Hello fellow journalologists,
Last week I linked through to an article by Eric Helman entitled AI bots are destroying Open Access. Ian Mulvany, who leads the technology team at the BMJ, included this quote from one his colleagues in a recent blog post:
Unfortunately, bot traffic on our journal websites has now surpassed real user traffic. These aggressive bots are attempting to crawl entire websites within a short period, overloading our web servers and negatively impacting the experience of legitimate users. … over 100 million bot requests have originated from data centers in Hong Kong and Singapore in just the past three weeks.
There could be a solution, though. The Register ran this story earlier in the week: Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content
Cloudflare’s response is to let crawler bots in and use generative AI to create junk content for them to devour in what the company has termed an “AI Labyrinth”.
With that update out of the way, here’s a summary of this week’s scholarly publishing news.
News
Canadian chemistry research publications will now be more openly available through a new three-year read and publish agreement between the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).
Thanks to their libraries’ commitment to driving the evolution of open knowledge, authors affiliated with participating CRKN member institutions can now publish open access in both hybrid and gold RSC journals at no cost to the author. As part of this agreement, researchers at participating CRKN member institutions will continue to benefit from unlimited reading access to RSC journals. This new agreement is expected to result in over 500 articles per year being published open access, ensuring that anyone can have access to this vital research.
Canadian Research Knowledge Network (announcement)
JB: In October 2022 the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) committed to 100% Open Access within 5 years. That was a bold stance to take and not without reputational or financial risk for the RSC, a highly influential publisher in the chemical sciences. We’re now 2.5 years into that transition, so how much progress have they made?
This graph, from Dimensions (Digital Science), tells you all you need to know:
The RSC is won’t meet its target, based on the current rate of change. The latest TA will transform 500 subscription articles from closed to open. That leaves ~22,000 research and review articles per year that are still behind the subscription barrier.
The RSC’s October 2022 press release included this paragraph:
The Royal Society of Chemistry’s goal is for the majority of its global author community to be covered by institutional or funder level deals. This will only be possible with the involvement and collaboration of its international partners, including institutions, corporations and funders. The Royal Society of Chemistry is making the commitment to engage with these partners and communities to evolve the open access landscape towards a model where the author does not pay article processing charges.
Supply generally follows demand; these data suggest that the demand for OA is not there, at least for the communities that the RSC serves.
As the national academy of science for the UK, the Royal Society supports open access and open science to maximise the dissemination and re-use of research outputs.
Looking back on the Royal Society journals’ progress over 2024, I am pleased to report that we have increased our open access output from 66% in 2023 to 71% across the research journals. Whilst the publishing landscape continues to change, and in many aspects consolidate, we continue to perform well in our commitment to transition to full open access.
Royal Society (Graham Anderson)
JB: This graph, using Dimensions data, shows the rate of change over time for Royal Society journals. I’ve grouped together ’Closed’, ’Green’ and ’Bronze’ (using the Unpaywall classification scheme) into ’Other’ to make the graph easier to read. The search was restricted to articles classified as Review or Research Article, so the numbers look slightly different from the graph in the Royal Society’s announcement. Hybrid OA has grown faster than Gold OA.
It’s worth stopping to consider why the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry (which are completely independent organisations, despite the ’Royal Society’ prefix) have had different levels of success in transitioning to open access. Demand for OA could vary by subject area or perhaps OA transitions just take over a decade to play out.
We have published the 2024 Annual Achievements Report, highlighting MDPI's role in driving efficiency, transparency, and excellence in scholarly communication. Focused on delivering an efficient, high-quality publishing experience, we remain dedicated to advancing open access scholarly publishing on a global scale.
JB: You can read the annual report here, which received a face lift compared with the 2023 report. The table below shows the key metrics, taken from the 2023 and 2024 reports.
The most noteworthy part of this table is that the staff grew by +13%, but submissions dropped by -9% (and published articles fell by -15%; see below). It’s unusual to increase the cost base of an organisation while the revenue opportunity is decreasing.
Two thirds of the 6,650 staff are “dedicated to editorial support”. This means that around 4,400 staff directly help to publish the 238,000 articles (54 articles per staff member). I doubt there are (m)any other publishers that devote that much human resource to editorial support on low-impact journals. Remember, this number reflects salaried staff, not academics working as editors.
The ALPSP press release includes this excerpt:
In 2024, MDPI made significant investments in research integrity. Alongside tripling the size of its dedicated integrity team, the company introduced key updates to its publication ethics policies, enhancing transparency in corrections and addressing the evolving role of Generative AI (GenAI) in publishing. MDPI also joined global initiatives such as United2Act and STM’s Integrity Hub to further support best practices in scholarly publishing.
The 2024 report makes no mention of article volumes, as far as I can tell (although the press release on the ALPSP website says that it published 238,000 peer reviewed articles). This is what Dimensions says the output looks like; article volumes in 2024 dropped by -15% compared with 2023.
The next table shows what happened to the 10 largest MDPI journals from 2022. Only one of them, Journal of Clinical Medicine, grew between 2022 and 2024. IJERPH was delisted from Web of Science, which explains its precipitous fall.
Some journals have grown, however. The next table shows the 10 journals that grew the most between 2022 and 2024 (source: Dimensions).
So what can we conclude from this? Submissions and article output have dropped, presumably because of the bad publicity around the delistings and general unease in the academic community about the special issue business model. MDPI appears to have invested in extra staff to try to improve quality levels and provide an improved author service. MDPI has many critics, who should remember this statistic:
However, if the same question was posed to readers of MDPI content, what would the percentage be? We can only guess, unfortunately.
In the context of the increasingly complex landscape of fees levied on authors in association with publishing their work in scholarly journals, this document defines the ethical issues associated with the disclosure, application, and administration of author fees (eg page, article processing or submission charges) and fee waivers, discounts, and incentives. These could include the potential for conflicts of interest between editorial decision making and journal finances; equity for authors from different geographical locations; and transparency for authors and readers. This guideline will be of use to librarians, funders (who pay author fees), publishers, journals that levy fees on authors.
COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics
JB: I missed this last week, but I’m very pleased to see these guidelines have been published. You can read the document in full here.
The missing piece, which perhaps could be the topic for another guideline, are the ethical issues around editorial compensation, as that relates to open access business models. I’m concerned that some publishers are financially rewarding editors based on the number of articles that they publish. This is bad practice, in my opinion, and it would be helpful to codify that in some way.
Chemistry journals take just under 3 years to retract papers plagued with self-plagiarism, according to a new analysis.
The study was published by Accountability in Research earlier this month. It found that biological science journals took the longest time to retract papers with self-plagiarism, 3.8 years, while math and physics titles took the shortest time, 1.8 years.
But when it comes to plagiarism of work by others, chemistry journals were the quickest to retract papers when compared to publications from other disciplines studied. The study pointed to a median retraction time of around 1.1 years.
Chemical & Engineering News (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
We are pleased to introduce Communications Sustainability, a new, editorially selective open access journal from the Nature Portfolio. We are open for submissions and looking to publish articles that contribute to making the world more sustainable. Articles that present novel scientific insights with proven applicability to sustainability; policy analyses and recommendations; analyses of solutions for sustainability or demonstrably effective technological advances all fall within our scope. We invite disciplinary studies in fields across the natural and social sciences and engineering, as well as interdisciplinary work that combines several of these fields – as long as they help to preserve the planet for current and future generations.
JB: The Communications journals are at level 4 in the Nature Portfolio transfer cascade (Nature = Level 1; Nature research journals = Level 2; Nature Communications = Level 3; Communications journals = Level 4; Scientific Reports = Level 5).
Communications Sustainability is the ninth journal in the series. The Communications journals have struggled to gain traction, collectively publishing ~4k research and review articles last year, with Communications Biology contributing 42% of that total.
By contrast, Nature Communications published just over 10k research and review articles and Scientific Reports published ~31k.
To understand how we can design new solutions for open science, we have to consider the incentive systems which drive current ways of working. Recognition for diverse contributions to science is critical to driving systemic change in how research is funded, assessed, and rewarded.
It isn’t enough to create technology solutions or implement policies to improve open science behaviors, as we’ve seen in our continued monitoring of open science practices. To accelerate the uptake of open science, researchers must be appropriately rewarded.
The Official PLOS Blog (unsigned)
JB: The problems with the scholarly publishing system are caused by the academic reward system. The question is, what to do about it? Ludo Waltman thanks that assessment reform and publishing reform need to go hand in hand.
According to the model, some 29% of the authors in the 2024 data set were women, a proportion that is broadly in line with other analyses, for example from the United Nations education and science agency, UNESCO. Most research areas recorded some increase in female authorship over the data period, but for the vast majority, it was less than 5 percentage points.
The Index data set shows a mismatch between the biological sciences and the physical sciences. In 2024, women comprised 53% of authorship of assessed studies in reproductive medicine, and 50% of authorship in the fields of paediatrics and nutrition, and dietetics. By contrast, classical physics (15%), quantum physics (16%) and condensed-matter physics (16%) had among the lowest rates of female authorship.
Nature (unsigned editorial)
JB: You can read the full analysis, done by Nature Index, here.
Who gets to be first? The question of whether a paper should have more than one first author can lead to fraught negotiations. And the discussions can be just as thorny when deciding which of two first authors is named in the very first slot.
But new results might help to take the edge off such discussions. Research published last month in the journal Scientometrics suggests that there is no reputational penalty for shared first authorships, even for the person named second ― at least under experimental conditions1.
Nature (Holly Else)
The Special Libraries Association (SLA), a global organization dedicated to supporting information professionals and specialized librarians, has announced it will begin a dissolution process after 116 years of service to the profession.
Since its founding in 1909, SLA has been a cornerstone for knowledge management, research, and information services across industries, providing invaluable networking, professional development opportunities, and advocacy for its members. After careful evaluation of the organization’s financial sustainability and the evolving needs of the profession, the SLA Board of Directors has made the difficult decision to begin the dissolution process of the Association.
SLA (announcement)
The Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot program marks its third year at Karger Publishers with three journals meeting their sustainability threshold to provide Open Access without Article Processing Charges (APCs) in 2025.
In the third year of the publisher’s S2O pilot, the journal Developmental Neuroscience has again met its sustainability threshold, while the two new journals in the S2O pilot, European Addiction Research and Neurodegenerative Diseases, have also met their criteria for this Open Access model for 2025.
Karger Publishers (announcement)
The data raise questions over how researchers at these universities are sustaining such spikes in research output while their first-authorship rates plummet significantly. Meho and his Beirut colleague Elie Akl are concerned that the trend could point to unethical behaviour, such as gift or sold authorship.
Chemistry World (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
Silverchair and Hum have announced a strategic partnership that integrates Hum's recently launched Alchemist Review with ScholarOne Manuscripts. This collaboration builds on the existing Silverchair Universe partnership between the two organizations and will allow publishers, editors, and reviewers to access Alchemist Review’s key manuscript insights including central claims, methodology, citation integrity, and research originality. The partnership between Hum, Silverchair, and trialing publishers is intended to accelerate the pace of experimentation and critical evaluation of applying AI to submission, peer review, and editorial challenges.
Silverchair (announcement)
JB: In case you're wondering what Alchemist Review offers:
Developed in collaboration with GroundedAI, Alchemist Review assists editors and reviewers by automatically extracting core claims, assessing methodologies, evaluating statistical rigor, and validating citations within manuscripts—capabilities that will soon be available to publishers the participate in the ScholarOne and Alchemist Review trial.
Surely, given its title, Alchemist Review should also be able to transmute paper(s) into gold?
AI systems are already transforming peer review — sometimes with publishers’ encouragement, and at other times in violation of their rules. Publishers and researchers alike are testing out AI products to flag errors in the text, data, code and references of manuscripts, to guide reviewers toward more-constructive feedback, and to polish their prose. Some new websites even offer entire AI-created reviews with one click.
But with these innovations come concerns. Although today’s AI products are cast in the role of assistants, AI might eventually come to dominate the peer-review process, with the human reviewer’s role reduced or cut out altogether. Some enthusiasts see the automation of peer review as an inevitability — but many researchers, such as Poisot, as well as journal publishers, view it as a disaster.
Nature (Miryam Naddaf)
JB: This news feature in Nature does a good job of covering this important topic. The journalist links through to a blog post from Timothée Poisot. Here’s an extract:
But as an editor, the fact that someone consistently writes good reviews does. The reputational boost you can get from thorough reviews is not tied to the journal for which you write them: it is tied to the editor seeing that your review is good.
If we start automating reviews, as reviewers, this sends the message that providing reviews is either a box to check or a line to add on the resume.
Writing automated reviews means we have given up.
The following rings true to me. Yes, we’re all very busy, but that doesn’t mean we should use LLMs to take shortcuts and in the process lose what it means to be an academic.
I do not care for the aesthetics of peer review. We are not children playing academics. We are supposed to be doing substantive, not performative work
We are excited to announce that DOAJ is moving to become a new legal entity, the DOAJ Foundation, a Danish nonprofit foundation. We will gradually transfer DOAJ’s operations over the coming months from our current host, Infrastructure Services for Open Access, to the new foundation. The move will secure DOAJ’s sustainability by providing more robust community governance and simplifying our organisation, meaning we can focus on our core mission.
To govern this new organisation, we have established a new DOAJ Foundation Board, made up of community members representing the diversity of DOAJ’s stakeholder groups. The Foundation Board will be supplemented by a new Advisory Board reflecting the breadth of DOAJ’s community: librarians, publishers, researchers, data users and research funders from all parts of the world. We will very shortly be putting out a call for nominations.
Directory of Open Access Journals (announcement)
Other news stories
Charlesworth Partners with JOMI to Expand Access to Surgical Education in China
ResearchGate and IntechOpen announce new Journal Home partnership for their open access journal portfolio
CLOCKSS triggers English, French, and German content published by EMH Swiss Medical Publishers
Journal retracts letter about pager explosion injuries in Lebanon
Cadmore Media Partners with Highwire to Enable Accessible, Searchable, and Discoverable Video Solutions for Scholarly Publishing
cOAlition S provides feedback on the Canadian Tri-Agency Open Access policy
And finally...
If you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to check out the latest issue of Science Editor, which is about The Future of Scientific Editing and Publishing. You need more articles to read, right?
Until next time,
James