Hello fellow journalologists,
On Thursday I wrote to explain that (1) Journalology will soon become a paid subscription product and (2) I will start a separate, shorter, newsletter, called The Jist, that will be free to read. If you missed that announcement, you can catch up here.
I received many replies to Thursday’s email, probably more than to all of the 120 newsletters combined. The responses were incredibly supportive and generally fell into two camps: “Good for you, I’m happy to pay” and “Will you offer group subscriptions?”
I had obviously considered how to sell and deliver group subscriptions and came up with a workable, if manual, process. As is so often the case in scholarly publishing, a hack would need to be deployed.
However, one subscriber pointed me in the direction of another technology option, which I’ve spent the past 3 days investigating. I think it would work well, but it will take some time to set up.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to postpone rolling out the paid subscription for a few weeks while I sort out, and test, the logistics. As a result, the full-length version of Journalology will be free to read for a while longer.
It’s a bit embarrassing to delay the launch so soon after the big reveal, but I’d rather get it right using a better technology solution than launch something that’s hacked together and is time consuming to administer (for you and me). Thank you for bearing with me.
With that piece of housekeeping out of the way, let’s move on to this week’s news after a brief message from Scholastica, which is kindly sponsoring this issue.
Thank you to our sponsor, Scholastica
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News
This combination of low volumes and long lead times for retractions means that citations to and from retracted articles represent a tiny contribution to JIF calculations. Overall, of the 4.6+ million citations that contributed to the JIF across ~ 22,000 journals in the 2024 JCR release, only ~20,000 were to or from content that had been retracted at that time (~0.4%).
In recent years there has been an increase in the number of retractions and we have also noted signs of a reduction in the time it takes to retract indexed articles. Given these trends, we have decided to introduce a new policy to pre-emptively guard against any such time that citations to and from retracted content could contribute to widespread distortions in the JIF.
Starting from this year’s JCR release, we will exclude citations to and from retracted content when calculating the JIF numerator, ensuring that citations from retracted articles do not contribute to the numerical value of the JIF. However, retracted articles will still be included in the article count (JIF denominator), maintaining transparency and accountability.
Clarivate (Nandita Quaderi)
JB: A blog post published earlier this month said:
Of the 1% of journals where there will be a change in JIF, the majority will change less than 10%, with 50% seeing a decline of 3% or less.
In other words, this new policy won’t affect many journals this year, but the proportion could increase over time if more papers are retracted, more quickly.
I noticed with interest that some publishers started shouting about their impact factor successes within hours of the new JCR release. This statistic made me chuckle:
116 out of 238 (49%) previously ranked MDPI journals increased their Journal Impact Factor.
So presumably the other 51% either stayed the same or decreased? Is this the scholarly publishing equivalent of a glass half full / half empty?
Meanwhile a Frontiers announcement on LinkedIn kicked off with “Not all superheroes wear capes” and linked through to this page, which leads with
Your research is the real superpower. That’s why maximizing its impact is important to us.
Followed by a long table listing the Frontiers journals and their impact factor. DORA is mentioned in passing at the end.
Twenty journals lost their impact factors in this year’s Journal Citation Reports, released today, for excessive self-citation and citation stacking. Nearly half of the journals on the list are from well-known publishers MDPI, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley.
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The company suppressed four journals this year for citation stacking, which it defines as two or more journals citing each other at an “unusually high rate.” The rest lost their impact factor for self-citation, when a journal has “an unusually high percentage” of citations to itself.
Retraction Watch (Avery Orrall)
JB: Last year Clarivate suppressed 17 impact factors, so this is a slight year-on-year increase. Neither Heliyon nor Cureus are on the list—both are still On Hold—so that particular saga continues (please note the the use of the em dash in this paragraph was not due to any kind of LLM).
Every science publisher pays men more than women. In 2024, the lowest median pay gap favouring men was 9.5% (Springer-Nature), followed by Sage (13.3%), Wiley (17.7%), and Informa (formerly Taylor & Francis) (22.7%). Elsevier remains an outlier in the magnitude of its gender pay gap and in the lack of progress. Eight years ago Elsevier stood out among publishers, with a median pay gap in 2017 of 40.4% in favour of men over women in its UK business. The UK average that year was 18.4% and we called Elsevier’s gap – double the national average – unacceptable. The company’s leadership promised change. Elsevier’s median pay gap for 2024 is 32.8%, maintaining its position as worst performer among peers over all eight years of mandatory reporting, and tracking only a slight improvement of seven percentage points over time. In fact, the ratio of Elsevier’s pay gap to the UK average has worsened – from 2.2 times in 2017 and 2.4 in 2020 and 2021 to now 2.9 times the UK average in 2024.
PLOS Global Public Health (Jocalyn Clark and Elizabeth Zuccala)
JB: The data presented in this short paper are based on the UK gender pay gap service. The story may be different in other countries. Publishers would do well to read and act on this:
Commitments to diversity and inclusion are prominently displayed on their journals’ pages and in global marketing and branding efforts, and in the case of Elsevier, a high-profile Inclusion and Diversity Advisory Board of pre-eminent experts is said to provide guidance to the company and address inequality. Accountability seems strikingly lacking. As we argued previously, “it is one thing to cite “diversity” and “inclusion” on a corporate website, but quite another to design and implement strategies that will make a real difference.”
For its fiscal fourth quarter of 2025, Wiley earned $443 million in revenue. That was down from the $468 million in the same period of fiscal 2024. However, the decline was mainly due to divestments.
The company’s bottom-line dynamic was much different. Net income according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) standards nearly tripled, rising to over $68 million from the year-ago profit of slightly more than $25 million. On a non-GAAP (adjusted) and per-share basis, profitability also improved by rising to $1.37 from $1.21.
The Motley Fool (Eric Volkman)
JB: You can download the earnings call presentation and transcript here. Here are the key statistics from the presentation:
- Article submissions +19%
- Article output +8%
- Research revenue growth +3%
You may wonder, as one investor did, why article output only grew by 8% when submissions grew by 19%. Jay Flynn, Executive VP and GM of Research & Learning, gave this response:
So there's always a 6 to 8-month lag time between submissions and publications. And there's never a great correlation between submissions and output in any given calendar year, but we'd love to see those trends all continuing to climb, and hats off to the marketing team and the publishing teams who drove those submission results this year as well as drove the article output results.
The other explanation, of course, is that a large chunk of the extra submissions are of low quality and aren’t publishable. It’s probably best not to explain that to the investors, though.
The situation in the USA at the moment is uncertain, to say the least. Matthew Kissner, the CEO, reassured the investors that everything is in hand.
Obviously, we're watching the external environment carefully in the U.S., of course. But we -- one is our internal indicators still are very strong. And the other is Jay and I had a focus group with a number of our leading sales folks at the meeting he talked about last week. We had our global sales force together. And we just wanted to get their read on the market, the U.S. sales folks. And what we're hearing back is there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty, but nothing yet that would cause us undue concern. That being said, we're obviously watching it very, very carefully.
Informa, which includes Taylor & Francis, also provided a trading update this week and had this to say about academic markets:
Underlying revenue growth of 13.7%, reflecting core like-for-like growth of 3-4%; Business is performing to plan and we continue to sign non-recurring licensing agreements with AI companies
Since 2020, Nature has offered authors the opportunity to have their peer-review file published alongside their paper. Our colleagues at Nature Communications have been doing so since 2016. Until now, Nature authors could opt in to this process of transparent peer review. From 16 June, however, new submissions of manuscripts that are published as research articles in Nature will automatically include a link to the reviewers’ reports and author responses.
It means that, over time, more Nature papers will include a peer-review file. The identity of the reviewers will remain anonymous, unless they choose otherwise — as happens now. But the exchanges between the referees and the authors will be accessible to all. Our aim in doing so is to open up what many see as the ‘black box’ of science, shedding light on how a research paper is made. This serves to increase transparency and (we hope) to build trust in the scientific process.
Nature (unsigned editorial)
JB: I smiled from ear to ear when I read this. Transparency is always a good thing. I was less pleased to see that the peer review reports are still hard to find on the website and are buried in the supplemental information. For example, I had to click three links to read this file. To paraphrase Douglas Adams:
“But the peer review reports were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur the academic, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
In 2022, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) announced our ambition to transition all of our RSC-owned journals to open access (OA) within the next five years. This ambition made us the first chemistry publisher to publicly commit to a fully OA future.
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Although we are moving away from a single pathway to open – via a complete portfolio of OA journals - our goal remains to build an inclusive, sustainable OA future, ensuring that all authors, regardless of geography or funding, can take advantage of publishing their work as openly as possible.
Royal Society of Chemistry (Sara Bosshart)
JB: I suspected that an announcement along these lines would be coming when I crunched the numbers for Journalology #112: The ROyAl family. The RSC is to be commended for having a bold vision, but the demand for open access clearly isn’t there, at least within some communities.
Sara’s blog post is a great example of what a good communications strategy looks like. It’s never easy to admit when things haven’t gone to plan, despite your best efforts. Sara wrote:
The resounding message we heard over and over is that one size cannot fit all: that while some regions are steaming ahead with fully OA, others are embracing their own ways to achieve openness and yet others are not yet ready for fully OA. It became clear that we needed to adapt our vision for openness to account for a landscape that is increasing in complexity and no longer coalescing around a single direction for open research.
I’m not convinced by that last point. Have we ever agreed on a single direction for open research? Hmmmm. What is true is that the publishing landscape is getting more complex, especially when it comes to open access. This complexity creates extra cost for publishers. I struggle to see how publishers will be able to decrease costs (to lower the price of OA to make it more equitable) while needing to offer different solutions for different regions.
The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Jisc are pleased to announce the renewal of their agreement supporting scientific researchers in the U.K. The agreement will continue to provide participating institutions full reading access to ACS journals and seamless open access publishing services throughout 2025 and 2026.
American Chemical Society (announcement)
JB: I don’t normally cover commercial agreements like this one in the newsletter, but I decided to break my own rule because this appears to have been a difficult negotiation (for example, here and here). You can read the details of the Read and Publish Agreement here. This quote is interesting:
The ACS have confirmed that manuscripts from eligible authors that contain Rights Retention Statements will not be rejected or diverted. Any manuscript submitted by an eligible corresponding author from a participating institution will automatically be published with a CC-BY licence, if accepted for publication by ACS.
The ACS communications team confirmed to me that the version of record will be published CC BY as part of this agreement, not the author-accepted manuscript using the Article Development Charge (ADC) mechanism.
This week the ACS also published Zero-Embargo Green Open Access: A Look Back at the First 18 Months, which included this:
Institutions can also take advantage of the reduced cost of publishing green OA, compared to gold OA, by selecting a
‘read and green’ agreement.
This means all authors at participating institutions can share their accepted manuscripts at the time of publication, without incurring any costs. Such agreements are significantly more affordable than traditional OA agreements while using the same automated systems that make it seamless and easy for authors and administrators.
So far, more than 40 institutions in Belgium and France have opted into read and green agreements; these agreements also offer significantly reduced gold open access APCs if authors wish to make the version of record of their article immediately available as OA.
So, in summary, some institutions in France and Belgium have chosen Read and Green, whereas JISC, which represents UK academic institutions, has chosen Read and Publish.
A physics journal has informed an embattled rocket scientist that it will retract three of his papers, citing concerns raised by the retraction of another of his papers last year. All three articles appear in Physics of Fluids, published by AIP Publishing, and describe a phenomenon called “Sanal flow choking.” As we reported last year, some scientists have denounced the concept as “absolute nonsense.”
Retraction Watch (Avery Orrall)
JB: As is often the case for Retraction Watch, the comments are worth reading. Here’s an excerpt from one comment:
Some context from a fluids researcher: Physics of Fluids was for many years the second most prestigious Journal in our discipline, behind the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. A few years ago the entire editorial board resigned, and started Physical Review Fluids, which is now the second most prestigious and rigorous journal. Physics of fluids, with an entirely new editorial board, will apparently publish absolutely anything, with only the most cursory review. The very fast review times have actually increased the impact factor, but the quality is through the floor.
So, to recap, the editorial board of Physics of Fluids (published by the American Institute of Physics Publishing (AIPP)) resigned in 2015 and launched a new journal hosted by the other big US physics society publisher, the American Physical Society. It’s not always the case the editors resign from journals owned by commercial publishers. AIPP subsequently found a new editor for Physics of Fluids.
Anyway, I digress, here’s a graph of research article output of the three fluids journals mentioned in the Retraction Watch comment (Dimensions, Digital Science):
Your immediate reaction might be that this is another example of a fully OA journal that’s grown rapidly. But, no. Here’s the growth broken down by access type. The growth is not primarily due to OA; the extra papers are being published behind the paywall.
This is not an isolated case. Here are the 10 fastest growing subscription journals in 2024 (Filtered for “Closed” in Dimensions and sorted by the growth (delta) between 2023 and 2024). The first two journals are published by Elsevier. There’s a commercial incentive to publish more subscription content, within a portfolio sales package, to replace the subscription value lost when a greater proportion of articles become OA in hybrid journals.
Last month AIP announced the appointment of an interim Editor-in-Chief for Physics of Fluids. Of course, correlation does not equal causation. We don’t know whether either the retraction notices or the rapid growth in article volumes had anything to do with the changing of the editorial guard.
In the dynamic landscape of academic publishing, PeerJ Computer Science has emerged as champion of open science since its inception in 2015. As we celebrate its 10th anniversary, we reflect on a remarkable journey that has revolutionized how computer science research reaches the global community.
The past decade has witnessed remarkable growth in PeerJ Computer Science’s global reach and impact. The journal has now published over 2,800 submissions from researchers worldwide, reflecting the growing trust and recognition within the academic community.
PeerJ (announcement)
JB: Taylor & Francis acquired the PeerJ journals in March 2024. This latest announcement prompted me look into how the PeerJ group is performing. The graph below shows volume of research articles over time.
We’re close to the end of June and it looks as though the volume has dropped a little from last year; Dimensions includes PeerJ group articles published up until June 16, so total output in 2025 will likely be lower than in 2024, unless something changes. I doubt this is what the T&F executive team was hoping for when they acquired PeerJ.
In the past, PeerJ made a big deal of its community credentials. The drop in output, if that’s what it is, could be due to lower submissions because of the new corporate owners or perhaps because of challenges with integrating PeerJ into the T&F infrastructure.
That gap is what a new platform called Preprint Watch is trying to address. Instead of using citations as a proxy for importance, Preprint Watch classifies scientific papers based on their epistemic role—where they fall in the broader arc of scientific development. The tool doesn’t care how many people are reading a paper. It’s looking for signs that a preprint may indicate the early stages of a conceptual shift.
Preprint Watch (announcement)
JB: I don’t have a view on whether this is a valid approach. An opinion piece in Nature summarises why approaches like this one (and, for example, DeSci Labs) need to be tested.
But these AI-based novelty indicators, and, to an extent, their predecessors, are yet to be robustly validated. Do they cohere with human judgements of what novel science is? Would they single out work that went on to win Nobel prizes or to be funded by novelty-focused programmes such as those by DARPA and ARIA, say? Without testing them at scale across multiple fields, we cannot trust them.
The Metascience novelty indicators challenge (MetaNIC) hopes to offer a solution:
Participants will design novelty assessments and test them over a set of 50,000 research papers, drawn from many fields. We will compare the algorithms’ scores against a huge ‘ground truth’ data set, gathered by asking more than 10,000 researchers to assess the novelty of the same set of papers, each being assigned only studies in their own field to judge. The team behind the indicator that best aligns with the human judgements will be awarded £300,000 (US$407, 000) to further develop their work.
Other news stories
Apparent NCI director candidate wants ‘open, respectful’ post-publication peer review while promoting anonymous site that calls sleuths a ‘mob’. Brown University physician-scientist Wafik El-Deiry has been a longtime critic of the post-publication forum PubPeer, where 75 of his papers have been flagged… El-Deiry has discussed publicly that he is a candidate for the top job at the National Cancer Institute. He is also a co-editor-in-chief of the journal Oncotarget. We extended an invitation to El-Deiry to answer questions on his thoughts on scientific publishing, post-publication review and on if he’s still in the running at NCI.
AI’s hyperbole making academic papers ‘more difficult to read’. Studying more than 820,000 abstracts of articles published on the arXiv preprint platform over the past decade, researchers from Nanjing University of Science and Technology and Wuhan University found a clear shift in the lexicon of scholarly papers since November 2022, when ChatGPT-4 was released – including a sharp increase in the use of certain nouns and adverbs preferred by large language models (LLMs).
AI slashes time to produce gold-standard medical reviews — but sceptics urge caution. Scientists say they have used artificial intelligence (AI) to reproduce 12 systematic reviews in two days — slashing the time it takes to produce these ‘gold-standard’ studies, which bring together the results of multiple publications and normally take many months to do... But other researchers are sceptical that the technology can accelerate the process as much as its creators suggest. They point out that the team has not yet automated some major tasks, and that the system needs to be tested independently — which would require more details of the study to be released.
Science’s reform movement should have seen Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ coming, critics say. Many geneticists have learned to write defensively, anticipating how their work could be distorted. They frame their papers carefully, understanding that many readers may never see more than the abstract, which makes it unhelpful to bury caveats deeper in the paper or in separate blog posts, Bird says. He thinks the executive order should be a wake-up call for science reformers to communicate more carefully. Lewandowsky agrees. The work of reform is necessary, he says, but “let’s make sure that it isn’t done in a way that inadvertently makes us useful idiots of an antiscience movement.”
N8 universities warn academic publishing deals are ‘unsustainable’. In a statement published on 12 June as negotiations with the world’s five largest academic publishers continue, the N8 Research Partnership, which represents eight large research-intensive universities in the north of England, calls for fundamental reform in how scholarly research is published, claiming existing deals due to expire this year have become financially unviable.
Critical gaps in ethical publishing knowledge among researchers in China, reveals new survey. A new survey has revealed a widespread lack of clarity among researchers in China regarding ethical publishing practices, particularly when third-party manuscript services are involved. Analyzing the results of the survey, the authors of a study published in the Journal of Data and Information Science highlight the urgent need for all researchers to receive comprehensive and fit-for-purpose ethics education. JB: You can read the report here.
Preprints.org Surpasses 100,000 Preprints Milestone. Over 350,000 researchers have chosen to partner with Preprints.org to share their work with the world. Over the years, they’ve given us feedback and the platform has grown. With our tenth anniversary right around the corner, we’re excited to see what the future will hold!
Eleven studies by Spanish scientist Rafael Luque are retracted due to fraudulent practices. The publisher Wiley, after noting the “systematic manipulation” of the results, withdrew it on July 19, 2023. In October 2024 another publishing house, Elsevier, retracted four of his studies in one go after discovering “suspicious changes” in the authors’ names, which suddenly included the addition of Chinese, Korean, Pakistani and Taiwanese scientists — a common practice when authorship is sold to the highest bidder for a few hundred dollars, to pad their resumes without actually doing anything.
Springer Nature psycholinguistics journal retracts over a dozen articles for authorship, peer review issues. Dorothy Bishop, a sleuth and professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford University, raised issues about the journal on her blog in October 2024. In the post, she wrote about how the journal appeared to be the target of Eastern European paper mills, and that other journals found to have published paper mill papers used fake peer reviewers.
Journal corrects nearly 100 papers after authors fail to disclose they are on the editorial board. Wiley has issued a mass correction at one of its journals after finding nearly 100 papers with undisclosed conflicts of interest related to submissions by board members and relationships between authors and journal editors. An investigation found conflict of interest issues in 98 papers published from 2020 to 2025 in Geological Journal, although the issues may have gone on before then, sleuths suggest. Nearly a third of the papers shared a single co-author — an associate editor at the journal.
When PubMed got it right, Elsevier got it wrong, and Retraction Watch helped clear it up. What happened next is a bit of a guess: The journal probably linked the papers to the letter to the editor when indexing it for PubMed, and marked them as retracted articles in the indexing file. At least, that’s how they show up in the PubMed entry for the letter. But the journal didn’t take the step of retracting the articles at the time, so they remained unmarked on the Contraception website.
Most AI researchers reject free use of public data to train AI models. New research from UCL reveals that many AI researchers support stronger ethical standards for training data. A global survey found that only one in four respondents believe AI companies should be allowed to train their models on any publicly available text or images. The majority favour more restrictive approaches, including the requirement for explicit permission from content creators.
Data released in this year’s independent Nature Index Research Leaders tables shows a shift in global research landscape. China has extended its lead in research output, according to data released in the latest Nature Index Research Leaders. The country’s Share, the Nature Index’s key metric of author contribution to high-quality research, reached 32,122, a 17% increase on 2023, with the region now having eight institutions in the top 10 compared to 7 in 2023. Asian countries as a whole enjoyed greater dominance, with drops seen from Western institutions in the number of top positions held within the rankings.
Announcements
IOP Publishing makes supplementary research data more visible. IOP Publishing (IOPP) is advancing open science and research impact by assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to supplementary data files submitted alongside research papers. This initiative will make supplementary materials more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible (FAIR), ensuring that authors receive greater recognition for their contributions beyond the primary research article.
An interview with Dr Charles Young, founding Editor-in-Chief of Research Connections. We’re pleased to appoint Dr Charles Young as the founding editor-in-chief of Research Connections. Research Connections is our new broad scope, global healthcare journal, which will support the scientific community driving increased understanding and awareness of diseases, treatments, health technologies, and health processes through the publication of high-quality and scientifically rigorous research. JB: Charlies is a former Lancet colleague of mine. Research Connections is published by OUP; the journal name doesn’t scream “healthcare” to me.
Cadmore Media Announces JAMA Network, AMA Ed Hub will Use Platform to Streamline Video Publishing. Cadmore Media is pleased to announce that the publishing groups at the American Medical Association (AMA), JAMA Network and the AMA Ed Hub, have selected its platform as the solution for video hosting and streaming.
Rethinking Peer Review in the AI Era: Announcing the Theme for Peer Review Week 2025. With over 895 responses from researchers, professionals, and advocates worldwide, “Rethinking Peer Review in the AI Era” emerged as the popular choice, underscoring just how urgently the community wants to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on scholarly evaluation.
Crediting early-career researchers in peer review. Beginning this month, Nature Methods is rolling out a new project aimed at strengthening peer review: a formal co-reviewing initiative to recognize early-career researcher contributions. We also discuss our introduction of a reporting checklist to improve the transparency and reproducibility of light microscopy studies.
Charlesworth Partners with BioOne to Provide Sales Representation Services in China, Hong Kong, and Macao. Charlesworth will serve as BioOne’s exclusive sales representative in China, Hong Kong, and Macao. The collaboration underscores Charlesworth’s longstanding expertise in the region and its ability to connect with key stakeholders from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to leading universities across the country; helping bring BioOne’s valuable content to a wider community of researchers.
Charlesworth and Cassyni Bring AI-Powered Research Seminars to China’s STM Publishing Community. Cassyni’s video engine automates key steps from speaker onboarding to DOI assignment and multilingual captioning. By generating accurate Chinese and English subtitles, creating semantic chaptering and providing rich engagement analytics, the platform fuels what partners call the “Cassyni Effect”: amplifying global reach and driving measurable increases in downstream downloads and citations. Under this partnership, Charlesworth will leverage its deep expertise and established network within China’s academic publishing landscape to promote Cassyni’s platform to STM publishers.
Scite Expands Extensive Publisher Partnership Network With American Society For Microbiology Indexing Agreement. Under this agreement, content from ASM’s comprehensive portfolio of peer-reviewed journals will be indexed and analyzed by Scite's Smart Citations technology, providing researchers with unprecedented insight into how microbiology research is being cited and utilized across the scientific community.
Molecular Omics has a new home. Molecular Omics publishes high-quality research from across the -omics sciences that provide significant new insight into important chemical or biological problems. The journal will join OUP’s world-class science portfolio starting with the 2026 volume. Royal Society of Chemistry Gold customers will continue to have perpetual access to all Molecular Omics and Molecular BioSystems articles published until the end of 2025.
RSNA and SEG Implement Retraction and Errata Feature to Strengthen Research Integrity. The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) have implemented the GetFTR Retraction and Errata feature on their journal platforms, significantly enhancing the visibility of corrections and retractions within their cited research. The integration was carried out in close partnership with Atypon – RSNA and SEG’s journal platform provider. JB: This follows on from the T&F integration announced last month.
eWorkflow partners with Imagetwin to preserve image integrity. eWorkflow Ltd, an artificial intelligence-based manuscript submission system, has partnered with Imagetwin, to integrate their powerful image integrity software into their workflow. Imagetwin includes AI-generated image detection, duplication, manipulation and plagiarism detection at speed and scale.
Dennis Lloyd Takes Office as AUPresses President. Dennis Lloyd, director at the University of Wisconsin Press, has stepped into the top leadership role of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses). The Association’s 75th President, he succeeds Anthony Cond, director at the Liverpool University Press.
We Need AI Standards for Scholarly Publishing: A NISO Workshop Report. A report detailing the output of these workshops was published by NISO this week. The report identified more than two dozen potential projects that could be undertaken to address various issues related to AI tools and systems in our community. The participants also prioritized these ideas, but wider feedback is also being sought.
Now live: Level 3 of the SDG Sustainability RoadmapDriving targeted action for global impact. Level 3: Advancing SDGs Together draws on the collective expertise of STM members across the academic publishing landscape. It offers a rich, thoughtfully curated collection of insights, resources, and case studies—demonstrating how a diverse community of publishers can unite around a shared mission: advancing trusted knowledge in service of global progress.
Opinion
High-quality publishing needs investment: editorial expertise, rigorous and timely peer review management, ethical oversight, the defence of research integrity, ensuring article visibility, and the preservation of the scholarly record. None of this comes without significant cost or effort.
Society publishers have already built and sustained these systems—not for profit, but in service of the disciplines they represent. Their services are accountable to academic boards and learned communities, not shareholders.
Research Professional (Antonia Seymour)
JB: Antonia is responding to this briefing from the European University Association, which was published a few weeks ago.
And finally...
A former colleague of mine, Nicky Borowiec, runs a design and brand agency. I rate her work very highly, but don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what the former Managing Director of the Nature Research Group, Dean Sanderson, had to say about her.
This week, Nicky announced that she’s offering a brand review service. If you need some support developing your portfolio’s brand design and tone of voice, then you should consider doing Nicky’s free brand audit questionnaire. You may learn something useful.
Until next time,
James
