The Journalology newsletter helps editors and publishing professionals keep up to date with scholarly publishing, and guides them on how to build influential scholarly journals.
Last week I wrote about the problems that indexers face when dealing with journals that don’t make binary reject / accept editorial decisions, such as eLife. A representative from Clarivate gently reminded me that the 2023 impact factors (which were announced a week or so ago) are based on papers published in 2021 and 2022. Since eLife started its new editorial model in 2023, the latest impact factor reflects papers accepted under the traditional peer review model. In other words, I was either (a) wrong or (b) a year too early, depending on your point of view. We will have to wait another 12 months to see if eLife will keep its impact factor.
It’s clear that indexers of all types, not just Clarivate, will have to make some difficult decisions with regards to journals that use the publish, review, curate (PRC) editorial model. Should indexers filter PRC journals’ content? If so, what are the criteria and are they transparent? If an indexer chooses not to filter a journal’s content, how can they help readers to identify work that’s of low quality? Or should it be a free for all, with anyone being able to publish anything and readers having to work out for themselves what to believe without any help from the indexers? Big questions. No easy answers.
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Publishing for impact: the Journalology coaching programme
Most business coaches work across multiple industries and are unable to provide useful insight into scholarly publishing. The Journalology coaching programme is different. I’ve got a proven track record and can help you to learn and develop.
Scholarly publishing needs leaders. Do you aspire to be one of them? Are you communicating effectively within your organisation and externally? Does your team work cohesively to provide the best possible author experience? Do you have a clear strategy that you’re able to execute?
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At the launch of Plan S, cOAlition S recognised that transformative arrangements (including TJs) would provide a useful means to repurpose funds for journal subscriptions to publication fees, thus supporting legacy publishers in transforming paywalled to Open Access publication models. It was, however, also made clear that the transformation would have to be completed at a definite point in time, by the end of 2024 at the latest.
As such, support for TJ programme will cease at this time. Participating publishers will be asked to provide a final report (for the year 2024) which will enable us to present a final analysis of the TJ programme.
cOAlition S sOApbox (Robert Kiley)
JB: Robert Kiley’s article on Transformative Journals (TJs) reads, in part, like a school pupil’s end-of-year report. Publishers that have done well get a gold star from Headmaster Kiley (well done Cambridge University Press). Others, especially “legacy publishers”, (a term that is both pejorative and inaccurate on multiple levels) get put on the naughty step:
However, many other publishers experienced problems in meeting their OA growth targets. For example, the BMJ (who had 30 journals in the programme) failed to meet OA growth targets for any of their journals.
Springer Nature (SN) – the single biggest publisher in the TJ programme – ended the year with just 117 journals still eligible for inclusion in the TJ programme. This is in stark contrast compared with 2022 data, when SN still had 1721 titles enrolled in the programme. And, though some have flipped to full OA, some 1572 titles (91%) have over the past two years failed to meet growth targets and become ineligible as TJs.
This is how the journals (all publishers) performed, on aggregate, in 2023:
More than half the journals across 20 publishers that take part in the transformative journals programme failed to meet their TJ target in 2023. Is this the fault of the publishers for not creating enough demand for open access (yes, I’m being sarcastic) or is it because the international demand wasn't there and the targets were unrealistic?
As a reminder, here are the rules of the transformative journals programme:
Journals that participate in the TJ programme agree to share data showing the OA penetration rate and whether they have met their agreed growth targets.
Specifically, TJ titles are required to demonstrate an annual increase in the proportion of OA research content of at least 5% points in absolute terms and at least 15% in relative terms, year-on-year. Journals in the programme also agree to flip to full OA when 75% of the research content is published in this way.
Long-term subscribers to this newsletter may remember that I did a deep dive into last year’s dataset. In issue 33 I wrote:
Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn may have seen two posts about the Nature journals’ transition to open access. I wrote them mainly because Robert Kiley’s cOAlition S announcement entirely failed to mention one of the positive news stories from the transformative journals programme, which was that 35 of the 36 Nature journals met their targets. I felt the need fill in the gaps.
One year on and yet again there was no mention of the Nature journals’ progress, despite the criticism made of Springer Nature as a whole in the blog post.
Yes, of course I’m biased. I’ll try my best to be as objective as I can in the analysis that follows, but my career history means that I have a significant conflict of interest here. After all, I was the one who got hauled over the coals when the Nature journals announced that they would start charging authors hefty fees to publish open access.
I downloaded the 2023 dataset from the Plan S website and put it into a Google Sheet (which you can access here). The first sheet is the raw data from the Plan S website. The other sheets are my own.
Here’s a summary of the proportion of research articles that were published open access in the Nature journals in 2023, using the Plan S data, sorted by the 2023 OA %. Journals highlighted in green met their Plan S transformative journals targets.
Nature Medicine had the highest proportion of OA content (66% OA), but it missed its target of 68% and so had its TJ status removed. Nature Computational Science and Nature Plants missed their targets by one percentage point and had their TJ status removed too. A line has to be drawn somewhere, I guess, but these are “failures” by small margins.
I’m incredibly happy to see the progress made by the Nature journals. Eight Nature journals now publish more than half their research papers under a CC BY license, which is worth celebrating especially since the journals only started offering a formal open access option in January 2021.
A significant proportion of authors are choosing to pay the high APC, which is an uncomfortable truth for funders, no doubt, and perhaps is why there was no mention of the Nature journals’ performance in Robert Kiley’s blog post.
The Plan S dataset also includes information on article usage. This is what I wrote this time last year:
If a journal charges a high APC then its authors need to receive a superior service, both before and after publication. In that regard, the most interesting part of the cOAlition S dataset are the metrics on usage. Based on these new data a case can be made that the Nature journals’ APC of $11,690 represents excellent value for money.
The average OA usage for a Nature article in 2022 was 39,186 article views. The median OA usage across the 2,326 cOAlition S transformative journals was 1287 article views. So each Nature article generated, on average, 30 times more OA usage than the median journal in the data set.
Is it better to pay $11,690 and receive 39k article views or pay $3000 (say) and receive 1300 article views? Is 30 times the usage worth paying 4 times the median price?
The Plan S dataset was released late on Friday afternoon and I’m writing this newsletter first thing on Sunday morning. I haven’t replicated the calculations for the 2023 data, but it seems likely that the overall trends will be similar.
The median downloads for the entire dataset (all publishers) was 1202 downloads for open access articles and 381 downloads for subscription articles, By contrast, the medians for the Nature journals were 12,309 downloads for OA and 4,842 downloads for subscription).
The usage data are worth bookmarking. It’s not clear to me if they are COUNTER compliant (I suspect not), but it’s one of the few publicly available datasets that provide a sense of the usage of different types of journals.
This report has outlined developments in the scholarly communication landscape since OSTP’s November 2023 Report to the Committees, estimated the proportion of federal research and development expenditures that have gone towards article processing charges to publish federally funded research (between 0.09 to 0.25 percent, depending on the bibliographic source used), and elaborated on trends in research integrity and peer review. Throughout the report, OSTP has underscored that the landscape of scholarly publishing is rapidly evolving and pointed to data needs to better monitor these trends.
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (report)
JB: Don’t waste your time, like I did, reading the economic impact statement; it’s spectacularly uninspiring. Just read the assessment in The Brief instead.
One of the most basic and essential questions that must be answered for any piece of legislation is, How much is this going to cost?
The tl;dr summary is that the OSTP report fails to get close to answering this question. Kent Anderson’s analysis is also helpful (OSTP Can’t Finish Its Homework) as is his summary of the new appropriations bill, which includes the following:
SEC. 552. None of the funds made available by this or any other Act may be used to implement, administer, apply, enforce, or carry out the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s August 25, 2022, Memorandum to Executive Departments and Agencies entitled ‘‘Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.’’
This could have significant implications for the OSTP Nelson Memo. This observation from X is worth noting:
Authors are not expected to provide rights to NIH to the Final Published Article. However, as noted in “Compliance and Enforcement,” NIH will accept submission of the Final Published Article to PubMed Central from journals with formal agreements with NLM as compliant with the Policy when its release meets public access requirements outlined in this Policy.
The proposed effective date for NIH’s policy has been moved up as well, and compliance will be required for any manuscript accepted for publication on or after 1 October 2025. Perhaps most importantly, the language used makes clear that the new Nelson Memo requirements will apply to all existing grant recipients rather than just those funded after the policy is implemented (“This approach has the benefit of capturing all Manuscripts accepted for publication regardless of whether the award or contract is new or ongoing”).
Clarivate, the company that calculates Journal Impact Factors based on citations to articles, didn’t publish the metric for 17 journals this year due to suspected citation manipulation. That’s a substantial increase from last year, when only four were excluded.
The increase is, in part, case of rising tides lifting (sinking?) all boats: In its 2024 Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate included an additional 7,200 journals from the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and the the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), a spokesperson for the company said, resulting in a larger number of impact factor suppressions than in past years.
Retraction Watch (Dawn Attride and Avery Orrall)
JB: You can see the 17 journals here. Most are published by small publishers.
Our pilot study of structured peer review implementation has shown that when asked to fill out a set of pre-defined structured questions, reviewers, across all disciplines, responded to those questions in almost equal measure by either adapting their previously prepared peer review reports to answer the questions, or by answering those questions on top of copying their fully prepared reports. Less than 10% of reviewers skipped answering one of the nine structured questions.
PeerJ (Mario Malički and Bahar Mehmani)
JB: Elsevier has published a list of structured peer review questions, which you can read here (I hadn’t seen them before — they are helpful). Table 1 in the PeerJ paper gives an overview of the questions used:
In February, JUFO [The Finnish Publication Forum] posted an open call asking for negative experiences to help re-evaluate the ranking system.
Heathers and Veli-Matti Karhulahti, a senior researcher at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä, gathered roughly 200 different publication-related experiences from BlueSky and X users and submitted them to JUFO.
The 60 journals will be downgraded from level 1 to level 0 at the start of 2025. Of these, 21 are from MDPI, three from Wiley, and three from Frontiers.
Retraction Watch (Dawn Attride)
JB: Downgrading journals based on anecdotal reports gathered from Twitter (sorry, X) seems like an odd approach to me, especially since:
Heathers’ X post which gained the most traction specifically asked for experiences with MDPI, Hindawi and Frontiers, Karhulahti said, which isn’t entirely representative of all publisher experiences.
Publishers of all types are developing portfolio strategies to help them survive and thrive in an increasingly open access environment. Portfolio strategies are important because they allow publishers to protect their flagship journals from having to increase the volume of content they publish. A successful portfolio strategy relies on close teamwork between departments. Three key elements need to be addressed:
New launches / acquisitions
Transfer pathways
Author satisfaction
Consultants talk a lot about portfolio strategies, but very few have actually designed and implemented one. I can bring a credible viewpoint to projects related to new launches and transfer pathways, helping you to create a more impactful journal portfolio.
In academia, declarations of a void in the research literature are rarely challenged. As long as a few unknowing, uncaring, or otherwise cooperative reviewers and editors let the statement slide, it passes unimpeded into the world of scholarship and becomes what I call a dismissive literature review. No one with a self or public interest in countering the claim is offered an opportunity to challenge.
Retraction Watch (Richard Phelps)
JB: I enjoyed this article as it rings true on so many levels. Richard Phelps concludes with:
All the above may make one wonder. How many of the most ambitious scholars conduct honest research literature reviews and thoroughly report those findings in their journal articles? With little enforcement or accountability, the benefit of dismissing a research literature without bothering to look for it far outweighs the risk of getting caught in the lie.
Today’s ecosystem is competitive and complex, and it is increasingly important to showcase the impact of publishers’ work in clear, tangible terms. Funders have a mix of data at their fingertips, but it often lacks a cohesive story: How has our funding catalyzed research? What projects have sprung from this investment? How does this tie into our organizational mission? And, perhaps most significantly, how is our funding translating into real-world benefits? The answers to these questions are fragmented across various data systems, with metadata management falling short of ideal and organizational siloes complicating the flow of information.
Silverchair (Hannah Heckner Swain)
JB: In recent years there has been too much focus on the APC prices and not enough discussion about the value that publishers provide for the price paid. Good publishers do more than filter and enhance; they also amplify the authors’ message. Sensus Impact has the potential to provide more transparency on ROI for funders. Worth checking out.
Many live from paycheque to paycheque. As one employee puts it: “I have made cuts that have helped me get by—I no longer have a car or book holidays that require paying for accommodation. I need dental work but I can’t afford it, so I have asked if it will be safe to wait a few years. I am hoping to take on extra work outside of my full-time job to pay for these dentist costs. I work long hours in a complex field and am highly qualified, and yet I can’t make ends meet.”
Research Professional News (anonymous)
JB: Related to this, Charles Whalley (who is not part of the Nature journals team, but is affiliated with the trade union involved in the industrial action) wrote an opinion piece this week for The Scholarly Kitchen: At the Nature Picket.
Senior managers need to re-energise and inspire their teams in hybrid-working environments. You can engage me to speak at departmental meetings, away days, or editorial board meetings.
A Journalology presentation does three things:
Educates. Journal editors and publishers are facing significant external challenges. Staff need to understand how the publishing landscape has changed over time, so that they can make good strategic and tactical decisions in the future.
Challenges. The best seminars challenge the audience to think in new ways. After all, received wisdom can create blinkered thinking. An independent viewpoint can help break the status quo and help a team to be open to new ways of working.
Inspires. A speaker needs to understand the audience’s worries and concerns if they are to inspire them to step up and take action. As Vice President of the Nature journals I led a team of 500 editors and publishers; I’m as at home with EiCs as with the C-Suite.
I fully appreciate that asking this question at the end of the newsletter will likely skew the results! However, I think about the question a lot. If you could click one of the two buttons that would be super helpful.
The Journalology newsletter helps editors and publishing professionals keep up to date with scholarly publishing, and guides them on how to build influential scholarly journals.
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, I’ve recently returned from my summer vacation; in this week’s newsletter I’ve tried to summarise the key news stories and opinion pieces from the past 3 weeks. If you’ve been away too, hopefully it will help you to catch up. The newsletter has two new sponsors: ChronosHub and Origin Editorial. I’m able to spend time creating this newsletter because of the sponsors’ financial support, for which I'm very grateful. Thank you to our sponsor,...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Those of us living in the northern hemisphere are now firmly into the summer holiday season. You’re receiving this email earlier than usual because my family and I are about to head off on vacation. You won’t hear from me for a while. If you get Journalology withdrawal symptoms, you can always browse the archives. Thank you to our sponsor, Digital Science Writefull uses AI to automate publishers’ language-related tasks and make these...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, I started off last week’s newsletter with a comparison of the volume of research articles published in the first halves of 2023 and 2024. There were a couple of things that didn't feel quite right to me and with the help of a Journalology reader I dug a bit deeper. Last week I wrote: IEEE Access has dropped by 34% too, for reasons that I don’t understand. My former Nature colleague downloaded the raw data file and found that the...