Hello fellow journalologists,
You may have noticed that I’ve retired the Opinion section in this newsletter. There are a number of reasons for this. First, most people are more interested in news than opinion, judging from the click-through rates. Second, the newsletter was getting unwieldy. Third, reading tens of opinions articles every week became a bit too much for me personally.
With that piece of housekeeping out of the way, here’s a summary of what’s happened in scholarly journal publishing over the past week.
News
Most of the affected publishers are university or nonprofit scientific society presses, including Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; the American Phytopathological Society; the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which publishes the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; and AAAS, which publishes Science. (Science’s News section is editorially independent.) Several of the journals whose subscriptions were canceled rank in the top quartile for impact factor in their subfield—for example, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Food & Function and Oxford’s Journal of Integrated Pest Management.
The National Agricultural Library cuts didn’t include journals at Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. Together those publishers accounted for more than half of the library’s journal subscriptions before the cuts, according to an analysis by Science. Studies of journal subscription fees indicate that on average, scientific society publishers charge less than such for-profit companies.
Science (Jeffrey Brainard)
JB: This quote from the USDA provides some level of explanation as to why the big publishers were unaffected:
In response to a list of questions and a request for an interview by Science, USDA’s press office provided an emailed response. As part of the Trump administration’s efforts to “improve government [and] eliminate inefficiencies,” the head librarian of the National Agricultural Library “determined which subscriptions were the most widely used, and USDA determined the subscriptions contracts with minimal use will be terminated,” the statement says.
This report, which builds on earlier work presented last year, proposes a Researcher Identity Trust Framework aimed at enhancing the integrity of editorial processes through proportionate and inclusive verification measures. By assessing risk levels, offering a diverse range of verification methods, evaluating trust consistently, taking appropriate actions based on trust assessments, and implementing feedback mechanisms, the framework seeks to balance the need for security with the imperative of inclusivity.
STM Association (announcement)
JB: You can read the report here; the recommendations start on page 30. The first part of the report can be viewed here.
The Transfer Code of Practice is a NISO Recommended Practice to ensure continuing access to journals when titles transfer from one publisher to another. Compliance with the code helps publishers make journal content easily accessible to librarians and readers when there is a transfer between parties. It also enables the transfer process to occur with minimum disruption to manuscript submission and production processes. Over 90 publishers have endorsed the Transfer Code of Practice since it was first established as a NISO Recommended Practice in 2015.
NISO (announcement)
JB: The Transfer Code of Practice (often called just “Transfer”) has been around since 2006; it’s an established document that sets out the rules when (for example) an academic society’s portfolio of journals moves from one commercial publisher to another.
You can comment on the draft up until May 2, 2025 using this link. As far as I can tell there’s no “track changes” version, so it’s not clear what’s changed since the last version.
De Gruyter Brill is expanding its Subscribe to Open program, DG2O, by immediately switching 37 additional journals to open access. In total, 58 journals from the De Gruyter portfolio will be published open access via DG2O in 2025, making approximately 2,300 research articles freely available to the global scholarly community. The transition is made possible through the continued commitment of libraries and institutions, whose renewed subscriptions helped meet the necessary funding threshold.
De Gruyter Brill (announcement)
AIP Publishing is pleased to announce two of its flagship scholarly journals, Journal of Applied Physics and Physics of Plasmas, will be open access in 2025 as part of our Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot program.
The switch is once again a result of AIP Publishing’s institutional subscribers renewing their subscriptions and supporting our S2O pilot program.
Announced in 2023, our S2O pilot allows, with sufficient institutional support, for new volumes of Journal of Applied Physics and Physics of Plasmas to be made open access for everyone to read and re-use. The pilot empowers authors to increase the reach and impact of their work by publishing open access without incurring additional costs — and embodies AIP Publishing’s commitment to equity, accessibility, and open science.
AIP Publishing (announcement)
S20 will fundamentally change how we report, and how institutions interpret, usage statistics. This will not only allow us to measure the success of our mission to remove access barriers to vital research, but will also offer academic institutions who actively support equity and inclusion proof that their subscription spending is improving the global reach of articles published in our journals.
Going forward, even if the COUNTER reports librarians pull show diminishing usage at a given institution, our hope is that seeing usage at the country level helps librarians to identify “probable” usage from institutional scholars in the direct geographic area; that global usage of individual articles allows librarians to chart the reach of articles published by scholars at their institution; and that usage metrics help to substantiate the value of their collective action for societal good.
Katina Magazine (Gaynor Redvers-Mutton and Ciaran Hoogendoorn)
JB: This is a data heavy, and nicely done, analysis of the usage of the Portland Press journals. Off-platform usage (e.g. usage on PubMed Central vs usage on a journal’s core platform) of content makes it harder to measure the value that an institution gets from its subscription. This article does a good job of laying out the challenges and solutions to this problem. If this topic interests you, then you may like to read SOLVED: reporting open access usage by library consortia.
More than 70 journals are trialling a publishing model called subscribe to open (S2O), in which libraries pay an annual subscription fee to make paywalled journals open access.
The trial, set to start next January, will run for three years if there is enough participation. It aims to make academic journals freely available online without charging authors or relying on donations. Fifty-four societies, museums and research institutions around the world have signed their journals up.
Nature Index (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
JB: This story is focused on the BioOne Pilot.
Through our ongoing collaboration with the S2O Community of Practice (S2O CoP), we are happy to share that 61 journals have now received the S2O label.
The S2O CoP brings together librarians, scholarly publishers, funders, scholars, and other stakeholders worldwide to collaborate, exchange insights, and promote best practices for the S2O model in scholarly publishing—all with the shared mission of making scholarly communication freely accessible for the public good.
You can now easily identify the S2O logo in our journal search results and on individual journal pages.
DOAJ Blog (announcement)
JB: This is important because different flavours of S2O have developed, with some publishers claiming to publish under the S2O model, but without including any conditionality (long time readers may remember the IWA Publishing story from last year). The badging should allow the S2O Community of Practice to better control the ’brand’ of S2O and ensure that there’s some uniformity in how its implemented.
The University of Cambridge’s publishing arm is launching what it terms a “radical, community-led” review to find out how the “broken” open research publishing system can be repaired.
Mandy Hill, managing director of Cambridge University Press (CUP), said: “More and more content is being published in journals every year because academics are incentivised to publish papers for career progression, and library budgets are not increasing.”
“This is clearly leading to a broken system,” she told Research Professional News.
Today, the university publisher has invited researchers, librarians, publishers, funders and publishing partners across the world to participate in the review of the current ecosystem, which Hill said “is not working for anyone”.
Research Professional News (Frances Jones)
Silverchair and Oxford University Press (OUP) announce the launch of Oxford Academic’s AI Discovery Assistant, delivered via the Silverchair Platform. Jointly developed by the Silverchair AI team and OUP, the new tool supports researchers through an intuitive search interface that delivers highly relevant results accompanied by AI-generated summaries.
Silverchair (announcement)
Kudos, the platform for showcasing research, has been selected by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) to offer its authors a cutting-edge promotional package aimed at maximizing and accelerating readership and impact for research publications.
Through the new partnership, AIAA authors will be offered an innovative promotional package that leverages plain language summaries and search marketing to build audiences. As competition for funding, career advancement, and recognition intensifies, researchers have proven increasingly willing to allocate personal or grant resources to tools that accelerate publication performance. Kudos’ b2c profit-sharing model helps societies and publishers quickly scale up new skills, services and revenue streams.
Kudos (announcement)
As publishers look toward the EAA deadline and beyond, the panel's insights illustrate that true accessibility is not just about compliance, it's about creating content that can genuinely reach and serve all potential users.
Silverchair (announcement)
We are currently developing a token-based system to reward fast, high-quality peer reviews. The concept is simple: every scientist who begins using DeSci Publish will receive free tokens. These tokens can be used to have their own research quickly reviewed by qualified peers. Additional tokens can be earned by reviewing others' work. All reviews will be public, allowing authors to include them in their submissions to traditional journals.
With these tools in place, we will then also be able to offer diamond open-access journals that can quickly review and publish papers, data, code, and other research artifacts.
Overleaf (Philipp Koellinger)
eWorkflow Ltd, an artificial intelligence-based manuscript submission system, unveiled its latest enhancements including eNeural Engine to automate the finding and inviting of expert reviewers whose publication record matches the submission’s semantic analysis, eTelligence to provide AI peer-review assistance and eGenie to provide AI-based commissioning.
A combination of new AI features come together seamlessly integrated within a single manuscript submission system - eWorkflow. These features named eNeural engine, eTelligence and eGenie will turbocharge scholarly publishing and allow publishers to focus their efforts, find new reviewers and authors to grow their user base and optimize the efficiency of their scholarly workflows.
eWorkflow Ltd (announcement)
JB: I hadn’t heard of eWorkflow before. According to its website:
Eworkflow is a cutting edge manuscript submission and tracking system. Developed in 2023-4, it aims to make the process of manuscript submission and handling easy, efficient and fast, whilst delivering better quality peer-review.
Last year, the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) released phase II of their Excellence Action Plan (EAP) for scientific, technical and medical journals. Shuai Yan and Mark Robertson of STM, with colleagues from the Society of China University Journals and Science China Press, have prepared a report to get you up to speed on the key components of the plan and the organizations and journals involved.
This phase of the EAP is part of a larger goal to transform individual journal developments into an integrated, ecosystem-based approach, aiming to position China’s STM journals among the world’s top tier by 2035.
STM Association (announcement)
JB: You can download the report on Figshare here. I haven’t read the document in detail yet, but it’s worth noting that a possible future for scholarly publishing involves a balkanisation of the publishing ecosystem with less international collaboration between researchers, because they are obliged to follow national regulations and follow government mandates. This could happen in the USA (Trump team ‘survey’ sent to overseas researchers prompts foreign interference fears) or Europe (remember the geowalling proposal?) as well as in China.
We have a verifiable method of assigning risk to journals which we can now apply to every journal in the world. Publishers can use Oversight to detect risks in their portfolios and address those risks. It’s robust, reliable, hard to game, and easy to understand. The same rating system can be applied to articles, institutions, funders… but maybe we’ll come back to those in future posts.
Medium (Adam Day)
JB: This is a nicely written post by Adam, which gives a clear explanation of what his new product (Oversight) can do.
While using bibliometric techniques to measure how disruptive research papers are to their field of study, Robin Haunschild and Lutz Bornmann stumbled across a strange phenomenon.
Just under 45,000 academic papers contained citations to themselves, they found. Haunschild and Bornmann — both information scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany — found these “paper self-citations” in journals indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science since 1980.
Retraction Watch
JB: The question that first popped into my head was How not Why. And then I read this:
But after taking a closer look, Bonhomme said, he discovered that many paper self-citations were coming from the authors referencing their own appendices and supplementary materials that were published under different DOIs — a fairly common practice in economics, particularly with papers with long appendices or supplementary material.
Findings reveal MDPI’s citation practices are sound, consistent, and comparable to prevailing industry trends and established norms.
The evaluation includes 237 MDPI journals indexed in the JCR and analyzed their Impact Factor (IF) both with and without self-citations for the latest available year, 2024. Self-citations rates (SCRs) were also examined relative to category averages and assess how self-citations influence their overall ranking within their respective categories.
Findings show some variability in self-citation. Overall, however, MDPI journals align to industry norms and the limits established by WoS. MDPI has very few journals with high SCRs in their category compared to other leading publishers.
ALPSP Blog (Giulia Stefenelli and Enric Sayas)
JB: I have no reason to doubt the veracity of these claims, but it seems odd to use what’s essentially a paid sponsorship slot (MDPI is a silver sponsor of the ALPSP Redux conference) to promote the study. To be fair to the MDPI authors, though, the data and python script have been made available and they’ve invited feedback.
With that caveat in mind, this table shows the self-citation rates of 10 large publishers, according to the MDPI analysis. Make of it what you will.
This is a rollicking good read, written in an informal style, and enlivened by cartoons, which works as a scholarly and accessible account of the so-called reproducibility crisis in biomedical research.
BishopBlog (Dorothy Bishop)
JB: One to add to your to read pile?
Over the past few months, I’ve been working with STM Solutions to assess the feasibility of a technical solution to the detection of falsified images in research articles. The tl;dr being that the technology already exists. An eventual system could involve the signing of images in a similar way to how secure web pages are signed, which could then be verified by a publisher or potentially an institution doing an investigation.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Phill Jones)
JB: Is there the potential for a CSI spinoff TV series?
A good analogy for anybody who’s seen a police drama might be the chain of custody used by the criminal justice system that provides documentation of where evidence came from, who handled it and what they did with it. Some relevant standards are already available and technical initiatives underway.
I used an LLM in the newsletter for the first time this week. The headline was generated by Google’s Gemini, which said:
That’s a really interesting concept! A CSI spin-off centered around academic journals opens up a lot of possibilities for unique and intellectually stimulating storylines.
Hmmmm...
The Research segment continues to be the main driver of Springer Nature's growth. Research saw a 6% underlying revenue growth to €1,414 million, primarily due to the excellent performance of the OA Journals portfolio. In 2024, Springer Nature achieved a significant milestone by publishing 50% of its primary research articles OA for the first time. This achievement underscores the company's leadership in the transition to OA, providing greater value to the research community by enhancing the accessibility and impact of scientific research. OA articles on average receive significantly more downloads, citations, and attention compared to non-OA articles.
Springer Nature (announcement)
JB: The share price has taken a dive recently, but this happened before the report was announced. I presume this was due to global market trends (stock markets are down across the board), but that’s just a guess.
The presentation that the CEO and CFO gave to investors is more interesting than the press release. From a journals’ perspective the key points to note are:
(1) Springer Nature received 2.3 million submissions in 2024, worked with 180k editors, and 1 million peer reviewers (slide 36)
(2) The volume of published primary research articles increased by 16% in 2024, compared with 2023, to 482k (slide 8)
(3) The proportion of OA articles increased from 44% to 50% (slide 8)
(4) A new transfer recommender tool (called T-Rex) has generated 195k transfer offers since May 2024, resulting in 50k resubmissions (slide 11).
(5) A new journal finder tool, launched in September 2024, that created 2.7k submissions per month.
(6) Springer Nature launched 66 new journals last year (page 15 of the transcript).
The transcript of the investor call provides additional insight. For example, Frank Vrancken Peeters, the CEO, said:
Cureus – our digital-first medical publishing platform – saw strong growth driven by increased submissions and 39% growth in publications.
That’s true, but he conveniently didn’t mention that the journal is still on hold by Clarivate and that article volumes are down in 2025 (see last week’s newsletter; it’s worth noting that Cureus has its own page on Retraction Watch).
In case you’re wondering how Snapp is doing, the saga continues:
As I’ve told before, researchers don’t like to write and read, they like to do research. And in Research, AI allows us to transform the publishing process by improving quality, speed and efficiency. The backbone of this transformation is Snapp – which is our home-grown submission-to-accept system supporting more than 1,000 journals and 1 million submissions in 2024.
(I thought reading and writing — ideally with some thinking in between — were core parts of being an academic. Is that really no longer true?)
Springer Nature publishes “over 3000 journals”, so only a third of them are on Snapp, despite Snapp being in development since 2019 (source). A more positive way of looking at it is that 1 million of the 2.2 million submissions (45%) last year went through Snapp. Changing the wheels on a moving bus is hard to do.
Frank had this to say about research integrity:
We invest in people, and I already talked about the direct team that we have under the leadership of a gentleman called Chris Graf. We have expanded the team to about 50 people today, but we also have an extended team both internally and externally, just a bit over 300 people. And we've actually also made significant investments in AI tools to safeguard research integrity. And some of those are, for instance, things like Snapshot, which identifies fake images. We have a tool called Geppetto, which looks at, let's say, fake text. We have a tool called Iceberg, which is effectively targeting paper mills because it looks at patterns and submissions. We have a tool called Referee, which looks at whether the references are correct. So I think we are doing everything as a company, but also together with other companies in the industry, through the research integrity hub, to to fight research integrity issues.
SSP Compensation and Benefits Benchmarking Study Results Available
When asked about satisfaction in their current position, 75% of participants responded that they were satisfied or highly satisfied in their current role. According to a 2024 Pew Report, “half of U.S. workers say they are extremely or very satisfied with their job overall. Another 38% say they are somewhat satisfied, and 12% are not too or not at all satisfied with their job.” While the response scales aren’t exactly congruent between the two reports, It seems that the satisfaction level in scholarly communications is outpacing the overall average (at least in the US).
The Scholarly Kitchen (Melanie Dolechek)
Earney said that universities are looking for transparency around exactly what they are paying for. “What we’ve never managed to get to, and is becoming increasingly important, is transparency and exactly how the costs to our institutions relate to the services provided via the agreements,” he said.
Earney added that universities want to see more movement on open access. A Jisc report published in March last year found that transitional agreements—which are what the current deals with the five big publishers are, and which were designed to be a temporary stop on the path to full open access—are now “at risk of becoming the ‘norm’”, while “the rate of transition is too slow”.
Research Professional News (Fiona McIntyre)
JB: Supply follows demand, not the either way around. The UK is pushing for a full transition to open access, which is a noble pursuit. However, science is an international endeavour and most countries don’t have the same priorities as the UK. JISC should remember that when it makes demands about the speed of transition.
Ukrainian researchers have criticised the scholarly publishing sector for its response to the Russian invasion of their country, warning that international journals are publishing articles produced at Ukrainian institutions taken under Russian control.
Writing in
an opinion article for Research Professional News, Alex Plastun and Serhiy Kozmenko lambast the publishing sector’s handling of publications from institutions in parts of Ukraine that have been seized by Russia.
By their count, first reported in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management, 289 research institutions have fallen under Russian control and “thousands” of research outputs from these institutions have been given Russian affiliations that have been accepted by the sector.
Research Professional News (Craig Nicholson)
The surge of AI bots has hit Open Access sites particularly hard, as their mission conflicts with the need to block bots. Consider that Internet Archive can no longer save snapshots of one of the best open-access publishers, MIT Press because of cloudflare blocking. (see above) Who know how many books will be lost this way? Or consider that the bots took down OAPEN, the worlds most important repository of Scholarly OA books, for a day or two. That's 34,000 books that AI "checked out" for two days. Or recent outages at Project Gutenberg, which serves 2 million dynamic pages and a half million downloads per day. That's hundreds of thousands of downloads blocked! The link checker at doab-check.ebookfoundation.org (a project I worked on for OAPEN) is now showing 1,534 books that are unreachable due to "too many requests". That's 1,534 books that AI has stolen from us! And it's getting worse.
Go To Hellman (Eric Hellman)
JB: This blogpost is about OA books, but perhaps the same issues are faced by OA journals? If anyone has any experience of this, please hit reply to this email.
Other news stories
Catchy, clear, concise: three-part phrases boost research paper citations
Catherine Spencer steps down as CEO of Cochrane
EDP Sciences’ Commitment to Research Integrity
And finally...
Journal editors will likely enjoy this opinion piece from Addamms Mututa and Keyan G Tomaselli (A world without journal editors? Universities take note...). Does this resonate with you:
They [journal editors] are also required to deliver their own publications quota on schedule. The journal editor thus works two full-time jobs, one by day and the other after office hours. This scenario should be publicised as a starting point for a situation that is the subject of this write-up: the journal editor’s tedium in the present academic world, characterised by the increasing demand for academic productivity.
Or how about this:
The dynamics of screening a paper have also shifted. The editor is expected to play hide and seek with rogue authors and identify – above the customary structural, argumentation, and relevance – whether authors actually wrote their work. This adds much workload to an already overstretched journal editor.
Until next time,
James
P.S. In the future I won’t be including graphs from Dimensions in this newsletter. Instead, there will be an MP4 file to listen to.