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.
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 network and look for another job, then you may want to take a look at the table of Glassdoor ratings for the major publishers, included in the lead news story, before jumping ship.
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Colleagues have come forward with allegations of severe workplace harassment and stress within MDPI Romania. They claim that the environment is toxic, characterized by unrealistic expectations and a lack of support from management. These claims have intensified scrutiny on the company’s practices, as employees express fears for their well-being under current conditions.
Predatory Journals (unsigned)
JB: There are a few layers to this story that need to be unpacked and interpreted carefully. A 27-year-old MDPI employee tragically passed away last week in the Bucharest office. Some of her colleagues claimed that stress was a contributory factor, but that’s speculation until there’s a formal investigation. Some people also allege that she was not given appropriate medical care; again, this needs independent verification.
Emotions are understandably running high with some MDPI employees writing to a Romanian blogger to provide testimonies of difficult working conditions. I would advise reading the original blog post (with a critical eye; you will need to use Google translate) rather than relying on the derivative version on the Predatory Journals website.
Most organisations have some disgruntled employees and for large organisations, like MDPI, even a relatively small percentage of unhappy workers could be a noticeable number, eager to share their point of view about the company when an opportunity arises.
So let’s take a data-driven approach and compare MDPI with other scholarly publishers. The table below shows the employee rating on Glassdoor for the major commercial publishers and self-publishing academic societies (N.B. the publishing teams are included in each society’s rating, rather than split out).
MDPI and Frontiers are at the bottom of the table, with PLOS not far behind; does this suggest that open access publishers have struggled to create favourable working environments or is the sample size too small? The top three organisations are all academic societies, but other societies (AIP and ACS) are further down the table.
These ratings, as far as I can tell, give a historical picture; so if a company was awful five years ago but is good now, the rating may not fully reflect the improvement in working conditions.
MDPI is unusual because it taps into a largely distinct pool of talent. People move between the more established publishers regularly. Most of us know someone who works for another publisher. MDPI is more of a black box.
Humans tend to be wary of groups they don’t know or understand. There’s a common narrative about MDPI; people tend to look for evidence to back up their pre-conceived ideas. So when disgruntled MDPI staff speak up, people will likely listen.
The allegations about MDPI working conditions are certainly concerning and must not be dismissed or ignored. Scholarly membership organisations should expect the companies that fund their mission to follow good working practices; MDPI is a Gold sponsor of the STM conference and dinner at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
DataSeer and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) are pleased to announce two new pilot programs designed to support high-quality reporting across scientific disciplines. The first will generate pre-filled MDAR reports for authors – saving them time and boosting the quality of methods reporting – for AAAS’ flagship journal Science. The second will establish an Open Science Indicators baseline dataset, quantifying how and when authors at Science share their data and code.
DataSeer (partnerships)
JB: You can read up about the MDAR (Materials Design Analysis Reporting) framework here. Reporting checklists are incredibly important, but they create a lot of work for the authors and for the editorial staff who need to monitor them.
The pilot with DataSeer flips the script on MDAR: instead of expecting authors to complete the checklist themselves, DataSeer’s Natural Language Processing technology pre-fills the MDAR checklist and invites the authors to confirm the entries and fill in any missing details. This approach both reduces author workload around the MDAR requirements and ensures that every MDAR checklist contains rich and detailed information about the data and other research materials associated with the article.
Karger joins over 40 major and mid-sized publishers as they collaborate with Scite to enrich and accelerate the research experience. Pioneered by Scite, Smart Citations go beyond traditional citations by showing citation statements, which indicate where references are used within citing articles and classify whether the paper provides supporting or contrasting evidence to the cited claim. To date, Scite has analyzed and indexed over 1.3B citation statements extracted from more than 37M full-text articles.
CCC is developing a researcher identification and validation service to help scholarly publishers, and their service providers, better identify researchers, their affiliations, and research-related connections leveraging a broad spectrum of data sources. The service is designed to provide a globally unique PID for each researcher and can be integrated into various workflows within the publishing ecosystem. Morressier is pioneering the adoption of this service through the integration of the beta version in their research integrity workflows.
Under this partnership, STM Integrity Hub will pilot the integration of multiple research integrity checks for authorship, affiliations, and citations, which are part of Paperpal Preflight for Editorial Desk, an AI-powered tool developed by CACTUS.
Safeguarding research integrity stands as a cornerstone in scholarly publishing industry, indispensable for the reliability and credibility of academic research. With the rise of scientific literature and the increasing complexity of research methodologies, upholding research integrity is of paramount importance. By integrating CACTUS’s renowned research integrity checks, the partnership aims to support STM and publishers that use the STM Integrity Hub with identifying potential misconduct and strengthening the credibility of scholarly publications.
We’re excited to share that we have completed our first funding round, bringing together a key group of angel investors who believe in our mission to restore trust in research. Their investment enables us to launch the Signals Data Graph and expand our offerings, providing comprehensive support to publishers in the rapidly evolving research integrity landscape.
In putting together this round, we sought out leading investors with deep knowledge, experience, and networks in the industry. With their support, we’re ready to move to the next stage of the Signals journey. We can now empower publishers to navigate the complexity of research integrity, implement the right solutions to meet their strategic objectives, and monitor their performance. At the core of this approach is the Signals Data Graph, which delivers rapid evaluations of articles at every stage of the publishing process by uncovering insights within complex networks, including citation patterns and co-authorships.
Around 85% of researchers who applied for grants from a German funder have given the thumbs up to ‘distributed peer review’, a new process in which applicants are asked to review proposals by other researchers as a condition to having their own proposal considered.
The Volkswagen Foundation in Hannover, Germany’s largest research-funding organization, is testing the process as part of its ‘Open Up’ programme, which handles grant proposals of up to €400,000 (US$447,000) for groups of two or three researchers who work on humanities and cultural studies.
BioOne, the leading nonprofit aggregator in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences, today announced that 71 titles from 54 global societies, museums, and research organizations will participate in its Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot beginning in January 2026. This represents the largest number of independent publishers under a single S2O offer to date.
This announcement follows a year of careful analysis in collaboration with BioOne’s publisher community. Titles eligible for the pilot were limited to those exclusively available via the aggregation BioOne Complete. According to the list maintained by the Subscribe to Open Community of Practice, among the pilot cohort are the first S2O titles published in Japan, Brazil, China, and Kenya.
Developed by Nikita Lad, Iva Grabarić Andonovski, Dana Compton, Jo Wixon, and Mary Hodgson, the survey was designed to assess the progress made by signatories to the SDG Publishers Compact, detect obstacles that prevent other publishers or journals from signing the compact, assess awareness and implementation of the EASE Environmental Manifesto, and identify other initiatives that promote SDGs.
Their paper presents responses from a range of academic and industry bodies including some major publishers and institutional presses with experience of the SDGs and Publishers Compact initiative, though the majority of responses came from editors of small academic journals that were not Compact signatories, setting the results apart from the International Publishers Association survey conducted at the same time, which involved respondents who were all signatories to the compact and mostly publishers—a distinction that provides a good basis for comparison.
So, while I agree that PLOS doesn’t have full control over how others will respond (in fact I might even say little or no control), what PLOS (and any other organization seeking to create change) can do is play out scenarios for how others might respond, and assess the probability, feasibility, and desirability of those responses. (Those who have attended a Charleston Trendspotting session with Leah Hinds and me will recognize that triad of a framework for futures thinking.) Personally, I’m not very comforted at the thought that those involved in the early days of APCs didn’t picture at least some of our current predicament! Even if they had chosen to go forth in the belief they could help the system steer clear of the issues, I hope someone had red-teamed the strategy to know what they were up against!
The Scholarly Kitchen (comment by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe)
JB: The comments section is worth reading and this quote is lifted from there. It seemed obvious at the outset where the APC model would take us. If companies can generate more revenue by publishing more papers, then it doesn’t require a McKinsey consultant to tell you what the outcome is likely to be. However, I admit that I didn’t foresee quite how bad it would get and what the negative consequences would be for journals staff, who are often under increased pressure to publish more articles with limited additional resources.
The EIC may be considered a pillar in their field, providing important work for your organization as an editor and elsewhere. But being an expert and esteemed researcher doesn’t mean they are exempt from bullying behavior. Over the years, I have witnessed, experienced, or heard of editorial staff being bullied in multiple ways. It can come in many forms, such as repeated and unwarranted criticism, and overly aggressive emails and feedback. Back in the day, it was paper manuscripts thrown just past a managing editor’s head, and now it’s invective and insults thrown via email.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Jonathan Schultz)
JB: I wrote a LinkedIn post pegged to this excellent essay; the comments on that post are worth considering, if you haven’t already seen them. The bottom line is: Bullies have to be stood up to (or run away from).
Discover journals welcome all valid research, regardless of the level of impact of each article. We share in a Springer Nature-wide mission to provide a home for all research. We know that up to 50% of research in some scientific communities never gets published¹, so part of our remit is to ensure that all research, validated by peers, has a place in a trusted imprint. The research must of course uphold the standards of its community, as confirmed by peer review, but we won’t turn away good research for having less perceived significance or impact. Our ethos behind this is that all valid research has a contribution to make; you never know what insight each article might lead to later down the line. We want to help provide the most robust scientific research record possible.
Springer Nature's The Source (Dylan Parker)
JB: I wrote about the Discover series of journals in last week’s newsletter. This article provides an overview.
Twenty years ago, we did things a little differently at the Nature Methods office. We printed out submitted manuscripts and scribbled notes in the margins; we marked changes in proofs with a red pen. The trill of a landline telephone ringing was our background soundscape. And when authors agreed to share their software to be peer-reviewed, they sent us multiple copies on CD (that’s a compact disk, for you young readers), which we then shipped to reviewers.
Publishers’ data and terminology are not as transparent as they might be. Elsevier, the largest publisher by journal volume, provides no data on the number of articles published in special issues—or on the extent to which these issues helped drive a 41 per cent growth in article volume between 2016 and 2022. Springer Nature produces “topical collections” and “journal supplements” as well as special issues.
Articles in special issues are often not clearly labelled, and regular issues increasingly include guest-edited sections. A single journal issue can even include more than one special issue.
Research Professional News (David Mills and Şefika Mertkan)
I won’t be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair, but I’ll be monitoring the news wires for updates; please email me with stories, photos or gossip (just hit reply to this message). If you’re attending a celebration of a successful IPO and want to fit in with the sartorial style, you’ll need to pack one of these before you board the plane to Germany.
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, 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...
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...