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 newsletter is nearly 2 years old now and, as a result, I’ve been revisiting topics that recur every year. In issue 34 I covered the 2022 Springer Nature annual report. In today’s newsletter I delve into the 2023 report.
It’s rare to read an annual report from an organisation (any organisation) that doesn't contain spin, and the Springer Nature report is no different. However, there are some interesting nuggets in there that I’ve teased out for your delectation.
But first a message from Digital Science, this week’s sponsor, about new functionality for my bibliometric tool of choice, Dimensions.
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We measure our financial performance using two main indicators – revenues and operating profits – and their underlying trends over time. In 2023, revenues saw underlying growth of 5.2%, reaching €1.85 billion. The Research segment delivered strong results, with underlying revenue growth of 2.9%, ahead of the market.
Adjusted operating profit increased to €511 million, resulting in strong operating cash flow and reinforcing our financial position. We reduced our net financial debt by around €280 million and, as a result, our leverage, enabling us to refinance our debt. Our robust financial performance allowed us to maintain our high investment levels, including €173 million of investment and operating spend on technology and products. In countries where we do business, we contributed €106 million in corporate income taxes.
Springer Nature (announcement)
JB: You can read the 2023 report in full here. It is, above all, a sales pitch for future investors. Springer Nature is privately held, so it has no legal requirement to share its financial performance. However, with an IPO (initial public offering; listing a company on a stock market for the first time) likely to happen at some point soon, this report is a way of showcasing the company’s financial successes.
The revenues are broken down in some detail in the report, but there’s very little information about the costs incurred and only headline operating profit figures.
In 2022 the adjusted operating profit was €487 million on revenues of €1821 million (26.7% margin); in 2023 the adjusted operating profit was €511 million on revenues of €1853 million (27.6% margin). So the business was more profitable, in terms of margin, in 2023 than in 2022.
It’s worth remembering that operating profit excludes taxes and bank interest payments; those will need to be paid from the €511 million.
Three ECM bankers noted that they now only expect a handful of deals after the summer. Several sources pointed to an IPO of Springer Nature in Germany as perhaps the landmark deal in 2H.
As I’ve explained in previous newsletters, Springer Nature has tried to IPO a few times before. An IPO failed in 2018 and as Dan Tonkery explained that year in Against the Grain, one significant reason was the amount of debt the company had:
I believe that there are three primary reasons that the Springer Nature IPO failed. I believe the primary issue is the debt level. The IPO proceeds would have been used to reduce Springer Nature’s debt level down to 3.75 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization. Springer’s debt currently stands at €3 billion euros and too much of the IPO funds raised were going to be used to pay down the debt. Why would an investor that is already carrying Springer bonds want to buy more debt or just replace one form of investment for another? Springer has too much debt and I believe that the company should have renegotiated their debt with their banks and reduced the level down to a more manageable level. Investors did not like buying debt. Shareholders don’t like to use their funds to cover housekeeping items. They often want their money used to expand products and services, for acquisitions, or to fund growth.
That’s why it’s significant that Springer Nature managed to generate enough cash in 2023 to pay off €280 million of debt, reducing its leverage. This needs to happen to facilitate an IPO.
Technology investment
There has been a lot of talk about open infrastructures and about funders disintermediating publishers by creating their own diamond open access platforms. It’s worth considering for a moment what they’re up against:
In 2023, our financial performance enabled us to increase our technology-related spend, including personnel costs, to more than €173 million, taking our total investment in these areas to over €470 million since 2021.
Springer Nature does a lot more than publish journals and books, so not all of this investment will have gone into the Research division. Having said that, the research division generated €1,368 million of revenue in 2023, which is a significant chunk of the €1,853 million total. It seems likely that a decent chunk of the €470 million technology investment has gone into the area that generates the most cash — the Research division.
Many academics believe that research publishing should be free of capitalism; that will only be possible if funding bodies are willing and able to make large capital investments into the technology needed to provide a similar level of services as existing publishers provide.
Diversity Equity and Inclusion
As you might expect, there’s a lot of discussion in the report about DEI issues, as is only right and proper.
Women made up 44% of our global leadership cohort at the end of 2023. In 2018, 39% of our global leaders (those in the top three tiers of the organisation) were women. We set a goal to reach 45% by the end of 2023. We're proud to have seen a significant increase of five percentage points in gender representation in this group over the period covered by the goal. The increase is largely driven by internal promotions and reporting-line changes, and we're pleased that our investment in talent has led to greater opportunities for women to grow their careers into senior leadership positions. This is also reflected in our Management Board, which, as of January 2024, is now 50% female.
When I was at Springer Nature the management team were sometimes referred to as “the WMDs” (white, male and Dutch), so this is an improvement I guess.
Submissions and transfer pathways
Submissions grew by 18.3% from 1,530k in 2022 to 1,811k in 2023, but the number of published articles only grew by 2.2% from 411k to 420k. Of the 420k articles published, 44% were published OA; 30% were in fully OA journals and 14% were in hybrid journals.
The 2022 annual report included this statement regarding transfers:
Our transfers desk helps authors whose research doesn’t meet the publication criteria for their initial choice of journal, to connect with editors at some of our other titles that may be more suitable. In 2022, around 115,000 articles were supported in this way.
Compare this with the 2023 annual report:
More than 24,000 papers were published in 2023 after having been transferred to other journals.
So there’s either a typo in one of these statements or, perhaps more likely, the 2023 report uses tighter language. When I read the report last year I assumed, probably wrongly, that 115,000 articles were published after being transferred downstream.
It’s worth pondering why only 24,000 of the 420,000 published articles (6%) were published via transfer cascades.
You could argue, not unreasonably, that Springer Nature should be doing a better job of keeping papers in house. After all, it received over 1.8 million submissions and rejected around 1.4 million of them, but published only 24,000 after transfer.
[It’s not clear from the report if the 1,811k submissions represent distinct manuscripts; if a paper is rejected by one journal and transferred to another journal does that count as two submissions? I suspect “yes”.]
So Springer Nature, which has a significant financial incentive to publish more papers, has a very high rejection rate.
There’s another way of looking at the low acceptance rate statistic: the research that’s submitted is of very low quality. We focus a lot on corporate profit margins. Perhaps we should focus just as much on the quality of the product we get as tax payers for funding academic research.
Snapp
Over a third of journals, and nearly half of our OA journals, are now live on Snapp, with the rest of our portfolio to follow.
According to the video on Snapp’s homepage, Springer Nature (ambitiously) intends to migrate all of its journals “by 2024.”
Migrating journals to a new peer review system is like changing the wheels on a bus while it’s moving. Springer Nature still has a long way to go to migrate all of its journals onto Snapp.
Total scholarly journal output has moved back to long-term trends following previous corrections to the post-COVID upswing. Open Access output, however, was held back by issues experienced by OA publishers.
Quality problems due to paper mills and the loss of JIFs for fully OA journals have been well-rehearsed elsewhere. Although affecting a subset of journals, the problems have led to a wider move away from journals published by fully OA publishers. The data suggest a mix of authors choosing alternative venues for their OA papers or rejecting OA completely. Large and more established publishers have seen continued growth in OA, so are likely picking up the slack.
It is worth noting that the fully OA publishers still account for around one fifth of the market’s output. Even with declining output or slowing growth, they will continue to account for a significant share of the market.
Delta Think News & Views (Dan Pollock and Heather Staines)
JB: Dan and Heather have calculated that total article output grew by 3.4% compared to the previous year, but OA article growth only grew by 2.1%. The big unknown is whether this is a blip or the start of a (relative) decline for OA. My money is on the former than the latter, but for that to happen publishers need to ensure that maintaining research integrity is their number one priority.
The new EASE Interactive Checklist for Submitting Authors is intended for use by journal editors and publishers. It combines the individual EASE Form for Authors’ Contributions and Conflict of Interest Disclosure, and the EASE Ethics Checklist for Authors into a single more convenient easy to complete form with check-box responses, up-to-date questions and terminology based around the CRediT – Contributor Roles Taxonomy.
EASE (announcement)
JB: You can read the accompanying editorial here and download the form here. If you’re wondering why this initiative is important, go and read The Checklist Manifesto.
Building on the successful launch of Machine Learning: Science and Technology in 2019 IOPP’s Machine Learning series will expand to include three new journals: Machine Learning: Health, Machine Learning: Earth, and Machine Learning: Engineering. The new journals will open for submissions later this year. In addition to research articles and reviews the series will also uniquely publish dataset, benchmark and challenge articles to meet the diverse needs of research communities working at the interface of ML, AI and the sciences.
IOP Publishing (press release)
JB: You can read more about the series of journals here.
There are two sides to the research impact bridge: who is creating impact, and who is being impacted. When we evaluate measures of impact outside of the academic community, through attention metrics or alternative metrics, we are talking about the work of the people who are impacted by research. Conversations of stakeholder management and impact measures are often made without considering the public, the media, the government, or the private sector. It is important for those in the scholarly communication industry to consider the needs of those who put research into practice, policy, and action.
China’s scientific collaboration with other countries has declined since the pandemic, driven by falling partnerships with the United States, an analysis shows.
The latest evidence comes from an analysis conducted by Springer Nature’s team in China. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.) The authors used InCites, a tool owned by publishing-analytics firm Clarivate, based in London, to analyse internationally co-authored articles that were published between 2013 and 2023. InCites draws on papers indexed in the science-citation database Web of Science.
They found that in 2022, the total number papers co-authored by researchers from China and their international peers declined for the first time since 2013.
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And, thanks to the recent release of Altmetric on Google’s BigQuery (GBQ), where this deep-dive report was put together, it can be rebuilt, tweaked or customized by anyone with a licence to the data.
It is our belief that there are no choices in the study of science that come without exclusion; the purpose here is not to provide a definitive list of the “best” papers published in 2023 (December 2022-November 2023). The list (like this post) shows that “attention” can mean many things, and what really matters is the question one is asking. We’d like to open the conversation, and look forward to seeing what the research community does with the data.
TL;DR (Kathryn Weber-Boer)
JB: It’s useful to have the ranking methodology spelled out. I like the fact that the top 500 is a stepping off point: users can amend the code as they see fit. Right from the start, my biggest criticism of Altmetric was “what does the number mean?” Increasing the transparency of the algorithms is helpful.
The rationale for a retraction may be described within the metadata model, but it’s not required nor is it critical to understanding that a work should no longer be deemed reliable – and therefore shouldn’t be cited for its underlying scientific content. It is recommended that retraction notices include the reason for the retraction, and, when applicable, a notice of publication removal should include a statement that clarifies why the publication is being removed. While potentially useful, a taxonomy of reasons for removal was determined to be out of scope of this project, but might be considered as an element of future work.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Todd Carpenter)
JB: Retractions are not inherently bad, but they are often perceived as career damaging. We need a way to categorise retractions to help honest researchers to correct the record if they made a mistake, but also so we can more easily identify bad actors who are repeat offenders. Don’t get me wrong, this is a fantastic piece of work, but, as is so often the case, more is needed.
We were sick of the academic publishing racket and had decided to try something different. We wanted to launch a journal that would be truly open access, ensuring anyone could read our articles. This will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, a not-for-profit publisher funded by a consortium of libraries and other institutions. When academic publishing is run on a not-for-profit basis, it works reasonably well. These publishers provide a real service and typically sell the final product at a reasonable price to their own community. So why aren’t there more of them?
The Guardian (Arash Abizadeh)
JB: Here we go again. This is another rant against publishers from someone who, as far as I can tell, has never worked for a publisher. I’ve been reading versions of this narrative my entire adult life. It gets wearing after a while. Springer Nature incurs costs of over a billion Euro a year, for example (see News section). Academics often focus on profit margins. They should also consider the capital that’s needed to run a publishing enterprise at scale.
The mBio ECB [Early-Career Editorial Board] was the brainchild of Maisha Miles, who was the journal’s longtime Managing Editor and later Journal Development Editor. Originally called the Junior Editorial Board, we have replaced the word “junior” with “early career” because this more accurately reflects the board’s composition. Maisha conceived the idea of creating a class of early-career scientists who would work with current editors to carefully review manuscripts and receive feedback for their reviews from the editors. The first call for applications went out during the World Microbe Forum in June 2021 and received more than 900 applications, indicating great interest in such a program. In 2023, after deeming the pilot a success,
mBio launched a call for the second ECB class and received 502 applications from 53 countries (206 U.S. applicants and 296 non-U.S.).
mBio (Arturo Casadevall, Maisha Miles, Miriam Day, Amanda Donaldson)
JB: More journals should create opportunities like this for early-career researchers. It’s good for the ECRs and it’s also good for the editorial teams to teach and learn from the next generation of editors.
At AGU journals, the total number of manuscripts has increased in recent years. This is driven more by the number of authors submitting manuscripts (which has increased) than the submissions per author (which has varied within a relatively narrow range). While the total number of distinct reviewers has also increased, the fraction of manuscripts sent for review has decreased—leading to a slight decline in reviews per reviewer. However, it is common for editors at AGU journals to make numerous requests to secure the two or three reviews that are the standard expectation at most AGU journals. For example, 25% of manuscripts sent for review in 2023 required eight or more requests.
AGU Advances (AGU Editorial Network)
JB: Experienced journalologists will have heard many of the arguments made in this editorial before. It’s still valuable, though, and is a good summary of the challenges that all editors and publishers are facing.
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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