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’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, ChronosHub
With the ChronosHub platform, publishers can now offer their authors a unified interface seamlessly integrated with existing systems, delivering a modern and cohesive experience.
From manuscript submissions to transfer acceptance, publishing agreement signing, and author charge payments, all author actions are accessible in one central location.
However, the success of the S2O model depends on the continuation of subscriptions by libraries. Sadly, while many previous subscribers have maintained their subscriptions under IWA Publishing’s version of S2O, a significant number of institutions across the world have not. Since the launch by IWA Publishing of S2O in 2021 our subscription revenue has declined considerably.
IWA Publishing is therefore adapting its implementation of S2O. All journals will continue to be published on an open access basis, but authors at institutions that do not participate in IWA Publishing’s S2O model will no longer be able to publish free of charge. This policy will take effect in September of 2024. Nothing will change for IWA Publishing’s existing subscribing institutions.
IWA Publishing (announcement)
JB: Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) allows publishers to transition a subscription journal (or portfolio) to open access, using established institutional sales channels. However, the big unknown is whether librarians will choose to cancel subscriptions once a journal flips and becomes fully open access. One of the early adopters of S2O was IWA (International Water Association) Publishing, which moved its 10 subscription journals to the S20 model in 2021.
A former colleague of mine, Arash Hejazi, took on the role of Managing Director of IWA Publishing in May 2024. He assessed the S2O business model and decided that a change was needed. Arash was kind enough to answer some questions from me via email. I started off by asking him about the decline in revenue. He said that the cumulative loss across three years has been very high (the attrition rate was “above 10%”) and noted:
We have seen cancellations across various regions, initially in North America and Europe, and now increasingly in Asia. Unless we change the model now, we expect the cancellations to grow.
The big question is whether IWA Publishing’s experience is an outlier. Last May, EDP Sciences announced that it would cease S2O on one of its journals, Radioprotection. Other S2O publishers have reported good renewals and some (for example De Gruyter) are expanding the number of journals that use the S2O model. Arash notes:
Different publishers may see different outcomes based on the shape of their portfolios, the geographical spread of their subscribers, and the fields they are active in. The inherent ’conditionality’ of S2O was not implemented by IWA Publishing and when we explored implementing it after three years, we encountered several operational complexities and logical paradoxes.
IWA Publishing did not implement S2O in the same way as, for example, Annual Reviews did. The omission of ’conditionality’ may be what caused it to fail; until this week I hadn’t realised that IWAP had missed out this important part of S2O. However, implementing conditionality is not easy, according to Arash:
The [S2O] model ought to find a solution to the paradox of ‘conditionality’ (that if significant numbers of libraries do not maintain their subscriptions, then the journals go back behind the paywall and do not continue to be published open access). This is potentially a problem for researchers who are required by their institutions or their research funders to publish on an open access basis. How can an author under such a mandate submit an article to a journal without knowing for sure that the volume of the journal in which the article will be published will be open access? Librarians and funders who are advising scholars to publish their research in open access journals, may think twice about recommending publishing in S2O journals, if the open access publication of the article is not guaranteed. Add to this the operational complexity of implementing the conditionality (make a journal OA, now let’s put it back behind the paywall, now we can make it OA again…).
I’ve had reservations about the S2O model from the start, but I’m willing to keep an open mind; it’s good that publishers are experimenting with new business models. Arash notes:
S2O cannot be merely sustained by ‘collective action’. The rules of economics will inevitably kick in and enforce the law of supply and demand. Any model needs to have a value proposition that creates a sustained stream of value for the customers. The value of access to the archive diminishes every year, and when subscription budgets are under pressure and librarians must choose, they will do so based on the priorities of their academics for access and publishing. This results in an increasing number of ‘free riders’, which makes the model collapse eventually.
This debate will run and run, both within the S2O Community of Practice and across scholarly publishing more broadly.
Nature Health advertised for an EiC a year or two ago, but for some reason it got shelved. This is a second attempt.
In 2004 and 2005 eight clinical Nature journals were launched under the brand Nature Clinical Practice. Revisiting this press release from 2009 brought back fond memories:
The existing Nature Reviews series of seven life science journals are firmly established as the leading monthly review journals in their fields. "Including the eight clinical journals as part of the Nature Reviews series will enable us to bring to the clinical sciences the qualities that have made the life science Nature Reviews journals so successful," says Dr James Butcher, Publisher of the clinical Nature Reviews titles. "No other publishing company is able to offer high quality monthly review journals covering advances in medical research from bench to bedside."
The rebranding worked. I learned many lessons from that experience, which I’ll save for another day. Suffice to say that Nature Reviews Respiratory Medicine is the first clinical Nature Reviews journal in a new medical specialty to launch since 2005 (we launched Nature Reviews Disease Primers in 2015, which went on to be the huge success that I hoped it would be; the 2023 impact factor is 81.5).
The two new Lancet journals will increase the size of the portfolio to 24 Lancet-branded journals.
I wrote about brand extension in The Brief two years ago (I now work independently of Clarke & Esposito). The opening paragraph went as follows:
In 1963, at the end of a two-decades-long stint editing The Lancet, Sir Theodore “Robbie” Fox gave a series of three valedictory lectures on the functions and future of medical journals. “And where one journal does not suffice,” he noted, “we seldom think of anything cleverer than to create another like it; and another, and another.”
Launching journals is not a new thing. Publishers have taken that path for decades.
Over the past few weeks some other publishers announced the launch of new journals too:
Sage has retracted 467 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, a title it took on when it acquired IOS Press last November for an undisclosed sum.
The publisher “launched a thorough investigation” into the journal in April, according to a spokesperson, after the indexing company Clarivate “informed us about concerns relating to the quality of some of the journal’s content.”
Retraction Watch (Ellie Kincaid)
JB: Wiley’s acquisition of Hindawi ended up being problematic too, remember. The new research integrity tools should help publisher acquisitions go more smoothly in the future. No one likes nasty surprises, especially a new owner.
Members of the appropriations committees in Congress are again taking aim at the White House’s plan to make federally funded research freely available upon publication, this time through a new, narrower angle that has broader support.
While Republican appropriators in the House have previously tried to entirely block the White House’s open access policy, now appropriators in both chambers of Congress have advanced legislation that would block federal agencies from limiting authors’ ability to choose how to license their work.
Open Research Europe (ORE) is the open access peer-reviewed publishing platform offered by the Commission as an optional service to Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries at no cost to them. It was launched in March 2021 and currently has approximately 500 publications and 900 peer-reviews. ORE follows an innovative open access publishing model for articles, which is based on open peer-review after publication (post-publication peer-review). The Commission’s vision, in collaboration with a number of national funders, is that as of 2026 ORE will transition from a publishing platform for Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries into a publishing platform for which responsibility could be shared with Member State funders and possibly also research performing organisations. The Commission is herewith tendering the open source publishing platform that will underpin ORE as of 2026, which will be largely based on existing open source software for scientific publishing.
In section 1, you will find data exploring China’s research growth, including indicators regarding its quality. Section 2 expands on the strategy underlying China’s accomplishments, including investment, and crucial policy shifts to increase research quality. Section 3 takes a closer look at how to identify world-leading institutions and high-impact researchers from the region.
Springer Nature (Ritu Dhand)
JB: If you care about the research coming out of China (who doesn't?) then you should read this brief report.
A Queensland University of Technology study has found that academics around the globe prize impact factor above all other considerations when choosing where to publish their work.
While they may resent reviewers’ requests to cut data from their papers, most comply if it means getting published in big-name journals.
The findings, published on a preprint platform, reflect perceptions that “academics who play the ‘publish or perish’ game” are strongly incentivised to accept all referees’ “suggestions” – including those that are “misleading or even incorrect”.
Academic publishers are selling access to research papers to technology firms to train artificial-intelligence (AI) models. Some researchers have reacted with dismay at such deals happening without the consultation of authors. The trend is raising questions about the use of published and sometimes copyrighted work to train the exploding number of AI chatbots in development.
Experts say that, if a research paper hasn’t yet been used to train a large language model (LLM), it probably will be soon. Researchers are exploring technical ways for authors to spot if their content being used.
One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study.
The work, published August 27 as a preprint on the Open Science Framework , examined SEM images in more than 1 million studies published by 50 materials science and engineering journals since 2010.
In their sting operation, Zaki and his colleagues created a Google Scholar profile for a fictional scientist and uploaded 20 made-up studies that were created using artificial intelligence.
The team then approached a company, which they found while analysing suspicious citations linked to one of the authors in their data set, that seemed to be selling citations to Google Scholar profiles. The study authors contacted the firm by e-mail and later communicated through WhatsApp. The company offered 50 citations for $300 or 100 citations for $500. The authors opted for the first option and 40 days later 50 citations from studies in 22 journals — 14 of which are indexed by scholarly database Scopus — were added to the fictional researcher’s Google Scholar profile.
Nature (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
JB: What surprised me the most about this article was the low price point.
At Origin Editorial we aim to ignite change in scholarly publishing. Our full complement of editorial services and consultations, as well as our reporting platform, Origin Reports, will elevate your journals.
Whether it’s through peer-review management services, or consultations on publisher RFPs and transitions, workflow and technology optimization, or reporting and analytics, you’re in good hands with Origin.
Visit our website today to learn more or contact Erin Landis, Managing Director, to ask how Origin can help meet your needs.
By writing more and publishing less, researchers can lower the pressure of the firehose while continuing to make valuable contributions to the world. When academics write policy briefs that inform legislation, create a blog to enhance dialogue in their field, produce open data that is broadly reused, or write open software that enables a broad gold standard method to be widely available, they should be rewarded with value on par with any particular peer-reviewed publication in a journal. All of these materials fill the spring even if only published manuscripts filter through to the firehose.
Upstream (Christopher Steven Marcum)
JB: This essay is rather long (it could do with a good edit, a bit like this newsletter), but it’s worth reading in full.
Increase your network. Observe who these resources are quoting and interacting with and check them out yourself. You’ll find that your web of knowledge will grow quickly and exponentially.
Enhance your understanding and personal relevance. If you’re not learning from others, you’re not growing. You can learn from those more advanced than you and those just starting out in their careers and everyone in between.
Let others help you save time. We have precious little time in our day job schedules. Take advantage of others who are sharing what they know.
Build your community. We only have limited opportunities to mingle in person at conferences and events. Influencers offer windows into worlds beyond your own.
While Sakana AI states it doesn’t see the role of human scientists diminishing, the company’s vision of “a fully AI-driven scientific ecosystem” would have major implications for science.
One concern is that, if AI-generated papers flood the scientific literature, future AI systems may be trained on AI output and undergo model collapse. This means they may become increasingly ineffectual at innovating.
However, the implications for science go well beyond impacts on AI science systems themselves.
There are already bad actors in science, including “paper mills” churning out fake papers. This problem will only get worse when a scientific paper can be produced with US$15 and a vague initial prompt.
One aspect that is often overlooked is what happens to the papers that cite retracted research. For example, in June, a Nature paper on stem cells was retracted amid concerns about the reliability of the data shown — 22 years after its publication, having amassed nearly 5,000 citations. Of course, an article lists references for a variety of reasons, such as to provide context, to introduce related work or to explain the experimental protocol. A retraction doesn’t mean that all the papers that cited the retracted article are now unreliable, too — but some might be. At a minimum, researchers should be aware of any retractions among the studies that they have cited. This would enable them to assess potential negative effects on their own work, and to mention the relevant caveats clearly should they continue to cite the retracted paper in the future. But, as far as I know, no systematic process is in place for publishers to alert citing scholars when an article is retracted. There should be.
Nature (Guillaume Cabanac)
JB: Let’s think through how this would work. Publishers would need a tool that has access to a list of retracted papers and that checks that list against the references cited in every article in its portfolio. Then, the publisher would need to send an automated email to the authors of each published paper that cited a retracted article. Getting the messaging right would be important. I can see authors getting confused and think they’re being accused of misconduct because they cited a paper that went on to be retracted.
Guillaume also makes this point:
Other avenues exist to question a study after publication, such as commenting on the PubPeer platform, where a growing number of papers are being reported. As of 20 August, 191,463 articles have received comments on PubPeer — nearly all of which were critical (see https://pubpeer.com/recent). But publishers typically don’t monitor these, and the authors of a criticized paper aren’t obliged to respond. It is common for post-publication comments, including those from eminent researchers in the field, to raise potentially important issues that go unacknowledged by the authors and the publishing journal.
As an FYI, publishers and journal editors can keep track of comments on their journals’ content here. PubPeer says:
PubPeer Journal Dashboards are built to give Journals specialized tools to keep track of and address comments on their articles. We provide a centralized dashboard with specialized search features and email alerts for everyone on your team.
If you haven’t signed up yet, you probably should...
Our findings suggest that AI tools are not yet ready to take on the task of editing academic papers without extensive human intervention to generate useful prompts, evaluate the output, and manage the practicalities. Our concerns echo those of previous studies, suggesting that despite the hype and promise, pure AI editing is still some way off.
Science Editor (Rachel Baron)
JB: This article reminded me that I should promote the session I’m chairing at ALPSP in a few weeks. The speakers and I need to agree on how to define “editing” (it’s more than moving words around on a page, in my opinion), but we may well touch on some of the issues raised in this article. Anyway, here’s the advert:
Other opinion articles
JB: I haven’t had time to read many of the articles that follow. I decided to include the links in case they’re helpful (to someone with a lot of time on their hands).
I will be at the ALPSP meeting in a few weeks. I hope to see some of you there, perhaps at this event:
Join some friendly faces from the SSP’s UK Community Engagement Committee (now amalgamated with the Scholarly Social) for a drink in the Podium Bar at 6pm, before heading over to the ALPSP Conference Welcome Reception at 7pm. Please let Bernie, Victoria and Abi know if you intend to join them by filling in this short form.
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, 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 Writefull uses AI to automate publishers’ language-related tasks and make these...