Hello fellow journalologists,
My family and I are heading off on holiday tomorrow and I haven’t packed yet, so this week’s newsletter follows the digest pattern of The Jist. There’s so much I’d like to say about the lead news story, but I should probably hold myself back and pack some socks instead. Anyway, here are the headlines.
News
The current landscape of scholarly publishing presents growing challenges. Some major publishers charge as much as $13,000 per article for immediate open access, while also collecting substantial subscription fees from government agencies. For example, one publishing group reportedly receives more than $2 million annually in subscription fees from NIH, in addition to tens of millions more through exclusive article processing charges (APCs). These costs ultimately burden taxpayers who have already funded the underlying research.
National Institutes of Health (announcement)
JB: The socks will have to wait. I can’t help myself. I’ve had too much skin in this game to let this story pass without comment.
Here’s an extract from issue 33 of Journalology, which was entitled Value:
The average OA usage for a Nature article in 2022 was 39,186 article views. The median OA usage across the 2,326 cOAlition S transformative journals was 1287 article views. So each Nature article generated, on average, 30 times more OA usage than the median journal in the data set.
Is it better to pay $11,690 and receive 39k article views or pay $3000 (say) and receive 1300 article views? Is 30 times the usage worth paying 4 times the median price?
We don’t know what the APC price cap will be at this point; the implications will be much more significant if the price is capped at $3000 rather than $9000, for example. I always thought that price caps would probably arrive eventually, but I would have put money on one of the Plan S funders introducing them before the NIH. What strange times we live in.
APC prices are generally based on two things: the selectivity (i.e. acceptance rate) of the journal and the editorial costs (i.e. journal overhead) incurred.
The maths are simple, but often overlooked.
(1) A journal that accepts 10% of submitted articles needs its APC to be five times higher than a journal that accepts 50% of articles, in order to generate the same amount of revenue.
(2) Furthermore, a journal that has 5 full-time, salaried, editorial staff — incurring overhead costs of $500k — is more expensive to run than a journal that has an editorial board of 20 volunteer academics, who receive $100k in editorial stipends between them.
Academics often think that publishers charge a high APC simply because the journal has a high impact factor or is perceived to be prestigious.
That assessment omits one important detail: high impact factors and prestigious venues are (often) created by low acceptance rates and in-house editorial teams, which require high APCs to be financially sustainable.
A price cap, if it were adopted widely, would likely push up acceptance rates on selective journals and make publishers reduce editorial costs, perhaps by replacing salaried in-house editors with (cheaper) academic editors or by asking each editor to spend less time on a paper and accept more of them each year.
Some people would no doubt be pleased to see the end of selective journals with high production values. I’m not one of them.
Sleuths’ concerns have sharpened with US President Donald Trump’s return to office early this year. In May, Trump signed an executive order to restore ‘gold-standard science’, instructing federal agencies to revise their research-integrity policies and protect ‘alternative scientific opinions’. The directive cites retractions and failures to replicate scientific studies as reasons for the public’s waning trust in science.
Research-integrity sleuths and specialists warn that this rhetoric could be used to cast doubt on established research and give politicians more power to decide what counts as ‘credible’ science. “I really feel as if the administration is engaged in reverse alchemy, and it’s turning America’s scientific gold into lead,” says David Sanders, a sleuth and biologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Nature (Miryam Naddaf)
Today marks an important milestone, as COPE and STM (the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers) jointly publish two new, complementary documents.
The formal COPE guidance consolidates and builds upon the key themes and recommendations identified in COPE’s earlier forum discussion and discussion documents on guest edited collections. It aims to support publishers in recognising and preventing fraudulent activity in special issues, and underscores the importance of regular audits.
Drawing on the collective expertise of a wide range of publishers, STM developed a detailed ‘How-to’ guide, offering practical, step-by-step advice for conducting audits and implementing safeguards concerning guest editors and collection content. It emphasises the importance of validating guest editors before projects begin and conducting regular audits during and after peer review to detect misconduct and operational weaknesses, supporting more robust risk mitigation.
Committee on Publication Ethics (announcement)
Dr Hook says China is “massively and impressively” growing its AI research capacity. Unlike Western nations with clustered AI hubs, he says China boasts 156 institutions publishing more than 50 AI papers each in 2024, supporting a nationwide innovation ecosystem. In addition, “China’s AI workforce is young, growing fast, and uniquely positioned for long-term innovation.”
He says one sign of China’s rapidly developing capabilities is its release of the DeepSeek chatbot in January this year. “The emergence of DeepSeek is not merely a technological innovation – it is a symbol of a profound shift in the global AI landscape,” Dr Hook says.
Digital Science (announcement)
I would hazard a guess that typically western-based editors and reviewers are the least enthusiastic group of research stakeholders concerning China’s growth, as they are asked to contribute more than what is fair.
The data shows that Chinese editors are under-represented in editorial boards. They accounted for a smaller share than Chinese papers in all of 16 sampled journals (a mixed bag of large STEM journals across publishers). In more than half of the journals, China contributed a three times higher proportion of papers than editorial board members.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Christos Petrou)
And finally...
The next issue of this newsletter will appear more than a week from now. If the idea of receiving one less email makes you happy, perhaps you need to read Jennifer Regala’s blog in EON (the official publication of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors): Speaking From Experience: Inundated Inbox.
Until next time,
James