Hello fellow journalologists,
This issue is slightly delayed, so there’s a lot to catch up on. We start off with two stories about research integrity sleuths and then delve into the implications of the NIH access policy. Oh, and the first Springer Nature AGM was held last week, which provides a fascinating insight into how a management team at a commercial publisher is incentivised by its shareholders.
But first, please take a look at the message from this week’s sponsor, Scholastica.
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News
The project, which has a US$900,000 grant from funder Open Philanthropy in San Francisco, California, to run for two years with a team of three to five people, aims specifically to root out flawed papers that have a serious impact on medical guidelines by skewing meta-analyses — reviews that combine the results of multiple similar studies to come to a statistically more powerful conclusion. “It is a great idea to take a very detailed look at such papers,” says Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth in San Francisco who is not involved with the project.
Nature (Nicola Jones)
JB: The project is called The Medical Evidence Project and is being run by the Center for Scientific Integrity, which is the parent of Retraction Watch (Ivan Oransky is the Executive Director of the Center). Retraction Watch announced the project and said:
Investigations by universities, organizations and publishers often take months or years to complete, and findings are only communicated at the end of the process. The Medical Evidence Project hopes to accelerate that, swiftly disseminating the results of its investigations.
I am beyond thrilled to introduce the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG), a community-led open source resource for performing post-publication peer review. At the end of this post, I’ve reproduced a commentary I wrote explaining the motivation behind COSIG and how we hope that it will be used. COSIG has been in development for the better part of a year now and involved the labor and feedback of lots of fantastic people, most of whom are mentioned below.
COSIG (Reese Richardson)
JB: You can view the collection of open science integrity guides here. There are 14 general guides on topics such as image duplication and suspicious venues, plus more specific guides for: biology and medicine; materials science and engineering; and maths and computer science.
Retraction Watch covered this development and noted the following:
Elisabeth Bik told us the team initially worried providing the “red flags” of paper mills was “basically revealing how we detect them. If we’re telling them what we’re paying attention to, in a way, we’re telling them how to fraud better,” she said. (A note that Retraction Watch administers the Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund.)
However, Bik also noted the information is already available in PubPeer comments, and the purpose of the guide was to centralize the information.
A different researcher feared losing his job while dealing with health problems. He told Zhang and Peng that he “had no choice” but to commit research misconduct. He bought access to an official archive and altered the data to support his hypotheses. He then found someone who could help him to write up articles and have them published. “Money is the answer to everything,” he said. “I met all the required criteria in just a few months, and eventually secured a permanent position in the faculty.” These kinds of admission are rare. Authors whose papers have been retracted on suspicion of paper-mill activity tend to remain silent or to deny any participation in research misconduct.
Nature (Christine Ro & Jack Leeming)
JB: This news feature includes some fascinating (and scary) anecdotes.
The DIAMAS (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication) project has released a framework of actionable Diamond Open Access (OA) Recommendations and Guidelines tailored to the needs of institutions, funders, sponsors, donors, and policymakers. Designed to support and strengthen the Diamond OA model, an academic-led academic publication model without fees for either authors or readers, the framework has been developed in close collaboration with policymakers and representatives from institutions and research funding organisations.
Plan S (announcement)
JB: You can download the Diamond OA Recommendations and Guidelines here.
The outcome for authors in these cases will ultimately be dictated by how aggressively the publisher decides to enforce its contractual rights. While some publishers may not continue their prior practice of automatically depositing articles on authors’ behalf under the new policy, there is little they can do to prevent an author from making the deposit. Authors normally would have their manuscript versions, including the Author Accepted Manuscript, as well as access to funder repositories, and funders do have the right to host the article.
Authors Alliance (Dave Hansen)
JB: This is the best article I’ve seen that lays out the challenges that authors and publishers face when navigating the NIH public access policy, which kicks in on July 1. It’s worth reading if you’re trying to understand this complex topic.
It seems likely that many publishers will stop automatically depositing the Author Accepted Manuscript on behalf of their authors. I doubt we’ll see any public announcements about that, though. The functionality will be quietly withdrawn with little fanfare.
This is the crux of the problem:
Institutions should also be aware that an author’s leverage to change terms in a publisher agreement are extremely limited at best. Often, an author’s agreement is presented as a click-through, with no opportunity to modify, and the journal editorial staff an author may contact do not have the authority to change the terms of those agreements. Moreover, authors usually do not have a background that would equip them to negotiate nuanced contract terms, even if such a negotiation were possible. This type of intervention also misunderstands the problem: authors and their institutions have already agreed to terms with granting agencies that allow for deposit of their article under NIH’s public access plan, and do not need to negotiate for that right; but publishers still have the right to refuse publication.
Will publishers refuse to publish papers after formally accepting them? Will this happen occasionally or at scale? Many publishers are concerned about how they will be able to cover their costs if articles are published open access (the Author Accepted Manuscript) with no charge incurred. That’s why the American Chemical Society introduced the Article Development Charge.
The article development charge (ADC) is a flat fee of $2,500 USD and is due after acceptance.
The ADC covers the cost of ACS’ publishing services from initial submission through to the final editorial decision.
Will other publishers follow suit? One to watch.
Springer Nature, a leading global publisher of research, today held its first Annual General Meeting (“AGM”) since its successful initial public offering in October. The AGM was attended by shareholders representing a total of 96.88% of the company’s registered share capital.
Shareholders approved all agenda items including the proposed dividend of €0.13 per dividend-bearing share. The dividend is scheduled to be paid to eligible shareholders on 11 June 2025.
Springer Nature Group (announcement)
JB: The press release is rather dull, as you might expect. More interesting fare can be found in the AGM documents.
Frank Vrancken Peeters, the CEO, received €153,000 as an STI (short-term incentive) for the period 5 October to 31 December, 2024 plus €289,000 salary (including pension and fringe benefits). In other words, €442k for a 3-month period.
There’s also a LTI (long-term incentive) scheme based on acquiring Springer Nature shares that kicked in on Jan 1, 2025. Springer Nature generated €1.85 billion in 2024, so the CEO took home around 0.1% of that revenue.
This percentage will increase in the future when the LTI scheme kicks in. For example, according to the 2024 RELX annual report, Eric Engstrom, the CEO, had a base salary of £1.4m but his total pay, including share options, was £13.5m. Remember, though, that RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, generates a lot more revenue than Springer Nature (£9.4 billion vs £1.6 billion).
You can read the full details of the payouts for the Springer Nature Management Board and rationale here.
There’s a certain voyeuristic (masochistic?) pleasure in seeing how much the top executives earn from their team’s labours. However, in many ways the non-financial targets that the Springer Nature Management Board were set are of more general interest, because they give an insight into the priorities of the shareholders of a large publisher.
For example, Harshavardhan Jegadeesan, the Chief Publishing Officer, was assessed on the following non-financial targets, in addition to the generic financial ones:
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Full OA revenue growth and improved turnaround time (he achieved 90% of the target)
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Market performance and usage of AI in publishing process (he achieved 150% of the target)
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New Senior leaders successfully onboarded and publishing volumes increased in key regions (he achieved 66% of the target)
Rachel Jacobs, the Group General Counsel, had the lowest performing achievement target of the Management Board. She was only awarded 50% for the target ’Representation goals and customer satisfaction’.
It’s worth noting that even though customer satisfaction was low, the main financial objective (operating cash contribution, which is a version of ’profit’) that all members of the Management Board were assessed on had 150% achievement, the maximum possible. Satisfied customers aren’t needed to beat profit targets, apparently.
On a more positive note, Springer Nature’s editors are presumably happy because Marc Spenlé, the Chief Operating Officer, was awarded the full 150% of his bonus target for ’Editor satisfaction and implementation of new AI tools’.
What gets measured gets done. The AGM documents give some insight into how large commercial organisations motivate their management team. It remains to be seen whether having their remuneration made public for the first time will help to motivate Springer Nature’s rank and file (you may remember that back in June 2024 the Nature editors were striking over pay).
Further analysis of Springer Nature’s usage data indicates significant global engagement with Q3 and Q4 journals, countering the misconception that their research is less relevant or widely used compared with higher impact journals. This highlights the limitations of over-relying on JIFs as the sole measure of a journal. Q3 and Q4 journals represented 22% of usage for Springer Nature titles in 2023, including both licensed downloads and non-licensed access requests.
JB: Presumably, then, Springer Nature’s Q1 and Q2 impact factor journals contributed 78% of usage, so I don’t see how it can be a misconception that Q3 and Q4 content is “less widely used”.
N.B. The Nature Portfolio journals were not included in this analysis; those journals have much higher usage than the Springer or BMC journals, which would have made the Q3 / Q4 contribution to usage even smaller. White papers like this one are essentially marketing exercises and need to be read with a sceptical eye.
Other news stories
‘Integrity index’ flags universities with high retraction rates. The Research Integrity Risk Index, described in a preprint on arXiv last month, categorizes institutions according to how many of their papers are retracted and how many are published in journals delisted from the scholarly databases Scopus and Web of Science. Researchers say that the index could improve university ranking systems that currently reward quantity of research output over quality.
UK’s share of global research outputs falls. On 5 June the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology published analysis showing that although the UK increased its number of scientific publications and citations of such publications between 2018 and 2022, its share of these metrics and of highly cited articles fell due to faster growth in other countries, in particular China and India. JB: You can read the report here.
New WHO rules: Protocols and results of all clinical trials must be published within 12 months. New guidance issued by the World Health Organisation states that all interventional trials, including trials that were terminated early, must make their protocols and results public on trial registries within a year of trial completion.
Why don’t medicinal chemists from industry publish anymore? The sharp drop in journal papers by medicinal chemists working in industry may be due to outsourcing of chemistry to contract research firms that aren’t allowed to publish research on behalf of their clients, chemists changing jobs more frequently than in the past, and companies being more secretive to protect their intellectual property, among other factors.
Reclaiming academic ownership of the scholarly communication system. This briefing describes the current status of academic publishing, highlighting the main factors shaping the system and the key challenges faced by the academic community. It also identifies opportunities for universities to play a leading role in shaping the future of scholarly communication. The active engagement of universities and other stakeholders is key to achieving a just scholarly publishing ecosystem that is transparent, diverse, affordable, sustainable, technically interoperable, and steered by the research community, as outlined in the EUA Open Science Agenda 2025. JB: Martin Eve wrote on a similar topic this week: What is a University Press?
Web-scraping AI bots cause disruption for scientific databases and journals. One factor driving the rise in AI bots was a revelation that came with the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese-built large language model (LLM). Prior to that, most LLMs required a huge amount of computational power to create, explains Rohit Prajapati, a development and operations manager at Highwire Press. But the developers behind DeepSeek showed that an LLM that rivals popular generative-AI tools could be made with much fewer resources, kickstarting an explosion of bots seeking to scrape the data needed to train this type of model.
Illustrators call out journals and news sites for using AI art. Researchers rushing to meet a deadline might be drawn to inexpensive or free text-to-image tools, such as Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, that can swiftly produce cover art. Clare already feels the impact of AI on her career. “I’ve seen a decline in the number of people who have been reaching out to me,” she says, adding that she’s had to lower her fees to remain competitive. “It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to convince people to pay for art when they can just get it for free.”
Announcements
CACTUS launches “CACTUS 100” initiative to empower small publishers and societies with AI-powered publishing tools. Recognizing that smaller publishing teams often face hurdles such as limited resources, rising compliance requirements, and increasing pressure to maintain research quality, the CACTUS 100 initiative offers over 100 essential AI-powered publishing outputs—completely free for 100 days from the day of activation. Each tool is designed to reduce editorial workload, enhance publication quality, and increase discoverability—all without adding to operational costs.
Springer Nature and the Consortium of Electronic Resources for Higher Education (KONSEPt) sign landmark National Open Access agreement for Malaysia. The agreement will enable researchers from all 20 of Malaysia's public universities to publish their work OA in more than 2,000 hybrid journals across the Springer Nature portfolio. Simultaneously, students and faculty gain full reading access to more than 2,300 journal titles. With recent data from Springer Nature showing the immediate impact that TAs have on OA output, this agreement will better support affiliated researchers in publishing openly, expanding the capability, global visibility and impact of Malaysian research, and fostering greater international collaboration.
IEEE chooses ChronosHub to deliver next-gen Publishing Portal. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) partners with ChronosHub to provide a centralized portal in which researchers will manage their publishing activities with IEEE, simplifying the publishing journey through a user-first experience while also optimizing operations. IEEE will leverage the ChronosHub platform to power their new Publishing Portal. It will seamlessly integrate with existing systems, providing a user-friendly front-end experience that brings IEEE’s portal vision to life.
ASM Partners with Hum to Deploy AI-based Taxonomy. ASM used Alchemist Taxonomy to build a custom taxonomy based on over 260,000 articles published in their journals. The taxonomy build took about two weeks. Alchemist Taxonomy then applied appropriate tags to every article in ASM’s back file, and will do so going forward for all future publishing.
IOP Publishing Offers Authors Streamlined Full-Text Access Across the Web with New GetFTR Browser Extension. Integrating the GetFTR browser extension reinforces our commitment to research integrity by helping researchers access the version of record directly from wherever they discover content. It ensures they’re reading the most reliable, citable, and up-to-date version of the research – exactly as it was intended to be shared.
SPARC to Become Independent Nonprofit Organization on June 1. Effective June 1, 2025, SPARC will officially transition from operating as a fiscally sponsored project of the New Venture Fund to an independent nonprofit organization. We have successfully incorporated SPARC as a charitable nonprofit organization in Washington, DC., and have filed for our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.
OpenEvidence and the JAMA Network sign strategic content agreement. OpenEvidence, the fastest-growing platform for doctors in history, has signed a multi-year content agreement with the JAMA Network, a consortium of peer-reviewed, general medical and specialty publications published by the American Medical Association. JB: This follows up from an agreement with the NEJM Group back in February.
Opinion
From this unique and precious community, we can gain courage and seek counsel. We must work with our key constituencies to create a kind of scholarly communications “mutual aid society,” recognizing that, for very good reasons, we are not all at liberty to speak out or act up in the same manner. But we must show up. To quote Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky at the Council of Science Editors meeting earlier this month, referencing another cartoon character, “This is not the time to disappear Homer Simpson-style into the hedge.” The stakes are simply too high.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Heather Staines)
As a former biomedical researcher, editor, and publisher, and a current consultant about image data integrity, I would argue that conducting systematic replication studies of pre-clinical research is neither an effective nor an efficient strategy to achieve the objective of identifying reliable research. Such studies would be an impractical use of NIH funds, especially in the face of extensive proposed budget cuts.
Retraction Watch (Mike Rossner)
JB: Agreed.
Prohibiting journals is our deliberate forcing function as we support such development at Astera and The Navigation Fund. By removing journals as an option, our scientists have to get more thoughtful about how, when, and why they publish. We’ve started to see some shapes of the future.
We began this as an experiment at Arcadia a few years ago. At the time, I expected some eventual efficiency gains. What I didn’t expect was how profoundly it would reshape all of our science. Our researchers began designing experiments differently from the start. They became more creative and collaborative. The goal shifted from telling polished stories to uncovering useful truths. All results had value, such as failed attempts, abandoned inquiries, or untested ideas, which we frequently release through Arcadia’s Icebox. The bar for utility went up, as proxies like impact factors disappeared.
Seemay Chou (Astera’s Co-Founder and Interim Chief Scientist)
JB: This article got a lot of coverage last week. It rehashes many of the arguments we’ve all heard before, including this statement:
But journal-based publishing already costs the global scientific community
$10-25 billion per year for subscriptions and article processing fees, most of which are paid for using taxpayer-funded grants.
If you click on the link in that paragraph you won’t find any mention of the cost of journal publishing. The article is about a SciHub survey and doesn’t mention the subject of costs at all, as far as I can tell. There’s a big difference between 10 billion and 25 billion. The journals market is likely to be much closer to the former than the latter.
Too busy to review an individual paper? Valid.
Too busy to review every paper? Unacceptable.
It is our responsibility to the community. Quid pro quo.
We only ask that you respond to those emails.
Matter (Steven Cranford)
JB: Everyone struggles to find peer reviewers, even editors at Cell Press journals.
Other opinion articles
Beyond Borders: How Publishers are Navigating the Challenge of Diversifying Their Author Base. Not many publishers we talked to currently use local-language marketing to reach new author communities. Some have considered it, but they haven’t yet taken the leap. This leaves a significant opportunity for early movers. Tailoring content and campaigns to regional audiences in their native languages can dramatically improve engagement and trust. Whilst the language of research is often English, communicating with authors, libraries, and other stakeholders in their local languages shows respect and can move the conversation forward much more quickly.
European Accessibility Act: Navigating the Challenges of EAA Compliance. With 13 journals, including our flagship JAMA published weekly, our challenge has been balancing our large volume of content with budget constraints. The process of ensuring that all digital content on our sites complies is time consuming, especially considering a large quantity of legacy documents, PDFs, and videos, not to mention our core websites. The project has required substantial investment in new tools and development, as well as audits, training, and significant staff time.
What makes a great engineering paper? Editorial insights into impact. First, we wanted to know what these editors considered to be an engineering paper. Do they differ from scientific research papers such that there are different aspects to consider? And if so, how do they differ? ... But the most frequent responses we received were that engineering research provides solutions to open questions and/or demonstrates application value.
Ethics and integrity in uncertain times. Research ethics and integrity challenges during pandemics are not unique, but they are vastly magnified during crises. Preparedness — developing the systems and tools to enable an effective response at all levels ahead of the next pandemic — is key. With that mindset, the PREPARED initiative, an effort funded by the European Commission, UK Research and Innovation and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation, developed the PREPARED Code. The aim of this code is to provide an ethics framework to support researchers, research ethics committees and research integrity offices throughout a pandemic.
And finally...
The best journals demonstrate leadership during challenging times and I’ve been impressed with how Science, led by Holden Thorp, has stood up for core scientific values during the recent onslaught on research and academia. Here are excerpts from two articles published on June 5. First up is Holden himself:
The global enterprise will adapt to the lack of American leadership, but the steep loss for the country itself is unambiguous. The United States will no longer have the same window into the technologies of the future that will allow it to shape and anticipate commercial and societal advances. This will eventually reduce the market successes and global leadership that the United States has boasted since World War II.
On the same day Science ran an editorial, Strangling intellectual independence, by Michael S. Harris:
American higher education is now at risk—not because of any single rival, but because of two self-inflicted wounds. It’s hard to imagine a more destructive one-two punch than what is happening today. One blow has been the federal government’s ideologically driven cuts to research funding at universities. At center stage have been the nation’s premier private institutions, with Harvard University bearing the brunt of attack at the moment. The other jab has been the ideologically driven attacks on academic freedom at state universities, as typified by recent legislation in Texas.
The Science news team has also done an incredible job in recent months. They deserve a massive thank you from the wider community (and some awards too).
Until next time,
James