Journalology #90: S2O KO or OK?



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.

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News

Update from IWA Publishing on adaptations to its S2O open access model

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.

If you want to learn more about conditionality in the S2O model the best place to start is the 2020 article in Learned Publishing. The IWAP team (led by Rod Cookson who is now Publishing Director at The Royal Society) wrote about how they implemented S2O in UKSG Insights in 2022. Rick Anderson's 2021 post in The Scholarly Kitchen is helpful too.


New launches: a summary

JB: Between them The Lancet Group and the Nature Portfolio are recruiting for editors-in-chief for four new health-related journals:

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:


Publisher retracts more than 450 papers from journal it acquired last year

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.


Lawmakers Raise New Licensing Concerns Over White House Open Access Mandate

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.

FYI (Lindsay McKenzie)


Open Source Software technical infrastructure for the European Open Research Publishing Platform

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.

JB: The ORE (Open Research Europe) database has been run up until now by F1000. Last year the European Union announced that it was tendering for a new supplier for ORE. The contract has been awarded to PKP’s Open Journal Systems.


Global Research Pulse: China

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.


Academics ‘value journal prestige over veracity’

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”.

Times Higher Education (John Ross)

JB: You can read the preprint here.


Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly

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.

Nature (Elizabeth Gibney)


Thousands of papers misidentify microscopes, in possible sign of misconduct

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.

Retraction Watch​ (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)


The citation black market: schemes selling fake references alarm scientists

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.


Other news stories

Superconductivity paper spurs dispute as field reels from earlier scandal

European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology and Elsevier announce new partnership

Former Maryland dept. chair with $19 million in grants faked data in 13 papers, feds say – Retraction Watch

JMIR publications celebrates 25 years of digital health leadership

Editage Partners with EurekAlert! to Amplify Global Research Impact

New open access journal from APS and Sage expands publishing opportunity for psychological scientists

Science communication award announces jury members

No more hunting for replication studies: crowdsourced database makes them easy to find

Authors retract quantum physics paper from Science after finding mistakes – Retraction Watch

HHMI invests $500 million in AI-driven life sciences research

MDPI Becomes Affiliate Member of CHORUS

Catalyst Grant - Digital Science

Cash for catching scientific errors

South Korea’s role in research and innovation explored in latest Nature Index

South Korean science on the global stage

How South Korea can build better gender diversity into research

Faked heart papers retracted following Ohio State investigation

Exclusive: Publisher to retract article for excessively citing one researcher after Retraction Watch inquiry

Journal retracts article for plagiarized images after trying to gag researcher who complained

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Opinion

Drinking from the Firehose? Write More and Publish Less

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.


Is There Such a Thing as a Scholarly Publishing Influencer?

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.

Science Editor​ (Jennifer Regala)

JB: Thank you for your kind words, Jennifer.


A new ‘AI scientist’ can write science papers without any human input. Here’s why that’s a problem

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.

The Conversation (Karin Verspoor)


Chain retraction: how to stop bad science propagating through the literature

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...


AI Editing: Are We There Yet?

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).

Resetting and Recharging Research Communications in the Sun of Los Angeles: A FORCE11 Conference Report

Peer review will only do its job if referees are named and rated

Why I’ve removed journal titles from the papers on my CV

Facilitating code peer review

Advancing data sharing and reuse: Barriers, solutions, and recommendations from a data workshop

Revisiting - What Does “Federally Funded” Actually Mean?

Understanding Resilience in Scholarly Publishing

Assessments of research culture should be open about failure

What’s in a picture? Two decades of image manipulation awareness and action

Revisiting: Cats and Horses

Optimizing research integrity investigations: the need for evidence

The Evolution of AI at Silverchair

How Can We Ensure Research Integrity? A CHORUS Forum

Biochemistry journal retracts 25 papers for ‘systematic manipulation’ of peer review

Sleuths spur cleanup at journal with nearly 140 retractions and counting

Summary of the C4DISC Toolkit: A Focused Toolkit for Journal Editors and Publishers: Building DEIA in Editorial Roles and Peer Review

Ask Athena: Sharing Papers in Peer Review

ORCID — Bitcoin Is Back!

An Interview with Brian Cody of Scholastica

Beyond the Article: How JAVMA and AJVR Promote Authors and Their Work

Coko’s Evolution: Stage Two

Infrastructure Spotlight: bioRxiv and medRxiv

Translating CRediT into non-English languages – CRediT

Crossref’s metadata schema to include CRediT – CRediT

Physical Review E’s Chief Editor on Interdisciplinary Research and Peer Review Challenges

Variability, Irregular Publisher Metadata, and the Ongoing Evolution of Databases Complicates Reproducibility in Bibliometrics Research - The Scholarly Kitchen


Three ways I can support you


And finally...

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.

Until next time,

James


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