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Journalology

Journalology #42: Unfortunate glitches

Published almost 2 years ago • 16 min read

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Hello fellow journalologists,

Scholarly publishing continues to move at pace. There’s been no lull over the (northern hemisphere) summer. As a result, there’s quite a lot to read in this issue. If you would prefer a more filtered view of the news in the future, please hit [Reply] and let me know.

News

​Kotahi 2.0: Setting a New Standard in Scholarly Platforms​

The peer review process is a crucial element of scholarly publishing. However, traditional systems often enforce a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach. In contrast, Kotahi provides flexibility to tailor the review process to each journal or review community’s specific needs. Different models like open, blind, or double-blind reviews can be configured. Reviewers can also collaborate on shared reviews while also providing individual feedback if desired. Kotahi enables customizing the level of author participation as well. Review workflows can allow authors to respond to reviewer comments via threaded discussions if needed. Annotations (comments) directly on manuscripts is also supported.

Coko (announcement)

JB: A few months ago I wrote the first draft of a story for The Brief on manuscript tracking systems, many of which provide an awful author experience. There is a real need for new technologies to provide authors, peer reviewers, and editors with better functionality. I haven’t seen Kotahi in action — I hope it lives up to its promise. Another one to watch is Opus Journal, which was launched earlier this year.

​How ACS Read and Publish Agreements Are Facilitating Significant Growth in Open Access Publishing​

ANKOS, a Turkish consortium that includes 45 participating institutions, signed a read and publish agreement with ACS in 2022. Before the agreement, Turkey was ranked 23rd on our list of top-submitting countries, but only 11% of articles on average from authors in Turkey were published OA in ACS journals. Just one year after signing a read and publish agreement with ACS Publications, ANKOS saw a 21% increase in submissions and 46% increase in published papers—notably, the percentage of content published OA in ACS Journals skyrocketed to 87%! Turkey also jumped ahead to 17th on the list of top-submitting countries, which demonstrates how national-level support in OA can tremendously boost overall publishing output.

ACS Publications Chemistry Blog

JB: The last sentence in this excerpt is a perfect example of the power of transformative agreements (TAs). Publishers that have large institutional sales teams capable of negotiating TAs are likely to take market share (submissions and published articles) from smaller publishers that are not able to offer authors ‘free’ publication via TAs. One of the unintended consequences of the move to APC-based open-access models is likely to be market consolidation and closures. Authors are more likely to submit to journals that are covered by their institution’s TA. Smaller publishers will struggle as a result.

​American Psychological Association partners with ResearchGate to provide access to journal articles​

As a ResearchGate partner, APA will provide access to more than 5,000 new articles a year, as well as backfile content of over 300,000 articles… Authors of the articles included in this partnership will have their content automatically added to their profiles on ResearchGate, giving them easy access to statistics that showcase the impact of their work and providing a unique opportunity for them to connect with their readers.

ResearchGate (press release)

JB: This is the latest in a series of partnerships between ResearchGate and publishers. The other publishers who have partnered with ResearchGate this year are: Wiley (June), Frontiers (May), Sage (May), Royal Society of Chemistry (April), Royal Society (March), and DeGruyter (February).

It’s worth remembering that Elsevier and the American Chemical Society (ACS) filed a lawsuit against ResearchGate in 2017 (see Science news story), which closed in May last year.

ResearchGate has become a ‛trusted partner’ in recent years. Publishers need to be able track usage of their content, including “off platform” usage on scholarly collaboration networks like ResearchGate. Librarians will cancel institutional subscriptions unless publishers can show the content is valued. Similarly, funders will be assessing the return on investment (ROI) for their APCs — publishers need to be able to track usage of OA articles too.

​Scientists who don’t speak fluent English get little help from journals, study finds​

Amano says that most journals lack clear policies to distinguish the quality of science from the quality of English writing. Among the 736 journals surveyed, only two — Nature and Nature Plants — stated in their guidelines that manuscripts would not be rejected solely on the grounds of perceived English quality (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its journal team). Of the 262 journals whose editors-in-chief were surveyed, only 6% instructed reviewers not to base their assessments solely on language proficiency.

Nature (Mariana Lenharo)

​Introducing “The Early Career Chew: Industry Bites for Peckish Publishing Professionals” Newsletter​

Four leading professional organizations—Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), Council of Science Editors (CSE), International Society for Managing and Technical Editors (ISMTE), and STM Association (STM)—have come together to launch “The Early Career Chew: Industry Bites for Peckish Publishing Professionals,” a free newsletter summarizing the top industry news, career resources, and events each quarter available exclusively on LinkedIn.

SSP Society for Scholarly Publishing announcement

JB: Read and subscribe now. Of course, early career publishers are more than welcome to sign up to this newsletter too…

​Costs of scientific journals have reached unsustainable level – The future of subscriptions in jeopardy​

Finnish universities and research institutions have long been facing financial challenges. Many of them have had to reduce their staff through negotiation processes. Meanwhile, scientific journal publishers have systematically raised fees for reading scientific journals and open access publishing, even though publishers essentially receive researchers’ articles and their reviews as unpaid work.
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The FinELib consortium is currently negotiating seven scientific journal agreements with a combined value of over 16 million euros in 2023. In 2022, these agreements enabled a total of 3660 Finnish scientific articles to be freely accessible. The publishers involved in the negotiations are the American Chemical Society (ACS), Elsevier, Emerald, IEEE, Oxford University Press (OUP), Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and Springer.

FinELib (announcement)

​Frontiers pilots ‘flat fee’ publishing partnership with University of California​

Gold open access publisher Frontiers has announced its first consortium partnership in North America with the University of California (UC). The one-year agreement will also pilot a novel partnership model: UC will receive unlimited publishing in 20 specified Frontiers journals for a pre-agreed annual flat fee.
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The eligible journals have been selected by UC from Frontiers’ Humanities and Social Sciences and Sustainability titles as being from underrepresented and under-funded disciplines. The deal will allow corresponding UC authors at any of the University of California’s 10 campuses, including the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), to publish in these journals without limit and without APC.

Frontiers (press release)

JB: The press release ends with “The new flat-fee model is a natural progression that will ultimately contribute to improved transparency and reduced administrative effort in the publishing market”. One of the big downsides of a ‘pay per article’ APC approach is that it creates a huge amount of additional administrative work for everyone involved, especially publishers, institutions, and funders. That extra work produces extra costs. A flat fee model would work well for publishers that aren’t rapidly growing. Frontiers’ article output grew by 46% between 2021 and 2022. To find out what’s happened in 2023 you’ll need to read the August issue of The Brief, which will be sent to subscribers very soon.

Follow up from last week

Last week I wrote about a Taylor & Francis initiative — Plain Language Summaries of Publications (PLSPs) — and noted that the £3925 APC seemed rather high. Mark Robinson, who is Corporate Media Relations Manager at Taylor & Francis, emailed me this update:

On the APC: unfortunately the journal you chose, Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery, was showing an incorrect APC on the finder tool when you looked it up. This was updated with the correct APC, which is substantially lower, on Monday morning. Fortunately nobody was charged the wrong APC and all of the other journals carrying PLSPs were already displaying the right rate.
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Regarding LLMs, the same policies apply to PLSPs as for all articles submitted to Taylor & Francis journals – i.e. that AI tools may be used in content creation but authors must acknowledge and document their use appropriately. AI tools must not be listed as an author.

The corrected APC is £2045. While I was browsing the T&F website to find that figure I stumbled across another feature that Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery offers, which is Accelerated Publication. Authors can pay $7000 to have an article expedited and published within 3-5 weeks of submission. Scientific Reports tried to offer something similar in 2015 and it didn’t end well (I had nothing to do with that pilot, I hasten to add, which was a low point in the journal’s history). Charges for colour figures in print in Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery are £300 per figure, but the good news is that there’s no submission fee or page charges.

Community Corner

Scholarly publishing is a global enterprise and it’s great to know that it’s being read and enjoyed across the world. This week’s contribution to the community wall comes from Melody Zhang who is based in Chaoyang District, Beijing, China, according to Melody’s LinkedIn profile.

Thank you for taking the time to write these kind words, Melody. New additions to the community wall have been rare recently; if you get value from these newsletters and are willing to show some public support, please do leave a testimonial. If your review is negative then I probably won’t include it in this section of the newsletter. Reporting bias is a thing, you see.

Opinion

​Guidance for Authors, Peer Reviewers, and Editors on Use of AI, Language Models, and Chatbots​

As AI technologies continue to rapidly evolve and be used and tested, important concerns about potential biases, ethical issues, and intellectual property rights of content generated by these tools have not yet been adequately addressed. That said, we fully recognize that these evolving technologies are precipitously changing the nature of content creation, generation, review, and assessment and will likely facilitate efficiencies for authors, reviewers, and editors and continue to transform scholarly publication. JAMA and the JAMA Network journals aim to use these technologies responsibly and will continue to provide authors and reviewers with guidance on accountable and transparent use of such tools.

JAMA (Annette Flanagin, Jacob Kendall-Taylor, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo)

​Dying Declaration: Musings from the Outgoing Editor​

I remember reading about a retiring journal editor who pondered whether, if he had rejected all the articles he chose to publish and instead published an equal number of articles from his rejection pile, would it have made any difference to his field. Many such queries spring into my mind too. On those evenings in which many were watching the Indian Premier League, binging on an online series, or engaged in private/online practice, I was busy verifying patient consent in case reports or deliberating whether the time was appropriate to send a reminder or assign another article to a particular reviewer or such. Was it all worth it? Did the time and effort we invested make a significant impact anywhere? Did any of the authors carefully review the stylistic changes I made to their accepted manuscripts, learn something from them, and apply those insights in their subsequent articles or pass them on to their students?

Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine (Shahul Ameen)

​Royal colleges must be more transparent on payments from industry​

When The BMJ contacted the colleges to check that the sums we calculated were correct, many had difficulties in confirming the amounts. Only one college, the Royal College of Anaesthetists, could send The BMJ a comprehensive list of payments from each company. Individual royal colleges are making attempts at greater transparency. The Royal College of General Practitioners has announced that it aims to publish a list of full payments by sponsors, but there is no common guidance for medical royal colleges to follow.

The BMJ (Kamran Abbasi)

JB: This is a good example of why journals are so much more than mere repositories of research. The best journals also advocate for their communities. Kamran, the editor in chief of The BMJ, is following in his predecessors’ footsteps. If you haven’t read Richard Smith’s book The Trouble with Medical Journals and work in clinical publishing, you should. A short version can be found here. Or, if you prefer a parody, try David Sackett and Andrew Oxman’s BMJ classic HARLOT plc: an amalgamation of the world’s two oldest professions.

​Ending the HIV pandemic: preparing for the future​

The United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the key funder of aid for HIV/AIDS globally. In 2023, it had a budget of US$6·9 billion, with $4·8 billion designated for bilateral HIV efforts and the remainder going to UNAIDS and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In its 20 years, it has transformed the global HIV response. However, it now faces the unprecedented risk of not having its funding renewed. Congressional Republicans are threatening not to reauthorise PEPFAR unless prohibitive restrictions are brought in to limit what they claim are links to abortion services. PEPFAR has long been a bipartisan political success amid fractious US politics. To lose it would be sorry condemnation of the USA’s ability to be a global health leader, as well as a disaster for health. As Lucie Cluver and colleagues warn in The Lancet, the loss of PEPFAR would undoubtedly result in death, orphanhood, and suffering for millions of children.

The Lancet (unsigned editorial)

JB: Science and politics are inextricable. I’ve had conversations with editors in the past who wanted no part in political discussions. Journals should focus on the science, they argue. I disagree. Journals can help to galvanise their community around issues that matter; nothing matters more than preventing the suffering of millions of children.

​Universal Access to Reliable Healthcare Information: An Interview with Neil Pakenham-Walsh of HIFA​

In 1994, the BMJ and INASP, and specifically Richard Smith and Carol Priestley, introduced me to the world of improving the availability of healthcare information. BMJ’s Fiona Godlee and most recently Kamran Abbasi have also been very supportive and we have a BMJ representative on our steering group. Richard Horton of The Lancet, likewise, has been a longtime supporter and we now have a Lancet representative on our steering group too. We have published several papers in both BMJ and Lancet journals. Our supporting organizations include several journal publishers, as well as publishers of practical manuals such as the wonderful Hesperian’s Where There is No Doctor (a must-have for all health workers — including doctors — working in very low-resource settings). We invite all publishers to join our forums (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish) and/or apply to become a HIFA supporting organisation.

The Scholarly Kitchen (interview with Neil Pakenham-Walsh)

​Can AI help with the heavy lifting of research communications?​

I explored using ChatGPT to assess whether it could produce a good standard first draft of a press release (Disclosure, ChatGPT contributed nothing to this blogpost). I instructed it to write a 300 word lay summary that the general public would understand from a research paper published by my colleagues titled ‘Why do ambulance services have different non-transport rates? A national cross sectional study’.
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… The press release generated fictional quotes attributed to an anonymous academic. The quotes were not plagiarised text from the research paper, thus highlighting the need for human peer review.

Impact of Social Sciences (Andy Tattersall)

JB: Yes, but can it do puns? All the best press releases have puns.

​A decade of surveys on attitudes to data sharing highlights three factors for achieving open science​

In conclusion, if we are to reach our open science and open data goals throughout the world, we need to be sensitive to the different conditions and resources around the globe. Our results indicate that government involvement and funding play an important role in improving the attitudes researchers have towards open science practices. The organisational influence of government funding and mandates shifts individual incentives. Researchers then realize that they lack the knowledge, tools, and training they need to properly share data, which can push the social change needed to drastically change the way that science is done for the better.

Impact of Social Sciences (Joshua Borycz, Alison Specht and Kevin Crowston)

​AI Beyond the Publishing Workflow​

If we start thinking of the use of AI beyond the publishing workflow, it can also help us to synergize many publishing activities around sustainability, justice, resilience, or really any other lens we choose. DOIs and ORCID iDs are fantastic, simple, but deep examples how innovations can build solidarity among different actors in the publishing industry by giving universal identity to creations and their creators, respectively. Can we expect AI to be used in such a way that it acts as an ‘aggregator’ of what we have individually achieved so far, as an ‘accelerator’ to lead us to the pace we want to reach, and as an ‘appraiser’ of our progress, thus becoming a vital element of our solidarity?

The Scholarly Kitchen (Haseeb Irfanullah)

​Can open access be made more affordable?​

At first glance, exploring a [Purchasing Power Parity] PPP-based pricing model is attractive. It strikes at the heart of affordability, by accounting for participants’ ability to pay. However, as we have seen, it is not that simple. A move to PPP, in most cases, causes price increases for many (some of which are unexpected) to subsidize the others that need more affordable options. This may result in some controversial changes. That impact would be magnified if publishers attempted to adjust prices upwards overall to counteract market value shrinkage. A PPP based pricing system, while attractive in principle, would need to be carefully implemented in practice. Prices or pricing tiers would need to account for more than the raw numbers. Optics would need to be carefully considered. There will be winners and losers. And, like William Gibson’s view of the future, they will be unevenly distributed.

Delta Think News & Views (Dan Pollock and Ann Michael)

JB: This is typically insightful analysis from Dan and Ann, although the description of the methodology used was light on detail (understandble for a blog post like this), so I’m not clear how they derived these numbers. Research papers often have authors from many countries, which makes this kind of analysis difficult.

​Double-Dipping in Academic Publishing: The Unsettling Exploitation of Authors and Readers​

After charging authors for publication — generally in the form of an article processing charge, which can range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars — numerous publishers continue to charge readers for access, effectively double-dipping into both authors’ and readers’ pockets. The guiding principle behind open access is to democratize knowledge, not commodify it. The current situation signifies a clear deviation from this principle and ruthless exploitation of academics, who often feel pressured by the “publish or perish” culture prevalent in academia.

Heterodox Academy (Dinesh Kumar)

JB: Institutional subscription prices have never been closely correlated with article volumes. If you calculate the subscription revenue per article for a journal it would likely vary depending on whether the journal over or under-published in a calendar year. There’s huge variation in revenue per article between journals too. Double dipping is clearly wrong — publishers shouldn’t generate subscription revenue from OA content — but unless the volume of subscription content drops dramatically, then it’s very difficult to say whether a journal is double dipping or not, because often article subscription volumes change year on year (up and down).

​A Conversation with Sarah Tegen, PhD, ACS Publications’ New Chief Publishing Officer​

It also means that as Chief Publishing Officer of ACS Publications, I’m beholden to scientists—not shareholders. I’m constantly thinking about how we can invest in our community and improve the author and reader experience. When I was an author and my papers were going through the peer review process, I was so excited to read the reviewer reports because the comments were invaluable in helping my professor and I think differently about the research question we were exploring. One of the tools I’m most proud to have conceived of is the ACS Reviewer Lab, a free training course to help ensure that reviewers are well versed in the critical skills required to complete insightful and useful reports.

ACS Publications Chemistry Blog (interview with Sarah Tegen)

​Who’s afraid of open infrastructures?​

The purpose of open infrastructure and standards is to provide a foundation on which other services may be built, where competition and commercial solutions can drive innovations and bring costs down, and the proliferation of services built on our foundations suggests we’re meeting a real need. Our next challenge is to ensure that we’re still around in the future, so the foundations are not pulled out from underneath the products and tools so valued by so many of our members and participants. To do that we need to ensure we are sustainable.

Research Information (Joanna Ball, Yvonne Campfens and Tasha Mellins-Cohen)

JB: Everyone benefits from open infrastructures. The ‘origin story’ section of this article is worth reading if you’re new to our industry and aren’t familiar with COUNTER, DOAJ, CrossRef, ORCID and NISO.

Journal Club

​Large Publication Gap for Gynecologic Cancers in High–Impact Factor Journals​

Research publications in high–impact factor journals by cancer site are not proportionate with individual cancer burden on society. Gynecologic cancers are significantly underrepresented in research publications relative to their disease burden, indicating a disparity that persists over the past 18 years. Relative underfunding of gynecologic cancers likely contributes to this publication gap.

Obstetrics & Gynecology (Nikita Sinha et al)

​Article Processing Charges in Gold Open Access Journals: An Empirical Study (paywall)

This study focuses on analyzing the trends in article processing charges (APCs) levied by open access journals. To gather the required data, a CSV file was generated from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The APC values were assessed and converted into standardized currencies, including INR and USD. Among the 17,379 journals included in the DOAJ, only 5,122 journals were found to charge APCs. Through the examination of the collected data, it was discovered that the highest APC amount recorded was INR 518,334.95 (equivalent to USD 6680.46), while the lowest APC observed was INR 1.04 (equivalent to USD 0.013).

Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries (Sarita Gulati, Atasi Sinhababu, & Rupak Chakravarty)

JB: The DOAJ only includes fully open access journals, remember. Some hybrid APCs are higher than this upper range.

​The experiences of COVID-19 preprint authors: a survey of researchers about publishing and receiving feedback on their work during the pandemic​

According to our respondents, the results section of their paper was altered in major ways in 1.9% of cases as a result of preprint feedback and in 10.1% of cases as a result of journal peer review. In the discussion/conclusion section of their paper, major changes were made in 2.8% of cases as a result of preprint feedback and in 11.3% of cases as a result of journal peer review. This seems to suggest a greater added value of journal peer review compared to feedback on preprints. It also may indicate that making changes as a result of peer reviewer comments when submitting to a journal is seen as less ‘optional’ than making changes in response to feedback on a preprint.

PeerJ (Narmin Rzayeva​ et al)

​Lowering the statistical significance threshold of randomized controlled trials in three major general anesthesiology journals​

Lowering a P value threshold of 0.05 to 0.005 would have altered one third of significance interpretations of RCTs in the surveyed anesthesiology literature. Thus, it is important for readers to consider post hoc probabilities when evaluating clinical trial results. Although the present study focused on the anesthesiology literature, we suggest that our results warrant further research within other fields of medicine to help avoid clinical misinterpretation of [randomised controlled trial] RCT findings and improve quality of care.

Canadian Journal of Anesthesia (Philo Waters et al)

And finally...

This week I heard from a Journalology subscriber who worked with Sir John Maddox on Nature in the early 1990s. Back then the typesetting process was somewhat erratic and created some unfortunate glitches, my correspondent tells me. In 1980 Nature ran a news article entitled Indian environment: Shandi inverted, when it was meant to read “Indian environment: Gandhi converted.”

Until next time,

James

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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