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.
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 undoubtedly Jake Okechukwu Effoduh, who gave the plenary lecture. His energy, positivity and insight were truly appreciated by the attendees.
Thank you to our sponsor, ChronosHub
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On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier B.V., John Wiley & Sons, Wolters Kluwer NV, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), on behalf of a putative class or scientists and scholars who allege that these six world’s-largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly journals conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research.
Lieff Cabraser (announcement)
JB: There are three allegations, the last of which is:
Third, the publisher defendants agreed to prohibit scholars from freely sharing the scientific advancements described in submitted manuscripts while those manuscripts are under peer review, a process that often takes over a year.
The Ingelfinger Rule dates from 1969 — should The New England Journal of Medicine be in the dock too?!? In any case, a quick Google search can show that this allegation is false. For example, here’s an excerpt from Springer Nature’s preprint policy:
Preprints are defined as an author’s version of a research manuscript prior to formal peer review at a journal, which is deposited on a public server (as described in Preprints for the life sciences. Science 352, 899–901; 2016). Preprints may be posted at any time during the peer review process. Posting of preprints is not considered to be a prior publication and will not jeopardize being considered for publication in Springer Nature journals.
I am rather dismayed by this case, especially when there are very good grounds on which academic publishers can be challenged.
I agree with some of Dorothy’s criticisms of our industry, especially this one:
Academic publishers claim to ensure quality control of what gets published, but some of them fail to do the necessary due diligence in selecting editors and reviewers, with the result that the academic literature is flooded with weak and fraudulent material, making it difficult to distinguish valuable from pointless work, and creating an outlet for damaging material, such as pseudoscience. This has become a growing problem with the advent of paper mills.
The new software tools that can detect fraudulent or poor quality work at scale should make it much harder for publishers to cut corners. Soon there will be no place to hide. The market will punish publishers that fail to do adequate quality control.
Springer Nature, publisher of science journal Nature and Scientific American, said on Thursday it plans an initial public offering (IPO) on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange that could be completed by the end of the year.
The German academic research publisher said its planned IPO will consist of a 200 million euro ($220 million) capital increase and a sale of existing shares. Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and BC Partners currently own 53% and 47% stakes respectively.
Reuters (Emma-Victoria Farr)
JB: The Reuters news story (and others like it) is short on detail, especially with regards to the specifics re: timing.
But despite positive tailwinds, investors are leaning into conservatism.
Throughout the year sources have told ECM Pulse that IPO discounts need to be around 20% to 30% to peers to have a chance of success in a tricky market, and sources say this demand from investors has not changed.
While Springer Nature’s target numbers will be likely based on forward-looking estimates for 2024/2025, which will be released by analysts in IPO marketing, Springer Nature will have to come in at a decent discount to satisfy those investor demands.
“It’s all down to valuation, things are better than they were, but it comes down to price. Issuers need to realise when they bring a deal that this is very much still a buyers’ market,” said one ECM investor when reflecting on Europe’s IPO market through to the end of 2024.
The IPO prospectus has not been published yet, so at this point we will need to watch and wait.
It’s an unusually detailed analysis of a little-noticed scheme that may be allowing some researchers to reap undeserved benefits for boilerplate or downright manipulative reviews. The practice may also be compromising the integrity of the scientific literature. “Some other researchers will probably base their future research on those fake-reviewed papers, and it’s scary,” especially for ones about health and medicine, says Oviedo-García, who primarily studies marketing and tourism.
Oviedo-García and other research integrity experts suspect the reviewers worked off a template to quickly crank out reports. They could then take credit for the work on their CVs to gain a boost in professional evaluations. Some may have additional self-interest: Several reviewers asked the author to include citations to their own papers, and some authors complied.
Science (Jeffrey Brainard)
JB: Academics get very little credit for doing peer review and it seems likely that some will cut corners to get the job done as quickly as possible. A good editor should be able to spot boilerplate easily.
This report provides an opportunity to reflect each year on our commitment to delivering impact, recognition, and value within the global healthcare community. As a 500-strong organisation, we are consistently proud of what we achieve. We have always said that we are small enough to care but big enough to deliver, and this report proves this statement to be true. Our vision of creating a healthier world is evident in our collaborative efforts to design and implement projects that enhance community wellbeing. We strive to make a difference across all the communities we serve worldwide.
Impact Report (Chris Jones)
JB: This report reads more like a piece of introspective reflection than as a marketing puff piece. I wish more annual reports were framed in this way.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Scholarly Angels alongside Andrew Preston and Paul Peters. Our mission is to support emerging entrepreneurs committed to enhancing the research ecosystem by building tools for researchers, institutions, publishers, funders, and R&D-intensive industries. Scholarly Angels will provide the guidance and resources to help turn ideas into successful companies—so founders can rely on more support and a little less luck.
If you're a founder looking to partner with engaged investors to grow your startup, we’d love to hear from you.
And if you’re interested in co-investing with Scholarly Angels in the most innovative startups in this space, let’s join forces to help the next generation of research tech startups soar.
LinkedIn (Ben Kaube)
JB: Scholarly Angels sounds like a 1970s TV series reboot. The IMDb entry would read something like this:
Three handsome sleuths work at a detective agency run by a mysterious AI who gives instructions over the telephone. They go undercover to solve the many cases of scholarly fraud that come their way.
Paper mills, the business of manufacturing and profiting off research fraud, is a growing ethical challenge in the scholarly publishing community. As paper mill articles are increasingly harder to detect, publishers’ reliance on peer review and manual screening processes can fail to prevent deceitful content from reaching publication. In addition to wasting publisher resources, harm may come to journal reputations and the communities in which the research is intended to serve. To mitigate these risks, Aries Systems and Clear Skies have collaborated to integrate Papermill Alarm, a paper mill detection service, with Editorial Manager® (EM), the leading submission and peer review tracking system.
Through our experience working with the preprint infrastructure community, including our landscape analysis and strategic support work with arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, we learnt that community and business/operations infrastructure lend a system view and consciousness to the ecosystem. A thriving ecosystem of tools, services, infrastructures, and people doesn’t happen organically. It can be enabled by careful research and listening, and intentional conversations with invested stakeholders, to identify critical gaps and needs and explore and test how the various components and players can best work together. We are excited to bring what we’ve learnt from the preprint space to add value to and learn from the research software ecosystem.
In their media messaging, the publishers and the Société des Gens de Lettres are cheering a change of policy on the part of the University of Nantes, which has renounced a prior regulation that obligated its researchers to publish in open access.
This has come out in an administrative court case in which the publishers’ association and the Society of Letters had strenuously objected, asserting that making open-access publication a requirement “ran counter to copyright and academic freedom.”
Although Aquarius and his team are pleased journals are fixing problems, they argue doing so silently is not the right solution. “You’re never sure who might have read the paper in the meantime and is not aware of the problem that was there and has been addressed,” Aquarius said.
Another issue journals have been silently fixing are fingerprints left by generative AI tools like ChatGPT when they are used to write manuscripts, said study co-author Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France. Cabanac has developed a tool that finds mentions of odd turns of phrases that are indicative of fabricated research papers.
The Global Academic Integrity Network (Gain), representing 40 standards agencies, has written to platforms including Google, X and LinkedIn, urging them to “take a stand and join the fight against academic dishonesty” by blocking links to essay mills, which allow students to pay someone to write an assignment on their behalf.
Many leading sectors have passed laws outlawing contract cheating, including England, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, as well as several US states – with legislation often explicitly banning the advertising of such services.
But Gain’s open letter warns that recent years “have witnessed a proliferation in the marketing and promotion of online cheating services across digital platforms”.
In this blog post, we are delighted to share how we’re enabling researchers to add another kind of Trust Marker to their ORCID records—verified institutional email domains. This allows researchers to demonstrate their association with an institution in a way that also preserves their privacy. ORCID uses the domain information available in the ROR registry to map these email domains to the correct ROR ID for the organization.
ORCID (Tom Demeranville)
JB: Many years ago a former colleague kindly gave me a mug with my ORCID number on it. Somehow I’ve managed not to smash it.
Perhaps I should branch out into Journalology merchandise? Let me know if you want a “filter, enhance, amplify” t-shirt, mug or tattoo.
Last year, we formalised our support for global open access publishing through the establishment of the Royal Society Open Access Equity scheme. This offers free publication to researchers from over 100 low- and middle-income countries and territories on all our journals, sharing these benefits of dissemination and reach.
In the year following implementation on 31 July 2023, we have seen this scheme support 20 papers to publication. Author location was extremely varied, with 14 countries represented across 4 different continents. This diversity was reflected in the disciplines of the work too, which included applied mathematics, nanotechnology, environmental chemistry, computer science, ecology and conservation, and more. By a small margin, the majority fell within the physical sciences.
Royal Society (Sophie Ferguson)
JB: To put this number into context, the Royal Society published around 2800 articles (of all types) in 2023, according to Digital Science’s Dimensions.
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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.
In parallel, we call on publishers to introduce a mandatory ‘author expertise statement’ in which authors would list their respective areas of expertise pertaining to the paper’s subject matter, perhaps as an extension to the existing author contribution statement. Such a mandate has ample precedent; for example, federal funding mechanisms require the inclusion of subject matter experts in investigation teams. We view this solution as complementary to the database referenced above. If journals were to require an explicit statement regarding which authors contributed which skills, then researchers would be incentivized to leverage our proposed database when expertise in a given area is lacking. Ultimately, we believe that adopting these tools and practices would stimulate domain-informed collaborations, bridge existing knowledge siloes and lead to more transparent science.
Nature Human Behaviour (Satyaki Sikdar et al)
JB: In recent decades we have asked editors and authors to do more and more (often with less and less). There are numerous checklists and statements that need to be completed. Some of those provide a good return on the investment of time. It’s worth asking whether new initiatives offer enough benefit to the community. Academics and editors are over-worked. There’s a real cost to asking for more declarations that need to be written and monitored. Will we keep adding more as the years go by?
Many have argued that science and democracy are natural partners (perhaps even co-dependent), but China’s success puts that into question. Why has China succeeded without the accompanying liberalization that so many expected? I argue that China lacked the state functions, provided in the West, that would create the conditions for science and technology to flourish. Since 1980, China has since put these policy mechanisms in place, to spectacular effect.
Since reopening to the West, and with carefully crafted imitation, China made four strategic decisions to propel them forward in science and technology: investment in research and development, changes to intellectual property laws, growth of educational investments (including student mobility), and active, targeted procurement of industrial and military products. Let’s take these apart.
While we support the overarching aim to unlock knowledge for the national benefit and to put publicly funded research into the hands of all Australians, CAUL does not support the Public Access Model proposed in the Advice. The Public Access Model is not an open access model and does not constitute an open access strategy. It will not drive the transformation of the scholarly publishing landscape that is needed to ensure an open future, and it will only reinforce the problematic academic publishing business models that Dr Foley notes in her Advice.
We are delighted to announce that a new ‘Essay’ article type is now available at PLOS Climate, PLOS Global Public Health, PLOS Mental Health and PLOS Water.
Essays, which are predominantly solicited by our Editors, are compelling, opinion-based pieces, focused on the most urgent and impactful topics facing our journals’ fields. They fulfill a community need for an article type that can, in particular, address concerns related to policy implications of regional or intersectional interest.
The Official PLOS Blog (announcement)
JB: A former colleague of mine, John McConnell, said that there are two types of editors: lumpers and splitters. Lumpers want to have as few article types as possible. Splitters like to create new article types at whim, much to the annoyance of the technology teams that need to support them. Will readers understand (or care about) the nuanced difference between “essays”, “perspectives” and “opinion” article types, for example? This is not a dig at PLOS, but rather something that all editors and publishers should consider carefully.
Scholarly publishers want and need to publish reliable and trustworthy content – and while there is a great deal of focus on investing in enhanced internal checks, resources and training, this is also a problem we cannot solve on our own. As the drivers of research integrity and publishing ethics misconduct can arise across different stakeholders (funders, institutions, researchers, publishers, indexers), it is in our interest to ensure joint efforts can effectively tackle the problems and re-establish a culture of integrity and trust. United2Act (supported by the COPE and STM organizations) is one such example of a collaborative effort between international stakeholders to take practical steps in tackling issues around research integrity, and specifically on what different stakeholders can do to attenuate the impact of systematic fraud, and ultimately permanently disrupt the activities of paper mills.
UKSG Insights (Sabina Alam)
JB: Publishers have a duty to avoid publishing fraudulent or poor quality science, but academic institutions and funders have an important role to play too. It’s easy to bash the publisher, but surely the fraudsters’ employers bear some responsibility too.
From this early data, we can see that linking key research objects to the submission of manuscripts and setting up supportive policies and editorial practices can enable achieving fully open science. Of course, different scientific communities have specific needs, and computational science may be the low hanging fruit of what is to come in promoting data and code sharing. But knowing that a world of full open science is possible, should encourage us and excite us to the necessary work ahead.
Impact of Social Sciences (Erika Pastrana)
JB: No one has done more to promote this important topic than Erika.
The bespoke Journalology coaching programme is especially helpful for publishing professionals who are transitioning into new leadership roles and need support to hit the ground running.
Senior managers hire coaches to help them improve their leadership, communication and management skills. Coaches generally work across multiple industries and so are unable to provide much insight into the business of scholarly publishing
The Journalology executive coaching programme is designed for editorial and publishing executives who want support from someone with real-world experience who can provide editorial and business insight, help improve decision-making, as well as hone leadership and management capabilities.
It can be lonely at the top, but it doesn’t need to be. Get the support you deserve.
Peer Review Week will be with us soon. If last year is anything to go by, there will be more articles to read, webinars to watch and podcasts to listen to than any of us will have time to consume. You can read the current lineup here.
At ALPSP I met Chris Leonard, the author of another newsletter, Scalene, for the first time. Chris writes about the intersection between peer review, humans and AI. You can (and should) sign up for his newsletter here.
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, 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,...
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...