Hello fellow journalologists,
This week’s newsletter covers the usual fare: research misconduct, APC pricing, gender equity, peer review and AI. All packaged up for your delectation.
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News
This paper introduces a dataset of article processing charges (APCs) produced from the price lists of six large scholarly publishers - Elsevier, Frontiers, PLOS, MDPI, Springer Nature and Wiley - between 2019 and 2023. APC price lists were downloaded from publisher websites each year as well as via Wayback Machine snapshots to retrieve fees per journal per year. The dataset includes journal metadata, APC collection method, and annual APC price list information in several currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD) for 8,712 unique journals and 36,618 journal-year combinations. The dataset was generated to allow for more precise analysis of APCs and can support library collection development and scientometric analysis estimating APCs paid in gold and hybrid OA journals.
JB: You can download the dataset here. The graphs in figure 1 are interesting. For example, here are the graphs for MDPI and Frontiers. The size of the ’bumps’ reflects the volume of journals.
Related to this, here’s a story from last month Gates Foundation contributes data to OpenAPC – Datasets on fee-based Open Access Publishing.
Zhang and Wang describe researchers using services to write their papers for them, falsifying data, plagiarizing, exploiting students without offering authorship and bribing journal editors.
One interviewee admitted to paying for access to a data set. “I bought access to an official archive and altered the data to support my hypotheses.”
An associate dean emphasized the primacy of the publishing goal. “We should not be overly stringent in identifying and punishing research misconduct, as it hinders our scholars’ research efficiency.”
Nature (Smriti Mallapaty)
JB: The story is more complex than this quote portrays.
Among all open-access articles examined, those that were made available through a platform other than the publisher, such as a repository on a university website (classified as green open access) had the most citations.
Researchers in low-income countries received relatively few extra citations from making their papers open access, says Neylon. Authors in Northern Europe were found to get the biggest boost, whereas those from African countries got among the smallest.
The results reveal that, although the proliferation of open access has enabled wider dissemination of findings, more research is needed to determine whether authors in low-income countries are actually benefiting from the increased availability.
Nature Index (Holly Else)
Full Year Revenue [Research Division] of $1,043 million was down 3% as reported, or 4% at constant currency, mainly due to the full year Hindawi impact. Excluding Hindawi, Research revenue for the year was flat.
Full Year Adjusted EBITDA [Research Division] of $331 million was down 13% at constant currency mainly driven by revenue performance and the incentive compensation swing. Excluding Hindawi, Research Adjusted EBITDA for the year was down 4%. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the year was 31.8%.
Wiley (press release)
JB: Revenues dropping by 4% and ’profit’ (EBITDA) down by 13% is not a good look for the markets, even if the margin is still very healthy.
Progress Towards Gender Equality in Research & Innovation – 2024 Review examines inclusion and diversity in career cohorts across intersecting disciplines and geographies, tracking multiple indicators over 20 years. It reveals progress, with women now representing 41% of researchers globally, but also that serious challenges persist in gender equality in research and innovation.
Notably, at the current pace of change, equality remains unacceptably far away; for example, although women’s representation in mathematics, engineering and computer science is increasing, it is not projected to reach parity with men’s until 2052.
Elsevier (press release)
JB: You can read the report here. Last week Springer Nature announced that it has joined the UN Women Media Compact in Pledge to Empower Women in Science.
Over 43% of our members are part of a society, association, non-profit publisher, or university press. Workers at commercial publishers make up 9% of our membership, while 28% of members are consultants or work for an industry service provider. Librarians and staff at post-secondary institutions make up 10% of our membership.
The Scholarly Kitchen
JB: Only 9% of members are from commercial publishers, which employ thousands of people. It’s worth considering why commercial publishers don’t engage as much with organisations like SSP as society publishers do and whether that’s a problem. Is it a cultural thing? Or is it because it would be expensive to send large numbers of people to conferences to network with potential new employers? If more commercial publishers were members, I suspect this statistic would increase (based on personal experience):
Less than 2% said their job ‘never’ permits an appropriate work life balance.
Of those scholars who report on research ethics, we provide compelling evidence that women report ethics more than men. For example, the odds of women-only authors reporting ethics are 71.8% higher than men-only (odds ratio = 1.718, p<.01). Similarly, the odds of mixed-gender co-authors (1-99% women) reporting ethics are 50.4% higher than men-only (odds ratio = 1.504, p<.05). This finding stands regardless of the methods they use.
However, where ethics is reported, it is often reported minimally. Researchers may include a single sentence documenting that a university ethics committee approved the research. Researchers rarely report on consent protocols, let alone what consent means in the context of their research project.
Impact of Social Sciences (Eleanor Knott and Denisa Kostovicova)
Six months after release, Sage Policy Profiles has helped over 14,000 researchers find where their work is cited in policy documents globally and for free. Powered by Overton, the world’s largest collection of policy documents, Sage Policy Profiles now indexes more than 13.4 million policy documents. It has also improved coverage around the world including new sources from government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and intergovernmental organizations, in Germany, Morocco, Spain, and Brazil.
Sage Policy Profiles is a free, browser-based tool that shows researchers where their work is cited in policy documents, creates a dashboard of those results, and lets researchers export them graphically. It was created to help researchers demonstrate impact and to broaden the research impact conversation from one that centers exclusively on academic citations to one that expands to include impact on policy and the public.
SAGE (press release)
Developed with Slimmer AI Science division, which Springer Nature acquired in 2023, one tool, Geppetto, detects AI-generated content, a classic indication of paper mill activity.
Geppetto works by dividing the paper up into sections and uses its own algorithms to check the consistency of the text in each section. The sections are then given a score based on the probability that the text in them has been AI generated.
SnappShot, also developed in-house, is an AI-assisted image integrity analysis tool. Currently used to analyse PDF files containing gel and blot images and look for duplications in those image types – another known integrity problem within the industry – this will be expanded to cover additional image types and integrity problems and speed up checks on papers.
Springer Nature (press release)
The EASE Peer Review Committee have completed work on a new strand of our Peer Review Toolkit, to help journal editors and publishers assess the quality of peer review reports.
European Association of Science Editors (announcement)
Other news stories
Silverchair Achieves ISO Certification
Richard Bennett Joins Hum as Chief Growth Officer
PubScholar joins the movement to support the Directory of Open Access Journals
Remembering David M. Shotton, Founder and Co-Director of OpenCitations
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Opinion
Our national obligations to OA are more logically driven through UK funder mandates attached to individual research projects. REF should be encouraging institutions to submit their best research outputs selected from the widest pool. It would then stimulate institutions to produce globally competitive outputs, not ones that satisfy a technically complex carve-out. Are our global competitors constrained in this way? The strength of an institution’s support for OA would be much better assessed in the new REF People, Culture and Environment component, in the context of OA and open research practices.
The Higher Education Policy Institute (Patrick Grant, Tanita Casci and Stephen Conway)
JB: Patrick Grant is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Oxford and so this opinion piece received a lot of attention. REF is the abbreviation for the UK Research Excellence Framework. You can read the proposed OA policy here.
This article may also be of interest to readers of this newsletter: ALPSP Response to UK Ref OA Policy Consultation,
When we informally alerted some colleagues involved in introducing these rankings at our institution, we met with indifference. The presence of these fake journals on the relevant lists is apparently perceived to have negligible consequences. However, the lists as used in the employee evaluation process – for example, to nominate researchers for yearly awards – have firm percentile cutoffs. And the fact that three fake journals are among the leaders in the Scopus rankings has the practical consequence that three honest journals which should have received the top score from the perspective of our local evaluation have been pushed to the lower tier.
Retraction Watch (Tomasz Żuradzki and Leszek Wroński)
Many organizations are working to try and categorize published research against the SDGs, but this is another area where I can get a bit tub thumpy as it’s too easy to overstate the relevance of publications to the goals, and doing so is dangerously counter productive. The well-known branding of the high level goals possibly exacerbates this because people think anything to do with any of these 17 headline topics can be counted as relevant to the SDGs. But in fact, the SDGs are much smarter than these broad goals. They are literally SMART — each goal breaks down into around 10 smart objectives, targets, and indicators.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Charlie Rapple)
JB: I’ve got tub thumpy about this topic in the past too. It’s great that publishers want to help make progress to the SDGs, but creating collections of papers vaguely related to an SDG doesn’t add much value.
This blog post from Impact of Social Sciences covers a similar theme: Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators – review.
On a related topic, the Farnam Street blog wrote about Experts vs. Imitators this week:
A final note on distinguishing experts from imitators: Many of us learn about a subject not by reading original research or listening to the expert, but by reading something intended to be highly transmissible. Think of the difference between reading an academic article and reading a newspaper article. While popularizers know more than the layman, they are not experts themselves. Instead, they are good at clearly and memorably communicating ideas. As a result, popularizers often get mistaken for experts. Keep that in mind when you’re in the market for an expert: the person with real expertise is often not the person who made the subject popular.
AI agents might be adopted as the go-to interface for reading papers, with the version of record becoming generally less useful for human consumption. Will we prefer to each have our own multimodal AI chatbot that creates a version of each paper according to our preferences and needs (including needs for visual accessibility and preferences arising from neurodivergence), and to which we can query and ask to perform actions, from simple text annotation to the generation of alternative visualizations of the data? Will each paper have its own persistent 'author chatbot’ ready to answer any queries? Will experts have their own AI avatar, open for consultations?
Nature Biomedical Engineering (unsigned editorial)
As an example, we can imagine a researcher uploading their latest paper to a preprint server. In the background, an AI-powered system analyzes the document, automatically extracting key metadata like author names, affiliations, funding sources, and references. Machines (either mechanically or semantically) cross-check these against authoritative databases like ORCID, ROR, and Crossref to ensure accuracy and consistency. The AI also semantically parses the full text, identifying the main concepts, methods, and findings discussed. It suggests controlled vocabulary terms and links to relevant ontologies. The researchers then QA the content and outputs via elegant interfaces. All of this rich, structured metadata is then transparently packaged by the AI 'middleware' in the correct data structures ready to be sent to APIs, and ingested by discovery systems, research databases, and knowledge graphs. No publisher in sight and a system that achieves the same or better result while freeing the researcher from the tedious and error-prone task of manually entering metadata and ensures their work is more findable, accessible, and reusable from the moment of 'publication'.
Robots Cooking (Adam Hyde)
JB: Adam has rapidly become one of my favourite scholarly publishing commentators. His posts are always thoughtful. This scenario sounds plausible to some degree, but it’s going to require investment. I suspect some publishers are already experimenting with this kind of scenario behind the scenes. I’d put my money on the large commercial publishers pulling this off (and charging for it) long before the ’open’ community is able to do so. I don’t say that with any sense of glee.
Other opinion articles
How to translate academic writing to podcasts using generative AI
Why brand might be the key to surviving the AI-pocalypse
An Interview with Nici Pfeiffer of the Center for Open Science
The Importance of Volunteering, Growing Professionally and Personally, and Making an Impact
Materials scientist explains why he started commenting on PubPeer
A Global Network for Early Career Research Integrity Practitioners
Research publishers are being overwhelmed by fraudulent papers
Unlocking the Power of Altmetrics
Webinars
If you want to learn about some of the core challenges facing the scholarly publishing community, this list of webinars could be of interest:
I’ll try to keep the Google Doc updated. Please help me by sending details of webinars that you’re hosting (just hit reply to this message).
And finally...
Arthur Boston wrote last week about paywalled, datawalled, wonderwalled, and the fourth wall. Here’s an excerpt.
Many of you will be familiar with Data Availability Statements in academic articles. Often, rather than including a link to the repository in which the data is housed, there is message that the study’s underlying data is available upon request. Today, I came across an example of the results of a paper being available on a case by case basis. The results.
Inspired by research papers written by authors who may or may not provide you with some key element of their published research, I would like to formally enter into the canon Wonderwalled.
Until next time,
James
P.S. If you got this far, please take a look at this and let me know what you think.