Hello fellow journalologists,
Welcome to 2025. Many of you will have had some time off and will now be playing catch up. In this issue I’ve attempted to summarise the key news stories that broke over the festive period. There’s a lot to cover, so I’ve dropped the Opinion section to keep this newsletter to a reasonable(ish) length.
A new year represents a new beginning. A time to take stock and plan for the year ahead. If you would like to work with me one-to-one, my coaching programme could help you to deliver on your objectives for 2025. Simply hit [reply] to this email and we can set up a time to discuss how I can help you.
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.
By the end of the six coaching sessions 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
The NIH and DOE policies require grantees to post accepted, peer-reviewed manuscripts in each agency’s public repository as soon as they are published, among other stipulations. Research funding agencies are also expected to require immediate sharing of project data. (NIH already began to require this in a 2023 policy.) First requested by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 2022, the requirements mark a major step forward for the global open science movement: Nine percent of the world’s research papers have U.S.-funded authors.
Advocates of open science have offered qualified praise. But universities are worried about logistics and costs, and many publishers are dismayed.
Science (Jeffrey Brainard)
JB: This has been in the works for a long time. There’s no mention of mandating a CC BY license for the Green OA version. This extract is likely to be of interest to publishers who read of this newsletter:
Other questions about the new policies surround copyright and who controls when a paper is published publicly. NIH and DOE both assert that work funded by those agencies is covered by a “government use license,” authorized by an existing U.S. regulation, that supports zero-embargo depositing of grantees’ papers—overriding standard contracts authors sign with publishers requiring embargoes. NIH also asserts that the government license allows other uses of the texts, a stance that may limit publishers’ ability to require permission and charge a fee for working with their articles. One of the most high profile possible uses is using automated methods including artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the papers for research.
Angela Cochran, who runs the publishing team at ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) is quoted a few times in the piece. This extract caught my eye:
Already this year, some large publishers have sold access to their paywalled content to AI developers for “text mining” to improve algorithms; Taylor and Francis, for example, signed a $10 million deal with Microsoft. Such deals have also been cut by small nonprofit scientific societies. ASCO’s revenue from this licensing matches the amount of money it earns from journal subscriptions, Cochran says.
If the Nelson Memo affects your programme (and it probably will) then you should also read Clarke & Esposito's take in the latest issue of The Brief.
Our growth is evident: from about 5,900 colleagues at the end of 2023 to over 6,650 today, our global MDPI community continues to expand. We expanded our global operations with a new office in Seoul, South Korea, and celebrated a record-breaking year with 60 MDPI journals newly indexed in the Web of Science and 37 MDPI journals accepted into Scopus. As at 30 December, 2024, we publish 457 journals, of which 448 are peer-reviewed and 9 dedicated to academic conference outputs. Of these, 306 are indexed in Scopus, 298 in the Web of Science, and 90 in PubMed.
MDPI Insights (Stefan Tochev)
JB: The MDPI staffing numbers were of interest to me. After all, this time last year Frontiers laid off 600 employees because article volumes had fallen. MDPI also had a difficult year in 2024, so I suspected that there may also have been redundancies there. Perhaps there were, but there was a net increase. 6,650 people is a large workforce.
The graph below shows the number of Articles (of all types) that MDPI and Frontiers have published since 2010 (Source: Dimensions, Digital Science).
In 2023 MDPI published 300,527 articles with 5900 staff (51 articles per employee) and in 2024 it published 238,061 articles with 6650 staff (36 articles per employee). That’s a simplistic back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it gives an indication of how the ratio of revenues to overheads has likely changed over the past few years.
It’s also worth remembering that although MDPI publishes 457 journals, the 46 largest by article volume are responsible for 71% of the article output. The other 90% of journals only publish 29% of articles. In other words, the portfolio is dependent on a relatively small number of large journals for the majority of its revenues. As you can see above, the decline in articles in 2024 was larger than in 2023. This year is an important year for MDPI. Will they be able to turn the ship around?
Finland is downgrading almost 300 Frontiers and MDPI journals to its lowest rating – a de facto blacklisting move that might soon be replicated in other countries, according to an expert.
Announcing its downgrading of 271 open access journals from January, Finland’s Publication Forum said the decision was the result of a policy set in September that sought to downgrade so-called “grey journals” – which, it says, “make use of the APC (article processing charge) operating model” and “aim to increase the number of publications with the minimum time spend for editorial work and quality assessment”.
Times Higher Education (Jack Grove)
JB: This quote summarises the backstory:
At its meeting, the Publishing Forum, known as Jufo in Finnish, which uses discipline-specific expert panels to rate the quality of journals, noted how “one of the most important changes in scientific publishing in Finland is the sharp increase in the number of articles published, especially in MDPI and Frontiers open access journals operating with APC fees”.
The graph below (taken from Dimensions) shows the volume of Gold and Hybrid research articles, by publisher, with at least one Finnish author. MDPI and Frontiers have a relatively small market share in Finland, which has dropped in recent years. Elsevier seems to be growing the fastest in Finland, when it comes to OA.
Frontiers challenged the decision with a series of opinion articles:
Meanwhile, around the same time another news story broke. Over 100 German Universities Partner with MDPI in New National Agreement.
ProPublica (report)
JB: Not-for-profits in the USA have to file their tax returns (called Form 990) at the end of each calendar year; the 2023 data are now available for all not-for-profits. The two graphs above show PLOS’ financial performance between 2011 and 2023. Revenues fell from $38.1m in 2021 to $33m in 2023, while expenses increased from $32.5m to $34.9m.
On the plus side, PLOS article output increased slightly in 2024 (graph below from Dimensions), so revenues should have increased too, unlike MDPI and Frontiers (see previous story).
The resigning editors also said Elsevier “unilaterally took full control over” the editorial board’s “scientific structure and composition” by requiring all editors sign a new contract every year,” leading to a decline in the number of associate editors. The publisher also “indicated it would no longer support the dual-editor [in chief] model that has been a hallmark of JHE since 1986,” according to the statement. “When the editors vehemently opposed this action, Elsevier said it would support a dual-editor model by cutting the compensation rate by half.”
Retraction Watch (Ivan Oransky)
JB: The resignation letter can be found here.
Over strong opposition of the editors, Elsevier has been relentlessly pursuing a restructuring of the EB. The goal to reduce the number of AEs to fewer than half the current number will result in fewer AEs handling far more papers, and on topics well outside their areas of expertise.
Research article output has dropped over the past decade as the graph from Dimensions (Digital Science) shows.
If output halves over a 5-year period then any publisher would start to ask questions and look to reduce costs. Does a journal that publishes 50 research articles a year need two Editors-in-Chief? (Answer below.)
The two EiCs had edited the journal for the past 38 years. In cases like this the publisher needs to balance loyalty towards the editors with the need to create a financially sustainable journal that looks to the future. In the USA presidents can serve for a maximum of two 4-year terms (well, that’s the current rule anyway). Should the same happen on journals?
Retraction Watch published a follow up story: Elsevier denies AI use in response to evolution journal board resignations, which included this statement from Elsevier:
We sincerely thank the outgoing editors, the majority of whom were coming to the end of their term at the end of 2024, for their invaluable contributions and dedication to the journal. We will continue to build on their important work in maintaining the high quality expected of the journal with the new editorial team.
The story also notes that three new EiCs have been appointed, which really does feel like overkill for a journal that publishes 50 research papers a year.
A huge collaboration has confirmed growing concerns that fake or flawed research is polluting medical systematic reviews, which summarize evidence from multiple clinical trials and shape treatment guidelines worldwide. The study is part of an effort to address the problem by creating a short checklist that will help researchers to spot untrustworthy trials. Combined with automated integrity tools, this could help those conducting systematic reviews to filter out flawed work — in medicine and beyond.
Nature (Richard van Noorden)
JB: You can read the preprint here. The plain language summary includes this extract:
We applied a comprehensive list of “trustworthiness checks” to 95 RCTs in 50 systematic reviews to learn more about them, and to see how often performing the checks would lead us to classify RCTs as being potentially inauthentic. We found that applying the checks led to concerns about the authenticity of around 1 in 3 RCTs. However, we found that many of the checks were difficult to perform and could have been misinterpreted. This might have led us to be overly sceptical in some cases.
These launches come at a pivotal moment. As healthcare faces global challenges—from the rise of chronic disease to the incorporation of AI in clinical care—BMJ Group recognises the urgent need for specialised and reliable platforms to drive real-world impact. These journals will help to bridge gaps between research and practical application, empowering healthcare providers and policymakers across regions and resource levels.
BMJ Group (press release)
JB: Corporate spin always makes me smile. The new journals will also help the publisher to create a financially sustainable portfolio, of course. Society publishers of all types are launching new journals. The open access gold rush is not restricted to commercial publishers.
The American Academy of Neurology announces today its newest journal, Neurology® Open Access, which joins the flagship journal Neurology® and its four subspecialty journals. The new online peer-reviewed journal publishes original research articles, scholarly reviews, case reports and study protocols in all areas of neurology and the clinical neurosciences.
American Academy of Neurology (press release)
JB: Speaking of which, this announcement was released yesterday...
The ICMJE updated the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. In addition, the ICMJE published a separate editorial highlighting the dangers posed by predatory and pseudo-journals, "Predatory Journals: What Can We Do to Protect Their Prey?"
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (announcement)
JB: The ICMJE includes representatives (often the Editor-in-Chief) from all of the major general medical journals and sets the tone for clinical publishing culture. You can read the editorial on predatory journals here and the updated version of the guidelines (with annotations) here.
The results began to appear immediately, and the number of manuscripts submitted by domestic authors to JKMS began to decrease noticeably. In proportion, the number of papers accepted and finally published has also begun to decrease. Unlike 2023, when an average of 5-6 papers were published every week, it is now difficult to publish even 3 papers a week. According to a survey by Jung et al.,3 submissions to the JKMS have decreased sharply since August 2024. The number of final papers published in 2024 decreased by about 20% compared to 2023.
This poses a significant challenge for JKMS, an open-access journal that relies heavily on article processing charges for revenue. The resulting loss is a serious financial setback.
While the financial strain on managing the journal is concerning, the more pressing issue is the noticeable decline in the number of published papers.
Journal of Korean Medical Science (Jin-Hong Yoo)
JB: This editorial is interesting because it gives some insight into how APC-based open access business models can be fragile in the face of external perturbations. This is the backstory:
The year 2024 began with the government’s reckless push to increase the number of medical students excessively, and the current medical community in South Korea is in chaos. Residents across the country have resigned and left university and training hospitals, and medical students across the country are taking a leave of absence. As a result, the remaining professors are taking on much more hospital work than usual, and there is absolutely no time to invest in research and paper writing.
Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. There could be other reasons why the journal is receiving fewer submissions, but the hypothesis seems sound.
A quick search in Dimensions for clinical research articles from South Korea (published in all journals) suggests that output was steady in 2024.
However, the editor-in-chief notes:
What is even more alarming, however, is the realization that this may only be the beginning.
Most of the papers submitted and published in 2024 were written prior to the onset of the medical turmoil in Korea.
This situation reflects widespread delays, as professors have lacked the time to refine previously drafted submissions or dedicate sufficient attention to peer review.
The more pressing question is: how many professors are currently embarking on new research or writing fresh papers?
Chemosphere has retracted eight articles this month and published 60 expressions of concern since April. As we’ve noted elsewhere, removing a journal from Web of Science means Clarivate will no longer index its papers, count their citations, or give the title an impact factor, which can have negative effects for authors, as universities rely on such metrics to judge researchers’ work for tenure and promotion decisions.
Retraction Watch (Ellie Kincaid)
JB: The Chemosphere story popped up throughout 2024, so this denouement is perhaps unsurprising.
New data released by Springer Nature shows the immediate impact Transformative Agreements (TA) have on driving global open access (OA) output, with some countries seeing increases in OA uptake of up to 78% in the first year of their TA.
“Accelerating open access at scale – a look at three transformative agreements” analyses data from across Springer Nature’s TAs with a specific focus on - LYRASIS (USA), SANLiC (South Africa), and the CTK Consortium (Slovenia).
Springer Nature (announcement)
JB: You can read the white paper here. The headline numbers are:
We have already come a long way from our first agreement in 2015: as of 2024, we support around 3,800 institutions through over 65 agreements. Widespread participation is essential to realising the full potential of TAs.
Springer Nature argues that Transformative Agreements are a ’Good Thing’, which they undoubtedly are for those publishers that have the large sales teams that are needed to negotiate them.
Ioannidis used the composite index to identify top-cited scientists: those whose citation indices are in the top 2% for their field or in the top 100,000 across all fields. He defined “precocious” scientists as those who reached the top-cited list within eight years of their first publication, and “ultra-precocious” as those who did so within five years. By contrast, the average time from first publication to most-cited status was 36 years.
The analysis revealed a marked rise in the number of top-cited early-career researchers between 2019 and 2023, the period for which Ioannidis has complete data. During this time, the number of precocious authors increased from 213 to 469, and ultra-precocious authors increased from 28 to 59.
Nature (Alix Soliman)
JB: You can read the preprint here.
We want to give you Oversight of these patterns and that’s why we’re delighted to launch Oversight, Clear Skies’ primary data analytics service.
Oversight has been in development for some time. It was first made available in mid-2023 for a few bespoke use-cases. It was then upgraded to full industry-level coverage. I’d like to extend my thanks to everyone who gave feedback on the service. We’re very grateful for your support.
Clear Skies (Adam Day)
JB: This blog post is part product announcement (buried at the end of the post) and part musing about how translation services can act maliciously.
Springer Nature has launched a new AI-driven tool to help editors and peer reviewers by automating a number of editorial quality checks and alerting editors to potentially unsuitable manuscripts so that they can be held back from peer review.
Developed in-house, this is the latest AI tool planned for integration into Springer Nature’s next generation article submission and processing platform, Snapp, following the inclusion in 2024 of two AI tools to identify fake content. Working in collaboration with researchers and designed to seamlessly integrate with Snapp, it is currently being tested and verified on over 100 OA journals, including Scientific Reports the largest OA journal in the world, and across over 100,000 submissions.
Springer Nature (announcement)
JB. The other two AI tools are Geppetto and SnappShot, which were announced in June last year.
In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will "maximize the impact" of their research, saying the $49 package will return "high-quality" outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher's sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.
Futurism (Maggie Harrison Dupré)
JB: [Head in hands]
Researchers have launched a database of more than 14,000 studies that have been withdrawn from the preprint server arXiv since its launch in 1991.
As well as shedding light on why those preprints were pulled from arXiv, the data set — called WithdrarXiv — aims to spur the creation of automated tools that flag potential errors to researchers hoping to submit manuscripts, says Delip Rao, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and a co-author of a study describing the tool. Most preprints have not been through formal peer-review or quality-assurance processes.
Nature (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
FoSci [Forensic Scientometrics] is a forensic, data-driven initiative to uphold scientific integrity and public trust in science. It combines forensic investigation and scientometrics, which is the study of how research is shared and built upon. FoSci uncovers patterns that uphold or threaten the integrity of science itself.
The problems currently researched by forensic scientometricians include: author misrepresentation, data manipulation, fake conferences, image duplication, misconduct (including fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism), papermill operations, questionable research practices, sale of authorship and citations, sneaked references, stealth corrections, and tortured phrases.
The Declaration states that these problems have widespread and potentially damaging implications, through the citation of fraudulent research in patents, clinical guidelines, government policy, and more.
Digital Science (David Ellis)
JB: You can read the Declaration here.
Following our announcement last year, the Science family of journals began using the Proofig software for image analysis across papers that are peer-reviewed. This tool enables the identification of image duplications and manipulations, image plagiarism, and AI-generated imagery. Since January 2024, we have analyzed more than 2000 papers and documented 23 with issues that prompted a request for explanations and raw data from the authors, and occasionally a request to reviewers to consider this new information. Most issues turned out to be errors in figure assembly and could be remedied before publication. However, two papers were rejected because the authors could not provide a reasonable explanation for the irregularities, undermining confidence in the data. This experience generally points to the need for careful data management in laboratories to prevent errors during figure compilation.
Science (H. Holden Thorp, Valda Vinson and Lauren Kmec)
JB: Two problematic papers out of 2000+ sounds reassuring. I would have expected a higher proportion than that.
The editorial also notes that Science journals will allow peer reviewers to use ORCID to track their peer review history; that the editors are monitoring PubPeer; and that Science published three times more erratum notices in 2024 than in previous years.
A publication platform called
DeSci Publish aims to predict the impact of manuscripts by giving them a ‘novelty score’. The developers say that this score could assist journal editors in deciding which studies to publish, and could be an asset for researchers who are looking to be published in a competitive journal.
The novelty score is calculated using an algorithm that compares the combinations of keywords and cited journals in a scientific manuscript with those in previous publications and projects the types of paper that will be published in the future. From this, it identifies novelty as deviations from these predictions. A high novelty score indicates that a paper connects ideas in unexpected ways, which are likely to be innovative and impactful.
Nature Index (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
JB: This is the key point for many readers of this newsletter. You might want to explore how your journals have fared with this new metric:
Since its launch by the DeSci Foundation in September, DeSci Publish has given novelty scores to more than 50 million manuscripts that are
catalogued by OpenAlex, an index of scientific documents run by Canadian non-profit firm OurResearch. Koellinger says that the team plans to continue releasing novelty scores of newly published literature.
Science and Retraction Watch’s investigation suggests authors, journals, and institutions all benefit from the scheme, which floods the literature with poor-quality publications and casts doubt on metrics of scholarly output and impact. For authors, commentaries can be a quick and easy way to amass publications and citations. Authors “just want a PubMed-indexed article. That’s it,” says Shirish Rao, a recent medical graduate who works at a hospital in Mumbai, India. Commentaries are an ideal avenue because “you don’t really need original data,” so AI tools can generate them in almost no time, explains Rao, who is a member of the Association for Socially Applicable Research, a nonprofit think tank. And because they are rarely peer reviewed, they are typically easier to get into journals than a research paper.
Science (Frederik Joelving)
Other news stories
Controversial COVID study that promoted unproven treatment retracted after four-year saga
Researcher linked to paper mill activity mysteriously reappeared on list of journal’s editorial board
EDP Sciences Maths Journals: From S2O to OSI
Creative rights in AI Coalition calls on Government to protect copyright as GAI policy develops
Introducing the Retraction Watch Sleuth in Residence Program
Journal won’t retract paper that involved human organ transplants in China
Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all
Journals investigating dozens of papers by leading Canadian urologists
UK university (Surrey) drops Elsevier deal
University of Sheffield drops ‘big deal’ with Elsevier
Another UK university (York) drops big Elsevier deal
New research paper highlights key questions to tackle the growing threat of paper mills
Partnerships
CSIRO Publishing Selects Silverchair
Emerald Publishing Partners with Silverchair
Bone & Joint launches AI-generated podcast developed by 67 Bricks
ACS Partners with Major Innovation Institution in Brazil for a Brand-New Read and Publish Agreement in the Region
Wiley and IEEE Extend Partnership
ResearchGate and Sage Journal Home partnership to cover 90 journals and include Open Access Agreement Upgrade
Royal Society Publishing launch Journal Home Open Access Agreement Upgrade for full portfolio
Cell Press, CEMPS, CAS, and CSPB renew partnership to publish Molecular Plant and Plant Communications
And finally...
This thoughtful opinion piece (Ethics of posthumous scholarly authorship in the sciences) is part of the BMJ’s coverage of Death is Just Around the Corner. Required reading for editors.
However, despite interest in posthumous literary publication, little has been written about it in scholarly science. Calls for a clear policy have not resulted in uniform comprehensive guidelines, and occasional online discussions have shown that there is no consensus about how deceased colleagues should be credited in publications: some advocate coauthorship; others acknowledgment only. Nor are there clear guidelines on how an author’s death should be noted.
This topic resonates with me personally. My father was a biochemist, who died in 1986 aged 46. His name appears as an author on three papers in 1987, one in 1988, and one in 1989. I’ve often wondered what he would have made of that.
Thankfully, the last four people to edit the BMJ are still alive and well.
I’ll be on stage with the current BMJ editor, Kamran Abbasi, at the APE meeting next week. We’re taking part in a panel discussion about the tensions between quality vs quantity, which will give him a good opportunity to push back on my earlier comments about the launch of five new BMJ journals (yes, I know, I have been more guilty than most of this offence in the past. Glasshouses, stones etc.)
If you see me during one of the coffee breaks, please do say hello.
Until next time,
James