Hello fellow journalologists,
I haven’t sent you a newsletter in a while. Partly that’s because August tends to be a slow news month, but it’s also because I’ve been balancing work and family commitments while the kids are off school.
In this issue of Journalology I’ve selected stories from the past month that are likely to have broad appeal and attempted to put them into context for you. If you've been away on holiday, hopefully this will help you to catch up on what you missed.
The strongest theme from the past month (and most of this year, in fact) is research integrity, so it seems appropriate to kick off with a message from this week’s sponsor, Dimensions Author Check API.
Thank you to our sponsor, Digital Science
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News
Research, the company’s largest segment, reported revenue of €731 million. The segment contributed most significantly to operating performance, with underlying revenue growth of 7%. This was driven by the Journals portfolio and the continued momentum in open access (OA) globally. The number of published articles rose by approximately 10% across the whole portfolio and around 25% in Full Open Access (FOA) journals.
Springer Nature Group
JB: The full report is hosted here and the presentation to investors here. Slide 4 shows the Research division’s performance; the transcript of the investors’ call includes the following from Frank Vrancken Peeters, the CEO:
The global article market grew by about 6% down from 8% last year. While our own article output increased by about 10%, reflecting market dynamics and our ability to capture market share. The full open access market saw 9% growth up from 3% last year. And also here we have performed substantially well above the market, with a growth of 25%. Submissions across the journal portfolio grew with more than 30% and 50% in Full OA due to our investment programs and the quality of our portfolio.
Slide 7 shows how AI is being deployed with Frank commenting as follows:
We have over 90 AI applications in use across the research workflow. These tools are already delivering measurable results: for example, our Transfer Recommender increased the number of transfers by more than 40% in H1 2025 compared to the same period last year, and our Reviewer Finder has halved the time needed to identify peer reviewers. Several new AI tools have been launched in the first half of the year — highlighted in blue on this research workflow.
Of course, scholarly publishers want to do more than deploy AI. They also want to publish the best research on AI:
In particular, top AI companies continue to choose Springer Nature to publish their most important research. Just at the end of July, Nature featured two outstanding examples. Meta’s new device that translates hand gestures into computer commands, and Google DeepMind’s Aeneas — an AI tool designed to decode ancient texts.
Journalology readers who work in sales functions may be interested in this summary of the US sales expectations:
24% of revenues came from the US in 2024. And about 11% of our total articles in 2024 came from the US based authors. Out of those articles, about 6% were from, you know, were dependent upon US government research and development funding and about half of those actually came from the NIH... And I think the good news also is, that our 2025 renewal season which we’ve just completed, actually, have quite a lot of active renewals in the US. And we expect that amount of renewals in 2026 to be quite significantly smaller in the US.
A few weeks earlier, Springer Nature released its annual open access report. This quote about transformative agreements is especially noteworthy:
Springer Nature’s TAs enabled 10 times more gold OA articles than those published outside of a TA - up from 7x in 2023. Since 2015, TAs have grown at average annual rate of 42%, now supporting authors from over 3,700 institutions globally.
Research Professional news concluded its story about the Springer Nature results with an Elsevier comparison:
Last month, fellow scholarly publishing giant Relx, owner of Elsevier, reported first-half underlying revenue growth of 7 per cent, taking half-year revenue to £4.74 billion (€5.49bn) and underlying growth in adjusted operating profit of 9 per cent, for £1.62bn.
Its chief executive Erik Engstrom said there was “continued good growth and developing momentum” in the scientific, technical and medical arm that includes online scholarly publishing. This STM arm had an adjusted operating profit of £491m and a margin of 37 per cent, the company reported.
Other commercial publishers also issued half-year trading statements. Informa announced “further strong growth” for Taylor & Francis:
Subscription renewals, further expansion in Open Research and continuing demand for specialist data and content archives underpins 11.9% underlying revenue growth in the first half, including 3-4% core underlying growth when excluding non-recurring Data Licensing Agreements.
Wolters Kluwer’s statement noted:
Health Learning, Research & Practice (42% of divisional revenues) recorded 1% organic revenue growth (HY 2024: 4%). Excluding print, organic growth would have been 5% (HY 2024: 5%). As expected, our medical research unit recorded slower organic growth against a prior period which had benefitted from reaching fullscale distribution for the New England Journal of Medicine. In June 2025, we launched Ovid Guidelines AI, an agentic AI module which speeds the process of turning medical evidence into guidelines for evidence-based practice. Print journal subscriptions continued to decline, as expected.
Wiley’s next earnings call is on September 4. However, they did announce: Wiley Achieves Milestone with 1,000 Scholarly Journals Now Operating on Research Exchange Platform.
Automated screening tools are fully integrated into the publishing workflow, helping maintain research integrity standards while reducing manual review time. The platform conducts 25 comprehensive checks at the initial screening, completing the process in under 10 minutes. Any potential concerns are automatically flagged for further review. This screening stage helps editors by filtering out papers with major scope or integrity issues.
I’ve covered these corporate updates in detail because the publishing community needs to understand the market that they’re operating in.
David Crotty’s excellent analysis in The Scholarly Kitchen clearly demonstrates that the large commercial publishers have been gaining market share in recent years; the 10 largest publishers now account for around three quarters of articles indexed in the Web of Science, up from just under half 25 years ago, he found.
There’s a lot of chatter about more equitable business models and cooperative ways of working for not-for-profits, which is admirable and to be applauded. However, let’s not forget why commercial publishers have been successful over the years: capital investment. Scale wins, especially when AI is combined with transfer cascades and transformative agreements.
The UK Royal Society is converting eight of its journals to the ‘subscribe to open’ (S2O) publishing model, starting next year. The non-profit publisher, which produces ten titles, including the world’s first peer-reviewed journals, announced the decision today.
The S2O model makes the content a journal publishes in a given year free to access and publish, as long as enough libraries commit to paying an annual subscription fee. Without sufficient subscriptions, a journal will continue to charge publishing fees — known as article-processing charges (APCs).
Nature (Miryam Naddaf)
JB: Rod Cookson, who runs the publishing operation at the Royal Society, was previously Managing Director of IWA Publishing. IWAP changed direction shortly after Rod left to join the Royal Society, citing high institutional subscription attrition rates.
It’s not clear to me from the news reports whether the specifics of the model implemented by IWAP and the Royal Society are the same or different, especially with regards to conditionality (i.e. putting content behind the paywall if not enough institutions subscribe). It will be interesting to see whether the Royal Society journals display the official S2O badge, which was announced in March.
There was a robust discussion on The Scholarly Kitchen about the pros and cons of S2O off the back of a post by librarian Rick Anderson, which is worth reading if you missed it. Lauren Kane, CEO of BioOne, responded on LinkedIn and concluded:
Clearly, I don’t agree with the thesis that S2O is bound to fail. But I’d like to make a final point that provocations around its failure – or the failure of any new initiative, business model, or publishing approach – discourage experimentation and hinder growth. This is not to say that we shouldn’t disagree or debate. In fact, it’s critical that we do. But we also must foster a landscape where trying new things and deviating from ‘the way it’s always been done’ is celebrated, not stifled. The market will ultimately decide what succeeds or fails.
Kennedy described the research as “a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry,” and said the scientists who authored it had “meticulously designed it not to find harm” in a detailed Aug. 1 opinion piece on TrialSite News, an independent website focused on clinical research. He called on the journal to “immediately retract” the study.
“I see no reason for retraction,” Dr. Christine Laine, editor in chief of the Annals and a professor of medicine at Thomas Jefferson University, said in an interview.
The journal plans to respond to criticism the article has received on its website, Laine said, but it does not intend to respond directly to Kennedy’s piece, which was not submitted to the Annals.
Reuters (Michael Erman and Jennifer Rigby)
JB: You can read Robert Kennedy Jr’s opinion piece here and Nature’s coverage here. Medical journal editors are in for a rough ride, I fear.
In a blog post (published somewhere in 2023 by an unknown author, unreferenced) on the Taylor & Francis website, Todd Hummel (Taylor & Francis Global Publishing Director, STM) stated that Bioengineered had ‘overcome the paper mill problem.’ However, their actions make it clear that they have been wholly focused on preventing publication of new articles from paper mills, by methods such as integrity checks at submission and vetting of reviewers. While we acknowledge the publisher’s effort to improve the submission, peer-review, and publication process, our findings indicate that they have not sufficiently addressed problematic articles already published.
Bioengineered (René Aquarius et al)
JB: This article, which is critical of Taylor and Francis, was published by Taylor & Francis. This is an example of editorial independence in action — journal editors should be able to accept articles for publication, even if they are embarrassing to the owner or if the owner disagrees with the findings.
To arrive at their conclusion, the authors looked at papers published by PLOS ONE, an enormous and generally well-regarded journal that identifies which of their 18,329 editors is responsible for each paper.
…
When the team crunched the data, they found 45 editors who facilitated the acceptance of retracted or flagged articles much more frequently than would be expected by chance. Although they were responsible for the peer-review process of only 1.3% of PLOS ONE submissions, they were responsible for 30.2% of retracted articles.
The data suggested yet more worrying patterns. For one thing, more than half of these editors were themselves authors of papers later retracted by PLOS ONE. What’s more, when they submitted their own papers to the journal, they regularly suggested each other as editors.
The Economist (unsigned news story)
JB: I’ve long argued (often unsuccessfully) that editors’ names should be published alongside each paper, especially on journals with very large editorial boards. That way, editors get recognised for their hard work and bad actors are easier to identify.
You can read the PNAS paper that this news story is based on here. Veronique Kiermer, Chief Scientific Officer at PLOS, responded to the study:
The PNAS case study includes issues PLOS had already acted on through prior investigations into paper mill activity and peer review manipulation, including editor–author networks. These earlier actions led to the removal of editors from our boards and the retraction of affected articles before the study’s publication.
PLOS continuously strengthens its integrity screening in response to emerging risks. Enhancements made between 2021 and 2025 have enabled PLOS One to identify and decline concerning submissions before publication, and this work is ongoing as we continue to evolve our safeguards to address new and emerging threats.
Let’s be clear, this challenge is not unique to PLOS. Many publishers are facing the same problems. The PNAS authors chose to dig into PLOS One because the data set is large and the editors’ names are publicly available.
Most of the authors signed a letter objecting to the retraction, which Science also published.
“While our work could have been written and discussed more carefully, we stand by the data as reported,” they wrote. “These data were peer-reviewed, openly debated in the literature, and stimulated productive research.”
The authors charged Science had overstepped guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) on retractions, as “no misconduct or error is alleged.”
“Disputes about the conclusions of papers, including how well they are supported by the available evidence, are a normal part of the process of science,” the authors wrote.
Retraction Watch (Ellie Kincaid)
JB: You can read the retraction notice here and the authors’ response here. In an accompanying blog post Valda Vinson and Holden Thorp from Science write:
Over the years since the paper was published, and especially in the past 5 years, as research integrity has become an even more important topic,
Science has moved to retract papers more frequently for
reasons other than fraud and misconduct. In this case, a number of factors led to the publication of a paper with seriously flawed content, including the peer review process and editorial decisions that we made. With this retraction—and with all retractions and corrections—we acknowledge and take responsibility for the role that we played in the paper’s publication.
A few days after the retraction was made, PLOS One serendipitously published this research article: Communicating astrobiology and the search for life elsewhere: Speculations and promises of a developing scientific field in newspapers, press releases and papers.
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And finally...
I won’t be going to ALPSP this year. How could I possibly miss the annual ALPSP jamboree you may ask? Well, I’m going under the knife on September 12th for a minor surgical procedure. I’m hoping that someone will sing “I Wanna be Sedated” in my honour at the ALPSP karaoke (Wednesday September 10 at 8 pm) but ideally not “Another One Bites the Dust” or “The First Cut is the Deepest”.
As a result of the surgery, the roll out of the paid subscription model has been delayed (again) until I’ve recuperated. I suspect that’s more frustrating for me than for you. It will happen. One day.
Until next time,
James