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Journalology

Journalology #19: Hiatus

Published about 2 years ago • 7 min read

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I haven’t published a newsletter for a month because of illness (the whole family caught Covid…), challenging work deadlines, and a holiday in deepest darkest Wales for the half-term school break. One subscriber told me recently that this hiatus was welcome because she hadn’t had a chance to properly read the previous editions of the newsletter. Presumably now everyone has caught up. For those of you who are recent subscribers, you can read past issues of the newsletter here:

​https://journalology.ck.page/profile​

I am still working on the fully featured Journalology website, which will see the light of day at some point in the not too distant future, but this interim measure allows you to browse past issues if you’re interested in doing so.

Colleagues who would like to subscribe to the newsletter can do so here:

​https://journalology.ck.page​

Please do spread the word.

A few days ago I had an article published in Geoscientist on how scholarly publishers have been covering the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Publishers have a crucial role to play in communicating research that can help to solve some of global society’s biggest challenges. Developing an SDG strategy also makes sense from a commercial point of view because some of the fastest growing areas of research centre around sustainability. This year marks the 20th anniversary of The Lancet's Child Survival Series, which taught me how journals can use their convening power to make a real difference in the world.

At the beginning of this week the Clarke & Esposito team published the 50th issue of The Brief, which we’re obviously very proud of. Here’s a quick summary of the content to help you to quickly find articles that may be of interest to you:

  • ​End of a Bargain “Springer Nature has sent an email to authors announcing that they will no longer be depositing manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC) or Europe PMC (EPMC) on behalf of authors who have opted to publish via the subscription route. Authors who pay for OA, either in hybrid or fully OA journals, will continue to receive this service.”
  • ​NIH Draft Public Access Plan. “As directed by OSTP, the NIH policy requires “public access” not “open access,” meaning that articles must be free to read by not to reuse (without permission of the copyright holder). No licensing terms such as the Creative Commons CC BY are specified and authors remain free to use grant funding to pay publication charges.”
  • ​Rights Retention Strategy. “To the extent that the RRS succeeds, it will do so by (counterintuitively) accelerating the shift to Gold (not Green) OA. Were that to occur, publishers may welcome the ability to shed the responsibilities of holding copyright on research papers to authors… Publishers typically employ services to monitor copyright violations and lawyers to defend those copyrights. These costs and the accompanying time burden will now shift to the author.”
  • ​Plan S: Ceasing Support? “From 2025 onwards, researchers will not be able to use cOAlition S funds to pay for APCs in hybrid journals published by the likes of the American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, IEEE, Oxford University Press and Springer Nature. Authors will still be able to publish in hybrid journals under a CC BY license and be compliant with the cOAlition S mandate; however, they will need to find another source of funding to do so. The RRS strategy is therefore, in large part, a work-around for this Plan S prohibition.”
  • ​Gender Diversity on Editorial Boards. “A recent research paper in Nature Human Behaviour suggests that the vast majority of journals have half as many women serving on editorial boards as are active within their community. Furthermore, this proportion remained constant between 1970 and 2017. In short, little progress has been made to improve gender diversity on editorial boards over nearly five decades.”

If you haven't already subscribed, you can do so here: https://www.ce-strategy.com/subscribe/​

I haven’t been active on LinkedIn recently, but plan to start posting content again next week. LinkedIn is becoming an invaluable resource for our community and there are lots of interesting conversations happening on the platform. If you’re on the fence, or struggling to know where to start, Jennifer Regala’s recent article in Science Editor provides helpful guidance: LinkedIn: An Effective Global Publishing Network at Your Fingertips.

If you'd like to be updated on my LinkedIn posts the best way is to follow me and then click the bell icon on my LinkedIn profile. If you enjoy the content and find it to be helpful, please do hit the like button or (even better) leave a comment to get a discussion going, as that helps the article reach a wider readership.

Briefly quoted

​The chasm between the scholarly record and grey literature​

Grey literature is content that’s hard for librarians to collect and, because it sits outside the scholarly record, it’s hard for researchers and students to find. It’s content that’s shuffled among the musings of fact-deniers, snake-oil salesmen and celebrity gossipers in the rat-packers’ jungle, which leads many to think it hasn’t been through peer-review – when, in fact, most has. However, the biggest problem is that grey literature is at risk of nocturnal vandals. I recently spoke with an NGO that advocates reform in international trade. As part of their mission, they undertake and publish research, which they post in a ‘library’ on their website. Except, when I visited earlier this year, I found that every link in the library was broken. What was shocking was that their communications manager and webmaster hadn’t realised. The links had broken during a rebuild of their website six months prior and no-one had had time to check.

Research Information (Toby Green)

​R Discovery becomes the largest repository of Open Access journal articles in the world​

With R Discovery, we want to build a community where researchers can access all relevant information about their field of study, area of research, or maybe even about a hobby, geography agnostically. The milestone of becoming the world’s largest repository of OA journal articles reassures our partners that R Discovery is an important tool in the academic environment. R Discovery will continue to provide personalized reading guides, smart research abstracts, and access to 9.5 million+ topics from across various research disciplines. This tool also showcases the advanced AI technology we are working with— where we understand the researcher’s interests and searches and present a personalized experience. It is a tool that is potentially a game changer in the OA movement, and we are extremely confident about its capabilities.

Cactus press release (Abhishek Goel)

​PLOS journals update their Human Subjects Research Policy​

Recently, the PLOS Publication Ethics team has handled higher volumes of cases where documents received during our investigations raised concerns about whether ethics standards were upheld during the research process, whether measures were in place to protect participants in the research, or whether the reported findings were reliable. In light of these concerns, PLOS ONE ran a trial in 2022 wherein cohorts of authors were asked to supply ethics approval documents before peer review. Compliance was high, but what journal staff found was deeply troubling: in one cohort, nearly two-thirds of submissions did not meet PLOS ONE’s human subjects research requirements and were therefore rejected. Importantly, journal staff would not have detected the issues had they not requested the ethics documentation.

PLOS Blog (Renee Hoch and Emily Chenette)

​Hyperauthorship: the publishing challenges for ‘big team’ science​

The term ‘hyperauthorship’ is credited to information scientist Blaise Cronin at Indiana University in Bloomington, who used it in a 2001 publication to describe papers with 100 or more authors. But with the rise of large international and multi-institutional scientific collaborations — such as the ATLAS consortium behind the discovery of the Higgs boson — papers with hundreds, even thousands, of authors are becoming more common. There are many legitimate reasons for this shift, but it is raising questions — and concerns — about the nature of authorship and the impact that hyperauthorship has on the metrics of scientific achievement.

Nature (Bianca Nogrady)

​Plan S: Annual Review 2022​

We will work with all stakeholders to develop alternative criteria, tools, and processes to
measure the intrinsic merit of research outputs. We will also strive to ensure that all scholarly contributions to the publication process – including editorial services, assessments, and peer review reports – are given proper and equal credit, irrespective of whether they are formally published in a journal. cOAlition S will also discuss more equitable, scholar-driven, and scholar-owned solutions to academic publishing, as well as innovative publishing models like peer- reviewed preprints.

Plan S

​How do we improve peer review?​

As tools get better for identifying manipulation, similar technologies are also likely to evolve for evading those tools, potentially leading to an arms race between paper mills and publishers. Therefore, people are likely to continue to be at the heart of the review process, and it is not surprising that the one technology identified by both Graf and Power Febres was one for the identification of peer reviewers, expanding the networks of peer reviewers and helping peer reviewers to be asked to review papers they want to review. However, once reviewers have been found there is still a lot to be done to improve the peer review process, to improve the quality of the review and ensure that appropriate credit is given.

Research Information (David Stuart)

​COPE position statement on authorship and AI tools​

AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements. Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.

Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

​Kudos announces major initiative to drive better understanding of SDG research​

The Sustainable Development Knowledge Cooperative is being launched in partnership with Impact Science, a brand of Cactus Communications (CACTUS). Together with publisher partners, Kudos and Impact Science will showcase and promote plain language summaries of research that can help reduce poverty and inequality; improve health education and economic outcomes; and protect our environments.

Kudos press release (Charlie Rapple)

And finally...

Thank you for reading until the end. Hopefully you found this newsletter to be helpful. Please do share this email with your colleagues if you think they would benefit from reading it too. The sign up page is here:

​https://journalology.ck.page​

Until next week,

James

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Journalology

James Butcher

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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