Hello fellow journalologists,
Two weeks have passed since the last issue of this newsletter. Family life has needed to take priority over writing Journalology. Hopefully you’ve been busy with life outside work, too, and this week’s issue will help you to catch up.
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The scholarly publishing environment is changing fast. Even the most seasoned publisher can benefit from independent advice. I can help you to build a successful portfolio strategy and thrive in an open access world.
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News
Meanwhile, Retraction Watch has learned that most — if not all — research investigators at the National Science Foundation’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) will also be leaving their jobs.
Some of the departures, at the OIG and the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), are voluntary, while others were part of the mass government firings carried out earlier this month.
Retraction Watch (Kate Travis)
Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been prohibited from co-authoring publications with World Health Organization staff, dealing a blow to global research efforts and continuing the Trump administration’s aggressive attack on government-funded science.
“CDC staff should not be co-authors on manuscripts/abstracts with WHO staff,” an interim guidance document dated Thursday and obtained by HuffPost says, adding that CDC staff should also not author publications related to work “funded by WHO.”
Huffington Post (Matt Shuham)
A temporary outage of the US-government-funded PubMed database of biomedical literature over the weekend sent many researchers globally into a panic. Although the disruption does not seem to have been deliberate, and the service has since been restored, the episode highlights scientists’ reliance on the website and left many anguished about its future.
Nature (Smriti Mallapaty)
Tang remains cautious about the impact the guidance will have on paper mills. Unless the courts collaborate with other relevant departments, including the State Administration for Market Regulation and the National Copyright Administration, the guidance’s reach will be limited, says Tang.
“The Supreme People’s Court does not have direct enforcement power over these organizations,” he says. “I am pessimistic about the effectiveness of this opinion, as it fails to fundamentally dismantle the business structures that facilitate research misconduct.”
And Wang expects the guiding opinions will mainly affect the use of paper mills, which are involved in only some research-misconduct cases. “Academic and administrative measures are currently the main methods of addressing academic misconduct in China,” she says.
Nature (Smriti Mallapaty)
The Black Spatula Project is an open-source AI tool that has so far analysed around 500 papers for errors. The group, which has around eight active developers and hundreds of volunteer advisers, hasn’t made the errors public yet; instead, it is approaching the affected authors directly, says Joaquin Gulloso, an independent AI researcher based in Cartagena, Colombia, who helps to coordinate the project. “Already, it’s catching many errors,” says Gulloso. “It’s a huge list. It’s just crazy.”
The other effort is called YesNoError and was inspired by the Black Spatula Project, says founder and AI entrepreneur Matt Schlicht. The initiative, funded by its own dedicated cryptocurrency, has set its sights even higher. “I thought, why don’t we go through, like, all of the papers?” says Schlicht. He says that their AI tool has analysed more than 37,000 papers in two months. Its website flags papers in which it has found flaws – many of which have yet to be verified by a human, although Schlicht says that YesNoError has a plan to eventually do so at scale.
Nature (Elizabeth Gibney)
The report details Emerald’s distinctive approach to responsible publishing and the "Emerald Goals" initiative, which tackles real-world societal challenges through interdisciplinary solutions.
This SDGs-based strategy enhances our dedication to promoting impactful research and aligns with our role as a founding signatory of the UN SDG Publisher Compact. This strategy communicates our purpose-driven brand and supports the education, publication, and impact of research aligned with the SDGs.
Through our Real Impact manifesto, we collaborate with partners to redefine "research impact," challenging outdated metrics. We acknowledge the barriers that exist and strive to foster a more equitable environment where research can thrive. Our focus includes advocating for innovative dissemination formats, robust support systems, and greater recognition of impactful work.
Emerald Publishing (announcement)
JB: When I read reports like this, I often wonder who the target readership is. Potential employees might be wooed and existing staff energised. How many academics will read the report? Would it convince them to submit a paper to Emerald?
The tone is very different from a standard annual report, which often present data on revenue, submissions and publications. Emerald takes a different tack. It’s worth remembering that Emerald was acquired by Cambridge Information Group in 2022.
Cambridge Information Group is a family-owned, mission-led investment firm with a history of long-term investments in education, information, and software companies. During CIG’s multi-decade ownership of ProQuest, the business grew rapidly through investments in new products and multiple strategic acquisitions. CIG's acquisition of Emerald builds on their deep experience in the higher education industry, with real ambition for long-term growth of the business.
This graph from Dimensions (Digital Science) shows Emerald’s output over the past 15 years (research and review articles). Just over half of the output is classified as ’Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services’ using the ANZSRC 2020 classification scheme.
Clarivate acquired Proquest from Cambridge Information Group in 2021 for $5.3 billion. Andrew Snyder, the CEO of Cambridge Information Group (which owns Emerald), is the non-executive Board Chair of Clarivate.
In research, organic growth slowed to 3% against a challenging comparable, the prior year having benefitted from new revenues related to the New England Journal of Medicine digital distribution contract, won in late 2022.
JB: Wolters Kluwer revenues were €5.916 billion in 2024. The “Learning, Research & Practice” group is part of the Health division, which had revenues of €1.584 billion. The report does not provide a break down of the contribution of journals sales to that total.
Taylor & Francis had a strong year in 2024, with underlying revenues on plan at c.3.5% (excluding non-recurring data access contracts) and an exceptional performance in licencing, archives and data access, in particular with AI companies, taking total revenue growth to 12.8%. As previously disclosed, this included $75m+ of data access revenue which is non-recurring.
In 2025, the year has started well, with subscription renewals ahead on both retention and cash collection compared to 2024. Open research volumes also continue to grow, with the focus on increasing submissions, improving acceptance rates and shortening the lead time from submission to publication.
Informa (announcement)
JB: Open access publishers have been focusing on ’increasing submissions, improving acceptance rates and shortening the lead time from submission to publication’ for many years now. The graph below (Dimensions, Digital Science; research and review articles published OA in fully OA or hybrid journals) shows how far behind Taylor & Francis is from the other large publishers.
In percentage terms the open access growth is good (30k articles in 2020 up to 52k in 2024; 75%), but the absolute growth has been much lower than at Elsevier or Springer Nature. Given the spate of recent acquisitions T&F clearly has ambitions to grow faster.
You can download the Informa report here.
[Research] Revenue of $268 million was up 4% as reported and 5% at constant currency driven by growth in open access, solutions, and AI licensing. During the quarter, Wiley executed two landmark recurring revenue agreements, including India (“one nation, one subscription” expanding access to over 6,000 institutions) and Brazil (transformational agreement expanding access to over 430 institutions). Leading indicators remain strong year-to-date, with submissions up 18% and output up 8%. Wiley also expanded a previously executed content licensing project for training this quarter valued at $9 million. For the nine months, Research revenue was up 3% as reported and at constant currency. Excluding AI revenue, Research revenue rose 2% in the quarter and year-to-date, both at constant currency.
Adjusted EBITDA of $88 million was up 11% as reported and 12% at constant currency due to revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the quarter rose to 32.7% from 30.9% in the prior year period. Year-to-date, Research Adjusted EBITDA margin was up 30 basis points to 31.1%.
Wiley (announcement)
JB: The Wiley investor presentation can be found here. The +18% increase in submissions and +8% growth in published articles is notable. There seems to be a trend for researchers to choose to submit in increased numbers to established publishers. Since article growth is lower than submission growth, many of the additional papers are likely of low quality.
Academic publishers have added their voices to growing concerns about [UK] government proposals to change copyright law, which would give new freedoms to artificial intelligence developers.
The proposed changes include an “opt-out” approach to tech companies scraping copyrighted materials, including academic research, for training AI models.
The opt-out proposal has drawn high-profile criticism from artists and the creative industries, but academic publishers have also raised concerns that it would not allow for “sufficient protection” of research papers and publications.
A consultation on the proposals closed on 25 February.
Research Professional (Sophie Hogan)
JB: OUP, CUP, Wiley, T&F and the Publishers Association are all quoted in the story.
CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, today announced a new AI Systems Training License will be available later in the 2025 calendar year to both existing and prospective CCC customers, including AI systems providers and organizations developing AI-powered applications. This voluntary, non-exclusive collective license is designed to aid organizations that want to comply with copyright laws for the use of third-party content to train AI systems as well as the external use and certain outputs from trained models.
Copyright Clearance Center (announcement)
Assessing the validity and trustworthiness of research claims is a central, ongoing, and labor-intensive part of the scientific process. Supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Predicting Replicability Challenge seeks to accelerate the development of methods that could dramatically reduce the time and resources needed to assess research credibility.
The challenge invites teams to develop algorithmic approaches that predict the likelihood of research claims being successfully replicated. Participants will have access to training data drawn from the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) database that documents 3,000+ replication effects. New research claims will then be used to test the algorithmic approaches’ ability to predict replication outcomes.
Center for Open Science (announcement)
On Open Data Day 2025, Frontiers is launching the FAIR² (FAIR Squared™) Data Management Pilot, a first-of-its-kind peer-reviewed service that helps researchers get credited and cited for their work while making data AI-ready, reusable, and impactful. FAIR² Data Management leverages AI-assisted curation to structure research data for publication, making it easier to find, reuse, and analyze—both by humans and machines—so researchers can focus on discovery rather than data preparation. By making datasets shareable and optimized for reuse, FAIR² Data Management enhances research efficiency and reproducibility, accelerating breakthroughs in global health, planetary sustainability, and scientific innovation.
Frontiers (announcement)
MDPI, a leading open access publisher, today announced the relaunch of a submission platform specifically designed to support small-scale, independent publishers. The Journal and Article Management System, JAMS, now offers flexible pricing and new editorial services to improve accessibility.
The platform’s new Editorial Guidance service, for example, offers expert consulting to help journals achieve indexing, expand readership, and enhance their impact, setting a new standard in editorial support across the scholarly publishing landscape.
JAMS’ new scalable pricing model has been designed to benefit publishers in the Global South, non-profits, and smaller organizations, improving access to high-quality journal management and engaging researchers from diverse communities.
MDPI (announcement)
JB: JAMS was initially launched in 2019 and often gets forgotten about in discussions about journal management systems. The revised website gives a helpful overview. The platform provides an end-to-end service.
Through this partnership, Silverchair is integrating Signals Manuscript Checks, using webhook notifications and an API to retrieve metadata from submissions. Signals traffic light evaluations are displayed directly in ScholarOne workflows via custom flags.
With the added nuance of the evaluation flag, the administrator or editor will be able to access the full Research Signals report directly from ScholarOne, ensuring a streamlined addition to the research integrity workflow. Notifications can be signaled from each stage of the publishing workflow, so publishers and editorial teams can customize which integrity checks run at different stages of the review process.
Silverchair (announcement)
Cassyni, the world’s leading platform for research seminars, now integrates directly with ScholarOne Manuscripts - enabling journals to deliver seminars as a new author service, automatically and at scale. These Author Seminars give authors the opportunity to increase the impact of their research and strengthen the journal community.
Journals use Cassyni to run online seminar series that reach a global audience. These seminars are fully integrated into the scholarly ecosystem – receiving DOIs and being indexed widely – and have been shown to attract large engaged communities of researchers who go on to preferentially choose the journal for their next manuscript. Papers discussed in seminars also go on to have higher citation impact.
Cassyni (announcement)
KGL will retain Origin’s management and team of associates and integrate them with its existing peer review and editorial group. With decades of experience supporting over 500 journals, KGL Editorial’s 200+ managing editors, credentialed subject editors, and editorial associates based in the US, Europe, and India provide comprehensive editorial office, peer review and production management, research integrity, developmental editing, and specialized services to publishers, editors, authors, and reviewers.
KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd (announcement)
Integrating via API with submission systems including Editorial Manager® (EM) and ScholarOne Manuscripts, Smart Review directly accepts articles into a comprehensive peer review workflow, providing at-a-glance oversight across multiple journals with advanced reporting capabilities. The system implements automated checks guided by human supervision, including figure and table labeling and citation, reference format, ethical disclosures, and conflicts of interest between authors and potential reviewers.
Supplementing long-standing checks such as with iThenticate and other manual and automated checks, additional research integrity checks are now performed via third-party integrations with Clear Skies’ Papermill Alarm and DataSeer’s SnapShot tool.
KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd (announcement)
Project MUSE is delighted to announce a major achievement in its quest to advance open access. Thanks to the unwavering support of libraries and institutions worldwide, MUSE’s Subscribe to Open (S2O) initiative has reached its sustainability goal for 2025. This remarkable accomplishment will make more than 100 journals’ 2025 volumes, from 27 publishers, openly accessible on the MUSE platform.
This success reflects a collective commitment to ensuring that vital humanities and social sciences scholarship is accessible to everyone, free from paywalls. The S2O model, rooted in equity and collaboration, allows subscription journals to annually transition to open access without relying on Article Processing Charges (APCs). By leveraging MUSE’s long-standing journal collections model, this initiative represents a sustainable approach to broadening access to essential scholarly works.
Project MUSE (announcement)
Other news stories
Aries Systems and CACTUS expand partnership to improve research quality with automated checks
CACTUS partners with EDP Sciences to enhance research integrity
eLife win OpenAthens UX Award 2025
GetFTR Expands Support for Perpetual Rights and Journal Transfers
Royal Society Publishing selects the Silverchair Platform for modernized digital library
The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) releases their Community Call to Action
Call for Proposals: IOI Fund for Network Adoption
100 million reasons to trust Scopus
Managing citations and bibliographies in Overleaf just got easier
Sexual harassment allegations linked to drop in citations
A coaching programme for publishing executives
Leading teams effectively and managing journal portfolios is hard, especially in a rapidly changing marketplace. It can be lonely at the top with few people to bounce ideas off or be truly open with.
Are you communicating effectively within your organisation and externally? Does your team work cohesively to provide the best possible author experience? Do you have a clear strategy that you’re able to execute?
Most coaches work across multiple industries and are unable to provide useful insight into scholarly publishing. The Journalology coaching programme is different. I’ve got a proven track record, as both an editor and as a publisher, and can help you to create more impactful journals and to get better at your craft.
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Opinion
The weeks ahead may be the greatest test that the US scientific community has ever faced. It is vital to remember that it is the words and actions of all members of the scientific community—universities, journals, societies, associations, activists, and scientists—that form the collective voice of science, not any one statement. In time, the dust will settle, and the new challenges confronting the enterprise will be clear. It will then be time to take stock and learn how to prosper in a new era. To prepare for that, we need unity and support for each other now. Regardless of style and tactics, everyone in the American scientific community must hold to the principles of independence, peer evaluation, and inclusion. These have enabled the country’s success in science and technology for at least a century. We will not turn our backs on them now.
Science (Holden Thorp)
JB: This is what good leadership looks like.
Considering recent directives by the current administration of the United States government concerning manuscripts under review at scientific journals, the CSE Editorial Policy Committee highlights our recommendations concerning the following topics: anonymous authorship, editorial freedom, removal of author name from byline, retractions/corrections, and withdrawals of submitted manuscripts before publication.
Science Editor (Jill Jackson, Stephanie Casway, CSE Editorial Policy Committee)
JB: If you work in an editorial role, you may want to bookmark Recommendations for Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications, which is also available as a PDF download.
By the end of this process, you should have a set of structured, section-by-section comments that can be quickly refined into a coherent reviewer report. But be sure to check the publisher’s policy on generative artificial intelligence (AI) before you get started. Some are fine with reviewers using generative AI tools to tidy up written feedback. But uploading a manuscript or review text to the cloud is usually a hard ‘no’ — confidentiality is on the line. Running an LLM offline locally keeps you within policy restrictions and safeguards the authors’ anonymity. Plus, it prevents their work from being scooped up for training future LLMs.
Nature (Dritjon Gruda)
We know that features such as the one’s listed above are technologically possible because we use these features every day outside of our industry. That is the entire point.
Industry reflection on what the expectations are/will be of the incoming generation of collaborators is crucial. Publishing technology enjoyed decades of innovative leadership in content discoverability and standards. The backbone exists, but the execution and the interface has fallen behind.
Artificial intelligence and Large Language Models are already replacing search and promising new content experiences. If we don’t modernize the way we engage with readers and volunteers, we will be left with doing nothing more than feeding the machines.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Angela Cohran)
JB: This has been a point of concern for as long as I can remember. I agree with Angela that the user experience needs to improve, but that requires investment. The largest publishers have the ability to make big investments, but even so the user experience is often woeful. The bottom line is spot on and may be a future that’s hard to escape.
However, there may be a novel route forward, as the next article explains.
This shift is leading us into an era of what I’ve previously described as Expert-Driven Development (EDD)—a methodology where the experts in the use case are the developers. In this model, AI removes the barriers between domain experts and software creation, allowing those with deep knowledge of publishing workflows—editors, journal managers, and production staff—to directly shape the tools they use. Instead of relying on intermediaries to translate requirements into software, they can interact with AI-driven systems that generate, test, and refine publishing infrastructure based on their needs.
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We are on the verge of a transformation where publishing infrastructure will no longer be dictated by large, static platforms but will evolve in real-time, shaped by those who know the workflows best. This is not a distant vision—it’s happening now, and the next few years will reveal just how powerful this approach can be.
Robots Cooking (Adam Hyde)
JB: In a separate post (AI-Driven Development in Scholarly Publishing) Adam says:
If you have an idea or need for a platform, let’s take the plunge into this new frontier together. The shift toward personalized, efficient publishing solutions is already underway, and the future looks promising.
In the social sciences IMRaD has been in part responsible for a transformation in academic writing from a more essayistic and free form, to what this author considers predictable and boring reports. While writing in the natural sciences, or quantitative social sciences, generally could be seen as a product reporting research, academic writing in the qualitative tradition of the social sciences is research.
During the writing process, the logic and consistency of ideas and arguments get challenged and tested. By muddling through the text, new perspectives, categories, and patterns can occur. Consequently, findings can be lifted to a more interesting analytical level, which, again, could potentially change the whole paper and its contribution to knowledge. Hence, while current standards of academic writing can enable consistency and efficiencies, they can also be disturbing and counterproductive, hindering the creativity and testing central to the process of writing/thinking in qualitative fields of research.
Impact of Social Sciences (Øyunn Syrstad Høydal)
Other opinion articles
The Levers of Sharing Research Data: Moving from Aspiration to Action with AI Support
DEI Under Threat: The Battle for Inclusive Research - The Scholarly Kitchen
Improving gender balance in editorial boards: A perspective from the Communications journals series
The benefits of inclusive publishing and why we need more inclusive journals
Advancing PDF in Scholarly Publications
Forging the Way Forward to Inclusive and Responsible Artificial Intelligence in Scholarly Publishing
Looking Ahead: The Research Nexus and the State of Metadata in 2050
Open repositories cannot ignore retractions and corrections - Impact of Social Sciences
Come ROR with us: Using ROR IDs in place of Funder IDs
Diversification and Decentralization of Peer Review: Part 1—Initiatives at the Forefront
Diversification and Decentralization of Peer Review: Part 2—Tools That Facilitate
Love Me Through It: My Thoughts About the Future of Scientific Editing, Publishing, and Social Media, Written in the Year 2025
And finally...
I’ll be taking part in a ISMTE webinar on March 18 on “Mid-to-Late Career Development”. I’m in denial about being in the ’late stage’ of my career (according to this article in a few years I will enter the fifth and final career stage: ’Decline’. Gulp.).
Anyway, here’s the sales pitch.
Join us for this webinar featuring James Butcher (Journalology) and Jennifer Regala (Wolters Kluwer), who will provide tips and tricks geared towards mid-to-late career professionals for staying engaged with the scholarly publishing community and informed on developments in the field. The session will feature a panel discussion with the speakers moderated by ISTME Webinar Committee member Holly Koppel and conclude with an audience Q&A.
Please do come along and ask us difficult questions. Old duffers like me (I can’t speak for Jennifer) need to use or lose it, you see.
Until next time,
James