Hello fellow journalologists,
This week’s newsletter is presented in a slightly different format. I’ve been very busy with work and personal commitments and haven’t had the time to do a ’normal’ newsletter.
What follows are the title and a brief excerpt from some of the stories that I’ve read over the past few weeks. None of the text was written by me.
Hopefully it will help you to get a quick overview of what’s happened in scholarly publishing recently.
News
Update from SUPRR: Misuse of ISSNs threaten academic integrity. A pressing issue in Ukraine is that publications in the temporarily occupied territories by Russia are unjustifiably using the ISSNs of Ukrainian journals originally founded by displaced Ukrainian higher education institutions, or obtaining entirely new ISSNs while falsely claiming to be the legal successors of these publication.
The state of research assessment: Insights from a survey of 6,600+ researchers. This blog summarises the key findings from the white paper, including how researchers are currently assessed, their perceptions of existing practices, and their hopes for the future.
Wiley Announces Team of Editors to Lead Advanced Portfolio Journals Expansion into Life & Health Sciences. Last October, Wiley unveiled plans to extend the portfolio—a series of highly-regarded journals with their roots in materials science, physics, and engineering communities—into key life and health sciences fields. This strategic move underscores Wiley's dedication to advance knowledge at the intersection of disciplines and provide researchers with the resources they need to explore the complexities of modern science.
Springer Nature's first annual report as a public company shows growth in open access and continued investment in technology to improve value for the community. Following the strong financial performance of Springer Nature released on 18 March, the company today issues its first annual report showing how Springer Nature is delivering on its mission to be part of progress. In 2024, research was made more visible for authors, more freely available and more trusted for all, with better value for money delivered for customers.
New research integrity AI tool added to Springer Nature’s growing portfolio. A new AI tool to identify irrelevant references in submitted manuscripts has been launched for use across Springer Nature’s journals and books. The tool is the latest AI-driven tool that has been developed in-house at Springer Nature to weed out problematic submissions and ensure the veracity of the publication record.
What Happens When Publishers and Editors Explore Peer Review Together. From the start, PLP [Purpose Led Publishing] has been about putting science first. That means making sure editors and reviewers can focus on what really matters. The Peer Review Assistant is designed to take some of the busywork off their plates by helping with routine tasks—while keeping human judgment firmly at the center.
Indian university’s channel on publisher’s platform disappears. So, did Cureus take down Saveetha’s channel for all its ties to questionable citation practices? Did the publisher audit all channels and remove those with unusual activity? The response from a Cureus spokesperson: "The channel was closed on March 18th because of non-payment of fees. No other channels were removed." Saveetha didn’t pay its bill.
China has already taken steps to reduce retractions of papers from its hospitals. Since 2020, however, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has published the International Journal Watchlist, a list of journals considered to be of low quality or otherwise problematic. This is helping Chinese researchers to avoid predatory journals, thereby reducing the risk of retractions.
Wiley journal retracts over 200 more papers. The International Wound Journal has retracted 242 papers so far this year as part of an ongoing investigation into manipulated peer review. We reported in December the journal, a Wiley title, had retracted 27 papers as part of an investigation. A Wiley spokesperson told us the 2025 retractions are part of the same ongoing investigation, and that the editors “anticipate additional retractions in the weeks to come.”
PLOS announces new partnership in China. The Public Library of Science (PLOS) and the Society of China University Journals (CUJS) today announced a 3-year strategic partnership between the organizations to work together on topics and content related to open access, open science, scientific integrity and scientific evaluation.
COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis paper raises questions about what earns post-publication peer review. The apparent necessity of post-publication peer review for some papers raises questions about how well publishers ensure the quality of the peer review process and editorial decision making, and how the companies respond to scrutiny.
AIP Publishing, One Nation One Subscription Sign Agreement Bringing Publications to Thousands of Institutions across India. AIP Publishing reached this agreement in partnership with Globe Publication Pvt. Ltd, a company committed to making global research accessible to the Indian academic community.
Taylor & Francis celebrates 15 years of unique scheme supporting researchers in resource-constrained countries. Global research publisher Taylor & Francis is marking 15 years of STAR (Special Terms for Authors and Researchers). This important initiative helps individual researchers who are not currently affiliated with an institution or research organization by providing access to the latest research.
F1000 extends pioneering Open Research Africa publishing platform to all authors in Africa. Open Research Africa (ORA), the pioneering platform from F1000 and the Science for Africa Foundation, has announced a significant expansion of its author eligibility criteria. All articles with an author based in Africa can now be submitted, regardless of their funder. Previously, only work supported by an ORA partnering research funder could be published on the platform.
Bridging the Gender Gap in African Scientific Publishing: Insights From Web of Science Indexed Journals. This study is the first to conduct a granular article-level analysis of African women's participation in WoS-indexed journals, employing innovative methods to infer author gender and utilising text mining techniques for qualitative analysis. Its findings provide critical insights for policymakers and academic institutions striving to promote gender equity in African research.
Launching our new journal – Microbiology Outlooks joins the portfolio. Joining our six established and successful titles, Microbiology Outlooks will publish authoritative reviews and forward-looking perspectives across the breadth of microbiology. Published articles will provide timely overviews of important topics and discuss the direction of future research and the wider impact of the science of microbiology and its application.
ASM Launches New Journal to Advance Animal Microbiology Research. The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is expanding its portfolio of journals with the launch of ASM Animal Microbiology, a journal dedicated to advancing research on animal-associated microbes and their impact on health, disease and productivity.
Elsevier and American Accounting Association announce launch of new journal. The American Accounting Association (AAA) announced today their affiliation with Accounting Open, a newly launched journal published by Elsevier. Accounting Open is a fully open access journal dedicated to publishing theoretical and empirical research contributing to the description, understanding, and prediction of accounting phenomena.
IOP Publishing Advances Research Data Sharing with New Policy for Two Environmental Research Journals. IOP Publishing (IOPP) is strengthening its support for open science by requiring authors publicly share the research data underpinning articles in two of its journals: Environmental Research: Food Systems (ERFS) and Environmental Research: Climate (ERCL). Papers submitted with data inaccessible will only be accepted if there is compelling legal or ethical justification.
MDPI and Bibsam Renew National Agreement for Sweden. We are pleased to announce the renewal of our national partnership agreement with Sweden's Bibsam Consortium. Notably, 22 institutions are receiving partner benefits under MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP), including substantial discounts on article processing charges (APCs) for affiliated authors.
SCOAP3 publishes first results of the new open science mechanism. In a pioneering move to enhance Open Science practices, SCOAP3 has established a new mechanism for the contractual period 2025-2027 (Phase 4). This new mechanism involves an annual assessment of these elements with publishers’ financial compensation adjusted based on the results.
American Physiological Society Achieves Open Access Goals with Subscribe to Open for 2025. The American Physiological Society (APS) is proud to announce the successful implementation of Subscribe to Open (S2O), achieving its goal of making 10 of its primary research journals fully open access in 2025 through S2O.
Taylor & Francis Journals Convert to Open Access through Subscribe to Open Pilot. Every article published in the 2025 volume of three Taylor & Francis journals will be made open access (OA), following a successful launch of the publisher’s Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot. Taylor & Francis has confirmed that enough institutions have renewed or confirmed the renewal of their subscriptions for each journal to reach the required S2O threshold.
Do men or women retract more? A study found the answer is … complicated. While male- and female-led publications share certain breaches of integrity, such as plagiarism, fabrication, image or text manipulation, the retraction profile of male-led publications is over-represented in characterized departures from integrity, i.e., misconduct, and breaches of ethics, such as lack of ethical authorization, whereas the retraction profile of female-led publications is over-represented in errors.
New data pipelines to improve timeliness and transparency on the latest retractions. With the new release Argos now offers the most complete and accurate view of retractions, for example we now showcase 17% more retractions in total. Even more significant: we’ve identified 167% more retractions in the past 12 months than other sources, demonstrating our ability to uncover more cases and offer a clearer, more detailed picture of the evolving research landscape.
New STM 2029 Trends Report Provides a Bridge to the Future. Entitled New Coalitions: Fortifying the Foundations of Trust in Research, the analysis builds upon prior analyses to present a visual and narrative exploration of the risks, responses, and roles shaping the future of scholarly communications.
Peer reviews of peer reviews: A randomized controlled trial and other experiments. Our results suggest that the various problems that exist in reviews of papers – inconsistency, bias towards irrelevant factors, miscalibration, subjectivity – also arise in reviewing of reviews.
Journal targeted by paper mill still grappling with the aftermath years later. At least 226 studies on rodents published in the open-access journal Bioengineered between 2010 and 2023 contain manipulated or duplicated images, says the analysis, which was posted on the arXiv preprint server on 28 March1. These are hallmarks of papers produced by paper mills — companies that churn out fake scientific manuscripts to order. Most of these 226 studies have not been retracted.
Math journal editors resign to launch open-access title ‘free from pressure or influence’. The managing editors and entire editorial board of Mathematical Logic Quarterly, a Wiley title, have resigned, citing “unilateral decisions” by the publisher “that affected the editorial process.”
Hyperprolific authorship: Unveiling the extent of extreme publishing in the ‘publish or perish’ era. The results reveal that hyperprolific authors are concentrated in fields such as Clinical Medicine, Biomedical Research, and Chemistry, and in countries with substantial research investments, including China, the United States, and Germany. Contrary to concerns about a trade-off between quantity and quality, hyperprolific authors tend to produce higher-impact publications on average compared to their peers.
A ‘joke’: Paper with ‘completely irrelevant’ citations retracted. Paragraph seven of the introduction consists of a single sentence: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [35-47] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.” One of the authors told us they included the references as a “joke” after reviewers pressured them.
Announcing OASPA’s ‘Next 50%’ project: a different conversation about the open access transition. What OASPA is hearing is that delivering open access seems more complicated, more challenging and more precarious than in the last decade. We believe we can help by convening conversations between stakeholders.
Is Editors’ Awareness of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) a Determinant of the Journal’s Contribution to SDGs? More than half of the editors who participated in the study had no knowledge about the SDG Publishers Compact.
And finally...
Seth Godin recently published his 10,000th email newsletter. He’s sent one or two emails a day over a 25-year period. It’s a perfect example of how consistent performance compounds over time. He’s written 3,000,000 words and his blog posts have been viewed 2 billion times. Now that’s impact.
Until next time,
James
P.S. The next newsletter probably won’t arrive in your inbox until March 27.