profile

Journalology

Journalology #43: History is repeating

Published over 1 year ago • 11 min read

​

​

Hello fellow journalologists,

In January I posted a set of graphs on LinkedIn that showed the sudden decrease in article output that many open access portfolios experienced in recent years (you can download the slides here). The PLOS portfolio, Scientific Reports, the BMC series, and Hindawi all experienced significant downturns at various points in their history.

MDPI and Frontiers grew exceptionally rapidly in 2022, much quicker than any other publisher, and the obvious question was “will history repeat itself?”. Would those two publishers be able to maintain high year-on-year growth rates in 2023?

We now know that the answer is “no”. I wrote an article for The Brief, which was sent to subscribers earlier this week, on the 2022 Frontiers Progress Report. Frontiers’ results for 2022 were impressive, but article output has fallen significantly this year, starting in Q2. I don’t want to repeat The Brief article here, but the take-home message is that in Q1 2023 Frontiers published 339 articles per day, on average; in Q2 that dropped to 242 articles per day; and Q3 is running at 222 articles per day.

I don’t know the reason for this drop, which could be due to a number of factors. Three weeks ago I showed how the output of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, an MDPI journal, decreased significantly after it was delisted from Web of Science. Has Frontiers taken note and implemented stricter quality control measures? Or perhaps publication turnaround times have increased due to the huge increase in submissions that the journal received last year?

In any case, the drop in output at Frontiers and the levelling off of growth of MDPI journals suggests that we are at an inflection point. We shouldn’t underestimate the effect that the rapid growth of fully OA publishers has had on our industry over the past few years. The slowdown of Frontiers and MDPI is one of the most important news stories in scholarly publishing in 2023.

News

​Research4Life & STM support Ukrainian science and research during conflict​

The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine recently expressed its gratitude to STM’s publisher partners for allowing free access to over 42,000 peer-reviewed journals, 174,000 e-books, and 155 databases through the Research4Life program. In 2022, R4L publishers granted Ukrainian institutions free access under the Group A category of Research4Life. In a letter, the Temporary Acting Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine, Yevhen Kudriavets, described how Research4Life's support became a lifeline for Ukrainian scientists by symbolizing resilience and allowing vital research to continue amid the uncertainty of war.

STM press release

​Brill expands Open Access activities: joins OA Switchboard​

Brill is delighted to announce their partnership with the OA Switchboard, the independent, community-driven intermediary dedicated to streamlining and simplifying the transition to Open Access. The OA Switchboard facilitates the exchange of OA-related publication-level information between publishers, funders, and libraries, enabling them to send, receive and respond to a pre-defined set of standardized messages between them.

Brill (press release)

JB: If you’re not familiar with the OA Switchboard then this short video should help you to get up to speed.

​Hum Unveils Lodestone, Cutting-Edge LLM to Unlock Deep Insight​

Lodestone is the new LLM model powering Alchemist. It creates rich, AI-native representations called embeddings which serve as the foundation for understanding content, topics, people, and organizations. For this reason it's often called a “foundation model”. Optimized for long text sequences, Lodestone can read a mid-length research paper. Similar models from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and LLM researchers only read the first one or two paragraphs.

Hum press release

JB: See also Dustin Smith’s opinion article in The Scholarly Kitchen which appears later in this newsletter. Dustin is Hum’s Co-Founder & President.

Community Corner

On Wednesday I'm taking part in a panel discussion at the Digital Science Publisher Day in the Author as Customer session: "A discussion around the metrics that are important to authors, how they affect publisher goals and the impact on research overall."

The session is being chaired by Helen Cooke, who was kind enough to leave a testimonial on the Journalology community wall.

Opinion

​After Stanford president controversy, we're retracting papers. That's part of how science must work​

Journals are often the first to be criticized for the sluggishness and ineffectiveness of this process. We are an obvious, perhaps even easy target, as it is ultimately our decision to publish and then correct or retract papers. Some of the criticism is warranted. Journals have their own bureaucracies that we all need to manage better. More importantly, journals are often timid about explaining the details of errors in the scientific record for fear of further eroding public confidence in their practices and, more broadly, of wearing away public trust in science.
​
That needs to change. It’s time for everyone involved in recording the progress of science to start talking about its woes as well as its glories in plain language, without delays and before scandal forces the conversation. For all the triumphs of the scientific process, mistakes are part of it too. Whether they are allowed to erode trust is up to us.

Los Angeles Times (Holden Thorp)

JB: Journal editors should write regularly, in my opinion. Holden Thorp, the Editor-in-Chief of Science, is a good example of that in action (his Substack newsletter is excellent; University investigations don't get you back to the future published this week is a case in point).

Richard Horton writes a weekly column in The Lancet called Offline, which is one of my favourite parts of the journal. Sir John Maddox wrote prolifically during his tenure at Nature. Richard Smith, Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi all contributed regularly to The BMJ. Marcia Angell and Jerome Kassirer wrote for the NEJM in the 1990s. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, the current editor of JAMA, appears as an author on numerous JAMA Network papers, often alongside industry legend Annette Flanagin.

Writing is hard work and it’s easier for salaried editors to carve out time to write regularly for their publication. The best journals provide leadership to their communities; well argued opinion pieces provide reassurance that the Editor has a handle on the issues that matter to readers. They also provide a journal with character.

​Why preprint review is the way forward​

eLife’s new model forms part of our overarching ‘publish, review, curate’ mission, which also includes Sciety – a journal-agnostic platform that aggregates reviewed preprints from across the web. As a way of helping readers navigate the growing preprint landscape, groups that provide peer-review services can join and curate papers of interest to their communities on Sciety. What’s exciting about Sciety is that it allows, for the first time, for multiple organisations to endorse the same preprint, creating an ecosystem where review and curation is performed by many groups, not just a single journal.

Research Information (Damian Pattinson and Emily Packer)

JB: The article claims that preprints are growing in popularity and links through to this graph on ASAPbio, which shows the exponential growth of preprints through to June 2020 (i.e. the graph is 3 years out of date).

I prefer to cite the Europe PMC graph, which is updated monthly:

There was a very strong growth in preprints up until the middle of 2020, which quickly levelled off. Despite what advocates may want you to believe, preprinting is not growing, at least according to the Europe PMC dataset.

For the record, I’m not against the publish, review, curate approach in principle, although I do have reservations about how it would work in practice. I can see a future where primary research papers are published in central repositories and are endorsed by ‘journals’ that independently vet them. Indeed, I suggested this future about 15 years ago, the first time I ever attended a Nature Publishing Group board meeting. The Board members erupted in laughter when I said that perhaps one day Nature would no longer publish primary research papers (my boss jumped to my defence, which made me appreciate her even more — defending your staff publicly is a good way to develop loyalty).

My prediction was hardly original, though. Sir Robbie Fox’s 1965 vision of “recorder journals” and “newspaper journals” was to all intents and purposes a publish, review, curate model.

​Can Inadequate Corrections Turn Misinformation into Disinformation?​

It seems reasonable that journals and their publishers, be held responsible both for their acts and their omissions. So, a reasonable conclusion is that the inadequate processes of correcting false information in these two cases turned misinformation into disinformation. Regardless of the exact term used, it is yet another example of how the system for correcting publications is broken and that the most important players appear not to care.

The Scholarly Kitchen (Mark Bolland, Alison Avenell, and Andrew Grey)

​In praise of peer review​

In 1665, the first issue of Philosophical Transactions was published, which from the very beginning noted that members of the Royal Society would informally review submissions. It is surprising that it is much more recently, in 1973, that Nature mandated external peer referee reporting for any submitted paper. On the 50th anniversary of mandatory peer review in Nature, we reflect on the history of peer review, and changes in the publishing industry as well as best practices during the peer-review process.

Nature Materials (unsigned editorial)

​Was ChatGPT Set Up to Fail? Choosing the Right Tools and the Right Prompts is Essential for LLM Discovery​

The message here: Give the robots a fighting chance! The new wave of AI tools is immensely powerful. But you have to use them correctly to unlock their potential.

The Scholarly Kitchen (Dustin Smith)

JB: This is a highly practical “how to use LLMs” article. The table in the article is helpful. I wasn’t aware of the ‘browse the internet’ functionality before.

​Superficial engagement with generative AI masks its potential contribution as an academic interlocuter​

The notion of ‘prompt engineering’ has already become overinflated, suggesting an arcane science which will lead to employment in the 2020s, much as data science was to the 2010s. There is clearly a skill to doing this nonetheless, albeit one which academics can easily learn through trial and error. Generative AI is not a tool that can be picked up and immediately used in an effective way, not least of all because of how careless use expands their inherent risk of hallucination. I would suggest academics should not use these tools unless they are willing to commit to using them in a reflexive and accountable way.

Impact of Social Sciences (Mark Carrigan)

​Generative AI and intellectual property​

A few weeks ago, in an art gallery in London, I saw a Durer print that wasn’t a Durer print - it was a copy, made in around 1506 by Raimondi, a student of Raphael. Vasari tells us that Durer was furious and went to court in Venice. I treasure the idea of Venetian magistrates trying to work out how to think about this: their verdict was that Raimondi could carry on making the copies, but could no longer include Durer’s logo. That was a case about intellectual property, but the verdict is also a neat split between two ideas of authenticity. Do we care who made it, and why, or do we just want the picture? That's why some people are horrified by music generators or Midjourney, (or, 150 years ago, were horrified by cameras), and others aren't worried at all.

Benedict Evans blog

JB: Normally I wouldn’t include a snippet from an article that’s not about journal publishing. But this article, like many of Benedict's essays, is insightful.

​Spirit, mission and community​

Seriously, though, Plan S is obviously one of the big developments. Opinions were mixed, but what it did was make us look in the mirror and think: ‘What are we going to do to really speed this process up?’ It has certainly created more traction in the move to open. I don’t believe in everything cOAlition S says and does, and there are lots of things that I would like to have been done in a different way, but the fundamental impetus for change has been really successful.

Research Information (interview with Mandy Hill)

​Summarizing ORCID Record Data to Help Maintain Integrity in Scholarly Publishing​

When we realized that there is the potential for the data in ORCID records to help with detecting potential paper mill submissions, we reached out to a number of our member organizations with a proposal to support the use ORCID data directly in the publishing workflow, presenting the available trust markers in a summarized way to help editors with research integrity checks. We are pleased that so many publishers and vendors are keen to work with us to help us refine our understanding of which information in ORCID records is the most helpful in their editorial and review processes.

ORCID blog (Paula Demain and Tom Demeranville)

JB: The blog post ends: “If you would like to join our list of pilot partners then please reach out to your ORCID Engagement Lead or contact membership@orcid.org. We would be more than happy to meet with you and get you up to speed with the program.”

Journal Club

​View of Interventions in scholarly communication: Design lessons from public health​

In short, scholarly communications needs an open, global data system for monitoring and evaluation, one we believe could be modeled on public health data systems. Such a system would comprise a set of desirable and adverse outcomes, based on comparable measures, with consistent tracking and open data. Under these conditions, each intervention can contribute cumulatively to new knowledge.

First Monday (Micah Altman, Philip N. Cohen and Jessica Polka)

​Best Practices for Using AI Tools as an Author, Peer Reviewer, or Editor​

Similar to peer reviewers and authors, editors evaluating and issuing decisions about manuscripts are accountable for the content of their decisions and the final decision on the manuscript, whether it is accepted or rejected. This includes whether the editor may choose to use generative AI to assist in the summarization of peer review reports or the generation of text for an editorial decision. The transparency and maintenance of confidentiality again remain essential, in precisely the same ways as noted for peer reviewers: the editor is accountable for ensuring the confidentiality of the peer review process where it is required (ie, when authors choose not to engage in open peer review).

Journal of Medical Internet Research (Tiffany I Leung et al)

​Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: Evidence from a Russia‐based paper mill​

The majority of papers potentially originating from the paper mill ‘International Publisher’ LLC are characterized by suspicious collaboration patterns. The patterns of such collaboration can be observed in the variety of affiliations among the authors of the article. Moreover, in many cases, the ‘authors’ of an individual manuscript specialize in different disciplines that do not correspond to each other and/or to the topic of the paper. In other words, the phenomenon of suspicious collaboration supposes a collaboration of scholars who (1) might not be familiar with each other; (2) do not have common research interests; (3) are affiliated with various universities; (4) specialize in different disciplines; and (5) might not specialize in the topic of the paper.

Learned Publishing (Anna Abalkina)

JB: C&EN covered this topic in a news story, published on Friday: One academic paper’s journey through the mill​

And finally...

As we move towards the end of the year some readers will be starting to think about performance reviews for their teams, which may include 360 degree feedback sessions.

In this regard, you may be interested in this excerpt from a recent newspaper article written by Brian Moore, a former England rugby player.

I remember one of the “clear-the-air” sessions we had after losing the Grand Slam against Scotland in 1990. Savage does not even come near. There were two chairs facing back-to-back. One faced a wall and the other a semicircle where the squad sat. Each player took his turn to sit facing the wall and then squad members took it in turn to sit in the other chair and to say whatever they wanted to you, and you were not allowed to reply. It is hellishly uncomfortable, and more than a few home truths were spoken.

Moore, who trained as a solicitor and writes incisively, continued:

I hated the experience, particularly as most comments contained elements of truth, but when I left the session, I had cause to reflect on the comments. If you are a professional, and this has nothing to do with whether you are paid, you must be honest enough to accept criticism, even if it is not constructive when, deep down, you know you deserve it. You then have to resolve, and do everything you can, never to put yourself in a position where those criticisms can be made again.

In Journalology #9 I argued that “feedback is a gift”. Another article published this week provided further insight into the benefits of open feedback sessions:

So we can reason away our own shortcomings based on intentions and feelings, but in this session you get to hear exactly what your peers thought you should have done. Even if you had the best of intentions, you still fell short of what you could have accomplished.

The Journalology testimonial wall contains many kind comments, which I'm truly grateful for. However, in many ways I'd be even more grateful for feedback on how this newsletter can be improved. What issues are you struggling with? How can I help you to become better editors and publishers?

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.

Read more from Journalology

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, The SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) annual meeting starts on Wednesday; many companies have been announcing partnerships and new products, ready for discussion at the jamboree. I’ve grouped those together, at the end of the news section, to help you quickly see whether any of the new initiatives can help you to improve your journal or portfolio. Another way to produce better journals is to get one-to-one support via the Journalology...

7 days ago • 16 min read

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, There’s a lot of ground to cover in this week’s issue and I’ve been playing catch up after a trip to the USA, so let’s get straight to it (after a short piece of self promotion; closed mouths don’t get fed). A workshop testimonial from Emerald Publishing James delivered two insightful train-the-trainer workshops one month apart that focused on positioning our journals programme for increased growth. His approach was thoughtful and...

14 days ago • 15 min read

Subscribe to newsletter Hello fellow journalologists, I tend to write these newsletters quickly and sometimes I make a mistake. Last week I said: Pablo Gómez Barreiro’s commentary was published on March 23 and presumably hadn’t been seen by Stefan Tochev, the MDPI CEO, by the time he published his latest newsletter on April 30, which used the original graphs. Somehow I missed this sentence from Stefan’s newsletter: An alternative approach, using weighted average by publication volume, shows...

21 days ago • 9 min read