retraction Watch (Anna Abalkina)
OurResearch is proud to announce a grant of $688,800 from The Navigation Fund to develop and launch an open, sustainable, web-based research intelligence (RI) module for the OpenAlex website. Our goal is to support expert finding, trend detection, and knowledge gap identification for researchers and research users. The RI module will serve as a map of the research landscape that’s easy to use for non-technical users, powerful for technical users, and supportive in helping all users increase their technical skills.
OurResearch blog
JB: You may want to vote for the next members of the OpenAlex Advisory Board. There are many (excellent) names to choose from.
The initiative will actively engage with the international DeSci movement to understand and shape its impact on the scientific community and to influence and guide the movement's trajectory by staying at the forefront of decentralized science developments. It will provide strategic advice to MPG management and researchers, highlighting potential new DeSci tools and methodologies that could enhance scientific outcomes. DeSci Connect aims to integrate these innovative approaches, to empower researchers to achieve greater transparency, collaboration, and efficiency in their work.
MPDL (announcement)
JB: This article from Forbes provides a useful overview of the DeSci movement. I’m doubtful that it will gain traction because it fails the KISS test.
Over 1000 patient and public reviewers are currently signed up to review for The BMJ. We find that patients and the public are willing to review, respond quickly to accept or decline invitations, produce timely reviews, and often raise insightful points. However, we recognise that increasing requests to review may place additional demands on a limited pool of reviewers. The question of making this additional remuneration to clinical and methodological peer reviewers is less clear cut, albeit their time is no less valuable or appreciated. They may, for example, regard manuscript review as part of their academic role and professional duty.6 We will, however, keep this under review since we fully appreciate that reward systems for peer reviewers are inadequate.
The BMJ (Emma Doble et al)
JB: Patient and public peer reviewers will get paid £50 per peer review. Academic peer reviewers will not get paid. The following quote is interesting. I hadn’t clocked how widespread this form of peer review is at the BMJ.
Over the past 10 years, we have amassed more than 2600 completed patient and public reviews across all article types. In 2023 we invited patient and public reviewers to review 82% of research, 85% of practice, and 23% of analysis submissions sent for peer review.
Other news stories
The paper mills helping China commit scientific fraud
IOPP integrates GetFTR retraction and errata service on content platform to further improve research integrity
Public Launch of the ALMASI EU funded Project and the European Diamond Capacity Hub
Revised Charter for Access to Research Infrastructures to foster open science, innovation, and research security - European Commission
ResearchGate and American Academy of Pediatrics announce new Journal Home partnership for complete journals portfolio
Free COUNTER membership in Research4Life countries
Open access: not an open and shut case for Australia
Paperpal Preflight & Clarivate EndNote partner for manuscript readiness
Opinion
We have set up a platform using the publish, review, curate model for the field of metaresearch – research about the research system itself. Our aims are both to innovate peer review in our field and to study this innovation as a metaresearch experiment of sorts. This initiative will help us to understand how we can improve peer review in ways that we hope will have implications for other fields of research.
The platform, called
MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review), has just been launched. It is a partnership between an academic society, the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science, and a non-profit metaresearch accelerator, the Research on Research Institute.
The Conversation (Stephen Pinfield, Kathryn Zeiler, Ludo Waltman)
This development reinforces how a commercial entity such as Clarivate, can, through its ownership of scholarly databases and indices, hold the academic community to ransom. Clarivate’s announcement is disappointing as it both punishes innovation in peer review and disregards the important role of authors in deciding how and where their research should be published.
As funders and institutions increasingly move away from using single metrics to assess research(ers), the role of Journal Impact Factors is becoming increasingly irrelevant. We know, for example, that funder journals such as Open Research Europe, Wellcome Open Research and Gates Open Research, and indeed all the F1000 titles, have never had a Journal Impact Factor and do not need it to show the impact that they have within their communities.
DORA (unsigned announcement)
JB: DORA has largely been a force for good in the scholarly publishing ecosystem, but this blog post is off the mark. Clarivate is not holding the academic community to ransom. How could it? Many institutions and funders choose to use impact factors to measure their researchers’ performance, but Clarivate’s not forcing them to do that. Yes, Clarivate is a commercial organisation, but that doesn’t make it inherently bad. If their products and services provided little value they would struggle to make sales and go out of business. Furthermore, if impact factors are becoming irrelevant, why write this article at all?
Bodo Stern, the Chief of Strategic Initiatives at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (and a former editor at Cell), used the cOAlition S blog to argue against Clarivate’s decision. Bodo was a co-author of the 2019 PLOS Biology paper A proposal for the future of scientific publishing in the life sciences, which laid out the case for the publish, review, curate model. So he has skin in this game, especially since HHMI is one of the driving forces behind eLife. Nevertheless, he makes some good points about some of the inadequacies of the traditional peer review system:
Moreover, the confidential nature of peer review at traditional journals makes it hard to grasp the full extent of the problem. It is thus unclear whether these journals publish more or fewer inadequate articles than eLife. But when they do publish those studies, the damage is more serious than at eLife because readers are led to believe that the articles report sound science.
Not all peer review is equally robust. Your idea of what constitutes sound science is not necessarily the same as mine. Without transparent peer review it’s relatively easy for a journal to make all the right noises about quality control while publishing methodologically dubious papers (perhaps to generate cash from APCs).
Meanwhile, over on The Scholarly Kitchen, Rick Anderson (University Librarian at Brigham Young University) wrote: Disruption As an End in Itself: eLife’s Suspension and DORA’s Response. He notes:
At no point does DORA’s statement address the substantive issue at the heart of the dispute between eLife and Clarivate, which is about quality and validity in scientific publishing, and the effectiveness of eLife’s publishing model in helping to safeguard it. Instead, the statement focuses entirely on eLife’s value as a “disruptor” of and “innovator” in the existing system – as if disruption and innovation were somehow, in themselves, ultimate goods that outweigh any possible negative outcomes particular attempts at innovation and disruption might lead to.
Kent Anderson argues that DORA Gets It All Backwards in his The Geyser newsletter:
Yet, leave it to DORA to go all-in on smearing Clarivate in the way only the self-righteous can — by labeling it “commercial” in progressive academic code intended to raise hackles and suspicions, as if all “commercial” organizations are nefarious, lack values, or make their profits illegitimately.
I’ll leave you with a final extract from an opinion piece that asks the important question Is there any alternative to the gamification of academic metrics?.
There is currently a heated debate around how academics should be assessed and where the appropriate balance lies between metrics and peer review in assessing the value of their contributions. However, these issues are systemic and deeply embedded in academic culture. The careers of most senior scholars have been built on publications, conferences, grants and positions of esteem within their academic discipline. For early- and mid-career academics, especially those experiencing precarious employment, not playing the game isn’t an option.
We recognize that paper mills represent a challenging topic for researchers and funders alike. Nonetheless, research funders and institutions must now take courageous decisions to provide the necessary resources to transform our understanding of paper mills. Dedicated funding of paper mill research will also signal that paper mills and research fraud represent legitimate, important topics. Research support must enable rapid, ambitious research at scale, matched with systems that fast-track research translation to the literature and its many user communities. For example, translation of paper mill research requires faster processes for achieving post-publication corrections at scale. Knowing that papers can be quickly flagged where there is strong suspicion of mill involvement will also be a powerful motivator for researchers and funding agencies, who may likewise see little point in identifying problematic papers if these papers simply remain uncorrected.
PLOS Biology (Jennifer A. Byrne et al)
Other opinion articles
Is using AI tools innovation or exploitation? 3 ways to think about the ethics
A Dissonance of Ideals: Openness, Copyright, and AI - The Scholarly Kitchen
Overview of CSE Connect: SSP DEIA Committee on Building DEIA in Editorial Roles and Peer Review
It’s Free to Be Nice and to Comb Your Hair: Civil Discourse in Scholarly Publishing Social Media
What luck
Ethics Clinic: Paper Mills and Predatory Publishers
SSP's Early Career Development Podcast Episode 20: Industry Primer - University Presses and Their Unique Role in Scholarly Publishing
Don’t let watermarks stigmatize AI-generated research content
Training in the Editorial Office: Editorial Assistant
Act now to stop millions of research papers from disappearing
Case studies are vital to monitoring the development of open science
More open abstracts?
Three ways I can support you |
And finally...
This week the editors of Nature delved into why the word scientist was controversial 100 years ago.
“Scientist” was a doubtful neologism at a time when scientists were in trouble about their style. They were accused, with some truth, of being slovenly; and those who aimed at a higher standard were careful not to offer the slightest cause for offence. The word became a shibboleth. Matters have, however, now changed; we no longer need a shibboleth … [T]he word has arrived; there is no chance of suppressing it entirely ... Cumbrous circumlocutions, such as “man of science” — offensive to feminists and with an artificial air no artifice can conceal — are wretched substitutes. The idea is definite and important; the discovery that there is something common in the intellectual attitude of all the sciences and foreign to other branches of learning is one of the greatest advances made by the thought of the last century. For a new thing … we must have a new name … If you will not have “scientist,” at least provide us with some other single word.
Until next time,
James