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.
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 intended: subscribers needed to opt in to get open access content and lost access when the targets weren’t met.
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I am pleased to be releasing my advice on open access to research literature, which has been a focus for me throughout my time as Australia’s Chief Scientist. My research shows that increasing access to the research literature, much of which is currently behind paywalls, will unlock enormous benefits for Australia.
There’s significant international momentum towards open access regimes, and it’s great to see the interest and activity here in Australia.
I’ve been thinking about options that would work in the Australian context. Drawing on discussions with many stakeholders, I have proposed a new approach to open access – a ‘public access model’.
Australia’s Chief Scientist (Cathy Foley)
JB: You can read the discussion document here. This is how Dr Foley describes the public access model:
However, journal articles involving Australian authors comprise only 4% of publications globally. None of these models allow fee-free access by Australian residents to the remaining 96% of the world’s journal articles. To address this challenge, Australia’s Chief Scientist has developed a fourth model: A public access model, where centralised negotiations for national read and publish agreements (i) allow read access for all of Australia to all the world’s journal articles – past and future; and (ii) include open access publishing for all new, Australian-led research to ensure it is freely accessible to the world.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but I can’t see how this would work in practice. For example, would a prestigious US clinical society, which publishes relatively few research articles from Australia, be willing to give free-to-read access to all Australians as part of a Read and Publish deal? Even if the price was acceptable to both parties, I can’t see how it would be implemented. If they tried to geofence the access (i.e. only people accessing the content from an Australian IP address), that could easily be circumvented by a VPN, in the same way that people use a VPN to access region-specific Netflix content. The commercial risk would be too high, surely.
As always, I’m happy to be corrected. If I’ve misunderstood what's being proposed here, please let me know. I confess that I haven’t read the 46 page document from top to bottom.
The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation should implement “Plan U”, mandating the publication of all taxpayer-funded research as “preprints” before they are submitted to academic journals. The Minister should also lead collective bargaining with academic publishers on behalf of universities to reduce costs and encourage reform. UK Research and Innovation’s “open access” policy should be modified to accept the publication of preprints as compliance.
UK Day One (Sanjush Dalmia and Jonny Coates)
JB: Research Professional News covered this report as did THE, which argues that the UKRI block grants (around £40m) to pay for APCs should be stopped: £10m should be invested into not-for-profit preprint servers and post-publication peer review platforms, the reports’ authors argue, and the reminder repurposed as cost savings.
Plan U makes a lot more sense to me than the rights retention strategy. However, it would mean that the version of record isn’t publicly available and runs the risk that inaccurate preprints (i.e. before peer review) will be used to power LLMs in the future.
This report puts forward a vision for Open Research Europe as a collective non-profit open access publishing service for the public good. This vision comes in the midst of important policy developments towards more equitable, transparent and sustainable costs for publishing and access to content, as well as accelerated activities for reforming research assessment. The report includes a rationale for the vision, the EU policy and political context, a value proposition and principles for the operation of a collective ORE.
Publications Office of the European Union (announcement)
Research delivered solid growth driven by robust demand to publish in our journals and execution of our publishing and go-to-market strategies. Learning delivered strong growth as it sees continued demand for its authoritative content in training GenAI models and core growth in Academic. Finally, we closed our third and final divestiture and actioned the remainder of our $130 million cost savings program, positioning us for further performance and profit improvement.
Wiley (press release)
Consider this sentence in comparison with the two previous stories:
The Company expects capex of $130 million compared to $93 million in Fiscal 2024 driven by the acceleration of its Research Publishing platform work and infrastructure modernization.
Some readers may resent commercial publishers’ profit margins, which is understandable to some degree. However, please remember that those profits are the result of considerable capital investment. Commercial publishers (and the large society publishers) are investing hundreds of millions of $/€/£ into their publishing infrastructures each year to help them to filter, enhance and amplify their authors’ content.
You can read the Wiley slide deck that was presented to investors here. Here are some key points from the presentation:
Article submissions +18% in Q1 vs prior year
Article output +6% in Q1 vs prior year
Research publishing revenues grew by 4%
Future plans include: “Advance Research Publishing Platform: migrate journals to end-to-end workflows and platforms”
Taylor & Francis has announced the launch of a new series of selective, forward-thinking open access journals which will present diverse perspectives on the complex issues facing our world. Each Critical Insights title is led by recognized experts in the field and will guide authors through the publishing process with high quality editorial support.
Broad in scope, Critical Insights journals will champion new thinking and novel approaches, with ‘Critical Insights summaries’ alongside each article outlining how it contributes to the direction of the field. Figures and images will also be available in a format that can be easily reused and shared.
Dedicated publishing staff and optimized systems developed for the series will ensure authors receive fast desk decisions, constructive and detailed peer review, high production values, and support to write their Critical Insights summaries.
Taylor & Francis (press release)
JB: Coming up with new journal names is hard as many of the most obvious titles (e.g. Journal of XYZ) have already been taken. One way to get around this is to create a prefix brand (in this case “Critical Insights”) and then add the specialty name at the end. Branding is a matter of taste, but to my ear “Critical Insights” sounds a bit naff. You can read more about the new series here, which currently consists of four new journals.
This week Sage announced a new journal, Dialogues on Climate Change, which is the “latest title in the prestigious Dialogues series” (there are five journals in total; I'm ashamed to say that I hadn’t heard of them before).
Many new journal brands have used marketing copy like “led by recognized experts in the field” and “high quality editorial support”. Creating a unique product is difficult. Build it and they may not come.
For example, back in 2019 Wiley announced, with much fanfare, a new series of journals using the suffix “Next”. Neuroscience Next and Genetics & Genomics Next were the first journals, with former Nature editors at the helm. I can’t find those journals listed on the Wiley website or in Digital Science’s Dimensions database.
My favourite marketing message for a new journal is from 1823:
A lancet can be an arched window to let in the light or it can be a sharp surgical instrument to cut out the dross and I intend to use it in both senses.
Critical Insights doesn’t have quite the same punch. T&F friends: please don’t be offended and instead take this as a challenge and aim to prove me wrong. Now that you have one of the most talented editors (and leaders) that I’ve ever worked with in your journals management team, I wouldn’t bet against you.
The journal Nature Synthesis has pulled a high-profile article describing the creation of a new type of carbon after a university investigation found some data were made up.
“The authors of the original paper claimed to have created an entirely new form or carbon, graphyne, which is fundamentally different common diamond or graphite,” said Valentin Rodionov, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, whose team has been investigating the now-retracted work for the past two years.
If true, this would have been a groundbreaking discovery,” Rodionov told Retraction Watch. His team described its findings in a commentary published on September 2 in the journal.
Retraction Watch (unsigned)
JB: You can read the Matters Arising commentary here.
Springer Nature has halted an accepted paper criticizing the publishing giant’s controversial retraction last year of an article that surveyed parents of children with gender dysphoria, leading an associate editor to resign, Retraction Watch has learned.
According to emails we obtained, the blocked paper was slated to appear as a commentary in a special issue of Springer Nature’s Current Psychology that aimed “to stimulate discussion of all aspects of the ‘unpublication’ of scientific articles.”
Studies that try to replicate the findings of published research are hard to come by: it can be difficult to find funders to support them and journals to publish them. And when these papers do get published, it’s not easy to locate them, because they are rarely linked to the original studies.
A database described in a preprint posted in April1 aims to address these issues by hosting replication studies from the social sciences and making them more traceable and discoverable. It was launched as part of the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT), a community-driven initiative that teaches principles of open science and reproducibility to researchers.
Voting members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the formation of a Working Group to develop an ANSI/NISO standard for a United States national PID strategy, which will increase the adoption of PIDs and provide critical support to open research. NISO is currently seeking members from across the information community, including representatives from federal agencies, PID providers, academic libraries, publishers, and software providers, to join the resulting Working Group.
Persistent identifiers, or PIDs, are a critical part of the infrastructure supporting scholarly communications and open research. They support research discovery and citations, allow users and systems to easily identify authors and institutions and link them to research outputs, and help ensure compliance with a growing number of government and funder mandates advancing open scholarship. To date, however, approaches to encouraging the adoption of PIDs and investment in PID infrastructure have not been coordinated, and there is little guidance available on how best to improve the implementation and efficacy of PIDs within the diverse spheres of the US research landscape.
ChronosHub is proud to announce that the first publisher, ACS Publications, has successfully gone live with their newly launched unified user experience, marking a significant milestone in their journey.
The product launch and first publisher going live comes less than a year after being acquired by the American Chemical Society (ACS). Working as an independent subsidiary, the rapid development and deployment underscore ChronosHub’s commitment to revolutionizing the publishing experience for authors and publishers alike.
The new author interface, which was unveiled at the 2024 SSP Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, represents a major leap forward in enhancing the author experience across the publishing process.
ChronosHub (press release)
JB: ChronosHub is sponsoring this week’s newsletter, but they didn't send me this press release or ask me to cover it. I found it through my standard weekly search strategies.
A Swiss medical publisher has ceased operations, including shuttering nationally prominent journals, after its parent organization, the Swiss Medical Association FMH, allegedly forced it into bankruptcy.
According to information on the website of EMH Swiss Medical Publishers, the Swiss Medical Association FMH holds a 55% stake in the firm. But on Aug. 22, 2024, the FMH’s board terminated its collaboration with the publishing house, including licensing for the association’s journal Schweizerische Ärztezeitung (Swiss Medical Journal), with immediate effect.
As you might have noticed, we’ve already adopted the Clarivate look and feel across many touchpoints. For instance, you might have seen us refer to Ex Libris as part of Clarivate and we have recently updated the look and feel of our Ex Libris website. As we continue to transition, you’ll notice the gradual phasing out of individual company logos for ProQuest, Ex Libris, Innovative and Alexander Street. This will happen in phases with Ex Libris and Innovative taking steps to change over the next few months.
Clarivate (announcement)
JB: Branding is complex for large organisations that own imprints. Nicky Borowiec’s article A cohesive brand - house of brands or branded house? provides a useful overview of how organisations can approach this.
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However, to date, there is a lack of cohesive evidence to prove that Open Science is achieving its aim of fostering societal impact. There are more and more efforts around the world to measure and monitor the implementation of Open Science practices (often referred to as “uptake”), like the European Commission’s Open Science Monitor, but there is no systematic way of monitoring its societal impact.
In response to this gap, we set out to synthesise and evaluate published evidence of societal impacts stemming from Open Science generally, and its key aspects, including Open Access publications, open/FAIR data, open-source code and software, open evaluation, and Citizen Science. Our scoping review considered more than 14,000 published papers and reports, and identified within these 196 that demonstrated evidence of societal impact.
Impact of Social Sciences (Nicki Lisa Cole)
JB: This article makes sobering reading. Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, but it’s noteworthy nonetheless.
When I have discussed with colleagues these and other issues around MDPI practices, I find that credible researchers tell me that there are some excellent journals published by MDPI. It seems unfortunate that, in seeking rapid growth via the mechanism of Special Issues, the publisher has risked its reputation by giving editorial responsibility to numerous guest editors without adequate oversight, and encouraged quantity over quality. Furthermore, the lack of transparency demonstrated by the publisher covertly removing Special Issue status from articles by guest editors does not appear consistent with their stated commitment to ethical policies.
BishopBlog (Dorothy Bishop)
JB: Special issues were covered in the latest issue of The Brief. Their conclusions were broadly similar to the points I made back in July (The Empire Strikes Back and New Year’s Day). Indeed, one former colleague asked if I had written the Brief article (I didn’t — I’ve been working independently of Clarke & Esposito since the start of this year).
The C&E team had this to say about MDPI:
The math is unforgiving. MDPI has published 50,000 fewer papers in the first half of 2024 as compared with last year. At an average of CHF 1,258 (US $1,491) per article, this is a decline of over $74.5 million in just the first half of the year – factoring in waivers and discounts, it is somewhat less but still a very large number. And yet, any reduction in head count comes just as more editorial scrutiny is required. This is a strain that all publishers are facing, but pure-play OA publishers have much less room to maneuver due to the proportionate drop in revenue associated with any decrease in output.
Underreporting and misreporting conflict of interest statements or types can undermine the integrity of scholarly work. Other research integrity issues around paper mills, plagiarism and predatory journals have already damaged the trust the public has with published research, so further problems with COIs can only worsen the situation. With the evidence of these findings, it is clear that all stakeholders in the research publication process must adopt standard practices on reporting critical trust markers such as COI to uphold the transparency and honesty in scholarly endeavors.
Digital Science
JB: One of the downsides of working in the same industry for a while is that I feel like I’m living through groundhog day. We’ve been discussing COIs for as long as I can remember. For example, here’s the bottom line from a Lancet editorial from 1996:
The Lancet's simple test, by no means perfect, is this: would a non-disclosed commercial interest, should it be revealed later, prove embarrassing to an author? We rely on the conscience and judgment of the author to draw our attention to such a personal conflict. In the end, this must be the person with whom the responsibility lies.
The following extract from a 2002 article by Richard Smith, the former editor of the BMJ who is always entertaining, is another example from the archives; what’s embarrassing to one person may not be embarrassing to someone else:
Our policy requires people to declare financial conflicts of interest and encourage them to declare non-financial ones. This is partly because most of the evidence relates to financial conflicts of interest and because defining non-financial conflicts is hard. But should we go further? Another question is whether we should ask people to declare the scale of their financial conflicts of interest? Charles Warlow, president of the Association of British Neurologists, raised this question in the debate over the American Heart Association and alteplase. It seems likely that different degrees of conflict are probably raised by being bought a cheese sandwich by a company or by being flown on Concorde to New York to give a lecture and spend five days in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. But at the moment we don't ask for amounts, partly because we British are even more embarrassed to talk about money than about our sex lives. But should we change?
These are just a couple of examples of the obfuscation around language in the open world. The stakes have risen more recently with weaponisation of the words ‘trust’, ‘risk’ and ‘sustainability’ (the subject of future discussion).
This language appropriation is irritating at best but fundamentally it is deeply concerning. There are echoes of ‘newspeak’ as described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Newspeak changed the meaning of words and was ‘designed to diminish the range of thought’. We need to remain aware of these issues and listen carefully to what is being said, and by whom.
Words matter. It is very hard to have meaningful conversations and make informed decisions when we cannot agree what we are talking about.
Upstream (Danny Kingsley)
JB: Is it deliberate language appropriation or is Hanlon’s razor at work here?
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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.
Our findings suggest that journalists' perceptions of debates in scholarly communication vary widely, with some displaying a highly critical and nuanced understanding and others presenting a more limited awareness. Those with a more in-depth understanding report closely scrutinizing the research they report, carefully vetting the study design, methodology, and analyses. Those with a more limited awareness are more trusting of the peer review system as a quality control system and more willing to rely on researchers when determining what research to report on and how to vet and frame it. We discuss the benefits and risks of these varied perceptions and practices, highlighting the implications for the nature of the research media coverage that reaches the public.
bioRxiv (Alice Fleerackers et al)
Webinars
If you want to learn about some of the core challenges facing the scholarly publishing community, this list of webinars could be of interest:
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).
And finally...
I'll be heading off to Manchester (UK, not New Hampshire) for the start of the ALPSP meeting on Wednesday. If you’re attending too please say hello, especially if we haven't met before. Here’s another quick plug for the session on Thursday. I hope to see some of you there!
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, 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,...
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...