Journalology #89: Zettelkasten



Hello fellow journalologists,

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.

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News

Springer Nature 2023 Open Access Report

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
...
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.

Ensuring everyone can benefit from the open access transition. There’s a strong focus on this topic in the press release, including the diamond OA journals (everyone is talking about diamond OA journals).

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.”


Launch of 24hreview: Enhances efficiency and integrity in academic submissions

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.
...
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.


Wiley and Oxford University Press confirm AI partnerships as Cambridge University Press offers 'opt-in'

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 Bookseller (Heloise Wood)


‘Surname strategies’ help researchers beat alphabet citation bias

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.


A publishing platform that places code front and centre

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.

Nature (Amanda Heidt)

JB: AGU is doing a pilot project in partnership with Curvenote, which was announced in an editorial last December. The Nature news feature says:

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.

Other news stories

Digital Science appoints new Chief People Officer

Clarivate Appoints Former ProQuest CEO Matti Shem Tov as the Company’s Next CEO

Karger Publishers Accelerates Audience Growth & Engagement Strategy through Expanded Partnership with Hum

Journal republishes chiropractic paper it had retracted after legal threats

PNAS corrects article by Kavli prize winner who threatened to sue critic

ResearchGate and Tsinghua University Press announce first Journal Home partnership from China region

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Opinion

The future of open research policy should be evidence based

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.


The World After OA

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.


The [MDPI] CEO's Letter #14 - New Headquarters, Marketing, Poland

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 above column is sponsor-generated content.

My experience as a reviewer for MDPI

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.


Bridging AI and Human Expertise for Sustainable Scholarly Communication: Enhancing Integrity and Efficiency

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.


Making Sense of the 2024 Journal Citation Reports

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.


Should Publishers Invoice Authors for Retraction Costs?

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.


Other opinion articles

Open Access in Switzerland

Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Academic Editors?

Artificial Intelligence in Scholarly Publishing: Responding to Opportunities and Risks

The scientific article as a master finding system

Simplifying data and code sharing

Never Waste a Good Crisis: A Conversation with Klaas Sijtsma, Former Rector Magnificus of Tilburg University

Introducing the NISO Communication of Retractions, Removals and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Guidelines


And finally...

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.

Last month a new book came out: A System for Writing: How an Unconventional Approach to Note-Making Can Help You Capture Ideas, Think Wildly, and Write Constantly - A Zettelkasten Primer, which I plan to read while I’m on holiday.

A few days ago I listened to episode 209 of the Focused podcast, where the book’s author, Bob Doto, was a guest.

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?

Until next time (next month),

James


113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2205
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