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.
Journalology #48: Lancet 200
Hello fellow journalologists, This week has been an important one for some Journalology readers, who celebrated The Lancet’s bicentennial anniversary with the publication of a special issue on Friday. In one article, at the end of this week’s print issue, six former Lancet editors reminisce about their experiences of “Life at The Lancet”. When Dot Bonn joined The Lancet in 1962, aged 25, little did she know that she’d work for five Editors-in-Chief over a period of 30 years, and would train the incumbent, Richard Horton. In the building’s entrance hall a bust of The Lancet’s radical founder, Thomas Wakley, gazed down from a pedestal, forever reminding us of his fiery determination to end corruption and incompetence in the medical profession, raise standards of care in hospitals, and promote social reform. One of the Editors that Dot worked with was Robin Fox (the son of Sir Theodore “Robbie” Fox, who also edited The Lancet and who I quote regularly in Journalology). Robin recounts his first week working on the journal in 1968, which culminated in a hot date in Sussex with an assistant editor called Susan “to see badgers”. It was not all play and no work, however: Seemingly, the main thing I have to master here is hyphens. These are to be deployed lavishly but with precision; for instance, the vital distinction between a working-party and a working party has previously escaped me. Stephanie Clark joined The Lancet in 1986 and had the dubious pleasure of trying to teach me to copyedit (it didn’t go well — my fault, not hers). She recalls: The office was deathly quiet, and if the whispering got too loud Robin and David would tap their pencils on the desks indicating “less noise please”. Conversation occasionally broke out if the three most senior editors left the room. At 12.30 pm precisely Robin and David would down pencils and get out their lunch boxes. One would read The Guardian and one The Times. At 12.45 pm they would exchange newspapers and continue reading until 1 pm, when pencils were lifted again. In 1988 Pia Pini joined the team. She recounts a legendary moment in Lancet history when Norton, the press officer’s guide dog: … ravaged the deputy editor David Sharp’s bag leaving a trail of yoghurt from a pierced pot, abandoned in favour of the tastier sandwich therein. (I was there at the time. David was NOT happy.) David Sharp, joined in 1965 and retired as Deputy Editor in 2001. HR policies were different back then: My job interview seemed more like a test of ability to keep down lots of claret at 6 pm with nothing to eat but water biscuits. I was not so fortunate. When David and Richard interviewed me in February 2000, there was not a drop of the red stuff to be seen, although I certainly needed a drink immediately after leaving the interrogation room; Richard was ‘good cop’, David ‘bad cop’. I joined The Lancet a few days before my 26th birthday. My life changed forever that day in many wonderful ways. I owe so much to the Lancet editors who taught me my craft and instilled in me a broad, global perspective. You see: A journal is an expression of the editors who work on it, who curate and create the content. The editors of truly great journals use their brand and convening power to try to improve human society through advocacy as well as evidence. The contributions from the six former editors are a tiny snapshot of the shared memories of the men and women who’ve worked on the journal. There are many people — some of whom subscribe to this newsletter — who have made a far greater contribution to the Lancet group than I have; I feel honoured (and slightly embarrassed) to have been invited to write an article for The Lancet’s bicentennial issue. Hundreds, if not thousands, of human beings (Lancet style once learned is never forgotten — Stephanie’s efforts were not entirely in vain) have helped to make the journal successful. Equally importantly, we’ve had a lot of fun while doing it and made friendships that last a lifetime. I’ve included snippets from the anniversary issue in a separate section of this newsletter; there’s so much good copy to enjoy and be inspired by. But first, the news... NewsAI beats human sleuth at finding problematic images in research papersFor his study, David sifted through more than 700 papers with relevant images published between 2014 and 2023 in Toxicology Reports, a journal he chose in part because it contains a lot of pictures and in part because in 2021, the journal’s publisher, Elsevier in Amsterdam, added an expression of concern to an entire special issue of the journal.
After checking the papers visually, David gave the AI a go and found that it worked “much faster than me very carefully staring at images for a long time”, although it did miss four papers that he had flagged. All told, there were duplications in around 16% of the analysed papers with relevant images.
Nature (Anil Oza) ‘In case I die, I need to publish this paper’: scientist who left the lab to fight in UkraineI continued my scientific work even when I was in the trenches. I performed some editorial corrections to my paper submitted to Cell Death & Disease when we were under mortar shelling. I had a strong feeling that I had to finalize the paper; I thought that in case I die here, I need to get this paper published. We had some Internet connection, which I used to discuss edits with my co-authors. In some ways, it was like any distanced information exchange between scientists. Nature (Layal Liverpool) JB: This news story brings a new and horrific meaning to the phrase “publish or perish”. GigaByte journal joins the ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ transformation of the publishing paradigmIn a new step, GigaByte is now building on this “publish then review” model of scientific communication by adding an endorsement step by aligning it with eLife’s new 'publish, review, curate' model that puts preprints first. This is done using the new 'Curating Groups' feature from Sciety, to distinguish groups that offer some form of assessment/endorsement of a preprint. These Endorsement statements from GigaByte featured on this page are also highlighted on the original bioRxiv preprint as well as the associated Sciety article page. Altogether, this helps readers see at a glance why this preprint might be important or interesting. GigaByte (press release) National Science Foundation research award will expand the shift+OPEN initiativeThe MIT Press is delighted to announce that it has received a two-year, $275,000 Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) from the National Science Foundation to expand the shift+OPEN initiative and shift at least two more journals to diamond open access. The Press will also use the grant to assess and compare the viability of open access models for advancing and sustaining the outputs of scientific and scholarly STEM and HSS research.
Our initial funding from Arcadia covered the expenses of transitioning a journal to open access for a three-year term and expert assistance in developing a sustainable funding model to ensure the journal remains open access. We plan to announce our new journal partner in late October 2023.
MIT Press (press release) A new Open Science Indicators dataset is here!This is the fourth quarterly update to Open Science Indicators since we introduced the dataset in December 2022. It covers January 1 2019 to June 30 2023 (four full years, plus the first half of 2023). Like the previous installments, this update measures data-generation and -sharing, code-generation and -sharing, and preprint posting. It also includes a preliminary version of our first new indicator: protocol sharing. Watch this space for more on how we developed the protocol sharing indicator in a future post. The Official PLOS Blog (announcement) Trials to Publications tool: Linking clinical trial data on registries with journal publicationsA free online tool promises to make the process of finding medical evidence more efficient and effective for systematic reviewers, health technology assessment experts and metascientists.
The Trials to Publications tool allows users to search journal articles for any trial listed on the American ClinicalTrials.govregistry. Working from a trial’s registry number, it uses a statistical model to automatically identify PubMed articles likely to report the trial’s outcomes.
TranspariMED (Till Bruckner) Find out how our new platform will improve research-policy collaborationThe UK government publishes their 'Areas of Research Interest' (ARI) each year, outlining the research topics or questions that they want answered. Researchers can use these documents to better understand government priorities, and put themselves forward as experts on matters relating to their work.
Previously each government department typically published these online as separate PDF or Word documents, with no unified structure or interconnectivity. Researchers hoping to learn what government departments were interested in had to read through many separate documents in order to find areas that might be relevant to them.
The ARI database brings all of these questions together in one place, making these areas of interest more accessible and easier to navigate. You can search by keywords, topic, government department, research field or country within the UK.
Overton blog JB: This news is a few weeks old now and is only tangentially relevant to journal publishing. However, Overton is an important tool in the research ecosystem and I wanted to flag it to Journalology readers. Euan Adie, the founder, developed Altmetric and has a strong track record of developing useful tools. It should be on your radar. If you want to know more about this project from a policy maker’s perspective, this article provides useful background information. Passing the NLM Torch – Welcome to Dr. Steve SherryNLM is excited to announce that long-time leader and innovator, Stephen Sherry, PhD, is now our Acting Director. Dr. Sherry has 25 years of experience performing research, education, and data resource management involving human variation, genetics, and genomics. His tenure follows that of Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, who retired from federal service on September 30 after seven years of service as our director.
Dr. Sherry brings a history of innovation and leadership to NLM. His vision to advance NLM’s mission includes enhancing health and research through robust, sustainable information resources and transformative information science, engineering, and technology development, all while leading in engineering excellence for resilience, reliability, and representation in the era of artificial intelligence.
NLM Musings from the Mezzanine (announcement) Lancet 200The Lancet’s 200 years: much more to do200 years isn’t a milestone. It is only a brief moment in the long and erratic history of human endeavour. Much of what we call progress in health is as much due to increasing prosperity and wider educational opportunity, as it is to technical medical advance. But the importance of health as an idea in society lies beyond the immediate materiality of bodily wellbeing. Our concern for health and our investment in health systems are proof of our social commitments to one another—health is an expression of our human solidarity. Unsigned editorial The Lancet’s enduring legacy: speaking truth to power
The Lancet has had a transformative role in health policy, science, and development. Over the past two centuries, the journal has taken medicine out of a silo, and placed it squarely within the realm of politics and beyond, calling attention to the greatest inequities in global health, and advocating for transparency and accountability from governments and multilateral organisations. Richard Horton’s critique in September, 2023 of the Iranian Government's crackdown on activists is just one of many examples of The Lancet recognising the inextricable link between health and human rights. The legacy of Wakley has truly endured. Sania Nishtar et al The Lancet at 200 years: a timeless mission to drive positive social change through advancing medical research and scienceAs we look to the next 200 years, there is no doubt in my mind that The Lancet will continue to have a pivotal role in scientific enquiry and medical advancement, and that it will continue to boldly catalyse social and policy change that benefits people and our planet. The progress made over the past two centuries gives me deep confidence in the positive progress to come. I thank Thomas Wakley, Richard Horton, and all the editors, authors, peer reviewers, and publishing teams past, present, and future for staying true to The Lancet’s core mission. Kumsal Bayazit Building on current progress to shape the future of biomedical scienceEquity in accessing the outcomes of biomedical research remains a challenge. Medical scientists of the future will be expected to play a crucial part in communicating science, and in acknowledging the roles of research participants in advancing knowledge and understanding biomedicine. They will need to act as facilitators for patient and community engagement and co-implementation of scientific projects, developing mechanisms to define priorities in biomedical science, paying attention to wider physical, socioeconomic, commercial, political, and environmental issues that influence disease and health, and combating rising anti-science movements in some regions of the world. Ana Olga Mocumbi, Irene Akua Agyepong, and Catherine Kyobutungi Equity, transparency, and accountability: open science for the 21st centuryThese initiatives will require coordination, cooperation, and investment, and sharing decision-making power to develop solutions that accomplish these goals and are acceptable to all. Investment can be achieved by shifting incentives away from high IF publishing to global open science and independent bodies. Willingness to incorporate LMIC concerns, priorities, and cultures in global open science is likely to be challenging, but the goal of making science more accessible, equitable, and reliable is well worth the effort. Margaret A Winker et al Offline: Scientific journals—irrational, perhaps, but necessaryHowever, many of us believe more than ever that science should remain the core of a medical journal's purpose. Science cannot be divorced from society's concerns. Rothman was correct: science cannot guide us to Elysian Fields. But it can act as a flint to ignite action where before there was none. This view is what animates us at The Lancet today. On this especially notable anniversary, when our world feels under particular strain, it seems worth being clear about the ambition we have for science and the role of scientists. Richard Horton The Lancet and the medical journal as an instrument of reformRising from the ashes of his own personal tragedy (including the loss of his house to arson), Wakley, until then a general practitioner, founded The Lancet in 1823 as an inexpensive, weekly reform journal at a time when medicine and British society wrestled alike with notions of entrenched privilege, secularism, and the rights of commoners. Within medicine, Wakley famously printed in his first issue of the journal the lectures of esteemed surgeon Astley Cooper (1768–1841), making them available to a broad readership, before moving on in subsequent issues to severely attack the entrenched nepotism, including among Cooper’s family and trainees, that shaped medical education and determined hospital privileges at London institutions such as Guy’s Hospital and St Thomas’ Hospital. Scott H Podolsky The Lancet: an archive of surgical historyA now infamous Lancet article from 1828 reported in excruciating detail Bransby's botched operation on Sussex labourer Stephen Pollard, while “cutting for the stone” (removal of bladder calculi). The article, by Lancet reporter James Lambert, gave a gory account of the patient's agony as Bransby Cooper fumbled for the stone. “Every now and then”, wrote Lambert, “there was a cry of, Hush!, which was succeeded by the stillness of death, broken only by the horrible squash, squash, of the forceps in the perineum. ‘Oh, let it go—pray let it keep in,’ was the constant cry of the poor man.” Pollard died shortly after the operation. Sally Frampton and Roger Kneebone Medical research, clinical trials, evidence, and the shaping of policyLaunched in March, 2020, and involving UK National Health Service (NHS) hospitals and patients, the trial was the biggest RCT of COVID-19 in the world. RECOVERY was a platform trial which could compare multiple treatments at the same time using a single protocol. The trial reported that a cheap steroid, dexamethasone, could reduce COVID-19 deaths by a third. At a time when more than half a million people had lost their lives, the evidence from this study was crucial. Through a series of large, randomised trials, designed to be as simple as possible for attending physicians in 176 acute hospitals across the whole of the NHS, the RECOVERY trial thereafter discovered other repurposed, generic, and new drugs effective against SARS-CoV-2 infection. These lifesaving RECOVERY studies, many of which were reported in The Lancet, led by co-chief investigators Peter Horby and Martin Landray, had a distinct genealogy that went back to the earlier ISIS philosophy: ask a simple question, be large in scale, and cheap to execute. Importantly, RECOVERY was a definitive study on which policy around the world is now based. Conrad Keating Beyond Thomas Wakley: invisible actors and hidden voices in The Lancet during the 19th centuryMedical journalism in the 19th century was rarely seen as high-status work. Medical journalists were generally younger medical practitioners from poor and middling backgrounds who jobbed as editorial assistants and reporters to earn extra income while they attempted to leverage a better position within the crowded marketplace of doctors. The role brought its own trials and challenges. Many in the medical profession remained deeply suspicious of journalists—perhaps unsurprisingly, since being on the receiving end of a vitriolic attack from The Lancet was hardly an appealing prospect. Sally Frampton and Roger Kneebone Comma crunching: a week at The LancetAt a village fete I once told a jovial but steely eyed woman working the tea urn that I was an editor. “Ah”, she replied with relish, “a comma cruncher.” It is hard not to see the truth in her characterisation. Everyone has their pet hates. One former editor managed to prevent the word tool appearing in The Lancet for 15 years at least. Editors have had all sorts of grammar and style rules drummed into them pretty thoroughly—it is difficult to let them go. After just a couple of years working at The Lancet, the absence of an Oxford comma on a billboard or a restaurant menu will be forever noted. Sean Cleghorn The Lancet 1823–2023: the best science for better livesOf the 168 British medical journals launched in the first half of the 19th century, only 12 were still being published by 1900. Building from 4000 subscribers in 1824, how did The Lancet buck the trend? The answer lies with its cheap price and weekly appearance, which encouraged the publication of up-to-the-minute research and rapid editorial responses. It also had a full-time editor who had come into post at just 28 years old, and who was determined that his readership would include rank and file practitioners and the educated public. Most crucially, Wakley borrowed from the popular press an invective-laden, confrontational tone with which he attacked the medical and political establishment, much to the delight of subscribers. Martin Gorsky and Agnes Arnold-Forster JB: Journalology is on track have 4000 subscribers by 2024. “Cheap price and weekly appearance” sounds like a good strategy to me. Perhaps this newsletter needs to have more of an invective-laden, confrontational tone in order to survive? Community CornerI’ve been fortunate to have hand a handful of mentors throughout my career who collectively helped me to develop into who I am now. Perhaps the one who influenced me the most was Richard Horton, who was my boss between 2000 and 2007. Richard, along with many other Lancet colleagues, taught me the craft of editing and helped me to understand how journalism (in its broadest sense) can help to improve global society. For obvious reasons, I’ve include Richard’s testimonial in this week’s Community Corner. He’s been incredibly supportive throughout my career and I’m so grateful that he selected me to join The Lancet’s editorial team 23+ years ago. OpinionThe American Chemical Society Offers a New Twist on the Article Processing Charge: An Interview with Sarah TegenThe ADC is a flat fee of $2,500 for our hybrid journals, and it covers the costs associated with the many publishing services provided from submission to final editorial decision. This includes organizing, maintaining, and investing in the high-quality scholarly peer review process and multiple other services provided by an expansive global network of editors and reviewers. These costs are significant, comprising more than 50% of the overall cost of publishing the final version of record. The Scholarly Kitchen JB: The article is worth reading in full. The comments section is along the lines that you might expect. Sarah emphasises that this charge is likely to be taken up only by 200 out of 200,000 submissions a year. I don’t see this as a money making exercise. Rather, it’s about making the point that publishers incur costs for doing peer review and it’s unreasonable to expect them to allow CC BY with zero embargo for the AAM (author-accepted manuscript) without being able to cover costs. Spitting out the AI Gobbledegook sandwich: a suggestion for publishersRecently, Hindawi has ramped up its integrity operations and is employing many more staff to try and shut this particular stable door. But Hindawi is surely not the only publisher infected by this kind of fraud, and we need a solution that can be used by all journals. My simple suggestion is to focus on prevention rather than cure, by requiring that all articles that report work using AI/ML methods adopt reporting standards that are being developed for machine-learning based science, as described on this website. This requires computational reproducibility, i.e., data and scripts must be provided so that all results can be reproduced. This would be a logical impossibility for AI gobbledegook sandwiches. BishopBlog (Dorothy Bishop) JB: The link goes to the REFORMS website (Reporting Standards for ML-based Science), which hosts a new checklist for editors to become familiar with. If Dorothy is promoting it then I’m sure it’s excellent, but it’s one more thing for editors to do. We keep returning to the tension between the need to do more quality control on each paper and the funders’ demand to reduce APCs, don’t we? GPT, Large Language Models, and the Trough of DisillusionmentOne good example of summarization is Elsevier’s topic pages, which distill entire research topics down to bite-size primers based on information from dozens or hundreds of research papers. I don’t know if Elsevier uses LLMs to create this content, but they have been creating these pages since at least 2018 (according to the Wayback Machine), when they were described as using ‘innovative automated approaches for information extraction and relevancy ranking’. Elsevier isn’t the only organization to have been doing this sort of thing since before ChatGPT. Scholarcy, a finalist in the Karger Vesalius awards in 2020, is an AI-powered article summarizer. Companies like Zapier, SciSummary, Petal, and dozens of other startups are also trying to get in on that particular act, often enabled by GPT or one its technological stablemates. The Scholarly Kitchen (Phill Jones) Proudly nonprofitMoreover, when we decide to start a new journal, it is because we think it will be of value to the scientific community, not that it will produce a profit. Meanwhile, our commercial peers have mechanisms to conveniently generate new journals every year. Many of these are fine publications, but there is a profit associated with each of them. Science (Holden Thorp) JB: Many? I oversaw the launch of 26 Nature journals I can hand on heart say that I’m proud of every single one. There’s a long list of potential journals that were investigated and subsequently dropped; we never launched a journal that couldn’t add value to the scientific debate. The editorial success of the Nature portfolio is a testament to the due diligence that we put in place. At the point when I left 18 months ago, 26 of the top 50 journals by impact factor had Nature in their title (yes, IF is not synonymous with scientific excellence, but even so). As Walt Disney put it: “We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.” Driving revenues was never a major motivator for me, which probably made me a bad publisher. Mea culpa. And finally...The Lancet almost never came into being. On August 26, 1820, its founder, Thomas Wakley, was assaulted in his home, which was burned to the ground, and left for dead. To this day no one knows why. It’s possible that it was a case of mistaken identity. His assailants may have been out for revenge because they thought Wakley had decapitated the Cato Street Conspirators at a public execution. “Cutting off a head ain't an easy thing to do lad," said Hobhouse, a wiry middle-aged man with receding hair and a prognathous jaw. “The executioner only took a few seconds, and that takes a surgeon’s skill and lots of practice.” The Cato Street Conspiracy (published in 2007) is my fictional interpretation of what may have happened 197 years ago. Two warnings are necessary: (1) the opening scene is a bit gruesome; (2) so’s the quality of the writing (especially the dialogue) — it’s the only short story I’ve written, and it shows. Until next time, James P.S. If you’ve had your fill of Lancet history and would prefer to look to the future, then try reading Unbundling AI by Benedict Evans. |
Journalology
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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