Hello fellow journalologists,
Some weeks are slow news weeks. Last week was not one of them.
But before we get to the news, here’s a message from Scholastica, which is kindly sponsoring Journalology over the next four issues.
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News
On the Ultimate Human Podcast with Gary Brecka, Kennedy said, “We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they’re all corrupt.” The journals, he said, publish studies that are funded by the pharmaceutical industry. As a substitute for them, he continued, the NIH will establish medical journals for its various institutes and centers — unless current journals change “radically.”
Stat News (Anil Oza)
JB: The Stat News article is behind a paywall, so you may want to read the BMJ’s news story instead or perhaps Politico’s.
The BMJ journalist wrote:
Kennedy’s plans appear to contradict those of his direct subordinate, new NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, who told Politico this month that he would let his agency’s scientists publish freely, and had even removed the existing requirement for prepublication review by supervisors.
You can read the Politico Q&A with Jay Bhattacharya, the Director of the NIH, here. This is the key quote with regards to academic freedom and journal choice:
I established academic freedom for publishing scientific papers on the NIH campus so that scientists can publish whatever result they like in scientific journals. They have to say that they’re speaking for themselves, not for the NIH, of course, but that’s just normal.
You may remember that Bhattacharya and FDA chief Marty Makary launched the Journal of the Academy of Public Health earlier this year (as well as the Academy of Public Health as far as I can tell). When I clicked on the homepage link to see the research articles the journal has published to date I was shown this.
Never mind. Everyone makes mistakes and publishing is hard. Eyeballing the homepage, it looks as though it has published three primary research papers since it launched on January 2025.
And then, last night, The Guardian ran this story: Exclusive: US veterans agency orders scientists not to publish in journals without clearance.
Senior officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs have ordered that VA physicians and scientists not publish in medical journals or speak with the public without first seeking clearance from political appointees of Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned.
The edict, laid down in emails on Friday by Curt Cashour, the VA’s assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs, and John Bartrum, a senior adviser to VA secretary Doug Collins, came hours after the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective co-authored by two pulmonologists who work for the VA in Texas.
The scientific research standards the executive order (EO) lists out might look like a good idea, Nosek says, because on its face it seems like the administration is trying to promote scientific rigor and transparency. But looking closely, that’s not what the order does, he says. “It uses those terms, but in the end, it creates a situation where the EO can convert those principles of good practice into weapons against scientific evidence,” Nosek says.
C&EN (Leigh Krietsch Boerner)
JB: Stand Up For Science published an open letter here, which outlines the problems, as it sees it, with the Restoring Gold Standard Science executive order.
NOTUS reported Thursday that seven of the more than 500 studies cited in the report did not appear to have ever been published. An author of one study confirmed that while she conducted research on the topics of anxiety in children, she never authored the report listed. Some studies were also misinterpreted in the MAHA report. The problematic citations were on topics around children’s screen time, medication use and anxiety.
The Washington Post / AP (Amanda Seitz)
JB: I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry (I did both).
We are delighted to announce the publication of a new white paper, “Safeguarding the Future of Society Publishing“, which explores how learned societies are navigating the evolving scholarly communications landscape.
This research, supported by Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), responds to the significant challenges facing society publishers today and the findings aim to support learned societies to navigate industry transformation through collaboration and adaptation.
Research Consulting (announcement)
JB: You can read the white paper here and download the graphs in a slide deck here.
Rob Johnson, who leads Research Consulting, wrote a commentary in Research Professional News:
79 per cent of societies expect to publish more content via immediate open access over the next five years, with 55 per cent expecting volume to grow faster than revenues.
This imbalance will strain finances and quality control processes, just as the growth of AI-generated content puts them under increased pressure. Recruiting peer reviewers is already societies’ biggest operational concern, with 54 per cent citing this as a significant challenge.
The big caveat for this report is that 50 of the 66 society publishers who responded were from the UK, with another 11 based in the USA. It’s a real shame that so few societies from countries outside the UK chose to take part.
Mrowka agrees that journal editors should require all raw data to be posted in a repository. He says that electronic notebooks can be a useful tool to keep track of data and experiments, because they insert digital timestamps. “This would be one measure that would have made it much harder for someone to cheat,” he says.
Nature Index (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
China is now the world’s top venue for clinical trials. A new study based on data from multiple clinical trial registries shows that more than 11,000 interventional clinical trials were registered in China in 2023, around 50% more than in the United States.
TransparMed (Till Bruckner)
JB: If you work on a clinical research journal, the source article may be of interest to you. The abstract notes:
China’s RCTs were predominantly domestic, while the United States maintained a higher proportion of international trials.
Shifting to a different research field can have negative consequences for a scientist, according to an analysis. A team assessed millions of scientific papers and concluded that, when a scientist moves away from their original area of expertise, their publications receive fewer citations than their previous work. The larger the shift, the greater the effect — a phenomenon the authors of the study have named the ‘pivot penalty’.
Nature (Mariana Lenharo)
JB: This point from the accompany News & Views commentary is well made:
How much of a pivot can be attributed to being a co-author on a paper from outside one’s area? The proposed measure does not take into account that some co-authorship teams are interdisciplinary and that not all authors on a paper have the same expertise. Would the results be different if the pivots were calculated only for the lead authors?
Close to 14.7% of original research articles with women corresponding authors are sent out to review versus 13.4% for men corresponding authors. Similarly, around 14.8% of original research articles authored by women corresponding authors get accepted versus 13.9% for men. Given the sample size and the fraction of corresponding authors choosing not to disclose their gender, these differences are not statistically significant. Our analysis therefore finds no evidence that women corresponding authors are less likely to have their manuscripts sent out to review or get accepted for publication. This indicates that the assessment is based on merit and that the internal editors at Nature Portfolio journals and external reviewers do not introduce bias into the process.
Springboard Blog (Marios Karouzos and Sowmya Swaminathan)
JB: This is a nicely done report, as usual, although the specifics of the methodology are difficult to parse.
One small complaint is that there’s no PDF available to download. Websites tend to disappear over time and a PDF of this report should be made available on a repository somewhere, so it can be referred to for decades to come.
It’s worth noting that only around 20% of submissions across the portfolio have a female corresponding author; in some subject areas (e.g. chemistry and physics) that figure is as low as 10%. According to 2024 data from the European Commission, 35% of corresponding authors globally are women.
Scientific Reports, which is part of the Nature Portfolio, is not included in the analysis. Given the sheer size of the journal, its numerous data points would have made an oversized contribution to the analysis. However, I understand that Scientific Reports was omitted because it uses SNAPP (the new peer review system), which is not able to collect gender information yet.
[As an aside, I missed this promotional blog post last week: What does it mean to be part of Nature Portfolio? We ask Scientific Reports authors.]
You can read more about the methodology here, which also includes a percentage for “Error” (a former colleague told me this is a standard deviation).
Nature published an accompanying editorial, adding one important caveat:
It is important to mention that no gender data are available for one-fifth of the papers submitted during the period covered by the analysis. This is because most of these articles were submitted by research administrators, who were not asked to disclose their gender. Furthermore, for the remaining manuscripts, around 10% of the corresponding authors preferred not to disclose their gender.
Other news stories
Ex Ordo and SPIE Launch Initiative to Streamline SPIE’s Conference Partner Program Workflow. This collaboration will offer conferences publishing their proceedings with SPIE, the opportunity to manage their entire conference lifecycle using Ex Ordo’s powerful platform. From abstract submission to peer review, registration, and proceedings delivery, the integration between Ex Ordo and SPIE will automate workflows and reduce the administrative burden for organisers, while ensuring seamless delivery of high-quality content for publication in the SPIE Digital Library.
Karger Publishers Collaborates With Molecular Connections to Decode Rejected Manuscripts Using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Manuscript Insight provides Karger Publishers with deeper perspectives into publishing trends, potential revenue loss, and key competitor journals that accept manuscripts rejected by the publisher. Molecular Connections proudly touts the platform’s accuracy rate at 99.99%, opening new possibilities for Karger to investigate missed opportunities and develop data-driven publishing strategies.
Data Conversion Laboratory Debuts “Content Crystallizer” for Scholarly Publishers. Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), an industry leader in structured data and content transformations, announces the launch of Content Crystallizer. Drawing from DCL’s decades of experience with many of the world’s top scholarly publishers, Content Crystallizer styles, edits, and transforms manuscripts in Word format into high-quality XML through an automated, streamlined, three-step process.
cOAlition S Head of Strategy, Robert Kiley, to conclude role in June 2025. Following Robert’s departure, the Strategy and Implementation Group of cOAlition S, which was established in January 2025, will assume responsibility for the design and execution of the coalition’s strategy in the forthcoming years, including ongoing initiatives to advance Open Access publishing worldwide. “The Strategy and Implementation Group represents the collective vision and expertise of cOAlition S organisations,” noted Robert. “I am convinced that their collaborative approach will bring fresh perspectives and even greater momentum to the cOAlition S mission”.
Silverchair Expands AI Playground to ScholarOne Manuscripts. The ScholarOne AI Playground will explore solutions that streamline the manuscript review process for editors. The aim is to save editors time, helping to reduce many of the bottlenecks in editorial evaluations. This user-friendly environment allows publishers and editors to discover, stress-test, and hone when and where to leverage AI in their workflows and informs Silverchair’s future product development.
The Open Access Journals Toolkit: new languages, new editorial board members, new horizons. The Open Access Journals Toolkit is an independent, open and multilingual resource for anyone involved in journal publishing. It aims to help individuals and organisations understand best practices around launching and running scholarly journals. From the start, it was intended as an open resource with specially created content for a global audience. A specially appointed international Editorial Board was commissioned to create the content, which they also peer review. The board is responsible for reviewing and updating the content, as well as writing new material. We are very pleased to announce today that we have three new languages of the Toolkit available: Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish!
New analysis from Springer Nature reveals widespread international disparities in research integrity training. Analysis of the results of surveys in Australia, UK, US, India, Japan, China and Brazil, found that whilst the majority of researchers express strong support for mandatory integrity training, access to such training is uneven and few participants are required to demonstrate understanding of the training material.
DIAMAS Releases International Recommendations and Guidelines for Diamond Open Access. The Recommendations are tailored to institutions, funders, sponsors, donors, and policymakers and address the diverse needs, concerns, and opportunities within the evolving Diamond OA ecosystem. The report highlights the collective responsibility for Diamond OA among all stakeholders and advises collaboration between stakeholders to ensure long-term sustainability. It also sets out several strategic pathways for fostering Diamond OA. JB: You can download the guidelines here.
Announcing the Winners of the 2025 EPIC Awards. We are proud to announce the winners of the 2025 Excellence in Publishing, Information Technology, & Communications (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. JB: Some of the categories had a Silver medallist, but not a Gold medallist. The price of Gold is sky high right now, but even so...
Opinion
Relatively fewer people are concerned with an issue which seems to me quite central: every year fewer and fewer researchers are reading original articles. AI summarisation, and the overall increases in article generation have meant that fewer researchers have time or energy to read the bulk of new material published in their discipline. The resulting paradox – more and more articles produced but less less human readers – seems to me to add up to a perfect“death of publishing“ argument.
My view, for the past five years, has been that we will create a self publishing environment in which acts of verification, peer review and value estimation take place quite separately from the initial appearance of scholarly findings as self posted articles in pre-print servers, in blogs or in other postings. The commercial activity will not be in publishing, it will be in software and data services.
David Worlock blog
JB: David is the closest thing we have to a ‘seer’ in scholarly publishing. Ignore him at your peril. Having said, if we’ve got to the point where academics don’t read research papers any more, then it’s worth pausing to consider whether we have lost something valuable. Critical appraisal is an important skill.
Were there any signs that could have helped Wiley avoid the catastrophe? It appears so. The turnaround time gap between special issue and regular papers should have alarmed editors and publishers alike. Specifically, while until 2019 special issue papers at Hindawi cleared peer review about a week faster than regular papers (well within expectations for invited content), the gap widened markedly from 2020 onward. By 2022, special issue papers were accepted 56 days faster than regular papers (123 days vs 67 days).
The Scholarly Kitchen (Christos Petrou)
JB: I learnt the hard way, when I took on responsibility for Scientific Reports back in 2019, how important pipeline management is. The PLOS One graphs (figures 4 and 5 in the TSK article) make me wince. It’s not a fun place to be, whether you’re working in an editorial, production or publishing capacity.
Growth can be difficult to handle, especially for publishers that don’t have access to deep financial reserves to hire extra staff or to improve aging technology.
Christos’ analysis also includes Frontiers in Oncology, which slowed down considerably between 2022 and 2024.
As news of Hindawi’s retractions spread across the industry in late 2022, other publishers and journals took notice. Frontiers is likely to have been one of them. Take, for example, its journal Frontiers in Oncology, one of Frontier’s largest titles that published more than 7,000 papers in 2022. Following the news of the retractions at Hindawi, the journal slowed down substantially. It accepted papers in 77 days in July 2022, while the investigation of Wiley was ongoing, and it slowed to 103 days a year later in July 2023. Ever since, the journal has slowed down even further, inching toward 120 days in late 2024.
Christos adds:
Following the developments at Hindawi and the high-risk profile of Frontiers in Oncology, it is possible that Frontiers added more layers of editorial scrutiny that would have led to the journal’s slowdown. It is healthy for a publisher to seek efficiency yet prioritize integrity when necessary.
Another possibility for the significant slowdown in 2024 is that Frontiers laid off 600 staff in January that year.
I recently listened to Lauren Kane's interview of Paul Peters on his own podcast, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Paul was CEO of Hindawi when it was sold to Wiley. Here’s an excerpt of the podcast transcript, in which Paul explains why he thinks Hindawi got hit by paper mills:
It was both a distraction for the team, where they're now trying to figure out how they fit in this big organization. And because of my experience at Hindawi over the previous 15 years, I had a really high level of paranoia about problems. And, you know, I would personally look at all of our open special issues.
I get a report every week to see, are there special issues with too many papers? Are there repeat authors across them? And I think one thing that is a direct result of me leaving is that I hadn't institutionalized that paranoia well enough.
So when I left and there wasn't, you know, me as the CEO looking at all these reports on a weekly basis, and they didn't have the scars that I had gone through to question and to dig into it a bit deeper. And, you know, like from Wiley's perspective, I think, you know, they never had to undergo such a serious attack on their reputation that it just wasn't in their DNA. And so, I think, you know, Wiley was caught off guard and the paper mills were just much more sophisticated than they had been before.
In his analysis Christos says:
Wiley and Hindawi claimed to have been caught off guard by papermills. That might be true, but the signs were there for everyone to see as early as Q2 of 2020, when special issue papers were already accepted 38 days faster than regular papers. That is two full years before concerns were raised internally and an investigation commenced.
Paul left his CEO role at Hindawi in February 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.
As editors, one thing we can also do is clearly signal that we stand on the side of science in this and all things. We are eager to continue to receive manuscript submissions in this area. Our commitments to the study of misinformation, to the integrity of public discourse, and to science, more broadly, cannot and will not be canceled.
Science Advances (Ethan Porter, Aaron Shaw, Emma S. Spiro)
JB: Well said. Editors need to make it clear what their editorial policies are and then stick to them, even if that’s incredibly difficult to do because of external factors.
Other opinion articles
Publishing as knowledge clubs: ASSAf Statement on the Recognition of Editors and Peer Reviewers. Editing and reviewing powers the academic enterprise. Editors are conceptual shapeshifters implementing the national research framework. These activities are now recognised in the 'ASSAf Statement on the Recognition of the Work of Editors and Peer Reviewers of Academic Journals and Books in South Africa'. This article calls on universities to include such work in performance appraisals. It also proposes a dynamic knowledge club model of editing to co-exist with the conventional discrete product format.
Fake attributions: a persistent and evolving research integrity problem. Part of the problem is that the current system doesn’t yet have the safeguards in place. Journals don’t verify author identities. Institutions lack simple ways to monitor potential issues in their attributed output. And many platforms automatically add publications to researcher profiles, often without their approval or any alert when suspicious authorships appear.
Journal Club
In conclusion, we describe a large response from the scientific community to the COVID-19 pandemic and a substantial increase in citations and public attention, especially for preprints. Evolving research topics were aligned with evolving areas of public interest and may partly be driven by them. These findings contribute to an understanding of how scientific discourse functions during a pandemic—particularly on the relationship between scientific discourse and the media, and on the role of preprints in the research ecosystem.
International Journal of Epidemiology (Matthew Whitaker et al)
JB: This paper is a few months old, but only just appeared on a PubMed search. It’s a fascinating insight into how Covid affected scholarly publishing landscape, and how the media covered those articles and preprints.
And finally...
Two essays caught my eye last week. The first, Extending Minds with Generative AI, was published in Nature Communications and has been widely read (15k views so far)
There is ample reason to be alert and cautious – we’ll come back to all that shortly. But in thinking about the effects of all our new tools and technologies, we may often be starting from entirely the wrong place. The misguided starting point is an image of ourselves as (cognitively speaking) nothing but our own biological brains. An alternative vision, one that I have long championed, is that we humans are and always have been, what New York University philosopher David Chalmers and I call ‘extended minds’ – hybrid thinking systems defined (and constantly re-defined) across a rich mosaic of resources only some of which are housed in the biological brain
The other somewhat-related article was "Vibe Work": A New Paradigm for Knowledge Work?, by Adam Hyde on his Robots Cooking blog:
AI introduces a fundamental shift in how we interact with professional tools and processes, moving from deterministic workflows to a more fluid and adaptive paradigm. Originally termed Vibe Coding by Andrej Karpathy in February of this year to describe a new approach to software development, the concept extends well beyond programming. This broader idea—Vibe Work—captures a similar shift in knowledge work across multiple domains.
Until next time,
James