Hello fellow journalologists,
Normal service returns this week, with a plethora of news, opinion and journal articles for your delectation. Share and enjoy.
A coaching testimonial from an Editor-in-Chief
I can recommend the coaching program without reservation. It’s been invaluable to be able to discuss the many issues that come up for editors. James is not only insightful but also well-organized so that the coaching is a great investment.
Professor Kathryn Phillips (Editor-in-Chief, Health Affairs Scholar)
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News
NIH’s default position is maximum transparency regarding research and research findings. This Notice updates the Effective Date of the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy, NOT-OD-25-047, to July 1, 2025 at which time it will replace the 2008 Public Access Policy. All other aspects of the Policy remain the same. The Policy will continue to apply to any Author Accepted Manuscript accepted for publication in a journal that is the result of funding by NIH in whole or in part through a grant or cooperative agreement, including training grants, a contract, an Other Transaction, NIH intramural research, or the official work of an NIH employee. Author Accepted Manuscripts meeting this qualification and with acceptance dates on or after July 1, 2025, are subject to the Policy.
NIH (announcement)
JB: The previous date was December 31, 2025, so this notice moves the date forward by 6 months. You can read Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH Director’s announcement here: Accelerating Access to Research Results: New Implementation Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy. He says:
However, a recent Pew Research Center study shows that only about 25% of Americans have a “great deal of confidence” that scientists are working for the public good. Earlier implementation of the Public Access Policy will help increase public confidence in the research we fund while also ensuring that the investments made by taxpayers produce replicable, reproducible, and generalizable results that benefit all Americans.
Environmental Health Perspectives, widely considered the premier environmental health journal, has announced that it would pause acceptance of new studies for publication, as federal cuts have left its future uncertain.
For more than 50 years, the journal has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to review studies on the health effects of environmental toxins — from “forever chemicals” to air pollution — and publish the research free of charge.
The editors made the decision to halt acceptance of studies because of a “lack of confidence” that contracts for critical expenses like copy-editing and editorial software would be renewed after their impending expiration dates, said Joel Kaufman, the journal’s top editor.
The New York Times (Teddy Rosenbluth and Apoorva Mandavilli)
JB: Last week The Lancet ran an editorial: Supporting medical science in the USA, which concluded:
Medical journals should not expect to be spared by the Trump administration's attack on science, nor should health institutions such as the NIH, the CDC, or academic medical centres. Science and medicine in the USA are being violently dismembered while the world watches. While the risks to civil servants and academics’ livelihoods are real and understandably frightening, bullies are only emboldened by acquiescence or indifference.
Emerald Publishing is committed to the realisation of a research and publishing environment built upon transparency, accessibility, and integrity. Accordingly, we have signed the Declaration to
#DefendResearch, which aligns with our core values and long-standing mission to contribute to positive change in research and society more broadly.
Emerald Publishing (announcement)
JB: By way of background, Emerald is a UK-based publisher that publishes around 20,000 primary research articles a year, making it the 20th largest independent publisher globally (source: Dimensions, Digital Science).
This week COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) published a statement on external influence on editorial decisions:
COPE wishes to express its strong support for and solidarity with authors in all disciplines, journal editors, and publishers and stress its unwavering belief that undue influence by any political, corporate or social entity is against the core ethical principles of editorial independence and academic freedom. We call upon all those involved in scholarly publishing to be guided by these principles when taking any action in response to external pressure.
And on Friday Science Editor published Scientific Communication in a New U.S. Government Regime: What We Need to Consider Now.
For those journals that remain, a new problem emerges. The inability to publish on certain topics represents a significant ethical dilemma: turn away good science, censor authors to remove offending language, or face the possibility of that science being taken down from any online sites. Moreover, will publication of such science be seen as a refusal to comply with executive orders? If so, what will the consequences be for the journal? These journals will have to walk a fine line between failing to comply with federal orders and author censorship; both options would mean an almost certain end to the journal.
Following the successful rollout across its journals and books of its AI tool that detects cases of AI-generated nonsense text in research manuscripts, Springer Nature is now donating the tool to STM. It will be integrated into the STM Integrity Hub, an industry-wide initiative that supports publishers in ensuring the integrity of their published content, as part of its mission to develop and trial tools that publishers large and small can use to screen submissions for indicators of compromised content.
Springer Nature (announcement)
JB: At first glance this is an admirable initiative, but I can't help but wonder how valuable Geppetto actually is. Does it work well? Perhaps I’m being overly cynical, but commercial organisations don’t generally give away products that offer a competitive advantage, but do like to bask in a positive PR glow. Springer Nature has developed other AI tools. Will those be donated to the STM Integrity Hub too?
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Nature journals’ new launches program, which began in 2015. Over the past decade, the program has successfully introduced a variety of new journals, covering a wide range of research areas. These journals cater to diverse communities, address global challenges, and influence policy.
Springer Nature (announcement)
JB: Hang on a minute. Nature Genetics was launched in 1992, so surely the new launch programme is a bit older than that!
(Actually, you could argue that the launch programme started in 1971 with the launch of Nature New Biology and Nature Physical Science, but since those two journals were quickly shut down because they were not financially viable, they generally get forgotten.)
As you may know — not least because I keep banging on about it — I oversaw the new launches between 2015 and 2022. We launched 26 Nature journals in that time.
Since then, I’ve written journal proposals for consulting clients using the same methodology that I developed for the Nature journals. If you’re looking to expand your portfolio and need some help deciding which journals to launch, please send me an email.
Karger Publishers recognizes the important role of experienced peer reviewers in training the next generation of reviewers. From April 2025 Karger Reviewers of 14 Journals* have the option to invite a colleague to co-review a manuscript via our submission system and co-reviewers receive the same acknowledgment for their contribution. The Co-review function is fully integrated into the submission system and formalizes the practice of involving students or less experienced colleagues in the review process, adding transparency and accountability.
Karger (announcement)
JB: It’s good to see more publishers offering this functionality. You may remember that IOP Publishing rolled this out to their entire portfolio 2 years ago.
If you want to learn more about co-reviewing Trends in Cell Biology has just published The value of joint peer review between early career researchers and supervisors.
News in Brief
JB: The text below are excerpts from the articles and not my own words.
Announcing Finalists for the 2025 EPIC Awards. Launching this year, the EPIC Awards highlight the remarkable achievements of individuals and teams who are advancing scholarly publishing through creativity, collaboration, and cutting-edge innovation.
Open repositories are being profoundly impacted by AI bots and other crawlers: Results of a COAR Survey. The results of the survey found that over 90% of respondents are encountering AI bots, usually more than once a week, and often leading to service disruptions.
Journals in Taylor & Francis collective funding pilot reach target for full open access publishing. Taylor & Francis has confirmed both journals in its innovative pilot, Collective Pathway to Open Publishing (CPOP), will be converted to open access (OA) for 2025.
Research career opportunities stifled by academic ‘Gollums’. The study showed Gollum-like behaviours such as data hoarding, idea theft, and blocked access to resources are “rampant”, Valdez told Times Higher Education, noting “this phenomenon disproportionately impacts early-career researchers and marginalised groups, pushing some out of academia altogether”.
Wiley position statement on illegal scraping of copyrighted content by AI developers. To demonstrate our commitment to responsible innovation, we have developed licensing frameworks that offer flexible, fair terms tailored to different use cases and development needs.
eWorkflow partners with Grounded AI to integrate Veracity. eWorkflow Ltd, an artificial intelligence-based manuscript submission system, has partnered with Grounded AI, to integrate their Veracity AI-powered fact-checking and citation technology. All manuscripts submitted via eWorkflow will now be screened using Veracity.
Elsevier AI summary ‘trashed researcher’s work’ and took weeks to fix. In March, Williams-Hoffman was surprised to discover that the online version of the paper contained an AI-generated question and answer section immediately below the abstract... The AI had apparently confused the methodology of Williams-Hoffman’s study with earlier research she had cited.
Reading List Feature Launch—Celebrate World Book Day 2025. The new Reading List feature on Preprints.org can help with the information overload. It offers a simple and effective way to organize and categorize preprints. These can be for personal use, group discussion, or for sharing with the wider public.
Peer Review Week - new website launch. We’re excited to launch a new website to provide a wealth of information about PRW. Explore upcoming events, contribute your activities, and stay connected with the evolving conversation around peer review.
Widespread lack of article accessibility policies among ecology and evolution journal. We reviewed the websites of 541 ecology and evolution journals to examine the extent to which they prompt authors to prepare accessible manuscripts. Here we show that nearly three-quarters of journals do not encourage authors to consider accessibility when preparing manuscripts.
Opinion
Soft power shifts the narrative around publishers, repositioning them not just as profit-driven entities or catalysts of disparities, but as proactive agents capable of addressing these disparities and driving sustainable progress within the science business ecosystem and beyond.
Science Editor (Eleonora Colangelo and Steven D Smith)
JB: In early 2015, soon after the merger between Macmillan Science and Education and Springer, I pitched creating an SDG (UN Sustainable Development Goals) programme to a member of the new Springer Nature executive team who asked, not unreasonably since he was the CFO, “how can we make money from that?”
In the summer of 2016 I recruited Nicola Jones to set up Springer Nature’s SDG programme. Nicola provided an update recently: Measuring our impact on the Sustainable Development Goals.
Nicola and the wider team have been very successful over the past (almost) decade, as this quote from her recent blog post makes clear:
Since 2015, our SDG-related content has been cited more than 17 million times, and we saw over 530 million downloads of our SDG-related articles in 2024.
You can make your own guesstimate on what the cost-per-download is across Springer Nature’s portfolio, but it’s fair to say that 530 million downloads is worth a few quid. The bean counters will be happy.
Money was never the driving force for this programme though, at least for me and for many Springer Nature staff. In a 1969 editorial, published on its 100-year anniversary, the Nature editors (probably Sir John Maddox) wrote:
At this occasion in the domestic history of Nature, it is important to say explicitly that it remains an honest objective to win for science not merely a ‘more general recognition in education and in daily life’ but also an opportunity to change the world.”
Nicola and the wider team have taken that legacy and run with it.
There’s a risk that publisher SDG programmes can become a PR spin exercise. However, when done well they can be incredibly powerful. The Lancet led the way with the MDGs (which ran between 2000 and 2015) and the journal’s influence sky-rocketed as a result. Soft power, indeed.
Overall, MDPI is the most affected publisher after applying weighted means. The reanalysis of the data using weighted means moves MDPI from 6th position (with a 14% self-citation rate) to 3rd position (with a 19.7% self-citation rate). Notably, the previous table leaders, OUP and T&F, remain in their respective positions with little change in their final percentages, likely due to the balance of total documents across their journals.
The Strain on Scientific Publishing (Pablo Gómez Barreiro)
JB: This relates to a MDPI sponsored blog post on the ALPSP website that I covered in a previous issue of this newsletter. Based in this new analysis, it looks like the MDPI team got their maths badly wrong and didn’t calculate the means correctly.
However, this reanalysis was only possible because MDPI published the data and the Python code. Mistakes happen and sharing the data makes it possible to spot errors like this one.
Pablo Gómez Barreiro’s commentary was published on March 23 and presumably hadn’t been seen by Stefan Tochev, the MDPI CEO, by the time he published his latest newsletter on April 30, which used the original graphs. The original blog post has not been corrected, as far as I can tell.
Opinion in brief
JB: The text below are excerpts from the articles and not my own words.
Reimagining Peer Review: A More Efficient and Rewarding Approach. The vision is for a technology-based framework that enables reviewers to enter a flow state by removing distractions and eliminating cognitively tedious tasks, allowing them to focus primarily on deep reading, critical analysis, and extracting insights.
The Papermill Crisis – What Editorial Offices Can Do About It? We know that papermills often set up fake accounts in order to submit papers on behalf of an author. If we suspect that we are dealing with a papermill, we should not give them any feedback at all and we definitely shouldn’t tell them how we caught them. As an analogy: treat the submission the same way you would treat a spam email.
Advancing Communications Between Editors and Institutions: News from the Office of Research Integrity. Confidentiality related to institutional research misconduct proceedings centers around protecting involved parties from reputational harm or retaliation and currently allows limited disclosure only when there is a “need to know.” Institutions have taken a very narrow view of need to know in the past. The 2024 Final Rule expands the need to know to include institutional review boards, journals, editors, publishers, coauthors, and collaborating institutions.
The Stack Overflow Effect: Are Scholarly Publishers Sleepwalking into an AI Disintermediation Crisis? Stack Overflow’s experience teaches us a clear lesson: simply providing content isn’t enough. To maintain their central role, publishers must proactively sustain vibrant researcher communities. Journals need to support interactive, community-driven activities that AI alone cannot replicate.
Journal Club
We hypothesized that authors’ ties with editors are associated with the number of their publications. Analyzing three decades of publications of 33 Nature journals in physical and life sciences, we show that authors with less reputation or a weaker tie to the editor have substantially lower chances to publish in the editor’s journal. This encompasses three aspects of authors’ reputation in the eyes of the editor: a past collaboration with the editor, an affiliation to one of the editor’s former research affiliations, and the author’s publication track record in Nature journals. These differences in the publication outcome are associated with the scientific experience of the editor and amplified by variations in the impact factor (IF) of the journal. Some of these differences changed after the establishment of a non-financial COI policy by journals.
PLOS One (Rémi Neveu and André Neveu)
JB: I stopped including Journal Club as a section primarily because I was wary of covering flawed research. I don’t have the time to read primary research papers in detail as part of the newsletter writing process.
I decided to break my own rule because this topic is incredibly important. It seems quite likely to me that some (many?) editors have unconscious positive bias towards researchers they used to work with; that would be true of editors of all journals, not just Nature journals.
This paper investigates that and is worth showcasing in this newsletter. The Nature journals don’t publish the names of the handling editor alongside the paper, so I wonder why the authors chose to focus on Nature journals (other than because bashing the Nature journals is a fun sport, of course). It might have been better to choose PLOS journals, for example, which do publish the editor’s name on the paper.
In the context of a growing interest in the role of preprinting in the scholarly communication system, it is important to understand the extent to which different research communities have adopted preprinting over time. The results of our study show the growing absolute number of preprints, with nearly three times more preprints published in 2022 compared to 2017, confirming the increasing trend in preprint adoption. However, in many research communities the proportion of peer- reviewed outputs being preprinted is still quite low. Our findings show that the proportion of preprinted outputs varies significantly across scientific disciplines and geographical regions. Furthermore, we found that the adoption of preprinting depends on the interplay of both factors—scientific discipline and geographical region—rather than being determined by either in isolation.
SocArXiv (Narmin Rzayeva, Stephen Pinfield, and Ludo Waltman)
JB: I’ve long been fascinated by the way humans use statistics to tell stories. Preprints have tripled, the authors say. This graph from their analysis tells another story; the slopes of the lines matter too, surely. Regardless, the authors have put together a helpful assessment of a topic that comes up frequently in this newsletter. N.B. This is a preprint (about preprints) and hasn’t undergone peer review yet.
And finally...
I try to keep this newsletter focused on news that relates to journals, which can be hard sometimes when there are so many geopolitical changes that will indirectly affect scholarly publishing. Peter Suber, who I’ve never met but have deep admiration for, did a written interview with ZBW Open Science Transfer, which contains even more links than this newsletter. It’s well worth reading: Peter Suber on science in danger: “Host your open and uncensored research in more than one place and preferably more than one country.”
Until next time,
James