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.
This week’s newsletter discusses Wiley’s new(ish) CEO (and his remuneration package), flat fee institutional models, and whether big brand journals harm research. I also assess the potential for MDPI’s new journal, Pets. So there’s lots to look forward to, but first a message from this week’s sponsor.
Thank you to our sponsor, Digital Science
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“After a formal process that included a global search, the Board has concluded that Matt is the right person to lead Wiley through the next phase of our journey as a knowledge solutions company. We look forward to working alongside him to continue our momentum and deliver significant value for our stakeholders, including shareholders, customers, and colleagues.”
Wiley (press release)
JB: In a previous newsletter I linked through to Brian Napack’s job offer letter from 2017, which was signed by Matthew Kissner, who was Chairman of the Board at the time.
You can read Matthew Kissner’s CEO employment letter, dated July 7, 2024 here. Here’s a summary of his remuneration package, which was published a few days ago:
The Company entered into an employment letter with Mr. Kissner, effective, July 8, 2024 (the "Employment Letter”). Under the Employment Letter, Mr. Kissner will (i) receive an annual base salary of $900,000; (ii) be eligible to participate in the Company’s Executive Annual Incentive Plan, with a target incentive equal to 150% of his base salary; and (iii) be eligible to receive an award under the Executive Long-Term Incentive Plan, with an anticipated value of $3 million, paid in the form of 60% performance stock units and 40% restricted stock units, which grant will continue to vest upon the transition to the next CEO. His annual incentive will be prorated to reflect any partial fiscal year of his employment. Mr. Kissner will not be eligible for severance under the Executive Severance Plan, or any other Company severance program during his tenure, or upon conclusion of his role as President and CEO.
Matthew Kissner, at 70 years old, is a spring chicken compared with the US presidential candidates. However, his time as CEO of Wiley is likely limited. Indeed, his Executive Long-Term Incentive Plan (ELTIP) is for “FY25” (fiscal year 2025), which suggests that either (a) he’s joining a group executive plan that ends at that time point or (b) that he’s agreed to lead the company until the end of the next fiscal year.
Option (b) is supported by the fact that the won’t be eligible for executive severance “upon conclusion of his role as President and CEO”. Option (a) seems less likely since Brian Napack’s ELTIP ran from FY18-20, so presumably the current ELTIP runs from FY24-26.
Flat fee partnerships offer a compelling value proposition for institutions, including enablement of improved open access budget planning with a single, predictable annual fee, that reduces administrative work and by extension frees up valuable resources for other crucial initiatives, as well as the opportunity for institutions and authors to leverage Frontiers' advanced technology platform to ensure research is openly accessible, discoverable, and easily readable by a global audience.
Frontiers (announcement)
JB: Simple business models are good business models. However, I can’t help but be cynical: flat fee models are more attractive to publishers when they are no longer growing exponentially.
It’s been an exciting year since we launched Annual Institutional Memberships (AIMs), and we are thrilled to share our progress to-date. Over the past 12 months, 24 institutions from have joined us in our mission to remove barriers to Open Access and make a more sustainable open future.
The AIMs model was designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind. By partnering with institutions, we enable authors to publish in PeerJ journals without having to worry about paying an APC. By eliminating financial barriers for authors, whilst easing the administrative burden of APCs, the model will help widen adoption of Open Access and, therefore, the dissemination of knowledge.
Mr. Albert G. Horvath, Chief Executive of American Chemical Society (ACS), joined Dr. Helen Pain, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in signing a memorandum of understanding between our two societies.
The signing ceremony is a celebration of international cooperation in chemistry, held against the backdrop of the congress of our sister organisation, EuChemS – the European Chemical Society – which is taking place in Dublin this week.
The Memorandum of Understanding aims “to co-operate for the establishment of a continuous communication and exchange in the field of chemistry and related areas of knowledge for the benefit of both United States and United Kingdom chemical sciences communities and the future successes of both societies”.
Royal Society of Chemistry (announcement)
JB: There’s no mention of a collaboration between their publishing programmes. You may remember that earlier this year the three big society publishers in the physical sciences (IOPP, APS and AIPP) announced a new ‘Purpose-Led Publishing’ Coalition. If anyone has any information about how that partnership is progressing, I’d be interested to hear more.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment (CUPA) has said it has suffered a “cybersecurity incident”, and said a hacking group has claimed to have published stolen data online.
The breach forced CUPA – the publishing arm of the university – to take some of its systems offline as “a precautionary measure” which it said it is working to restore “as quickly as possible”.
The incident occurred in early June, and CUPA said it has worked with forensic experts following the breach. It added that most customer-facing platforms remain live, and there has been no impact on exams.
Science Europe, the group of major research funding and performing organisations, has adopted a “renewed focus” on research integrity, describing it as a “cornerstone” of research.
The association, whose members include the French National Research Agency, the German Research Foundation and UK Research and Innovation, published a position paper on research integrity on 11 July.
The paper announced “a renewal of Science Europe’s focus on research integrity as part of its activities to contribute to the evolution of research cultures and support research quality”.
Five new journals covering multiple subjects have launched their inaugural issue in June 2024. We are excited to be able to share with you the newest research rooted in the value of open access.
We would like to express our deepest appreciation to all the Editorial Board Members and each journal will ensure its high-quality output using excellent editorial and rigorous peer review processes, to ensure that the articles achieve high impact and visibility.
MDPI (announcement)
JB: Only time will tell whether these new journals, which include Pets and Real Estate, will grow to become a Great Dane or a New Century Global Center. Here’s an excerpt from the inaugural editorial of Pets.
Pets are often considered family members, and therefore, owners seek high-quality, evidence-based veterinary care. In line with this increase in pet ownership, over the last few decades, there has been a substantial increase in clinical and basic scientific studies published across either clinically highly specialized or broader multi-disciplinary journals. Yet it often remains challenging for veterinary clinicians and scientists to find a journal that welcomes veterinary submissions ranging from cutting-edge research to case reports as well as repeated studies and studies with negative findings that are assessed and reviewed by veterinary experts.
According to Digital Science’s Dimensions, there were just over 20,000 Research Articles published in the field of veterinary sciences last year. MDPI is currently ranked number three in terms of published output.
The top two MDPI journals in the category are:
The editorial scope of Pets seems to overlap with both of these existing journals, so it’s not clear to me why “it often remains challenging for veterinary clinicians and scientists to find a journal that welcomes veterinary submissions”.
I’m reminded of this quote from Robbie Fox’s 1965 book Crisis in Communication: The Functions and Future of Medical Journals:
Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Today, we are releasing the 2024 version of Scholar Metrics. This release covers articles published in 2019–2023 and includes citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar as of July 2024
Google Scholar Blog
JB: You can view the database here. Here’s what the top of the veterinary medicine category looks like. Large journals are likely to have large h5-indexes because of the way the index is calculated.
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Ten years since the launch of our patient and public partnership strategy, our successes are largely down to individuals championing the cause and guiding, advising, supporting, and cajoling others on this journey. It was hard—it still is—and we have achieved mixed success. But we believe that working in partnership with patients and the public brings unique insights into what we publish as well as adding value. We can also point to objective measures of progress and impact. We urge other medical journals to join us in delivering the patient revolution. It is an embarrassing indictment of medical journal priorities that so many are content to do so little. If medical journals are to fulfil their primary purpose—to improve health and wellbeing outcomes—they cannot continue to fail the test of patient and public partnership.
The BMJ (Emma Doble, Sophia Walker, Amy Price, and Kamran Abbasi)
JB: If you work in medical publishing, please read and digest this editorial. The BMJ has led the way; others should follow.
One element of that is IOP Trusted Reviewer status. This certification recognises the 15 per cent of reviewers who provide the most thorough reviews – amounting, so far, to 14,000 people. Their feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with many appreciating the recognition and its reinforcement of their commitment to high standards in peer review. The scheme also makes it easier for our editors to identify excellent reviewers, which makes the whole reviewing process faster and more efficient.
Laura Feetham-Walker
JB: This article provides a useful overview of the work IOP Publishing has done recently on improving their peer review process.
The 2023 citation metrics have been released in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). This year, 237 MDPI journals were awarded an Impact Factor, an almost 14% increase from 208 last year. Of the 237 ranked MDPI journals, 72% (171) are in the top quartiles, either Q1 or Q2. Twenty-nine of our journals received their first Impact Factor this year, accounting for more than 5% of the journals accepted into the Web of Science last year.
Together, we are changing how high-quality science is accessed and published, accelerating the dissemination of the latest scientific insights, and ensuring that your work is accessible to all.
MDPI Insights (Stefan Tochev)
JB: Publishers of all stripes promote their impact factors (me included in the past, although, for the record, I had absolutely nothing to do with this), so we shouldn’t be surprised that MDPI has been touting their JCR successes in recent week.
There was a link to a YouTube video in Stefan’s article, entitled The World’s Most Cited Open Access Publisher, which was published 3 weeks ago. I don’t know much about YouTube, but it’s perhaps noteworthy that the video has been viewed close to half a million times even though the MDPI channel only has 2.72k subscribers. Perhaps this video has received a lot of paid promotion on YouTube? Here’s a screen grab showing the summary of the video:
Greatly reduce emphasis on the journal impact factor as a promotional tool, ideally by ceasing to promote the impact factor or by presenting the metric in the context of a variety of journal-based metrics ... that provide a richer view of journal performance.
In the late 18th century, the summaries that the secretaries wrote into the minute books, after a paper had been read aloud at one of the weekly meetings, were known as ‘abstracts’. These secretarially authored abstracts were part of institutional record-keeping practices, and they were used to inform the decisions of the editorial committee for the Philosophical Transactions.
In 1830 the Society’s printer, Richard Taylor, suggested that these abstracts might be published. He was already printing reports on the Society’s meetings in his own journal, the Philosophical Magazine, but using the secretarial abstracts would give the Society control over how its meetings were reported, as well as saving Taylor some work. Taylor also offered to print the Royal Society’s abstracts separately, for circulation among the fellows.
This Commonplace Series on Peer Review aims to foster discussion on innovative peer review models designed to make published information more useful and reusable within the scholarly community. The mission of the open access movement involves more than mere accessibility and final publication outcomes; it must represent a comprehensive methodology and guiding principle applicable to all stages of the publication process, from manuscript submission to sharing final research findings. Failure to do so could result in contradictory and incomplete implementation of open access principles. Continuing the discourse from our previous issue on promotion, tenure, and academic recognition models, we address the problematic "publish or perish" mentality and the gatekeeping dynamics in scientific dissemination, where peer review serves as a major gatekeeper for both quality and quantity.
Commonplace (Lorela Mehmeti)
JB: This is a call for submissions with a deadline of September 20.
It would be convenient if we kept all the good research in one place. Or in a handful of well-known, rubber-stamped journals. This was the central conceit of scholarly publishing for the past century. But does it still hold up?
A brand name doesn’t tell us much about quality. Yet how we value research has become so focused on a few prestige journals – exalted, exclusive and expensive – that it thrives on the assumption it does. You publish in them, your work is important; or you don’t and it’s not.
Research assessment – whether formal, as part of researcher evaluation in institutions; or informal, as in deciding whether it is worth reading – should at least engage with the piece of research itself. Yet it often doesn’t.
Impact of Social Sciences (Damian Pattinson and George Currie)
JB: It’s worth stopping to consider whether you agree with the statement “a brand name doesn’t tell us much about quality”.
Brands are a core part of human society. We use them as shortcuts across all aspects of our life, to help us to make quick decisions on whether to trust a product or service. Scholarly publishing is no different.
Do selective journals get it right every time? No, of course not. They occasionally publish flawed research and also reject papers that are subsequently published elsewhere and become influential. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful signals of potentially influential research for readers.
Furthermore, I’d argue that brands help to keep journals honest. Brands can disintegrate (for example, Hindawi) or lose their sheen. Editors and publishers of journals and portfolios work hard to maintain and grow the value of their brand in the eyes of their community.
eLife has changed its approach over time. Let’s not forget how the journal was positioned when it was announced back in 2011 — as a direct competitor to Cell, Nature, and Science (CNS) — with the main differentiator being that it was run by academics not professional editors. Here’s a quote from Herbert Jäckle, who was vice president of the Max Planck Society at the time, from the 2011 press release announcing Randy Schekman’s appointment:
Publishing top science requires the leadership of the best active scientists to reliably judge the quality of the submitted work and the reviewers’ responses, and to take rapid and unbiased decisions that are transparent both for the authors and the scientific community. Randy’s commitment as a founding editor of the new journal guarantees that these essentials become reality.
eLife was never able to compete with the CNS journals, which is perhaps why the three founding organisations decided to change the focus of the journal when Schekman left and was replaced by Michael Eisen.
Journal brands are often used as proxies for research quality, which is problematic when it comes to research assessment, but that doesn’t mean that journals with long established brands don’t provide a valuable service to readers. Brands have been used by human beings for thousands of years. I don't see that changing any time soon.
References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science.
However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles’ metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.
The Conversation (Lonni Besançon and Guillaume Cabanac)
JB: I have not included any additional links coloured white in this newsletter.
The scholarly publishing environment is changing fast. Even the most seasoned publisher can benefit from independent advice. I can help you to build a successful portfolio strategy and thrive in an open access world.
Our analysis of the three case study journals examined exhibited a similar trend: the adoption of guest edited special issues as a growth and revenue strategy by long-existing commercial publishers. Special issues pose new risks for research integrity as it can be a relatively easy target of large-scale fraud. We hereby acknowledge that any peer review system is imperfect with editors and authors being colleagues who work in narrow disciplines, but as recent research has highlighted relying on the oversight of guest editors can be particularly vulnerable to suspicious collaboration patterns. This is partially because there is a greater onus on journal editors to sustain their journal’s reputation for rigorous peer review while guest editors do not have the same concerns and do not face similar pressures.
Accountability in Research (David Mills, Sefika Mertkan & Gulen Onurkan Aliusta)
JB: I have deep reservations about the special issue editorial model, especially with regards to the use of guest editors. Journals need to have a trusted relationship with their editors, rather than using unvetted academics as a way to rapidly grow journals.
We find that most academics do not think that using ChatGPT to fix grammar needs to be reported, but detection software did not always draw this distinction, as abstracts for which GPT was used to fix grammar were often flagged as having a high chance of being written by AI. We also find disagreements among academics on whether more substantial use of ChatGPT to rewrite text needs to be reported, and these differences were related to perceptions of ethics, academic role, and English language background. Finally, we found little difference in their perceptions about reporting ChatGPT and research assistant help, but significant differences in reporting perceptions between these sources of assistance and paid proofreading and other AI assistant tools (Grammarly and Word). Our results suggest that there might be challenges in getting authors to report AI use in manuscript preparation because (i) there is not uniform agreement about what uses of AI should be reported and (ii) journals might have trouble enforcing nuanced reporting requirements using AI detection tools.
PLOS ONE (Nir Chemaya and Daniel Martin)
JB: We probably didn’t need a research paper to reach these conclusions, but it’s a useful datapoint anyway.
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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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