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.
I took some time off recently to celebrate a significant wedding anniversary, so we’ve got 2 weeks’ news to catch up on. Grab a coffee and skim through the newsletter; a lot has happened in the past fortnight.
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Citing eLife’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting them, Clarivate says it is re-evaluating the inclusion of the open-access biology journal in Web of Science, its influential database of abstracts and citations.
In contrast to the other journals recently placed on hold from indexing, including Elsevier’s Science of the Total Environment, Clarivate has cited a specific policy as the reason for re-evaluating eLife: “Coverage of journals/platforms in which publication is decoupled from validation by peer review.”
Retraction Watch (Ellie Kincaid)
JB: Few industry observers will be surprised by this news. Indeed, I was expecting it to happen earlier in the year (see Journalology #82). eLife issued an announcement about its indexing status; its Executive Director, Damian Pattinson, has been quoted in various news stories including in Science and Research Professional News.
Damian told Retraction Watch:
“The issue comes down to what they define as ‘validated,’” Pattinson told us. “We believe all papers we publish are validated by peer review,” he said, because they undergo a “very rigorous” review and evaluation process that is “deliberately transparent and open.”
eLife's unusual editorial model means that it does not reject papers after peer review. According to its own data, around a quarter of the papers it publishes are considered by the editors and peer reviewers to have “inadequate” or “incomplete” strength of evidence, as shown in the graph below.
Some researchers and funders believe that authors should be able to publish freely, with readers left to make their own decisions on whether the research is valid. Editors should not be used as gatekeepers, they argue; their role is to facilitate peer review and not to make binary accept / reject decisions.
Long-term readers of this newsletter will know that I disagree with this approach. Journals “filter, enhance, and amplify”. Cutting out the dross (to quote Thomas Wakley’s opening Lancet editorial from 1823) is important.
When I go to a supermarket I expect the retailer to have weeded out produce that is infected with bacteria or spoiled in some way, regardless of the brand that it’s sold under. Here in the UK we have a Kitemark, which is used on products from child car seats to toasters:
Kitemark certification confirms that a product or service’s claim has been independently and repeatedly tested by experts, meaning that you can have trust and confidence in products and services that are BSI Kitemark certified.
Traditional journals do something very similar and that role is valuable, in my opinion.
We should remember that Clarivate’s future decision about eLife will need to be applied to other journals that use PRC models (publish, review, curate). eLife can’t get special treatment. Indeed, I’d argue that this is the most important implication of Web of Science’s future decision. We need to anticipate unintended consequences.
If eLife keeps its impact factor, then it seems likely that other publishers, especially commercial ones, will adopt the PRC model. After all, if generating revenue is a publisher’s priority then taking payment from every paper will be much more appealing than charging an APC on, say, 60% of papers that are accepted.
PRC proponents may welcome this, but the devil is in the detail. What if a publisher adopts the PRC model but doesn’t publish the peer review reports alongside the paper? Or perhaps they do publish the peer review reports, but don’t use an assessment scale. In this scenario, which journals should be indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed etc? Does there need to be a ’gold standard’ for the PRC model? If so, who gets to decide what best practice is? What if publishers adapt the core model, as has happened with Subscribe-to-Open?
We believe that the Publish-Review-Curate model cannot stand by itself: it should incorporate a binary editorial decision, which should be made before or during curation. We therefore propose two forms of PRC, both of which incorporate a validation step based on peer reviews.
The eLife editorial model has some benefits that we shouldn’t lose sight of. I like the fact that ’sound science’ research papers sit alongside what might be considered ’impactful’ work in the same journal; the two assessment scales that eLife editors use are elegant, although I would like readers to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff by using a filter on the eLife website.
Researchers waste huge amounts of time submitting to different journals sequentially in order to find a home for their paper. The eLife editorial model solves that problem. The assessment of the research is done within an individual journal, rather than across multiple journals.
I hope eLife will adopt a pragmatic approach and introduce binary accept/reject decisions. Their experiment deserves to continue. All the evidence suggests that journals that lose their impact factor will haemorrhage submissions. The graph below is taken from my recent Dimensions blog post. IJERPH (an MDPI journal) was delisted in March last year and its output fell rapidly as a result. The Sword of Damocles is still hanging over Heliyon and Cureus.
Delisting from Web of Science would be disastrous for eLife as a journal and also for the staff who earn a living by working there.
If that happens then some people will blame Clarivate, but the fault can’t be laid entirely there. The perverse academic reward system that uses impact factors as a proxy marker for academic performance is the main culprit, of course, but the eLife executive team and the owners need to take some responsibility too. If the journal is delisted, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed, it always seemed the most likely outcome when the new publishing model was announced two years ago. Hopefully eLife has plans ready to mitigate against losing its impact factor. If any journal can weather that particular storm, it's eLife.
Finally, it's worth noting that eLifestarted recruitment for a new Editor-in-Chief in July. The appointment hasn’t been announced yet, as far as I can tell.
The challenges facing the big OA-only publishers in 2023 have been well-rehearsed. Delisting from Web of Science has led to an exodus of authors from across their portfolios. In 2022, we estimated that the big OA publishers – MDPI, Frontiers and Hindawi – together accounted for over 30% of OA market volume. It’s not surprising, then, that a decline in output from these publishers had a profound effect on the marketplace.
The results have been a mix of cannibalization and leakage. Established publishers and other access models have captured some of the publishing demand. Some content may have been subsumed into fixed-price deals, and so has not led to an increase in overall revenue. Then, given the quality concerns of special issues, it’s likely that a good proportion has simply disappeared. The signal to noise ratio has improved, and special issues are no longer fueling the growth that they once did.
The fundamental driver of OA used to be the policies of funder organizations. Now it appears to be those of Clarivate.
Delta Think (Daniel Pollock and Ann Michael)
JB: The Delta think team conclude: “We anticipate a 2023-2026 CAGR (average growth each year) of 4.9% in OA output and 6.3% in OA market value. This is significantly lower than historical averages.”
If you want to catch up on DeltaThink’s market sizing efforts, you can watch a recording of a recent webinar here.
Silverchair, the leading independent hosting platform partner for scholarly and professional publishers, today announced signing a definitive agreement with Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CLVT), a leading global provider of transformative intelligence, to acquire ScholarOne Manuscripts and ScholarOne Conferences (“ScholarOne”). Upon closing, this new combined offering will set Silverchair apart in the industry as an independent and client-led technology partner to scholarly publishers. With this acquisition, Silverchair will be uniquely capable of helping publishers solve their greatest content and technology challenges.
Silverchair (press release)
JB: Don’t bother reading the press release. Rather, read Roger Schonfeld’s excellent analysis instead (Silverchair Buys ScholarOne from Clarivate) or the Clarke & Esposito team’s take.
Performance metrics for editorial staffers prioritize the quantity of published manuscripts over their quality, our source in Bucharest said. Editors get one performance point for every published manuscript they handle, but only half of a point for rejecting a manuscript. Staffers who reach a certain number of points get a monthly bonus. Assistant editors, for instance, had a target of 15 points per month until Oct. 22, 2024, the day after we emailed MDPI the allegations in this story, when the number was lowered to 12, according to our source.
Retraction Watch (Frederik Joelving)
JB: I’m pleased that an experienced and respected news outlet covered this story (you can read my take here: Journalology #96). I’ve previously argued that publishers should not use editorial performance metrics based on how many papers are accepted, especially for pay-to-play open-access journals. It introduces a huge conflict of interest, especially if performance is pegged to remuneration in some way.
Under the leadership of Dr. Jack Resneck Jr., Chair of the WMA Declaration of Helsinki revision workgroup, the revision team concluded that some areas of the document had to be updated to ensure the Declaration’s continued relevance. The 2024 revision of the Declaration of Helsinki provides for increased protection for vulnerable populations, improved transparency in clinical trials, and stronger commitments to fairness and equity in research.
The World Medical Association (press release)
JB: Please note the use of the phrase “participants in research” and not “subjects” in the press release. I wince every time I read the latter, probably because of my Lancet training.
In that regard, it’s worth remembering why the Declaration of Helsinki was created 60 years ago. Quoting from Jack Resneck’s article in JAMA:
Created by the World Medical Association (WMA) in the wake of historical abuses and violence committed under the guise of scientific research, the Declaration of Helsinki (DoH) was the first set of international ethical principles guiding medical research involving human participants.
Human beings participate in research after giving informed consent, and are not subjects. Words matter. Words can kill (the contents of this book are especially important given current international events. Highly recommended).
The publishing giant Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, has around 5,000 retractions but more than 11,400 high-risk papers according to Nature’s analysis of Argos data — although all of these together make up just more than 0.2% of the publisher’s output over the past decade. And the publisher MDPI has retracted 311 papers but has more than 3,000 high-risk papers — about 0.24% of its output. Springer Nature has more than 6,000 retractions and more than 6,000 high-risk papers; about 0.3% of its output. (Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher.)
Nature (Richard van Noorden)
JB: I covered the Argos launch in Journalology #93. Anyone can sign up to use the Argos dashboard, which now includes visibility on all journals that have published more than 10,000 articles. If you haven’t signed up for a free account yet, it might be worth taking a look to see how your journal fares.
Following a consultation with the funder, library/consortium, and publisher communities, this new pricing framework has been designed with the aim to promote greater transparency and inspire publishers and other service providers to implement more equitable pricing across different economies. This approach resembles successful models in other industries – similar to how the pharmaceutical industry has implemented tiered pricing based on countries’ capacity to pay, ensuring both equitable access and sustainable business models.
The framework is adaptable, allowing publishers to implement changes gradually and in line with their specific circumstances. It can be applied to various pricing models, including article processing charges (APCs), subscriptions, and transformative agreements.
As part of our project to investigate “reasonable costs” for public access to United States federally funded research and scientific data, we have developed a synthesis report focused on the multi-model scholarly publication ecosystem that facilitates public access as required by the Nelson Memo. This paper outlines the historical developments that have shaped the current landscape, the key financial (cost and payment) stakeholders in the system, and the models and approaches that have developed in the continued shift to public and open access.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (Jennifer Kemp and Katherine Skinner)
Patients are increasingly involved in both research projects and reporting on findings, bringing their valuable perspectives to medical literature. However, patient authors typically have less familiarity with the publishing process than their research colleagues and may also have additional considerations for their involvement, such as the implications for confidentiality.
The new resource addresses these needs by going beyond standard authorship guidance, outlining what prospective patient authors should do and expect at each stage of the process. This includes how patient authors can contribute to an article, what information about themselves they will need to provide, and what happens after submission.
Taylor & Francis
JB: When I first read this headline I thought it was about authors who published in journals with very long submission-to-publication times. Yes, I’m an idiot. You can read more about the guidelines here.
A study by IOP Publishing (IOPP) has highlighted differences in how physical science research communities adopt open data sharing and the various barriers they encounter.
Environmental scientists are the most open with their research data, yet legal constraints related to third-party ownership often limit their ability to follow the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) principles. Physicists are also willing to share data but have concerns about the accessibility and understanding of the formats used. Engineering and materials scientists face the most significant barriers to sharing FAIR data due to concerns over confidentiality and sensitivity.
We examined spelling errors as a simple indicator of corner cutting. Spelling errors are less serious than other bad writing practices, such as plagiarism and spin, but they are easy to check across millions of papers.
We searched for errors in PubMed, which is a popular literature database in health and medical research. We examined over 32 million abstracts published between 1970 to 2023 and looked for spelling errors in the titles and abstracts of published papers, using common errors drawn from our experience as statisticians.
Eleven of the fifteen errors have increased over time, with most showing a strong increase. The total error rate has increased from 0.1 per ten thousand abstracts in 1970, to 8.7 per ten thousand in 2023.
Impact of Social Sciences (Adrian Barnett and Nicole White)
JB: I whole-heartedly agree with their bottom line:
The rise in spelling errors highlights the tension between working slowly and carefully versus publishing quickly. Ongoing efforts to improve research culture should stress the need to commit adequate time to research projects.
The statistician Doug Altman famously called for “less research, better research” back in 1994. Thirty years later we need even less research and much better research. What we don’t need is “reserach”.
And, no, I haven't forgotten the time when I missed the 'l' out of 'public' in a previous issue of this newsletter. My wife’s howls of laughter still haunt me.
The EDCH aims to strengthen the Diamond OA community in Europe by supporting European institutional, national and disciplinary capacity centres and Diamond publishers and service providers in their mission of Diamond OA scholarly publishing. The EDCH will provide these Diamond stakeholders with coordination, sustainability, training modules, technical tools, and services at scale. The EDCH thus answers the need for capacity building in the Diamond OA community that was expressed in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access.
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Transformative agreements can be more than just tools to enable open access publishing and access to paywalled context. They can also serve as mechanisms for institutional accountability in upholding ethical research standards. By including provisions related to research integrity — such as designated contacts for misconduct investigations, mutual commitments to ethical guidelines, and penalties for non-compliance — these agreements can become instruments for establishing publisher-institutional partnerships based on shared ethical commitments and fostering a more responsible and resilient scholarly publishing environment. This collaborative approach would ensure that both publishers and institutions play an active role in safeguarding research integrity.
For many journal portfolios, the focus is on ever-increasing expansion, launching new journals to reach new markets, and capturing niche audiences. But what happens when those niche journals cannibalize each other and fight for prominence—when one journal emerges as the de facto flagship journal, and your research community begins to see the others as second string? As Sr Editorial Operations Manager, this was the main problem I faced at the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and, rather than fight against this trend, I proposed merging our 4 journals into one robust title that covers all aspects of petroleum engineering. One year later, the results are promising: Submissions to the new, consolidated journal are up 20% compared with total submissions for the previous journal portfolio. I believe this new journal will allow SPE to remain competitive within our field of research and offer new opportunities for research in a rapidly changing industry.
Scholarly publishing as a whole is in the midst of a long-term shift away from a model centered on editorial work towards one based on services and platforms. We expect generative AI to accelerate this trend, and publishing organizations are already engaged in strategic planning about how to map generative AI services to support the workflows of readers, authors, and editorial staff. The boundaries between discovery, interpretation, and writing practices have already become increasingly interconnected, and these services will likely become a fully integrated suite of tools aimed at keeping researchers engaged with a single platform across the research process In the near future.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Tracy Bergstrom and Dylan Ruediger)
Payers must also pay for publishers’ profit margin and brand value, among other things. In the absence of sufficient information in the public domain, the last two are complicated elements to understand, such as why Elsevier’s highest APC (Cell: US$ 10,400) is 52 times greater than the lowest one (Materials Today: Proceedings: US$ 200).
The Scholarly Kitchen
JB: It’s not that complicated, surely? Cell has a low acceptance rate and a salaried editorial team, and so needs a high APC in order to be sustainable.
Let’s do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to make the point. In 2023 Cell published 382 research articles according to Dimensions (Digital Science), which equates to about $4m in revenue if every paper was published open access.
There are 23 people listed on the Cell masthead, but there will be many staff working in support functions (Production, HR, Finance, etc) that need to have their salaries paid from Cell’s revenues. If we assume a 1-to-1 ratio of support staff to editorial staff (an underestimate, probably) then 46 people’s salaries (and pensions, medical insurance, office costs etc) need to be paid from the $4m in revenue. That’s less than $100k per person.
I’m more aware than most of how rough-and-ready this calculation is; it’s highly unlikely to be accurate, but it should make the point that selective journals with in-house editors need high APCs to be viable.
For many years my favourite scholarly publishing blogger was Cameron Neylon. He’s an elegant and thoughtful writer, but his blog has been quiet for a long time. That might be about to change. I do hope so.
Until next time,
James
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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.
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Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, When I started this newsletter back in August 2023 I wasn’t sure I’d make it to issue 10 let alone issue 100. And yet, by some miracle, here we are. There have been times when I wished I’d never started writing Journalology, generally at 6 am on a Sunday morning when there’s a blank sheet in front of me. However, looking back over 100 issues, it’s been an enjoyable and educational experience. I learn something new every week; hopefully you...
