Hello fellow journalologists,
With Christmas fast approaching, this will be the final newsletter of 2024. Thank you for reading Journalology this year; I hope you’ve got some value from it.
I’m attending the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference in Berlin January 14-15, so please do say hello if you’re there too. I’m taking part in a panel discussion that will cover one of my favourite topics: “Balancing Quantity and Quality in Research Communication”. Nandita Quaderi from Clarivate is moderating and the other panelists are Kamran Abbasi (BMJ), and Simone Ragavooloo (Frontiers).
Thrive in 2025: join the Journalology coaching programme
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News
Sage, a leading independent academic publisher, has acquired Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., a renowned global media company publishing more than 100 peer-reviewed journals in biotechnology and the life sciences, specialized clinical medicine, public health and policy, and technology and engineering, as well as the leading B2B media brands Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN) and Inside Precision Medicine.
Mary Ann Liebert (press release)
JB: The following quote from the press release suggests that the acquisition was as much about the heart as the head:
“This acquisition marks the joining of two mission-driven publishers founded by women who are pioneers in academic publishing,” said Blaise Simqu, Sage CEO. “Mary Ann Liebert and I have been friends and publishing colleagues for 20 years, and I have worked side-by-side with Sara Miller McCune, Sage’s Founder, for more than 30 years. Both women are extraordinary. Both took big risks, invested their own resources, and created publishing houses that have enabled researchers to break new ground in emerging fields and ultimately, serve humanity. With a future at Sage – and with Sage’s independence guaranteed – Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. will continue in the entrepreneurial spirit that has steered both founders.”
Mary Ann Liebert Inc publishes 6500 research articles a year, according to Dimensions, which is around 10% of Sage’s yearly output.
Virtually all of the Mary Ann Liebert papers are in the biomedical sciences. Unlike some other recent acquisitions — for example, Taylor & Francis’ purchase of PeerJ — this acquisition isn’t driven by a desire to increase the volume of open access articles; Mary Ann Liebert’s open access article volumes have fallen in recent years.
Mary Ann Liebert founded her company in 1980. 45 years is a long time to work in this industry. We all wish her a very happy retirement and congratulate Sage on the acquisition.
We are not changing our publishing model. But in order to best serve researchers and provide the broadest possible coverage for research published with eLife, we have made the decision to provide a partial feed of eLife articles to Web of Science in order to maintain authors’ coverage in the index.
The partial feed will include Versions of Record (VORs) with
eLife Assessments that note papers as “solid” or above when considering the strength of evidence. According to recent data, this means 93% of eLife papers will continue to be indexed, while the remaining 7% of “incomplete” and “inadequate” VORs will no longer be eligible for inclusion in Web of Science.
Our decision means the vast majority of eLife research will be eligible for inclusion in the Web of Science Core Collection. However, because we are not willing to change the eLife publishing model to accommodate Web of Science’s policies, eLife will be a partially indexed journal and as such not eligible for the Journal Impact Factor.
eLife (announcement)
JB: I’m pleased that common sense has prevailed and that eLife has put pragmatism ahead of idealism.
The 7% figure surprised me because back in February eLife published the graph below that showed that over 25% of ’publications’ (their word) were inadequate or incomplete.
What does the word ’publication’ mean here? The version of record? Or the peer reviewed preprint?
The February announcement also noted:
Moreover, based on the terms used by reviewers and editors to describe the significance and strength of evidence, the quality of submissions under the new model is very similar to the quality under the previous (legacy) model (figures 4 and 5).
Now I’m really confused. The quote above uses the word “submissions” (my emphasis in the quote above) rather than “publications”, which is used in the title of Figure 5. The February update also says:
For the revised versions published to date, the changes in significance have been modest, but the changes in the strength of evidence have been larger. In particular, articles originally described as incomplete improved in 77.5% of cases after revision (62/80) and articles first described as inadequate improved in 80% of cases (12/15).
So perhaps that’s why the graph shows that 25% of ’publications’ are inadequate or incomplete but the latest announcement says that only 7% are? The 25% figure might be the score after the first round of review and the 7% figure is after the papers have been revised. Possibly. That’s my best guess, anyway.
Regardless, the 7% number seems very low to me. Sound science journals like PLOS One and Scientific Reports reject around half of the research papers that are submitted to them. eLife says its editors don’t choose to peer review papers based on the perceived quality of the papers after an initial read (I find it very hard to believe that happens in practice), so if anything the ’rejection’ rate should be even higher for eLife than for a sound science journal. The quality of the submissions to eLife could be unusually high, I guess. I feel like I’m missing something here.
As far as I can tell, eLife hasn’t released data on how many authors walk away after peer review. After all, if a paper gets very positive reviews at eLife the authors may decide to try their luck at Cell, Nature or Science knowing that they have guaranteed publication in eLife if they need it further down the line. Will this happen more frequently in the future when eLife loses its impact factor? Will eLife morph into a peer review service and publish fewer VoRs?
I hope that eLife will provide more insight into how many authors walk away after peer review when they publish their next update. The terminology needs to be clearer too. This is an important experiment that many of us are watching closely.
Scopus recently announced how it will handle eLife:
In this model there is no guarantee that with the Version of Record the article has gone through the entire peer-review process and that where applicable comments and recommendations from the reviewers are addressed. That is because in the curate step, declaring the article as Version of Record is in the hands of the author self and not the (editorial oversight of the) journal. With that we find that the certification in the current model of eLife is not fully consistent nor complete.
Scopus, in consultation with the CSAB, concludes that eLife does not fit the criteria and definition of a journal in Scopus anymore and the following decisions were made.
So it looks as though Scopus is going even further than Web of Science and does not even consider papers that have received good ’evidence’ ratings as being properly peer reviewed, because the authors may not have incorporated the referees’ suggestions. Scopus will consider eLife content to be analogous to preprints:
eLife will be taken out of the Scopus journal collection and will no longer be included in journal metrics and rankings.
eLife content will continue to be indexed by moving it to the Scopus preprint collection. That means all eLife content will remain discoverable in Scopus as preprints and the items will be attributed to the respective Scopus author profiles as preprints. Note: Preprints do not contribute to any existing Scopus metrics of the main (journal) collection of published content.
I don’t have access to Scopus, so I can't check whether the same criteria apply to F1000, Wellcome Open Research etc.
I’ve covered eLife a lot in recent weeks primarily because it’s a test case for the PRC (publish, review, curate) editorial model. Or at least the version of PRC where there’s not a binary accept / reject decision after peer review.
It’s an important story because if eLife had kept its impact factor and was fully indexed then other journals would probably have adopted its editorial model. The cynic in me suspects that some publishers would love to be able to monetise every submission, not just the ones that are accepted for publication as the version of record. That seems less likely to happen now that Scopus and Web of Science have issued their edicts.
The proportion of authors, reviewers, editors, and EAB members who identify as women underwent notable increases between 2022 and 2024 , while men comprised the largest percentage of ACS journal user groups by gender identity during this time. Women comprise significantly higher proportions of editors and EAB members compared with their representation among authors and reviewers in 2024, and the 10-year trend in editor and EAB member gender demographics continued to show a consistent increase in the proportion of women in these ACS journal user groups. This is the first ACS Publications Diversity Data Report to share demographics of transgender identity among ACS journal user groups; 1.5-1.8% of ACS journal authors, reviewers, editors, and EAB members identified as transgender.
ACS Publications Chemistry Blog
JB: You may remember that Springer Nature did a similar analysis earlier this year, which I summarised in Issue 75. The ACS (American Chemical Society) report also dives deep into the data, which is to be applauded. After all, what gets measured gets done. You can read the report in full here (120 pages, so grab a coffee first).
There are lots of angles to address; I’ve chosen to showcase a couple of the gender-related data points. The graph below shows that the proportion of female authors and peer reviewers has increased between 2022 and 2024. Yes, the y-axis doesn’t start at zero, so the growth looks more dramatic than it actually is, but this is progress at least.
Let’s turn our attention to editors now. The graph below shows how ACS has diversified its editorial boards by decreasing reliance on researchers from the USA.
Over the past decade, more women have been appointed as Editors and Editorial Advisory Board members of ACS journals, as you can see below. These proportions are higher than the ones Springer Nature reported earlier in the year: 22% of Springer Nature’s Editors-in-Chief and 29% of their Editorial Board members are women, compared with 39.3% and 384%, respectively, for ACS.
Several big publishers have cashed in on AI licensing deals this year. In May, Informa, the parent company of the UK academic publisher Taylor & Francis, announced that it made a US$10-million deal to license content to Microsoft. The next month, the US academic publisher Wiley announced to its investors that it had earned $23 million from a deal with an unnamed firm developing generative-AI models. In September, the company said that it expected to earn another $21 million from such agreements this financial year. Nature’s news team contacted several other publishers including Elsevier and Springer Nature, Nature’s publisher, about whether they had plans for licensing deals, but received no comment.
Nature (Diana Kwon)
JB: There’s not much that’s new here. It’s a useful summary of the topic, though.
PLOS has been awarded a $3.3million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, underscoring its commitment to pioneer a shift away from traditional publishing models. The 3-year funding package from the Gates Foundation will support PLOS’ transition towards APC-free publishing by enabling authors, funded by the foundation, to publish with PLOS without facing APC barriers, and to contribute to open access publishing options for authors who do not have access to funding. This 3-year grant offers support while PLOS is actively working on new publishing models grounded in open science starting with an ongoing research & design project.
The Official PLOS Blog
JB: In 2022, PLOS generated $35m of revenue, so the $1m-a-year grant represents roughly 3% of turnover.
In 2023 PLOS published 18,883 research and review articles, according to Digital Science’s Dimensions. Last year, 311 articles (1.65%) acknowledged Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grants. So the Gates Foundation looks to be paying twice the going rate for the articles they publish. Of course, the volume could increase over the next few years.
So, we’ve recently launched our Open Lab as a dedicated Incubator unit. We’ll ask questions; what truly incentivises authors to publish open access? How do we enable access to the right information for people to benefit from research outputs? What further services are needed to create better value for open models already on offer? What’s the future of paid access and what does this mean for licensing? How can we ensure equity for all authors and readers? How does access translate into real-world impact?
We’re committing to testing new models on a small scale, and we’ll be very open and frank about what works and what doesn’t – this is an industry-wide concern, not just an Emerald one.
Emerald Publishing (announcement)
In order to craft an engaging narrative around research impact, and the part transparent research plays within it, DataSeer, a provider of artificial intelligence data solutions for research stakeholders, is partnering with Silverchair, a leading independent platform provider for professional and scholarly publishers. The organizations have collaborated on a pilot that aims to display research transparency data on a funder level within the new Silverchair product Sensus Impact. This trial combines DataSeer’s Open Science Metrics with Sensus’ dashboards, creating another element in the dynamic, at-a-glance impact narrative that the platform’s funder microsites aim to tell.
DataSeer (announcement)
JB: The announcement contains a view of data sharing practices from research supported by five funders as an example.
Bar charts are ubiquitous in the life-science literature, yet a study suggests that they’re often used in ways that can misrepresent research findings. The preprint, which was first posted on bioRxiv in September and has yet to be peer reviewed, found that in a collection of nearly 3,400 papers from 2023 that included at least one bar chart, almost one-third distorted the data in some way, highlighting a need for increased data literacy among scientists and for a system of checks throughout the writing and publishing processes.
Nature (Amanda Heidt)
The majority of respondents opposed the proposed January 2025 implementation, citing concerns about the feasibility, potential for non-compliance, and need for more time to adapt. Feedback suggests a strong preference for delaying implementation, aligning it with the longform output policy, or even deferring it to the next REF cycle. Additionally, respondents called for guidance and tools to support compliance with the new policy when it is implemented.
REF 2029 (announcement)
JB: The Research Excellence Framework is vitally important for UK academics as it determines how much government funding institutions receive. So if your journal or portfolio has a large exposure to UK research, this is important. You can read the full announcement here: REF 2029 Open Access Policy and Consultation and Engagement summary published. The journals’ implementation date has been deferred by a year:
The implementation date for requirement changes to the REF Open Access Policy will be 1 January 2026, rather than 2025. As noted in August, this gives a clear 12-month lead-in for implementing changes and adapting systems.
Around three out of every four PDF versions of scholarly papers are largely inaccessible to low-vision and blind readers, a study has found.
Researchers looked at how often around 20,000 studies published between 2014 and 2023 were compliant with 6 accessibility criteria. That includes providing alternative text for figures and headers for tables, as well as adding the tags necessary to make PDF files accessible to low-vision and blind readers, who typically access these files using assistive reading devices.
Only around 3% of the analysed studies met all six criteria, the analysis found, and just under 75% met none of the criteria at all.
Nature (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
For now, she’ll continue to do that from outside the country where she was born, even as it monitors her activity. Sleuths are used to criticism and threats as a result of their work, says Oransky, but Abalkina’s Russian identity can provide “an added layer that many don’t have to face”, he says. “The fact that she keeps up the work and still pushes on paper mills in Russia is a testament to who she is.”
Nature (Holly Else)
Other news stories
A summary of our Annual Meeting - Crossref
The “New” Silverchair: Brand Updates & New Logos
Why is there a citations gender gap in Indian materials science?
Bribery offers from China rattle journal editors. Are they being scammed?
‘Getting paid to review is justice’: journal pays peer reviewers in cryptocurrency
19 months and counting: Former Hindawi journal still hasn’t marked paper
ResearchGate and Canadian Science Publishing expand Journal Home partnership to cover Open Access Agreement Upgrade
Unveiling IOI’s 2024 Impact Report
ASM and RSNA Integrate GetFTR to Enhance Access from Article References
Springer Nature welcomes India's "One Nation One Subscription" Initiative, supporting the country's research ecosystem JB: Normally when there is a big announcement like the ONOS deal all the associated publishers issue a press release and shout about it. But, as far as I can tell, Springer Nature is the only publisher to have done this (and somewhat belatedly too). I can't help but wonder why.
PeerJ launches PeerJ Open Advances in Plant Science
Opinion
Scholarly publishers stand at a critical crossroads in the global knowledge ecosystem. By aligning their operations with the SDGs, they have the unique opportunity to shape the future of our world. The future of scholarly publishing is intrinsically linked to our collective ability to address global challenges. This transformation demands more than incremental changes—it requires a fundamental reimagining of our purpose, processes, and potential impact.
Scholarly publishers must become active architects of change, not passive disseminators of knowledge.
Science Editor (Ashutosh Ghildiyal)
OpenResearch.wtf (Mark Hahnel)
JB: These graphs come from a preprint posted by SciHub founder Alexandra Elbakyan. The numbers are scary.
Owing to the complexity of this issue, how best to promote the use and reporting of QUID [quantitative uncertainty informative data] will require thoughtful consideration. For example, journals may consider requiring a table or statement that systematically describes and presents each type of QUID assessed for each study aspect, similar to but extending beyond existing reporting requirements and checklists (for example, the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) guidelines or the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT)). This format would allow for the consideration that not all QUID are appropriate for all studies and provide flexibility for the reporting of QUID that may be developed in the future. Listing which QUID were assessed for the study would allow any reader to assess the trustworthiness of the study design, execution and reporting.
Nature Human Behaviour (Raul Cruz-Cano & David B. Allison)
JB: Every editor reading this newsletter should create a “won’t do list”. Perhaps QUID should be on it, perhaps not. The point being, every year editors are being asked to implement more and more checklists. Most editors are struggling to do the basics well and don’t have time for these extra checks, however well intentioned they are. Will AI come to the rescue?
If you work in scholarly publishing, in any capacity really, I think you should go and read the recent report from STM on trust and identity.
I have been thinking about the role of identity, and identity verification, in our industry for a few weeks now, and I’ve been struck by how odd it is that we don’t have strong identity verification practices. I’d been meaning to write up my thoughts on that with the proposal that we should move towards implementing what are called “know your customer” protocols, so this report is highly serendipitously timed from my point of view.
It’s very well written, and touches on many of the points that one should think about in relation to this question.
Ian Mulvany blog
JB: I agree 100% with Ian (who is CTO at the BMJ). I learnt a lot from reading this report and from Ian’s thoughtful assessment, too.
Other opinion articles
Filling the Gap: SSP Launches a Global Compensation Benchmarking Study for Scholarly Communications Professionals and Organizations
An Oath of Research Integrity?
Ethics In Scholarly Publishing Is More Than Following Guidelines
The Meaninglessness of Software Categories: A Case for Kotahi as a Scholarly Communications System
Intelligent summaries: Will Artificial Intelligence mark the finale for biomedical literature reviews?
News and Views: How much content can AI legally exploit?
Portico highlighted in Nature’s Call for Action to Preserve Digital Research
Growth Without Burnout: Managing Polarities Consciously for Sustainable Success in Publishing
China OA on the rise: What are the drivers behind authors’ OA choice?
What Have We Learned from Subscribe to Open?
Chatting at the Kitchen Table about India’s ONOS Deal
Getting it All Done With Grace JB: Thanks for the shout out. I’d add The Brief to the list of recommended resources. Oh, and Science Editor.
The high stakes of reproducible research and how publishers can support it
And finally...
The end of the journal has been predicted for many years. An article published on Leiden Madtrics follows a long line of similar predictions.
So, will we even need journals if human readers can retrieve knowledge directly from AI? Of course, this also affects evaluation regimes where journals have taken center stage. We are curious what the future roles of academic journals and peer review will look like. Likewise quantitative evaluation systems will be challenged too. How can they account for a more dynamic form of research communication? What kind of metadata and indicators will be required for assessing quality and impact
Is the end of the journal nigh? Will I need to rename this newsletter soon? Issue 105 (or issue 1 if I need to rebrand) will be sent in early January.
In the meantime, I’d like to wish you all a happy holidays. See you in 2025.
Until next time,
James