Hello fellow journalologists,
There’s two weeks’ worth of news to catch up on, as I was on vacation with my family over Easter. So I’ve adopted the same format as the previous issue, primarily to make this newsletter as concise as possible. As before, the text that follows has been pasted from news sources and is not my own.
I’ve mixed in a few opinion pieces that I enjoyed and grouped similar topics (research integrity, AI etc.) together.
But first, I hope you’ll indulge me as I promote the Journalology coaching programme, using a recent client testimonial. If you want to find out more, click the orange button in the box below or email me directly (james@journalology.com) and I’ll send you more information.
If you, or a member of your team, need some extra support to hone your skills and get better at your craft, I’d be delighted to help if I can; coaching calls are often the highlight of my week.
A coaching testimonial from a society Publisher
James was invaluable in helping me find my footing in a new chapter of my career, as I transitioned from a management to a leadership position. He listened closely and with empathy, while still challenging my perspective when needed. I not only learnt from his experience and practical advice but also benefitted from the space and clarity he provided. This allowed me to begin trusting my own expertise and navigate the imposter syndrome that so many of us feel.
If you're looking for a coach who can support with both actionable publishing strategy – drawing on experience and perspective from highly successful journals – as well as support your personal and professional development, James is perfectly placed to help. I'm incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him.
Publisher, Society Journals Portfolio
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News
Medical Journals Get Letters From DOJ. A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to "various scientific debates." Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles "misinformation" and "competing viewpoints," among other things. MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters. JB: You can read the letter here and the ACCP’s statement about supporting editorial independence here. The New York Times covered the story here. On Wednesday, Stat published New England Journal of Medicine gets swept up in U.S. attorney inquiry. Obstetrics & Gynecology also confirmed to NBC news that it received the letter. Science covered this story alongside rumours that two open access CDC journals will have their funding cut. Martin also sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, saying: “It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.”
It’s Alt-Right v. (Springer) Nature. Rather than Elsevier being the whipping boy this time, now it’s Springer Nature — because, as one bright light on the alt-right puts it, “It’s European.” An article on Breitbart describes how DOGE is going after “woke” medical journals, with Nature as the poster child.
CSE’s Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility: Staying the Course. Yet in the face of these many uncertainties, one thing is certain: the Council of Science Editors (CSE) remains committed to our role as an indispensable advocate and resource for the responsible and equitable communication of science. This commitment includes fostering a diverse community of members who support each other in CSE’s mission and maintaining a safe space for members to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and offer suggestions for change.
Preprints Serve the Anti-science Agenda – This Is Why We Need Peer Review. Yes – there are benefits to more freely and quickly sharing science. But preprints join predatory publishers and paper mills to fuel a growing challenge for our society: distinguishing credible science from inaccurate, biased, and misleading work. This is encouraging a race to the bottom, where good science can carry the same weight as bad science, ‘alternative facts,’ and ‘truthiness’ – which is actually no weight at all.
Invasion of the ‘journal snatchers’: the firms that buy science publications and turn them rogue. Research-integrity analysts are warning that ‘journal snatchers’ — companies that acquire scholarly journals from reputable publishers — are turning legitimate titles into predatory, low-quality publications with questionable practices.
A new journal record: Sage title retracts 678 more papers, tally over 1,500. The retraction of “a final batch” of 678 articles concludes Sage’s investigation into questionable peer review, citation manipulation, and other signs of paper mill activity at one of its journals, according to the publisher.
Medical societies call for BMJ to retract ‘misleading and irresponsible’ guideline. Thirty-four medical professional societies have called for The BMJ to retract a recently published guideline recommending against the use of interventional procedures, such as steroid or anaesthetic injections, to treat chronic back pain.
Advancing our Understanding of Systematic Manipulation & Paper Mills: Wiley & CWTS Partnership. The Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, in collaboration with the publishing company Wiley, is opening a new position for a PhD candidate to carry out research on paper mills and related forms of systematic manipulation in publishing. JB: Bravo, Wiley. That’s €35,000 well invested. Will other publishers follow suit?
Chinese funding agency sanctions 26 researchers in latest misconduct report. The organization responsible for allocating basic research funding in China has issued misconduct findings against 26 researchers for violations ranging from breach of confidentiality to image manipulation, plagiarism, and buying and selling authorship.
eWorkflow partners with Clear Skies to integrate Papermill Alarm. eWorkflow Ltd, an artificial intelligence-based manuscript submission system, has partnered with Clear Skies Ltd, to integrate their Papermill Alarm. All manuscripts submitted via eWorkflow will now be screened using Clear Skies’ multi-award-winning research integrity checks.
Why Universities Should Make Misconduct Reports Public. The best way to prevent idiosyncratic behavior — including cronyism, defensiveness, and opacity — is to create a framework for behavior against which exceptions can be judged to be either reasonable or warranted.
Frontiers Annual Report 2024. Our industry-leading research integrity team applies these cutting-edge AI solutions to proactively detect image manipulation, paper fabrication, and organizational fraud among the many quality checks we deploy on each submission. As a result, almost half of all article rejections were managed by our research integrity team, maintaining rigorous control while alleviating pressure on editorial boards. JB: There was no report in 2023. The 2024 report doesn’t mention the drop in article output anywhere in its 54 pages. There’s a lot about citations and impact factors, though. Quelle surprise.
Huge reproducibility project fails to validate dozens of biomedical studies. In an unprecedented effort, a coalition of more than 50 research teams has surveyed a swathe of Brazilian biomedical studies to double-check their findings — with dismaying results. The teams were able to replicate the results of less than half of the tested experiments.
AI research summaries ‘exaggerate findings’, study warns. AI tools overhype research findings far more often than humans, with a study suggesting the newest bots are the worst offenders – particularly when they are specifically instructed not to exaggerate.
Science sleuths flag hundreds of papers that use AI without disclosing it. He created an online tracker, Academ-AI, to log these cases — and has more than 700 papers listed. In an analysis of the first 500 papers flagged, released as a preprint in November, Glynn found that 13% of these articles appeared in journals belonging to large publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature and MDPI.
New STM Draft Report: Classifying AI Use in Manuscript Preparation. STM has released a new draft report, Recommendations for a Classification of AI Use in Academic Manuscript Preparation, developed by the STM Association’s Task & Finish Group on AI Labelling Terminology. This draft is now open for community consultation. JB: You can download the draft report here.
STM Defends Copyright in AI Case. STM has filed an amicus brief supporting authors in the Kadrey v. Meta litigation, which challenges Meta’s use of copyrighted works to train its generative AI systems. The brief underscores that Meta knowingly copied and distributed large volumes of copyrighted content sourced from notorious piracy websites—including Z-Library, Libgen, Sci-Hub, and others—that have been repeatedly shut down by courts and investigated by authorities.
AI can help publishers with misconduct as more research published. As of 2022, more than 50 per cent of scientific publications [to Elsevier] have authors in low-income or middle-income economies – which includes India and China – compared with 1995 when this figure was 13 per cent. Karlsson said Elsevier reached nearly 3.5 million submissions each year, of which the organisation publishes about 15 per cent following peer review.
PLS and ALCS Agree to Development of Pioneering CLA Generative AI Licence. Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) have announced a significant development in the licensing of content for generative AI. The two collective management organisations representing publishers and authors have agreed to the development by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) of a new collective licence for generative AI.
The Open Access – AI Conundrum: Does Free to Read Mean Free to Train? At minimum, OA licenses could mandate that AI tools trained on OA papers need to include citation capabilities in exchange for the free use of high-quality material, to ensure that the creators of academic are appropriately recognized. As OA publishing is rapidly becoming a significant share of academic output, OA policies around AI use could reshape the technologies engagement with research substantially.
10 reasons why the science research journal has passed its sell-by date. Researchers in many disciplines cannot afford the time to read papers in full. As a result, machine to machine communication becomes vital, and is not aided by current systems. The classic research article is a narrative form in a world with increasing the few human readers. Machines do not appreciate narrative: they perform better on world structured data clearly marked with metadata.
Road to Open: Despite Challenges, Mathematics Journals Remain Open Access through Subscribe to Open in 2025. This year’s renewal campaign was markedly more challenging than in previous years, prompting reflection on the long-term resilience of the S2O model. While we ultimately succeeded in renewing the journals, the process highlighted a potential loss of momentum for S2O across our subscriber base. JB: I appreciated the candid and honest way this announcement was framed.
Recent Drop In Life Science Preprint Posting Due To Capacity Problems At Research Square. A representative from Springer Nature confirms that “the recent decrease in preprints is due to a temporary reduction in our screening capacity.” They also report that “our team is working to increase capacity so we can resume previous posting volumes” and additionally confirm that “we did experience a backlog, but this is steadily improving.” JB: The announcement also says: “On the whole, preprint posting has continued to steadily increase, following a rapid jump during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Is that a fair assessment or PR spin? Judge for yourself (the grey bars are for Research Square; the other colours are other preprint servers):
ACM Joins India’s ONOS Initiative with Transformative ACM Open Agreement. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest computing society, has joined India’s One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) initiative through a transformative new read-and-publish agreement with the ACM Open program. This agreement provides 6,500 government-funded higher education and research institutions across India with Premium Access to the ACM Digital Library, while enabling authors in participating institutions to publish an unlimited number of Open Access research articles in ACM journals, ACM conference proceedings and ICPS Proceedings with no article processing charges (APCs).
American Physical Society earns top score in SCOAP3 open science assessment. The American Physical Society has received the leading score among publishers participating in the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) in the first evaluation of open science practices in scholarly publishing. With high marks in elements like accessibility, data availability, and article metadata, the Society earned a total score of 20.18 out of 25 — almost double that of the next highest scorer.
The Impact of Inflation on APC Costs. Overall, OA prices are increasing below inflation. The data suggest that authors continue to get (modestly) increasing value for money for their OA fees. However, the headlines are skewed by the large number of hybrid journals. When looking only at fully OA (“gold”) journals, prices are rising slightly faster than inflation.
Learning from the Past | Periodicals Price Survey 2025. While much has changed in the marketplace over the decades, the bottom line has not: Library materials keep getting more expensive. Prices have begun trending upward again in recent years and a 5.5–6.5 percent price increase is predicted for 2026. JB: Table 1 shows the average price per title for different subject areas. Chemistry come out on top, presumably because chemistry journals are often rather large.
Scientific journals should not charge to publish response articles. My team was charged more than $4,000 to publish our response. And the original authors had to pay another $4,000 to publish a subsequent follow-up – on top of the similar amount they were charged to publish their original paper. JB: Yuk!
Exclusive: the most-cited papers of the twenty-first century. But the most highly cited papers generally aren’t the most famous scientific discoveries. Rather, these works tend to describe scientific methods or software, the workhorses on which scientists depend.
These are the most-cited research papers of all time. Overall, 16 papers from the twenty-first century now make it into the all-time top 50, although they have had much less time than older papers to garner citations. Software descriptions and computer-aided findings have made notable rises in the ranking.
Science’s golden oldies: the decades-old research papers still heavily cited today. The researchers found that popular twenty-first-century papers on topics such as artificial intelligence (AI), scientific software and methods to improve the quality of research dominate today’s reference lists. But some studies published before 2000 are still heavily acknowledged even now.
EPJ Applied Physics transitions to NESTOR submission system. We are pleased to announce that EPJ Applied Physics (EPJ-AP) has successfully transitioned from the MMS submission system to NESTOR (New Editorial System Tool for Research), an editorial platform developed in-house by EDP Sciences to meet the evolving needs of the scientific publishing community.
Introducing Mathematics Source from EBSCO Information Services. EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) announces the release of Mathematics Source, a full-text resource offering current trends and relevant topics in the field of mathematics. The in-depth collection of mathematical sciences journals will appeal to students, researchers, educators and industry professionals, as well as anyone looking to deepen their understanding of mathematics and its applications across various fields.
China overtakes the United States in cancer research output. In 2024, China overtook the United States in cancer research output in the Nature Index for the first time, taking its place as the leading country in the field. With a 19% jump in Share that year, China’s improvement was much stronger than the United States’, whose output only increased by 5% between 2023 and 2024.
Wolters Kluwer empowers medical research in India with Ovid. Wolters Kluwer is pleased to announce it is collaborating with the Government of India as part of One Nation One Subscription (ONOS). This pivotal initiative is aimed at enhancing research accessibility and equity across the nation.
CHORUS Board of Directors Election Results. Newly elected to the board is Allyn Molina (Wiley). Returning to the CHORUS board are: Jenny Peng (OUP), Mark Doyle (APS), Scott Delman (ACM). All will serve a three-year term ending in 2028.
Understanding ORCID adoption among academic researchers. Our findings suggest a cost–benefit analysis that faculty are undergoing when deciding whether to get an ORCID. It is clear that a large portion of faculty without an ORCID do not see the benefits, either broadly or because they are in a field where they do not see its value or are at a career stage where they do not believe it is necessary.
Emerald Publishing launches Sustainable Finance Review journal. Emerald Publishing has launched its latest academic journal, Sustainable Finance Review (SFR). This new publication is set to explore critical areas in finance, including renewable energy financing, ESG, Fintech, decarbonization, carbon markets, public-private partnerships, and sustainable finance policy.
New Feature: Save to Reference Managers with the GetFTR Browser Extension. From today, the extension will offer a new feature: the ability to save document links to reference management tools further simplifying the research workflow. Researchers can now download and save links to their preferred folder or tool, or save them straight to Mendeley. Support for additional reference managers will be available soon.
And finally...
Every now and then I come across a beautifully written article that deserves to be shared and read widely. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen's recent post on The Scholarly Kitchen: Horizon Shifting, Or, How to be a Human in Modern-day Scholarly Publishing.
This is a time where we are all navigating new ways of being, new ways of shifting our horizons on an hourly and daily basis. It’s a time to give grace to one another, leaning into the strange wisdom that the pandemic imparted, which is the ability to see each other as full humans, ones who are navigating constantly changing circumstances
Well said, Stephanie.
Until next time,
James