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.
On July 4th UK citizens voted for a change of government and made a lawyer from a working-class background Prime Minister. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, our US friends celebrated kicking the Brits out so they could make their own electoral decisions, while worrying what might happen if a billionaire with a criminal record gets re-elected. Today, French citizens are voting in a pivotal election that’s being observed closely across the world.
However, these votes are minor and inconsequential when compared with the choice put before you, the readers of this newsletter, a week ago. The poll at the end of Issue 83 asked a simple, but vitally important question: “is this newsletter too long?” Of the readers who (a) opened the email; (b) made it to the end; (c) felt the urge to vote; and (d) got the technology to work, the general consensus was “keep it as it is”.
The sample size is small and unlikely to be representative, but those are mere details. The people have spoken. I now have a clear mandate for length over brevity. I won’t let you down.
Thank you for bearing with me over the past 2 weeks as I promoted the new Journalology website. Normal service resumes this week with a message from a proper sponsor, alerting you to the new Altmetric Journal Benchmark dashboard.
A message from our sponsor, Digital Science
Exciting news from Digital Science! We are proud to announce the launch of the Altmetric Journal Benchmark dashboard — your new solution for assessing and comparing journal performance.
This innovative dashboard empowers publishers to:
Easily report on journal success
Benchmark performance against competitors
Inform growth strategies with data-driven insights
The dashboard also integrates with the Altmetric Explorer, allowing you to take your analysis to the next level.
The extensive consultation, carried out by Research Consulting and Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), engaged over 11,600 respondents from the research community worldwide, providing a wealth of insights and perspectives. Running from November 2023 to May 2024, the consultation solicited diverse opinions from researchers and other key stakeholders, including research performing organisations, scholarly societies, publishers and providers of communication infrastructure, via online surveys, focus groups, and feedback letters.
Plan S (announcement)
JB: You can read the report and access the underlying data here; the interactive survey results are probably the best way to interrogate the data. For example, here’s the data set for a question aimed at readers:
The following comment is telling. cOAlition S would get broader support if the organisation had a well thought through implementation plan (together with costings) and avoided divisive language.
While the proposed changes to infrastructure and funding could support the realisation of cOAlition S' vision, the lack of clear implementation guidance emerged as a significant concern during the consultation. In some cases, this hindered stakeholder engagement, in combination with the use of ambiguous terms (e.g. "community-based scholarly communication system") and the use of negatively charged language (e.g. “The coupling of editorial gatekeeping with academic career incentives is damaging science.”) in the framing of TRP’s rationale.
After following the fate of some 126,000 rejected manuscripts, the research team found that authors in Western countries are almost 6% more likely than are those based in other parts of the world to successfully publish a paper after it has been rejected. This could be, the authors suggest, because of regional differences in access to ‘procedural knowledge’ of how to deal with rejection — how to interpret negative reviews, revise accordingly and resubmit to a journal that is likely to accept the work. (Many academic journals are based in Western countries.)
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) today announced the publication of the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-45-2024).
The NISO Recommended Practice establishes best practices for the creation, transfer, and display of retraction-related metadata, ensuring that participants (publishers, aggregators, full-text hosts, libraries, and researchers) can communicate retraction information quickly and enabling readers who discover a publication to readily identify its status.
NISO (announcement)
JB: An early version of this document was available for comment at the end of last year. The abstract of the final version is available here and the full text can be read here. This point is worth noting:
This Recommended Practice does not consider the rationale or decision-making processes associated with issuing an EoC [Expression of Concern], retracting a publication, or removing content, as guidance on these activities has been provided by organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Instead, it focuses on the metadata and display elements that will help better communicate these decisions once they have been made.
Publishing metadata in a consistent way is important because it will allow our community to have better visibility of how retractions are changing over time. It should also allow us to get better visibility of researchers who regularly appear on retraction notices.
We searched for each of the 441 publications in 11 resources, including PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and other databases. We were able to find over 2800 records for these retracted publications in these different resources, of which less than 50% identified that the publication had been retracted. We also found that a publication being marked as retracted in one database didn’t mean it would be marked as retracted in other databases. Less than 5% of the publications were marked as retracted in every resource through which they were available.
You can read a proof of the research paper, which will appear in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, here.
A decade on from the first Altmetric Top 100 reports, which listed the most influential academic articles in a given year, a leading provider of alternative metrics for published research is now releasing an upgraded overview of research engagement: the Altmetric 500.
The Altmetric 500, which analyses the attention for scholarly articles published in 2023, covers over 50 research categories – representing different fields of research (FoR), geographies and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – and reflects activity across 11 different attention sources.
Digital Science (Simon Linacre)
JB: I meant to include this story last week, but the link got lost. Digital Science is sponsoring this week’s newsletter, but, for the record, they did not ask me to include the story. Some readers may roll their eyes at ranking articles in this way; creating lists for 50 different categories will help users to compare like with like.
The NUJ and Springer Nature are pleased to have reached an agreement which ends our pay dispute through a two-year settlement and would like to pay tribute to the mutual efforts that helped us find a way forward.
We are committed to re-establishing our good relationship and look forward to increased and regular communications going forward. The recent events have emphasised the importance of open dialogue, and we are dedicated to ensuring that this continues to be a central aspect of our working relationship.
We acknowledge the value of the Nature brand and the talented colleagues that sit at its heart as well as its importance to the wider scientific and academic community. We are committed to ensuring a rewarding and enjoyable work environment for all our colleagues, which is central to Springer Nature’s culture.
NUJ (press release)
JB: Thank goodness this is now over. It’s such a shame that it got to this point; a resolution had to be found once senior members of the academic community came out in support of the editors. No one wins from the events of recent weeks, which will linger long in the collective memory.
The ambition is for ORE to be a top quality, trusted collective open access publishing service for the public good. It should be collectively owned and supported by research funders and research institutions and operate as a service for researchers with no author facing fees. The aim is for the infrastructure of the platform to be open source and for the publishing service to be without eligibility barriers. To achieve this, conversations are ongoing between the European Commission and other national funders to finalise the vision and principles, put together a roadmap and explore not-for-profit business models and governance structures that might work.
With the latest release of the PLOS Open Science Indicators (OSI) results, we are introducing a new indicator for study registration—also known as preregistration. The results from this preliminary version of the indicator show that adoption is lower than for other indicators but is growing, albeit slowly. Over time, more researchers may be discovering how registering and publicly sharing a study design before results are known can enhance trust in their work.
This release also provides a first look at Open Science practices for articles published in 2024, bringing the results for data sharing, code sharing, and preprint posting up to date through the first quarter of this year. The complete dataset, which extends back to 2018 and now comprises 135,214 articles, is as always freely available to access and reuse.
There is widespread agreement in findings from analysis of survey data and expert opinion that pressure on researchers to publish frequently and in high prestige journals is a major inhibitor of research integrity. Following this, the emphasis on obtaining external research funding can create perverse incentive structures that inhibit integrity. Researchers commonly report the use of journal metrics, citation indices and publication numbers as proxies to judge academics’ professional value, and they perceive this use therefore affecting job prospects, reputations, and likelihood that research funding is awarded. These pressures are seen to contribute to the incidence of questionable research practices (QRPs). Expert opinion and available data suggest that QRPs are a far more prevalent issue for research integrity than fraud or data fabrication.
UK Research Integrity Office (report)
JB: This report includes a brief literature review of topics related to research integrity. The authors go on to note:
The commonly proposed solution to this issue [pressure to publish] is that quality of research should be judged more carefully via a variety of criteria and indicators, and that quantity of output should be deemphasized. Importantly, this includes qualitative judgement by experts of relevant research outputs. Measures for assessing robustness and transparency have also been suggested as additional tools to be used when making decisions that entail judgement of individual researchers and their work. These solutions may go some way to ameliorating the issue, but qualitative judgements require significant investment of time and expertise from decision-making bodies seeking to assess large numbers of submissions.
Using journal brands as a proxy for research quality is problematic, but the alternative — subjective qualitative judgements — creates a huge amount of work for institutions, and also would likely create a separate set of problems.
The current system, in which funders award large grants to one individual, who then employs 5, 10, 20 or more people, all with the ambition of becoming a PI, has served academia well, but will inevitably lead to an oversupply of researchers. Some might say that creating more highly qualified people is a good thing, regardless of whether they choose research careers, because their knowledge and skills will benefit them regardless of their occupation. Others might disagree, arguing that research should be subject to the kinds of recruitment limitations that exist in professions such as medicine.
De Gruyter is expanding its Subscribe-to-Open program DG2O, with plans to transform an additional 37 journals into open access by 2025.
With the expansion of the De Gruyter S2O program to include additional key humanities and social sciences titles, important research from disciplines that have so far been underrepresented in the move towards open access will be made freely available online to readers around the world. There will be no publication fees (APCs) for authors, making the model particularly fair and inclusive for researchers in disciplines where financial support for APCs is less established.
Initial analyses of the De Gruyter journals that have already been transformed into open access as part of DG2O show that they are read significantly more often and in significantly more countries worldwide since they have been opened.
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The scientific community’s continuing reluctance to let go of the journal, even when ostensibly superior technical solutions are available, suggests it continues to play an important role in the eyes of researchers. Whether it is understood as a community, a club or a brand, the journal holds an enduring value for authors, readers, users and evaluators of research. There is a pressing need to reform the access, editorial, governance and business models that underpin today’s scholarly journals. Yet efforts to replace the journal itself may prove a step too far.
FEBS Network (Rob Johnson)
JB: I tend to agree with Rob. I can’t see journals going away any time soon; there’s too much history there. Researchers “stand of the shoulders of giants”: a paper in The Lancet (launched in 1823) or Nature (launched in 1869) means something because the authors become part of the journal’s history.
My father published a couple of papers in Nature that appear in the outskirts of this network. He died at a young age, but his (modest) contributions are part of scientific history. Brands and history are important to human beings. It’s not just about getting tenure or securing the next grant.
Rob writes:
In the early 2010s, PLOS ONE’s seemingly inexorable rise led some to conclude open access ‘megajournals’ would revolutionise the publishing world. Yet after publishing in excess of 30,000 articles in 2013, PLOS ONE’s popularity slumped, and it has stabilised at around half that level in recent years.
It’s worth asking why the popularity slumped. I’d put good money on the underlying reason being that the peer review process became incredibly slow. The journal became a victim of its own success. It simply couldn’t cope with the deluge of papers that were submitted to it. The same thing happened at Scientific Reports when its output dropped.
As we consider what a “database” publishing model could look like in the future, we need to learn from these experiences. Scaling a peer review process that involves human beings is incredibly hard. It’s probably even harder now that there are more bad actors around.
The major current challenge is to be read. So-called “high impact journals” offer such access, but at a high price. To rely on such a process when sorting algorithms could readily generate source-agnostic lists of relevant papers and agreed minimum standards could exert quality control reflects a dramatic lack of system governance from the scientific community and a silent acceptance of the actions of commercial publishers.
International Science Council (Geoffrey Boulton and Moumita Koley)
JB: Editors beware: you will soon be replaced by an electronic version of the Hogwarts sorting hat. Presumably paper mill articles will be assigned to Slytherin.
By any measure, JAMA Network Open has been an extraordinary success. Since 2019, we have seen submissions increase from 3100 to nearly 15 000 in 2023. Our publication rate has grown from a few articles published every Friday to a mean of 40 articles spread across the workweek. Importantly, the quality and reach of the articles has increased in tandem. In 2023, JAMA Network Open published 1960 research articles, and 202 of these were reports of clinical trials. Articles published in JAMA Network Open last year had more than 30 million views and 73 000 media mentions. JAMA Network Open’s impact factor is one of the highest among general medical open-access journals. There are many reasons that JAMA Network Open has emerged as the world’s leading large-volume open-access journal, including its synergy with the other 12 journals that comprise JAMA Network. What cannot be overstated in the journal’s growth and success has been the commitment and vision of its first editor in chief.
JAMA Network Open (Eli N. Perencevich)
JB: I chose to quote the statistics, rather than the more thoughtful parts of this editorial from the incoming Editor-in-Chief, because it demonstrates that canny publishers of all types have developed a portfolio strategy in recent years. Why? As the editorial explains:
Other challenges to be confronted include the continued consolidation of the publication industry, which will create additional pressures on smaller publishers, many of which are not-for-profit, such as JAMA Network
Digital Science’s Dimensions tells the story well (y-axis = number of research articles) for the five largest JAMA journals:
The JAMA Network Open APC is a relatively modest $3000, which means that the journal generates, at most, $5.4m in revenue for the AMA (the total will likely be less than that because of waivers). Those funds, after costs are deducted, will provide some level of financial defence against potential falling subscription revenues caused by, for example, the OSTP mandate.
You can watch a video interview with the new Editor, Eli N. Perencevich, here.
‘Practice research’ is ‘an umbrella term that describes all manners of research where practice is the significant method of research conveyed in a research output’. The research element can be embodied in the work or in the representation of the work, or, it may need articulating using a research narrative. Practice research includes research conducted through practice in disciplines as varied as art, architecture, dance, and music, as well as education, and health and social care, and each of which may have ‘numerous discipline-specific formulations of practice research’.
Impact of Social Sciences (Holly Ranger, Jenny Evans, and Adam Vials Moore)
Concurrently, the company has witnessed mounting tensions within its workforce and a push to unionize. While Starbucks consistently used to rank as one the best places to work, it has completely disappeared from the charts since 2016. Instead, employees have been increasingly verbal about their working conditions, pointing to the disconnect between performance metrics geared toward sales volume and those focused on the quality of the connections with customers.
Sure, the company gained revenue and efficiency in the short term, but at what price in the long term if it commoditizes itself, loses its authenticity, and lessens the experience of being in a third place — if it ends up losing what Schultz described in his February open letter as its “soul” in the process? We see it as a Faustian bargain that may please Wall Street today but will eventually corrode the company, leaving it a hulking shell of itself.
Scholarly publishing has become commoditised in recent years; quantity matters more than quality to some executives. I’m hopeful that things will improve, not least because new research integrity tools will make it clear for all to see when publishers cut corners and publish articles of dubious provenance or quality. Reputation is everything and brands can lose their sheen very quickly. Our community talks a lot about how AI will make scholarly publishing more efficient; editors — the baristas of scholarly publishing — need to have enough time and space to ensure that journals don’t lose their “soul” in the process.
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.
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