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.
A few hours after hitting the ’send’ button on last week’s newsletter I saw a tweet about Heliyon — a broad-scope journal published by Elsevier and hosted on the Cell press website — being put ’on hold’ for indexing by Web of Science.
That piqued my interest because I had just started drafting an article about Heliyon and Cureus, the two journals that grew the fastest in 2023, for the Digital Science Dimensions blog. I naturally wanted to see if Cureus (which is published by Springer Nature) had also been put on hold. Sure enough it had. That added an extra twist to my blog post, which went live this week: A view on two rapidly growing journals.
Meanwhile the Springer Nature IPO finally went through. The initial reaction from the markets was positive, which bodes well for BC Partners, the private equity firm that owned 47% of Springer Nature, as it seeks to sell more shares in the coming months. Future investors will want to see strong open access growth, which makes the fate of Cureus an important news story.
So, there’s lots to talk about in this week’s newsletter. But first a message about the coaching programme that I run.
Become a better leader: the Journalology coaching programme
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.
The bespoke coaching programme is especially helpful for publishing professionals and editors who are transitioning into new leadership roles and need support to hit the ground running. It can be lonely at the top, but it doesn’t need to be. Get coaching support and become a better leader.
Shares in academic research publisher Springer Nature gained on their first day of trading in Frankfurt on Friday, with Europe’s first major initial public offering since the summer boosting prospects for equity markets.
Springer Nature shares gained 8.2 per cent to close at €24.24 in Frankfurt, having priced the stock in the IPO around the middle of its targeted range at €22.50. The rise valued Springer, which sold €600mn of shares as part of the deal, at €4.8bn.
Financial Times (Ivan Levingston, Rafe Uddin, and Raphael Minder)
JB: I could hear the champagne corks popping from my base here in the north-west of England. They finally managed to get the deal over the line. I’m genuinely pleased for many of my former colleagues who worked so hard to make this happen.
BC Partners’ investors, the Holtzbrinck family, and some SN executives will become rich(er) off the back of the IPO. However, there was a real cost — a human cost — to get this IPO done. Blood, sweat and tears have been shed, and not just by those who will benefit financially from the Frankfurt listing. Private equity demands a pound of flesh, which has been dearly bought. Let’s not forget that as the bubbles flow.
Web of Science, Clarivate’s influential database of abstracts and citations, has paused indexation of new content from the open-access journals Heliyon and Cureus, apparently due to concerns about the quality of their articles.
Indexation in WoS or Scopus, another major bibliometric database owned by Elsevier, has become an important stamp of approval for scholarly publications worldwide and can make or break a journal.
Retraction Watch (Frederik Joelving)
JB: Cureus and Heliyon (published by Springer Nature and Elsevier, respectively) were the two fastest growing journals in 2023, so this is a significant development. Being put “On Hold” by Web of Science is analogous to a research paper getting an “Expression of Concern”. We don't know at this point if the journals will be delisted from Web of Science. The sword of Damocles is hanging over the journals’ head.
As I said in the introduction to this newsletter, I wrote an article about Cureus and Heliyon for the Dimensions Blog, which was published this week. It provides some insight into why Cureus and Heliyon grew so fast in 2023.
Until September 2024, BioLEAGUES also controlled an official ‘channel’ in the Springer Nature journal Cureus, the world’s largest medical journal by annual publication volume, which allows BioLEAGUES to appoint its own editorial officers and handle its own submissions to Cureus. This channel published at least 131 articles between February 2023 and September 2024.
Cureus is a medical journal; the name is a play on “cure us” and “curious”. It publishes large numbers of case studies (the lowest form of clinical evidence). The business model is unusual.
Publishers often want to expand their brand into new subject areas (see next story about Wiley’s Advanced series), which isn’t easy when the name of the brand has a strong affiliation with a specific community, as Cureus does.
Cell expanded into the physical sciences by launching journals with single word titles, sometimes named after famous scientists like Joule (an energy journal) and Newton (the new physics journal). All the journals, including Heliyon, are hosted on the Cell Press website.
The three Cureus spin offs use the Cureus prefix brand, but the publisher has created a distinct URL to host them (https://www.cureusjournals.com/), which may prove to be helpful if the parent title (https://www.cureus.com/) gets delisted.
The latest Cureus spin-off journal is Cureus Journal of Business and Economics, which was launched this week. The author guide is a clone of the parent journal, but with some (dubious) editing. For example, the section on discipline-specific standards is wonderfully nebulous:
If you click on the link for the Publication Ethics and Scientific Misconduct section you see this:
Springer Nature got the IPO over the finishing line this week; investors will expect to see strong open access article growth in the future. The Cureus journals are an important part of that story, but Cureus is not the only brand that’s in play.
Springer acquired BioMed Central in 2008; the BMC website hosts journals covering many of the disciplines within the natural and applied sciences (see here). There are now 61 BMC-branded journals, plus many more unbranded journals that sit on the BMC platform.
Springer Nature briefly experimented with a new “SN” brand. Then, a few years ago, it launched the Discover series. SN Applied Sciences was rebranded to Discover Applied Sciences and is doing well. Most of the other Discover journals are more miss than hit, but it’s still early days. Discover Concrete and Cement hasn’t published any papers yet; it will need strong foundations to succeed.
There are now 61 Discover journals (is 61 a magic number?), only nine of which are listed in the Scopus index. There are 46,000 journals listed in Scopus, so the barrier to entry is fairly low. Most of the Discover journals have been launched relatively recently.
Pay-to-publish open access business models reward publishers for quantity not quality. More journals = more articles = more revenue, the reasoning goes. However that only works if the brand delivers on its promise and is differentiated in some way from other journals in the portfolio that have similar titles.
These days, the senior management team at Springer Nature includes few people with deep scholarly publishing experience; the remaining old hands may well leave soon, now that the IPO has gone through. Old-school publishers, who built careers working on subscription journals — where quality matters more than quantity — often prefer hitting the brakes to putting the pedal to the metal.
Experimenting with new ways of working and trying new business models should be applauded. However, scholarly publishing traditions have been honed over centuries. There are commonly agreed concepts of editorial and publishing best practice that have consequences if ignored.
We don’t know whether Cureus and Heliyon will be delisted from Web of Science or even when a decision will be made, which in itself is problematic for the two publishers. We should assume innocence until we hear otherwise. However, if the two journals are removed from the Web of Science, the following graph (obtained from Dimensions) shows what could happen. The stakes are high. If the thin thread holding the sword of Damocles snaps, a quick death will likely follow.
Wiley (NYSE: WLY), one of the world’s largest publishers and a global leader in research and learning, today announced plans to further expand the prestigious Advanced Portfolio , a series of highly-regarded journals in materials science, physics, and engineering communities, into new areas of study in the life and health sciences.
Led by the flagship OA journal, Advanced Science, and the world-renowned Advanced Materials, the Advanced Portfolio currently encompasses 22 high-impact titles built and driven by a team of full-time, professional editors. This strategic expansion underscores Wileys dedication to advance knowledge at the intersection of disciplines and provide researchers with the resources they need to explore the complexities of modern science.
Wiley plans to launch six new Advanced titles in key health and life sciences fields, such as cell and molecular biology, oncology, neuroscience, and plant science by the end of 2026. In addition, the Advanced Portfolio is deepening its reach in the physical sciences, with a particular focus on chemistry and artificial intelligence (AI).
Wiley (press release)
JB: This press release is announcing the launch of 10 new journals: six in the biomedical sciences, two in AI and two in chemistry. Do you see a pattern emerging here? The key difference with the previous story, though, is that these journals are being touted as “high impact” journals with an in-house editorial team. Presumably Wiley is trying to fill out the top of its transfer cascade. This approach is very different from the high volume brand extension happening at Discover and Cureus, which sit at the bottom of the transfer pyramid at Springer Nature.
AIP Publishing announced today the latest addition in its open access portfolio, APL Computational Physics. The new journal is slated to open for submissions in early 2025.
APL Computational Physics will serve as a dynamic platform for the rapidly evolving landscape of physics where computational techniques are at the core of new research developments. It will provide a dedicated outlet for a wide range of computational models, methods, and simulations spanning the diverse domains of physics.
PLOS’s continued dedication to advancing Open Science, coupled with its groundbreaking innovation in publishing business models, reinforces its commitment to fostering research communication that is sustainable, accessible, and impactful for all. With support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, PLOS is embarking on a pioneering 18 month research and design project to address two significant barriers in Open Science:
1) Lack of recognition for contributions beyond the article—such as data, code, and methods.
2) Lack of affordability—current article processing charges (APCs) prevent many researchers from participating in Open Access.
Our project seeks to transform publishing models to ensure that science is open, recognized, and accessible to all, delivering meaningful change to the research community.
What’s key is that the Stacks Journal’s peer-review process happens in collaboration instead of isolation. This is how peer review and publishing used to work. For instance, in the nineteenth century, the Royal Society in London invited groups of scholars with expertise in specific topics to come together, debate new work and determine whether it would be published. Now, most journals have two reviewers who assess a manuscript separately. At the Stacks, we bring together communities of reviewers to collaborate. It’s double-blind, to ensure fairness, and reviewers can see each other’s comments and discuss whether they agree.
Taylor & Francis has today announced its first Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot, one of several innovative options it is trialing to accelerate open access (OA) publishing. S2O enables a journal’s subscribers to support its conversion to OA, making new articles available to readers everywhere.
Taylor & Francis is inviting existing subscribers of the participating journals to renew their subscriptions for next year by March. If enough institutions support S2O in this way, all articles published in the 2025 volume will be open access. This process can then be repeated, one volume at a time, for the following years. If the required level of support is not achieved for any of the pilot titles, they will remain as subscription journals (with a hybrid OA option).
Taylor & Francis (press release)
JB: The three journals in the pilot are: Technical Services Quarterly, Legal Reference Services Quarterly and LGBT Issues in Counseling. T&F publishes 2700 journals.
You might expect lots of separate clusters to emerge as distinct academic families. But it turns out that almost all Nobel laureates share some connection, however distant, as represented by this sprawling network.
An incredible 702 out of 736 researchers who have won science and economics prizes up to 2023 are part of the same academic family — connected by an academic link in common somewhere in their history.
Nature (Kerri Smith & Chris Ryan)
JB: This “immersive” news story is very well done.
A study of nearly 400,000 scientists across 38 countries finds that one-third of them quit science within five years of authoring their first paper, and almost half leave within a decade.
The analysis, published in Higher Education, used data from the citation database Scopus to track scientists’ scholarly publishing careers — a proxy for how active they are in research. It found that, overall, women were more likely than men to stop publishing, but the size of this difference varied between disciplines.
With the Frankfurt Book Fair fast approaching, I’m thrilled to officially announce the launch of Midnight at the Casablanca — a brand-new long-form interview podcast! Join me as I sit down with some of the brightest minds and most influential figures in scholarly publishing. Together, we’ll explore their personal journeys through this centuries-old industry and dive into how they’ve navigated the unprecedented transformations seen over the past few decades.
LinkedIn (Paul Peters)
JB: I’ve added this to Overcast (the best podcasting app, in my opinion).
It appears the term ‘paper mill’ may fail to fully capture the diversity and scale of activities overseen by these hydra-like conglomerates. Moreover, the high-level view of these networks that we’ve unraveled suggests an extraordinary ability to adapt and the capability for aggressive growth – a picture of a resilient enterprise. With so many functionally identical business fronts operating concurrently, those operating the network need not worry if one business is identified publicly, one professional society shuts down or one journal is de-indexed; plenty will remain to fill its place.
Retraction Watch (Reese Richardson, Spencer Hong, and Luís A Nunes Amaral)
JB: This is a ’must read’. The scale of the network is incredible. See ’828’ below:
By searching for other entities, first through direct links (e.g. a parent company publicly listing its subsidiaries) and then through more subtle indicators (e.g. businesses that shared the same address or phone number), we uncovered a network of associations consisting of 828 distinct businesses, journals, publishers, individuals, universities, professional societies and indexing services.
One of the interesting things that mills do is publish boring papers. Before mills, every news piece about research fraud was about too-good-to-be-true science which turned out to be exactly that. A big fake discovery in a glam journal. On the flip-side, the mills were able to hide in plain sight by publishing boring papers — only faking results that sounded plausible, but which no one could be bothered to check. We are now at a stage where the fraud is so big, it has become impossible to hide and impossible to ignore.
Is anyone under any doubt that we will create fully automated peer review systems which operate more successful than human beings? I have been watching this space since the work of UNSILO in Aarhus almost a decade ago, and I cannot now conceive that we will fail in the search for systems that detect plagiarism, copyright theft or papermill inventions that work at a higher percentage of efficiency than human peer reviewers. While the systems will all require human supervision, audit and checking, they will counter the ability of AI to be misused until we come to a further level of technological development which requires a further wave of watchdog development.
Analytics need to become more inclusive — more intuitive, more visual, and more context-sensitive in order to be impactful for these new audiences. They need to cater for a wider range of automated access scenarios, including bulk access to the underlying metrics and more flexible querying of data sets outside of templated reports. They also need to incorporate qualitative data that can add valuable, rich depth to understanding impact, but is often lost when pipelines are designed around scale and numbers alone.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Tim Lloyd)
JB: Not so long ago ’usage analytics’ revolved around counting how many copies of a journal were printed. Measuring usage is so much more complex now, as this article helpfully explains.
Our findings indicate that there is a positive correlation between the interdisciplinarity of scientific publications and the attention they receive from policy documents in almost all fields. More specifically, the stronger the interdisciplinarity of scientific publication, the greater its ability to attract attention from policy documents. In simpler terms, interdisciplinarity plays a role in facilitating the translation of scientific research into tangible policy outcomes, which provides useful insights for researchers and policymakers.
Impact of Social Sciences (Liang Hu, Win-bin Huang and Yi Bu)
While the Open Access movement has made impressive gains, it is an ongoing effort. The shifting of costs from access to publishing, as reflected by author-pays Gold OA, has shifted equity issues but not eliminated them. While the development of Diamond OA and other related initiatives holds promise, the scale of our global challenges means we have to address today’s information needs with a variety of approaches that involve everyone in scholarly communication. Research4Life takes a practical approach to maximize the benefit to our community of users in low- and middle-income countries. To build true equity, we must do all we can to lower barriers to the publication of research outputs and foster participation in all aspects of the publication lifecycle to ensure greater representation from scholars in lower-income countries as authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers.
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’ve been fortunate to interact with many smart people over the years. Without doubt one of the cleverest was a school friend, Ben Coppin. I remember an astonishing intellect coupled, somewhat unusually, with humility and kindness. He now works as Engineering Director for the Google DeepMind Impact Accelerator and earlier this year started a YouTube channel called Scruffy Leadership. His latest video is about how leadership is often overwhelming.
If you’re a leader, or aspire to be one, watching this would be worth 15 minutes of your time. One of the most important take aways is that it can be lonely at the top. It’s important to find someone you can talk to, whether that’s a mentor, a friend, or a coach.
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, It’s been a relatively quiet news week. Maybe publishers are keeping their powder dry ready for the Frankfurt Book Fair next week? Or perhaps everyone has been spending all their time telling the world how they published the seminal Nobel prize winning work? Regardless, it won't take you long to skim through this newsletter, which will likely be a relief, especially if you’re on your way to Frankfurt. If you're using the Book Fair to...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Many of us took part in Peer Review Week, which ends today. The sheer scale of the number of events was overwhelming (see here). You can watch my own contribution, alongside Danielle Padula from Scholastica, on YouTube by clicking the play button below: We talked about how the role of a journal editor may be affected by advances in technology. (My 8-year-old son was very impressed that I’m a ’YouTuber’, but he complained: “I didn’t...
Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, Are scholarly publishers a force for good? Many academics certainly don’t perceive commercial publishers that way. This week we consider whether (with apologies to Stephen Sondheim): We ain’t no delinquents, We’re misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good! The same topics come up again and again in this newsletter: open access equity, research integrity, peer review, reproducibility and so on. This week is no different. There’s a...
