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.
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 publication date of almost all of the IEEE Access articles in 2023 was listed as 01-Jan-2023. As a result, the search for H1 2023 included every IEEE Access paper published in 2023 and the search for H1 2024 included every paper published year-to-date. This would certainly help to explain the 34% drop in output!
I got in contact with the Dimensions (Digital Science) support team who responded:
The logic for determining the publication date in Dimensions is as follows: we collect both the online and print publication dates from our sources and take the earlier of the two as the publication date. If the full date is not available in our sources, e.g. only the year is available, we normalise that date as 'YYYY-MM-DD', so 2023 becomes 01-01-2023. Although this is the logic currently used to determine the publication date, we still provide both the online and print publication dates in the full record export file.
For some reason, virtually all of the IEEE Access articles have a print publication date of ’2023-01-01’ (it’s an online only journal), so all of the articles are considered to have a publication date of 01-Jan-2023 in Dimensions; the print date overrides the (real) online publication date in the searches.
This got me thinking about the other finding in last week’s newsletter that didn't feel quite right. The 16% drop of Gold shown in this table seemed very large, perhaps artificially large:
Last week I wrote:
Could the drop in Gold articles be an artefact of slow indexing? That seems unlikely: why would fully OA journals be indexed slower than hybrid or subscription journals? The ratios are unlikely to change, even if the absolute numbers do.
There was another explanation that I hadn’t considered. The above table was based on a search from 01-Jan to 30-Jun of each year. I redid the search using the dates 02-Jan-YYYY to 30-Jun-YYYY. This search omitted any papers with a January 1 publication date. The table changes to:
Hindawi, MDPI and Frontiers collectively fell by 55k articles, which would explain the 6.5% (45k articles) drop. Suddenly the Gold story makes much more sense.
328,093 research articles have a publication date in Dimensions of 01-01-2023, which is 16% of the H1 2023 cohort (we would expect 0.6% of H1 papers to be published on Jan 1). Half of those papers, remember, will likely have actually been published in the second half of the year, but appear, wrongly, in the H1 search.
Now, before you get excited about the 8.5% hybrid increase, I did another search for 01-Apr-YYYY to 30-Jun-YYYY and the table changes to this:
Make of that what you will. I'm struggling to draw definitive conclusions about the underlying trends. Having said that, the expected drop in Gold OA as a result of the decreased output of Hindawi, MDPI and Frontiers seems to be consistent.
The Dimensions team were very responsive to my questions. They are looking into improving the search functionality:
We understand that the wording provided under the advanced search field could be improved to make it clearer how the incomplete dates might affect the searches being performed. We will look into changing this as part of one of our next releases. We will also review the current logic for determining the publication date to see if there are ways of ensuring that the more complete date is captured to avoid normalisation as much as possible.
The publication date inconsistencies mainly affect smaller publishers. The table below shows the number of research articles published on 01-01-2023 by publisher (top 10 listed). Elsevier is the only major publisher that appears on the list (Sage is no longer one of the “big five”). I suspect that the data feeds from these publishers are the cause of the underlying problem.
One of the conclusions from last week’s analysis was that journals like Cureus, Scientific Reports, Heliyon, and Nature Communications grew considerably in the first half of 2024. None of those journals are affected by the New Year’s Day misclassification and their growth appears to be real. Springer Nature’s 33% article growth between H1 2023 and H1 2024 (see previous newsletter) also seems valid.
Thank you to our sponsor, Digital Science
Writefull uses AI to automate publishers’ language-related tasks and make these scalable — ensuring significant savings.
Writefull Revise is a solution that enables authors or copyeditors to upload a manuscript and revise the language using edits in Track Changes. An OA publisher evaluated Writefull Revise with 1.4K manuscripts, and found that the papers had a lower rejection rate, a higher acceptance rate, quicker acceptance (-22 days), and fewer revision rounds (-0.5 rounds).
cOAlition S is pleased to announce the release of a new pricing framework designed to foster global equity in scholarly publishing. Developed by Information Power following consultation with the funder, library/consortium, and publisher communities, the framework is introduced to enable discussion, promote greater transparency and inspire publishers and other service providers to implement more equitable pricing across different economies. To support this, the framework provides users with guiding principles, data, information, and tools. The approach is adaptable, allowing publishers to implement changes gradually and in line with their specific circumstances. It can be applied to various pricing models, including article processing charges (APCs), subscriptions, and transformative agreements.
Plan S (announcement)
JB: You can read the full report here and download the Excel file here.
The model in this excel spreadsheet allows publishers and service providers to explore options for setting differential global pricing to foster equity in scholarly publishing.
I haven’t had a chance to explore this properly yet. It will be interesting to see how publishers respond to this document.
The prices closely correlate with a journal’s impact factor, the controversial metric based on citations to a journal’s articles. Hybrid journals tend to charge more in part because many are older than gold ones, so they have had more time to develop a reputation that may carry a higher impact factor—and the higher interest from authors that often goes with it. Other factors that tend to bump up price: selectivity (journals that reject more papers have more paid staff) and whether the journal is published in English and by a publisher based in a developed country—all hallmarks of the world’s top-ranked journals.
Science (Jeffrey Brainard)
JB: Correlation does not equal causation. Price generally corresponds to acceptance rate (and whether a journal has an in-house team of editors). A journal that accepts 10% of papers needs to charge 5 times as much as a journal that accepts 50% of papers to generate the same revenues. Acceptance rate is correlated with impact factor, of course; the framing of this paragraph makes a good news story (“controversial metric”), but the emphasis is wrong, in my opinion.
Right to License and Copyright Articles.—Researchers should have the right to choose how and where they publish or communicate their research, and should not be forced to disseminate their research in ways or under licenses that could harm its integrity or lead to its modification without their express consent. The Committee is concerned that in implementing OSTP’s August 2022 Memorandum to Executive Departments and Agencies titled, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to federally Funded Research” agencies may be violating this principle. OSTP is directed to clarify its guidance to agencies and instruct them not to limit grant recipients’ ability to copyright, freely license, or control their works.
JB: Thank you to the Journalology reader who sent me this link. I don’t claim to be an expert on US funder mandates, but this seems noteworthy. The appropriations bill hasn’t been passed yet, so this text could yet be removed. Publishers will be closely watching the language that OSTP uses in its guidance to agencies.
The citations, it turned out, often belonged to papers full of nonsense text authored by long-dead mathematicians such as Pythagoras. The studies had been uploaded as PDFs to the academic social platform ResearchGate and then subsequently deleted, obscuring their nature. (Wise and Richardson had to dig into Google’s cache to read the documents.) “We were like, ‘Wow, this procedure is incredibly easy,’” Richardson recalls. “All you have to do is put some fake papers on ResearchGate.”
It’s so easy, Wise noted at the time, that a quickly written script to pump out plausible-sounding papers could make anyone highly cited—even a cat. “I don’t know if he was being serious,” Richardson says. “But I certainly took that as a challenge.” And he knew just the cat to beat: F.D.C. Willard. In 1975, theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington added his Siamese to one of his single-author papers so the references to “we” would make more sense. As of this year, “Felis Domesticus Chester Willard” has 107 citations.
Science (Christie Wilcox)
JB: This is nonsense. Everyone knows that the most cited cat is Larry, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office and inhabitant of 10 Downing Street. Just look at how many citations this recent tweet received:
Become a better leader: the Journalology coaching programme
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?
Most 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, as both an editor and as a publisher, and can help you to create more impactful journals and get better at your craft.
We think that it’s too easy for journals and publishers to claim that they have followed COPE guidance, when — in our view — they have only paid lip service to publication integrity while sidestepping the harder work of assessing, flagging and resolving concerns.
Here we argue that updating and improving COPE guidance and flowcharts (see Supplementary information, Fig. S1, for example) could make the process of checking publication integrity more efficient and effective. We also propose five ways to do it.
Nature (Andrew Grey et al)
JB: COPE was set up as a self-help group for journal editors. It was never designed to have teeth. These whistleblowers are understandably unhappy about how long it takes to investigate and act on research integrity allegations. I’m not convinced that these proposals will solve the problem, though.
As with Alethea, I imagine that some publishers will immediately be concerned about PDFs being uploaded to Papers so someone can interrogate it with AI. It is useful to note though that Digital Science’s terms with AI providers do not allow re-use of any inputs for model training. Regardless, I anticipate we will see attempts to develop some sort of DRM-like technology blocks to prevent end-users from uploading PDFs into AI tools; however, I would suggest the more savvy publishers will develop a strategy to instead capitalize on this user desire path to deliver value to authors in the open access publishing ecosystem.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe)
JB: I enjoyed this article. DRM is not the solution.
Submission and peer review systems (SPRSs), facilitate the process of author submission, peer review, and editorial decision-making around research articles. ScholarOne, Aries, and eJournalPress are the most notable examples and each has been in use for decades. These systems would be categorized as monolithic solutions that aim to cover the editorial workflow from submission to accepted manuscript. (Some also have production module add-ons, with various levels of adoption.) While there is an appreciation for the power of these systems, and the specific and very complex workflows they address, their lack of a modular and API-first approach is increasingly a limitation.
...
Publishers are increasingly investing in advanced marketing tools to better target and engage authors, reviewers, and guest editors. To maximize these tools’ effectiveness, there’s a growing need to leverage the wealth of data stored in SPRSs.
Clarke & Esposito (Colleen Scollans and Pam Harley)
JB: This is a typically thoughtful piece of work from Colleen and Pam. However, I disagree with the final sentence in this extract. The firewall between editorial and commercial teams is a core tenet of our industry. Allowing marketers to use data from peer review systems is fraught with danger. The trusted relationship between editors, peer reviewers and authors must be maintained.
This decline in participation is self-perpetuating - the more people leave, the more unreliable the journals seem. Revenue spikes downwards at this point, targets are missed, and the whole thing starts to circle the drain.
This is a lot like an ecosystem collapse. In an ecosystem, multiple interdependencies overlap, and their mutual influence maintains a complex system. Pull one of the threads too hard - for example, take all the wolves out of Yellowstone - and it all goes to hell.
James Heathers
JB: This is the first part of a series. One to watch...
Journals are key parts of many organizations’ missions and the returns they provide help to support the important work of those organizations. Whether you self-publish or partner with a publisher, you should have the same level of insight into and understanding of how your journal works. The answers to these questions will likely look quite different today than they will in even just a few years’ time, and ongoing dialogue and engagement with your publisher is vital.
Origin Editorial (George Woodward)
JB: George asks for comments on this article. Please go ahead and provide some feedback.
Over the past decade, a growing number of bibliometric analyses of varying quality have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. Despite this growth, surprisingly few published articles provide guidance on how a bibliometric analysis ought to be reported. Moreover, to our knowledge, these articles have been written based on the opinions/experiences of different researchers, as opposed to best evidence-informed practices. This known uptick in the publication of bibliometric analyses in combination with a lack of evidence-based guidance suggests the need to develop such guidelines. As such, the Guidance List for the repOrting of Bibliometric AnaLyses (GLOBAL) aims to provide minimum guidelines for the reporting of bibliometric analyses.
Leiden Madtrics (Jeremy Y. Ng, Henry Liu, Stefanie Haustein)
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).
Journal Club
I often don't have time to read Journal Club research papers in full. Inclusion does not equal endorsement. You’ll need to make your own assessment of the papers’ methodology and conclusions.
This study sought to understand how health, science, and environmental journalists perceive predatory journals, how they ensure the journals they report on are credible and trustworthy, and the implications of these perceptions and practices for the diversity of the research that makes the news. Collectively, the findings suggest that these specialized journalists largely believe predatory journals are a problem for their peers, or a problem in theory, but not one they would ever fall for themselves. Many have relatively limited awareness and understanding of these journals and feel confident that they can avoid research published in them by applying internalized strategies for evaluating a journal’s “trustworthiness.” These strategies rely heavily on assessments of a journal’s reputation and familiarity—as well as the perceived professionalism of the articles published within it—and are often applied in an intuitive, takenfor-granted way.
bioRxiv (Alice Fleerackers, Laura L. Moorhead, Juan Pablo Alperin)
Although high-impact clinical journals have publication policies supportive of preprints, concerns remain that posting a preprint before submission to a peer-reviewed journal may jeopardize publication, especially if the preprint generates media attention and citations. While biology articles with corresponding preprints have received greater attention than those without, little is known about the highest-impact clinical research. Therefore, we aimed to assess how frequently research articles published in the highest-impact clinical journals are preprinted and whether media attention and citations differed between articles with and without corresponding preprints.
To spur in this direction, in this paper, we have used the organizational psychology literature to develop a theoretical framework that goes beyond anecdotal evidence and examines the deep causes of research-related misconduct. Additionally, we have tested our framework on a representative sample of European scholars focusing on a mild research misconduct: the use of Sci-Hub. The latter has three main motivations: i) mild and accepted misconducts are perceived as armless and non morally wrong, for this, in those cases, it is easier to obtain truthful answers; ii) in our particular case, the use of Sci-Hub is popular in rich universities irrespective of income and access, suggesting the existence of a deeper cause for using it; and ii) past literature highlights that mild misconducts often create a slippery slope and a fertile ground for more serious misconduct. Indeed, the Sci-Hub platform distributes research materials obtained illegally that scholars use while doing research. Thus, using Sci-Hub represents a mild research-related misconduct since scholars can use their library resources or contact the authors to obtain a copy of the paper they need without using the platform.
Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set.
Now they have a new way to prove it: “copyright traps” developed by a team at Imperial College London, pieces of hidden text that allow writers and publishers to subtly mark their work in order to later detect whether it has been used in AI models or not. The idea is similar to traps that have been used by copyright holders throughout history—strategies like including fake locations on a map or fake words in a dictionary.
There are no copyright traps in Journalology. Please forward this email to your colleagues if you think it would be of interest to them.
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, This week I attended the ALPSP annual conference and met some Journalology readers at the event, which was lots of fun. The quality of the presentations and panel discussions was excellent; the organising committee and wider ALPSP team did a fantastic job. I’m still reflecting on what I learned, in particular what the future might hold for small society publishers in an open access world where scale wins. The star of the show was...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Before we kick off another bumper issue I want to quickly revisit the lead story from last week: the discussion of the subscribe-to-open (S2O) model. Last week I said that EDP Sciences “would cease S2O on one of its journals” and linked through to a 2023 press release. However, I hadn’t clocked that in June 2024 the same journal, Radioprotection, announced that it was moving back to S2O. This might suggest that the S2O model worked as...
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,...