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.
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
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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).
For the third consecutive year, publicly available data shows that Springer Nature’s approach towards open access (OA) continues to deliver the highest impact for its authors and the research community
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The report also highlights key initiatives from Springer Nature in 2023 to support equity in OA. These include expansion of TAs into Africa and the Americas, waiving €26m of APCs in fully OA journals and enabling authors from low-income and low- and middle-income countries (LICs and LMICs) to publish in Nature and the Nature research journals at no cost. They also include publishing over 10,000 OA articles free of charge in 2023 in diamond OA journals and experimenting with new low-cost OA models.
Springer Nature (announcement)
JB: This report, which is written with future investors in mind, is split into five parts. Here’s a quick summary of each one
OA transition at Springer Nature. The graphs showing average citations paint Springer Nature in a good light, compared with its competitors. It’s not clear if these averages are means or medians; presumably they are means and as a result the contribution of the highly cited Nature Portfolio journals would have pushed the averages upwards.
Spotlight on Transformative Agreements. “In 2023, our TAs published 7x more gold OA articles in Springer hybrid titles than via author choice (authors choosing to publish OA.” Transformative Agreements, which are difficult to negotiate, are the large commercial publishers’ (not so) secret weapon; smaller publishers can’t compete with this.
Investing in technology to advance OA. “Since 2021, our total investments and operational spending on technology across the business and all portfolios has totalled over €470m.” Publishing on the internet costs nothing, right?
Spotlight on integrity. “In 2023, we launched Geppetto, an AI-enabled tool that trawls submissions across all our journals for indicators of suspicious text, started testing SnappShot, which screens for manipulated images, and following our close relationship with Slimmer AI, acquired its Science division to expand our existing in-house expertise and safeguard integrity by automating checks for plagiarism.”
The Society of China University Journals (CUJS), affiliated with the Ministry of Education, has launched a groundbreaking pre-review platform, “24hreview,” in partnership with international publisher Wiley. This innovative platform aims to streamline the academic submission process and address significant challenges related to academic integrity.
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The 24hreview platform revolutionizes this process by offering a fast pre-review submission that takes only about 5 minutes. Journal publishers then organize dedicated teams of full-time editors to manage manuscripts from the 24hreview platform, providing feedback on whether the manuscript is approved for peer review within approximately 24 hours. Upon receiving an "agree to peer review" decision, authors are notified via email and can then submit their manuscripts on the journal's official website, where they will enter a "fast processing workflow" for expedited review.
JB: Speed matters to authors and this platform appears to act as a broker and to encourage journals to make a quick decision on whether to send a paper out for review. This approach might be appropriate for sound science journals, but I doubt it would work for selective journals. Busy academic editors can’t be expected to turn a paper around in 24 hours. Good things come to those who wait.
Two further academic publishers have confirmed they have made deals with or are considering working with artificial intelligence (AI) companies a week after Taylor & Francis revealed it is set to earn £58m ($75m) from selling access to its authors’ work to AI firms.
Wiley and Oxford University Press (OUP) told The Bookseller they have confirmed AI partnerships, with the availability of opt-ins and remuneration for authors appearing to vary. In July, academics hit out at Taylor & Francis (T&F) for selling access to its authors’ research as part of a partnership with Microsoft worth $10m, with parent firm Informa’s half-year financial results later revealing that it was set to earn tens of millions from AI deals, with one additional confirmed but unnamed AI partner and future deals in the pipeline.
The study on “overcoming alphabetical disadvantage”, which analysed some 70,000 publications by 2,278 academics in the disciplines of psychology, sociology, economics and politics over a nine-year period, found that those with “surnames placed at the end of the alphabet…often employ strategies such as changing surname initials, using hyphenated surnames or adding prefixes to improve their positioning in the author list of the article”.
Times Higher Education (Jack Grove)
JB: My birth name was James Zutcher, but I changed it in 1995 when I started my PhD.
By launching a virtual environment in the paper, readers can view and execute the underlying code, and edit that code to experiment with the data. Data are hosted in the Google Cloud Platform and executed using Binder, making computation free to access, but also limiting the computing resources available. The interface supports interactive citations, including the ability to cross-reference and automatically number figures, equations and tables. When users hover over these interactive references, pop-ups provide information without requiring the reader to navigate away from the text.
At first, scientists will be able to submit Curvenote-formatted manuscripts to the journal Earth and Space Science — probably by the end of the year. The goal is to eventually offer the option for all AGU journals.
Leading teams effectively and managing journal portfolios is hard, especially in a rapidly changing marketplace. It can be lonely at the top with few people to bounce ideas off or be truly open with.
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 to get better at your craft.
Among the questions that urgently need answers include:
To what extent is paid open-access publishing contributing to publishing industry consolidation?
In what measurable ways is industry consolidation affecting publication quantity and quality?
If the number of independent publishers continues to decrease significantly, what are the ramifications for the research enterprise?
To what extent is the long-term survival of scientific society and university publishers at risk, and what effects would a decline in scientific society and university journal publishing have on different research communities?
Will vertical integration by publishing companies—i.e., the growing ownership of data analytics, hosting, and portal services by large academic publishers—measurably influence costs and/or quality of service for researchers and institutions?
PNAS (Phillip A. Sharp, William B. Bonvillian, Amy Brand, and Michael Stebbins)
JB: This essay contains more questions than answers. Lots and lots of questions in fact. Don't get me wrong, questions are good. But so’s shutting the stable door BEFORE the proverbial horse bolts. It was blatantly obvious from the outset that the introduction of APC-based business models would have two outcomes: (1) selectivity filters would become more porous; (2) scale would win.
I do not see the branding of the great journal names altering at all: Nature ,Cell, Science are in a very safe place. But when, as I read recently, a communications letters journal publishes 21,000 articles in a year, it is not so much a brand as a channel. I see a potential consolidation of brand to institutions. In an age where all publishing of this type is digital, all processing can be effectively accomplished in AI moderated environments: when peer review can be semi- automated as well , subject to human supervision and approval, then it is surely not hard to imagine that the research institutions will want to secure the branding and represent their corpus of knowledge and their productivity in one place? . And publishers of today will surely become their collaborators with this tomorrow. those who are despondent about the disintermediation of publishers and publishing should cheer themselves up with the huge prospects offered by collaboration with research institutions on one side to create secure branded repositories for articles and attached evidential data, while on the other side looking at the intelligent commercial reuse of such data in industrial and commercial AI applications. this is not the time for publishers to have a Gutenburg moment and retreat to the scriborium
David Worlock blog
JB: Is replacing journal brands with institutional brands a good idea? How will that improve equity? You could argue that it would make things even worse. Good journals provide a vitally important function: independence.
As a marketing team, we can communicate our messages, but trust has to be built at every touchpoint in the stakeholder journey. Just talking about it isn’t enough. We need to be about it. That’s a role each of us plays, from editorial to IT, from marketing to HR. We must build trust from the inside out. It starts with each manager and resonates out via every team member.
As a company, our goal is to give all stakeholders with whom we interact – whether internal or external – the experience of working with an organization it can trust.
MDPI Insights (Stefan Tochev)
JB: At the end of his newsletter Stefan links to an Op-Ed piece in Politico. He writes:
Politico’s reputation as a highly credible and influential news platform makes it an important venue to reach key opinion leaders (KOL) from academia, policymakers, and thought leaders from many industries. This visibility helps promote the OA philosophy.
You can read the Politico article here, but bear in mind this footnote:
The manuscript had indeed undergone extensive revisions. The biggest change, however, was also the biggest red flag. Without any explanation the study had lost almost 20% of its participants. An additional problem was that all the issues I had raised in my previous review report remained unaddressed. I sent my newly written feedback report the same day, exactly one week after my initial rejection.
Bishop Blog (René Aquarius)
JB: We should always be careful when considering anecdotes. This is n=1 after all. Having said that, many of us have heard similar stories to this over the years.
René Aquarius’ article is worth reading through to the end as it’s a shocking example of how transfer cascades can be abused.
The speakers were asked which tools should be exposed to authors for presubmission use, and which tools should be reserved for internal integrity checks. Patel shared an example of an editor who uses ChatGPT to write better letters to authors whose work is rejected. Rather than a generic letter, ChatGPT can help write customized, personalized letters explaining why manuscripts were rejected and sometimes suggesting alternate journals. So far, this has been well received by authors.
Science Editor (Michele Springer)
JB: Presumably the AI wasn’t trained on this set of rejection letters. FWIW, this rejection letter from 1844, is my all-time favourite. They don’t make ’em like they used to.
Authors have been told that JIF is an indicator of overall journal quality, and naturally if the JIF drops, that must mean that the quality has dropped. However, that is a deeply flawed assumption given that the JIF is impacted by trends in publishing that have absolutely nothing to do with journal quality. For example, there is a clear correlation between annual research output and JIF. The more articles published in a year, the more citations in that year; and higher citations lead to higher JIFs overall.
That growth effectively created JIF inflation, and contributed to a growing perception that JIFs should always go up, with little reason to question the drivers causing that growth. After all, if the JIF improved, it must have been the result of a successfully executed editorial strategy.
Lippincott Author Community (Duncan MacRae)
JB: If you’re new to scholarly publishing, read this article.
Given that accountability is shared among the author, reviewer, university, and publisher, could we devise a system to hold all four parties financially accountable? Does the funder play a role here as well? Are monetary penalties the right approach? If so, then perhaps a penalty system could be implemented, where each party pays a fine. These penalties could then be pooled into a fund managed by an advisory board. This fund could address several issues in academia, such as incentivizing peer reviewers, encouraging contributions from underrepresented countries, and supporting early-career researchers with discounted APC charges. Just a thought.
The Scholarly Kitchen
JB: The primary goal must always be to correct the scholarly record. Anything that reduces the likelihood of that happening is problematic. Yes, processing retractions is expensive in terms of time and money. Prevention is better than cure. Academic institutions and publishers need to invest in stopping the problem at source.
I’m more than a little obsessed with the topic of note taking (and note making; read this to learn about the difference) prompted in part by Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes.
I know of at least one Journalology reader who shares my obsession and uses Obsidian. Has anyone else ventured down the digital Zettelkasten rabbit hole?
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,...