Hello fellow journalologists,
The SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) annual meeting starts on Wednesday; many companies have been announcing partnerships and new products, ready for discussion at the jamboree. I’ve grouped those together, at the end of the news section, to help you quickly see whether any of the new initiatives can help you to improve your journal or portfolio.
Another way to produce better journals is to get one-to-one support via the Journalology coaching programme. The box below contains a testimonial from Lisa Junker, who I’ve had the pleasure of working with this year. If you’d like to find out more, click the link below or simply hit [reply] to this email.
A coaching testimonial from a society publisher
As a more senior professional leading a society publishing portfolio, I had fairly specific learning goals that I wasn’t able to accomplish through industry conferences or professional development courses.
James held an initial meeting with me to better understand my goals and the needs of my society’s portfolio, and from there we developed a coaching plan. He developed specific training materials based on my learning needs, incorporating the specifics I provided about our strategy and data. He also responded to drafts I created based on what I had learned and provided in-depth feedback to help me improve further.
I’d highly recommend the Journalology coaching programme for any society leader that wants to walk away with a better independent understanding of journal strategy and better tools for its implementation.
Lisa Junker (Senior Director, Publishing and Editorial Strategy, Infectious Diseases Society of America)
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News
In addition to this growth of paywalled articles, there is widespread concern that OA publishing models based on Article Processing Charges (APCs) or transformative arrangements are inequitable and inhibit participation in knowledge sharing.
These developments occur against a backdrop of an incentive system which rewards researchers for focusing on journal placement and quantity of published papers, which can influence research priorities. This focus creates additional challenges for the peer review system, as it works to evaluate increasingly complex and data-intensive research findings.
Amidst these trends, there is a growing recognition of the importance of open science practices beyond just Open Access to publications. Stakeholders are increasingly advocating for openness throughout the entire research process, including access to preprints, protocols, research data, research software, code, and peer review reports.
Plan S (report)
JB: Plan S uses Dimensions (Digital Science) to do their analyses, so it’s no surprise that this graph, from the report, looks similar to the data I presented in a video earlier this year.
Since 2017, the absolute number of subscription articles published each year has increased. Here’s another graph from the report, which shows how much of the OA growth has been driven by hybrid journals (again similar to the video I shared with you a few months ago).
The report says:
The number of articles made available via the "Hybrid" route has increased, likely due to the transformative arrangements, such as Read and Publish agreements and transformative journals. In the future it will be interesting to see if this number declines following the statement from cOAlition S that, post 2024 it will no longer financially contribute to such arrangements.
Yes, very interesting indeed. Will Plan S will be pleased if the proportion of OA articles published in hybrid journals drops and the proportion published behind a paywall increases? Would that count as success?
That’s unlikely to happen as most of the Plan S funders don’t operate transformative agreements anyway. Indeed, the Plan S policy could boost hybrid OA numbers, if authors choose to use their institution’s transformative agreements instead of paying for an APC from a non-Plan S grant.
In a separate announcement (OASPA's 'Next 50%' project: Your Voice Matters at a Critical Moment for Open Access - OASPA), Malavika Legge from OASPA wrote:
The timing is critical. With a noticeable slowdown in open access publication growth, we need to collectively reassess what “open” truly means and chart a bolder and more comprehensive path forward. This is not something OASPA will do in a vacuum: we are seeking inputs about our primer via an
open survey which will accept responses until 11 July.
Meanwhile, an unreviewed preprint by Melanie T Benson Marshall et al asked the question: “It’s messy and it’s massive”: How has the open science debate developed in the post-COVID era?
While the UNESCO Recommendation appears promising in principle, a common view among participants was that it is challenging to implement in practice, in part because of these culture-specific tensions and in part because of its abstractness. This is significant because participants viewed the Recommendation as highly influential following the COVID-19 pandemic, but often felt overwhelmed by the challenge of knowing how and where to begin to implement it.
The open tools and systems we rely upon need our immediate attention and action. We continue to reaffirm our commitment to a vision where every place of higher learning has access to the tools and infrastructure necessary to engage and participate in research. This report is a tool, one that brings attention to the current state of open infrastructure and that highlights actions we might take to radically improve that state. So much is needed to build that better future we seek, where open infrastructure is truly supported and sustained. We’re hard at work, as we know so many of you are as well — let’s use this moment, together, to make open the default for knowledge.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (Kaitlin Thaney)
JB: This related opinion article shows the challenges of funding open infrastructure: SciPost at a crossroads
For 9 years now, thanks to your involvement, SciPost has grown into being recognized as an essential open science infrastructure. We are often touted as a template for journals of the future and case study in open science because of the clarity and (to scientists) self-evident nature of our principles, and because of our focus on quality-oriented, community-based services.
Our sustainability is however under threat. Our business model is virtuous by design and affordable by construction, but can only succeed with sufficient goodwill and support from academic organizations.
Last October, we circulated an Open letter to academic organizations in the hope of stabilizing our fundraising.
Unfortunately, this has not been successful. Our financial situation has not improved. In fact, it has deteriorated. Only 147 out of 1351 (a mere 11%) benefitting organizations have sponsored us.
In a study published in PLoS Biology on 8 May, scientists analysed more than 300 papers that used data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), an open data set of health records. The papers all seemed to follow a similar template, associating one variable — for example, vitamin D levels or sleep quality — with a complex disorder such as depression or heart disease, ignoring the fact that these conditions have many contributing factors
Nature (Miryam Naddaf)
JB: I’ve heard anecdotal reports from editors that papers like this are being submitted en masse. Researchers (and perhaps paper mills) are using publicly available data sets to quickly produce primary research articles, using AI. Single association studies have limited value and editors need to be aware of this new trend (half of the papers identified in this study, which ran from 2014 to 2024, were published in 2024).
The researchers suggest that public databases such as NHANES should ask researchers to register their study plans before giving them access to data. Such measures would be “an auditable step to try to stop people wholesale mining these kinds of data sets”, says Harrison. “When they’re exploited like this, it drowns out any meaningful finding.”
You can read the PLOS Biology paper here.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Toolkit for Disability Equity, a comprehensive resource designed to advance disability equity in scholarly communications. This toolkit offers practical guidance, strategies, and tools to create more inclusive environments for individuals with disabilities. As a community-led project, our goal was to focus our resource on the needs of disabled people, while also incorporating best practices for engaging around disability issues in the scholarly communication workplace.
Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (announcement)
JB: You can access the toolkit here. It’s a collection of articles released over the past few years helpfully collected together into three sections:
Female journal editors were associated with greater female last authorship, underscoring the role of leadership in shaping authorship patterns. Additionally, a higher proportion of female coauthors was linked to increased odds of both female first and last authorship, while female last authors were associated with higher odds of female first authors, reinforcing the importance of diverse research teams and mentorship in supporting female career progression. These findings suggest that editorial leadership, team composition and mentorship networks play a crucial role in advancing gender equity in academic publishing. Strengthening policies that promote gender-inclusive editorial boards, transparent authorship tracking and structured mentorship programmes may help sustain progress towards equitable representation in medical research.
BMJ Open (Christie Rampersad)
JB: The vast majority of journals need to improve the gender balance of their editorial boards. I’ll keep including studies such as this one in the newsletter in the hope that readers will engage with this vitally important topic.
Another article, published a few days ago, covers similar ground: How much of HERstory is in the HIStory of the Journal of Applied Physiology?
Females have been consistently underrepresented in the Journal of Applied Physiology, both as research participants and as manuscript authors. This study provides a comprehensive audit of the journal’s publications from its inception in 1948 through the end of 2023 to examine these biological sex-related trends over time. Except for 2023, data reveal a persistent and significant gap in the inclusion of female participants and authors throughout the journal’s history.
Our data, covering a wide range of publishing imprints, each of which has over 2,400 articles published during the quarter, shows a significant variation in the percentage of articles that included at least one retracted article in their references. The industry average across these publishers is approximately 1.315%, but looking at the table clearly shows some imprints perform very well while others show room for improvement.
Scitility (announcement)
JB: This graph tells the story.
The Scitility team note:
In some cases, citations to retracted articles are deliberate (e.g., to discuss the retraction itself). Note that this is rarely the case for the bulk of incidental references and we worked hard in the above chart to remove the obvious cases.
Authors need to know if they are inadvertently citing a retracted paper. Scitility believes it can help both authors and publishers.
Furthermore, readers need to know if an article in a reference list has been retracted, as this related news story makes clear: Taylor & Francis Online highlights updates to cited research through new GetFTR-powered indicators.
New indicators have been introduced to the references section of Taylor & Francis journal articles to inform readers when cited research has been retracted or updated. Using GetFTR’s retraction and errata service, Taylor & Francis Online is one of the first journal platforms to offer this functionality... If a cited article has been retracted, a ‘Retraction’ button now appears next to the citation; for corrected articles, an ‘Updates’ button is shown. Users can hover to see a brief summary or click through to the GetFTR Document Status page for a detailed timeline.
Announcements
CACTUS and Silverchair collaborate to elevate research integrity. This collaboration is focused on bringing quality and efficiency to editorial workflows in ScholarOne manuscripts by equipping journal editors with advanced tools to assess research integrity risks, technical compliance, and language quality. The integration of Paperpal Preflight for Editorial Desk into ScholarOne workflows provides a targeted suite of AI-driven checks to detect research integrity risks, ensure technical compliance, and evaluate language quality.
Silverchair Expands Integration Opportunities with ScholarOne Relay API. ScholarOne Relay will supercharge the flexibility and integration opportunities within ScholarOne workflows, enabling publishers to quickly and efficiently address their most pressing challenges. The ability to create a network of interconnected solutions with a consistent presentation and reliable and modern interfaces will rapidly transform the user experience of ScholarOne Manuscripts.
Oxford University Press and Hum sign agreement to pilot Alchemist Review. Hum has announced that Oxford University Press (OUP), one of the world's largest university presses, will soon begin using Hum’s AI-based editorial assistant, Alchemist Review. Working on a limited set of content, this collaboration will enable OUP to leverage Hum’s deep textual analysis together with Grounded AI’s contextual citation checks to provide an intelligent manuscript assessment to their editors. The goals are to enhance the depth of manuscript assessment, reduce editorial burden and seek efficiencies in the editorial review process.
River Valley Technologies Unveils Innovative Research Integrity Dashboard. River Valley Technologies has released its Research Integrity Dashboard, incorporating a suite of third party tools, as well as River Valley’s own Research Integrity Checker. The configurable system is fully built into River Valley’s award winning submission and peer review system, ReView 3.0. The Dashboard can be customized by publisher, journal, or even article type, ensuring all appropriate checks are carried out. These include third party tools such as ImageTwin and Clear Skies. The consolidated results are displayed within a single user-friendly interface.
Aries Systems and DataSeer Partner to Advance Research Excellence and Transparency in Scientific Publishing. Scholarly journals are often overburdened with time-consuming editorial checks on incoming submissions. Inconsistent journal standards, limited transparency, compliance discrepancies, and a rise in fraud can lead to expensive bottlenecks, post-publication corrections, and threats research integrity. To streamline this process and mitigate these risks, Aries Systems and DataSeer have partnered to integrate SnapShot, an automated editorial screen technology, with Editorial Manager® (EM), the leading manuscript submission and peer review tracking system.
CCC Introduces Expanded RightsLink Author Services for Scholarly Publishers. CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, is expanding RightsLink Author Services to provide scholarly publishers with a streamlined way to automate and trigger targeted promotional offers and publication charges for authors at key points across the publication lifecycle.
CCC Makes ‘Get It Now’ Article Delivery Service Available to Academic Libraries via EBSCO Discovery Service™. CCC’s ‘Get It Now’ academic article delivery service is now integrated with EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS), enabling students, faculty, and researchers at higher education institutions to request and access individual journal articles from within the EDS search and discovery platform.
KGL Accucoms Facilitates Inclusion of Five Leading US Publishers in India’s ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ (ONOS) Initiative. Representing five esteemed scholarly society publishers—Annual Reviews, APS, AIAA, ASM, and SPIE—in the landmark One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) initiative is both a privilege and a clear reflection of what strategic, sustained collaboration can accomplish. This milestone agreement, three years in the making, was made possible through the dedicated efforts of KGL Accucoms, whose deep understanding of the Indian research ecosystem and commitment to equitable access played a part in its realization.
ACS Publications Joins India's One Nation One Subscription Initiative. A total of 30 major international journal publishers, including ACS Publications, are part of ONOS. All journals from these publishers will be accessible to students, faculty members, and researchers at participating institutions.
Wolters Kluwer introduces Ovid Guidelines AI. Building on a long-standing publishing relationship, Wolters Kluwer and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) are expanding their shared efforts to advance evidence-based cancer care. At the upcoming 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting, the two organizations will appear alongside Google Cloud in the "AI and Oncology” area in Lakeside Lounge to showcase the ASCO Guideline Generator, the first early adoption of Ovid Guidelines AI. The new technology, which will be available in early 2026, will help accelerate clinical practice guideline development at ASCO, enabling authors to develop continually updated guidelines. JB: More about the collaboration here: ASCO and Google Cloud to Deliver AI-Powered Tool that Provides Faster, Interactive Access to ASCO's Evidence-Based Clinical Guidelines.
Brepols Publishers Selects Ingenta Edify Platform to Support BrepolsOnline, Its Ebooks and Online Journals Environment. Brepols, a leading international academic publisher specializing in the humanities, is pleased to announce that it has selected Ingenta, a global leader in publishing technology solutions, to support their BrepolsOnline platform.
Other news
New Technology from Sage Report Explores Librarian Leadership in the Age of AI. Drawing on global surveys of over 1,000 students and 300 librarians, the findings uncover a complex relationship between confidence, capability, and trust in the academic use of AI. While over half of the students reported using AI tools like ChatGPT in their research, just 8% say they’ve received support from their librarian in doing so. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity: students overwhelmingly trust their librarians, with more than half saying they’d feel more confident using AI tools if recommended by them. JB: There are four reports in this ’Librarian Futures' series, which you can download here.
Taylor & Francis appoints Ashok Subramanian as Chief Technology Officer. Subramanian’s appointment represents a return to Taylor & Francis, where he previously contributed to the Cogent OA project. His understanding of both publishing dynamics and technological innovation makes him ideally suited to drive Taylor & Francis’s digital transformation initiatives and enhance its scholarly communication platforms.
The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) releases their Community Call to Action. The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) has released a Community Call to Action, inviting organizations and individuals to contribute resources (funding, expertise, metadata, and infrastructure) to support the first phase of a community-driven infrastructure for making persistent identifier (PID) metadata better and more complete.
Opinion
The more one looks into this debate, the clearer it becomes: “predatory” has become less a meaningful descriptor than a convenient label – used, often aggressively, by established actors to discredit newcomers and preserve their turf. Yes, predatory journals as described above do exist. However, the issue we now face is that these are increasingly – perhaps intentionally – conflated with legitimate, non-predatory journals. Those that seek to challenge the legacy, paywalled model of academic publishing.
Research Information (Emmanuel Andrès)
JB: This testy essay was written by the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Clinical Medicine, an MDPI journal. I haven’t seen any evidence of traditional publishers calling MDPI predatory, at least publicly, so I wonder what the trigger was for this outburst.
The graph below is from Dimensions (Digital Science) and shows the volume of research articles published in Journal of Clinical Medicine in recent years.
The journal’s growth has stalled, but I doubt that’s because other publishers are calling it predatory (if anyone has evidence to the contrary, I’d be pleased to see it). Rather, it reflects a general downturn for both MDPI and Frontiers, after their meteoric rise. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, some authors appear to have switched allegiance back to the large commercial publishers.
Professor Andrès writes:
It also has an international editorial board, an ethics committee, and a formal post-publication correction mechanism. And yet it is often lumped into the “predatory” pile. Why? Because it publishes quickly. Because it accepts submissions from under-represented regions. Because it doesn’t pretend to be a gentlemen’s club for a select few.
He also notes that Journal of Clinical Medicine is a member of the ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors), which, from what I’ve heard over the years, is the very embodiment of an elite old boys’ club.
Put simply, the policy-development process at Nature and Springer Nature was driven principally by editorial proposals and discussions toward an internal consensus. However, these internal processes were often stimulated by, or dependent on, discussions and standards developed within external research communities. In some cases, they were also influenced by views elicited by consultation with expert ethicists and others. These consensus policies and guidelines then provided a framework for independent decision-making by editors and editorial managers across the company.
The CRISPR Journal (Philip Campbell)
JB: This essay, written by the former Editor-in-Chief of Nature, provides an overview of how editorial policies were (and I suspect still are) formulated at Springer Nature.
The following point about editorial policymaking being collaborative, not competitive, is incredibly important:
I want to emphasize two key points at the outset. Editorial policymaking is a collaborative rather than competitive process, often including cooperation between editors of competing publishers, either ad-hoc or through the Committee on Publication Ethics. Second, and never to be forgotten: editorial policies, however well justified, always necessitate their own tasks, often burdensome, for editors and for researchers, and sometimes also new development of IT infrastructure. (The competition for IT development within a company can sometimes delay editorial policy implementation for months or even years.)
Other opinion articles
Federating diamond OA in Europe and beyond: the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH). The Diamond Capacity Hub will ensure synergies align and support diamond OA capacity centres in Europe, including diamond OA publishers and service providers. It will facilitate the diamond OA capacity centres that service diamond OA outputs in terms of technical services, training, quality, best practices and sustainability.
The state of preprinting in Europe and the Netherlands. As shown in our paper, the adoption of preprinting has grown substantially in recent years. Nevertheless, preprint adoption is still quite low in many disciplines, even in Western and Northern European countries, which are ahead of many other countries in terms of preprint adoption. Low preprint adoption delays the dissemination of scientific knowledge and therefore harms progress in science.
Falling Dollar, Rising Prices. Recent rapid and significant changes in the value of the dollar have made it more expensive for US institutions to buy from outside the US. Our analysis shows the profound effects of a weaker dollar on APCs over a period of just 15 weeks.
Can a better ID system for authors, reviewers and editors reduce fraud? STM thinks so. Many other domains — financial services, social platforms, even dating apps — have needed to verify identities without directly handling sensitive documents themselves. The common solution is to use specialist third-party services that perform identity checks independently, and then return a confirmation of trust to the relying party, without exposing the underlying documents.
Why restrictive academic authorship practices perpetuate inequality. Universities, publishers and funding bodies need to take action. Grant funding should support capacity-building for Global South researchers rather than serving as a means of data extraction. Journal editors should actively seek out diverse perspectives and support collaborative authorship, breaking down long-standing gatekeeping mechanisms. Change must go beyond tokenistic measures and lead to real structural shifts.
And finally...
The recordings from this year's APE conference are now available to watch. You could watch the session I took part in (Balancing Quantity and Quality in Research Communication) or browse the menu of all the sessions. Startups to watch – Innovators of tomorrow was enjoyable, as was Protecting Trust in Science.
Until next time,
James