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 #49: Bonfire sale of the humanities
Hello fellow journalologists, In this week’s issue you’ll learn how much CEOs of top publishing companies earn (before, during and after employment) and also get an insight into what happens when a vital supplier goes bust. It’s been a busy news week. NewsBrill and De Gruyter to create leading academic publisher in the humanitiesThe transaction creates the leading academic publisher in the Humanities and presents a unique opportunity to accelerate organic growth and achieve necessary scale. With pro forma combined revenues of around EUR 134 million and 750 employees, De Gruyter Brill will be well-positioned to offer the best possible service and infrastructure to its communities, jointly publishing well over 3,500 books and 800 journals per year. De Gruyter (press release) JB: Brill was founded in 1683 and De Gruyter in 1749, which makes last week’s Lancet bicentennial look like a children’s party. This week’s acquisition is the culmination of a tough 12 months for Brill and I thought it might be a good idea to summarise the backstory to provide perspective on the price paid (€51.5m) and the possible underlying reasons for the acquisition. In July 2022 Brill announced that John Martin would join as CEO starting on September 1. Less than a month after starting his new role Brill’s main distributor, Turpin, went into administration, which adversely affected Brill’s business. On February 13, 2023, Brill announced that John Martin was stepping down as CEO “to pursue other opportunities in the market for education technology in schools”. Two days later a trading update was published, which announced that Peter Hendriks (a former executive at Springer) would join as interim CEO. The announcement noted: Full-year operating expenses were negatively impacted by one-off costs related to setting up new fulfilment and order-to-cash capabilities, as well as higher costs for consulting and technology. Possible impairments on inventory and intangibles are currently being assessed. Brill does not expect a net profit for FY2022 and does therefore not foresee paying a dividend in 2023. According to the 2022 annual report, revenues were €48m but operating profit was €-4.5m. To put that into context, in 2020 and 2021 operating profit was €+4.5m (or about 10% of revenue). By the end of August this year, the financial results had stabilised somewhat with revenues growing by 2.2% in the first half of 2023 when compared with the first half of 2022. However, operating profit dropped from €1084k in H1 2022 to €232k in H1 2023. People often quote multiples of EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation; a widely used measure of corporate profitability) as a proxy for a valuation. The multiple will differ for each industry — tech companies often have very high multiples because of the expectation of high future growth. For example, the Microsoft – Activision deal announced earlier this week had a multiple of just over 18 times EBITDA, which is very high. By contrast, a manufacturing company with low growth and lots of capital expenditure (i.e. expensive equipment to buy and maintain) might have a valuation multiple of only 5 times EBITDA. Brill’s EBITDA in 2021, before the recent disruption, was €7.2m, so the €51.5m price that De Gruyter paid to acquire Brill is a 7-times multiple. Looking at revenues, paying just over 1-times revenues looks very low until you understand the backstory. Speaking about the acquisition Carsten Buhr, Chief Executive Officer of De Gruyter, said: We believe combining our businesses will provide us with the scale to finance the necessary investments in technology, workflows and platforms. This will enable us to further improve the author experience and our services to libraries and academic and professional institutions worldwide. We believe the combination has the ability to accelerate our combined growth rate and we look forward to working with Brill on a clear business plan from a shared vision and joint ambition: to create the leading academic publisher in the Humanities. This acquisition makes strategic sense for both De Gruyter and Brill; margins are tight in HSS publishing and the publishers will likely be financially stronger by combining as one unit. Market consolidation is a direct consequence of the move to open access (OA) publishing. In an OA world scale wins, which is why we can expect to read more announcements like this one in the future. Wiley Announces CEO TransitionWiley (NYSE: WLY and WLYB), a global knowledge company and a leader in research, publishing, and knowledge solutions announced today the departure of Brian Napack as President and Chief Executive Officer and the appointment of Matthew Kissner as Interim CEO, effective immediately. Mr. Kissner previously served as Wiley’s Group Executive and Board Chair, as well as Interim CEO from May to December 2017. Wiley will be rescheduling its planned October 12 Investor Day for a later date to be determined. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (press release) JB: The next time you receive a job-offer letter you may want to compare it with Brian Napack’s from 2017, which outlines his likely severance package. I think it would be fair to say that he won’t be short of a bob or two (a phrase that will likely perplex a sizeable chunk of the non-UK based Journalology readership). Wiley lost $400m in one day back in March, so the only surprise about this announcement is that it took so long to appear. P.S. If anyone would like to pay me a signing-on bonus of $4m, I’d be very happy to have that conversation. Introducing AI-supported Research HighlightsUsing an internal Springer Nature (publisher of Nature Reviews Microbiology) tool, editors are now able to use AI to help them craft Research Highlights on editorially selected papers. Our approach uses automated content generation to create an initial draft, which is then checked and edited by a human editor. This approach allows the published article to benefit from cutting-edge technology without compromising on accuracy, quality or the nuance that a human editor provides. This synergy of technology and editorial experience reflects our view about the irreplaceable role of editors in research communication. In this issue, we present the first Research Highlights written with the support of AI and published in a Nature journal. Nature Reviews Microbiology (unsigned editorial) JB: I can’t help but wonder how much time is saved here. We can expect research highlights being produced at scale (or perhaps on demand) across scholarly publishing. If the summaries are accurate that should be welcomed. European Commission Awards F1000 with a new Contract to Continue to Provide the Technology, Editorial and Communication Services for Open Research EuropeF1000, which is part of Taylor & Francis group, was awarded a 4-year contract in 2020, tasked with establishing and managing an open access publishing platform for the European Commission, helping them to fulfil their ambition of championing a new publishing model that centres on greater quality, integrity, collaboration, and transparency compared with traditional models. The new contract will see F1000 continue to provide the technology, editorial and communication services for ORE and onboard all of the European Commission framework programmes, which will be eligible to publish on ORE from now on. The publishing platform will also start to take steps towards supporting multilingual publication and enhance the interoperability of the platform with OpenAIRE. Taylor & Francis Newsroom (press release) JB: I wrote about ORE in the May issue of The Brief. So far in 2023, ORE has published 83 articles (that have passed peer review) and 276 in total since it was launched in 2021. Does that count as an “incredible success”? Sustaining DOAJ: our new support model for librariesWe are constantly improving our processes and systems but can no longer absorb the rising costs of providing our service with our current supporter models. We need to increase our income so we can continue to grow, handle the growing number of applications from journals, and support our questionable publishing investigations that are becoming increasingly resource-intensive. DOAJ News Service (announcement) JB: For background information see: Striking a balance between openness and free access in scholarly infrastructure – DOAJ at 20. Nonprofit Publisher Annual Reviews Acquires Charleston HubNonprofit publisher Annual Reviews is pleased to announce that it has acquired Charleston Hub, home of the Charleston Conference, the premier international library event, and Against The Grain, the journal connecting publishers, vendors, and librarians. Annual Reviews (press release) JB: First ACS acquires ChronosHub and now this. Would anyone have predicted these strange alliances at the start of the year? CCC Releases AI-Enabled Affiliation Matching Software Powering Open Access Publication Modeling and Analysis for PublishersOA Agreement Intelligence supports the import of publication data from subscriptions and non-RightsLink sources to further enhance the capability to analyze and compare various business scenarios. The solution combines sophisticated, AI-enabled, affiliation-matching technology and analytic capabilities, to reliably disambiguate institution affiliation and funder relationships. This empowers publishers to easily structure and negotiate OA agreements. Copyright Clearance Center (press release) How thousands of invisible citations sneak into papers and make for fake metricsBut Cabanac noticed something weird: The study had been cited 107 times according to the ‘Altmetrics donut,’ an indicator of an article’s potential impact, yet it had been downloaded just 62 times.
The metadata files of the papers in question seem to contain more references than are in the HTML or PDF versions, Cabanac says. According to Cabanac, the references are sneaked in at some point into metadata files that are submitted to Crossref and automatically ingested. Since metadata files can be resubmitted as many times as one likes, updated metadata files can also be submitted anytime after an article is published.
Retraction Watch (Dalmeet Singh Chawla) CACTUS Launches 'Insights XChange' A New Podcast Series for Conversations Reshaping Academic ResearchEmbark on an explorative journey through the rapidly changing realm of academic publishing with the premiere of the next season of Cactus Communications (CACTUS)’s podcast, “Insights Xchange – Conversations Shaping Research,” hosted by industry expert, Nikesh Gosalia. Set to make its debut in early October, this pioneering podcast promises to delve into the pivotal issues, emerging trends, and impactful technologies shaping the research world. SSP Society for Scholarly Publishing (press release) Frontiers institutional partnerships update – autumn 2023It is our conviction that science funded by all should be available to all, for the benefit of all. That is why Frontiers is working towards the goal of having all publications covered by institutional agreements within the next five years… Our team will continue to work closely with institutions to co-create new and inclusive partnership models that work with their budget cycles, and which move the financial responsibility away from the author. Frontiers (press release) Consulting the research community on cOAlition S’s “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal: tender resultscOAlition S is delighted to announce the successful completion of the tender process for selecting a contractor to facilitate the consultation with the research community regarding our “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal. The tender has been awarded to Research Consulting Limited, a UK-based specialist consultancy firm focused on research and scholarly communication. Research Consulting will deliver the work in partnership with the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), an interdisciplinary research institute at Leiden University specialising in the study of scientific research and its intersections with technology, innovation, and society. Plan S (announcement) How ChatGPT and other AI tools could disrupt scientific publishingA study examining 100 publishers and journals found that, as of May, 17% of publishers and 70% of journals had released guidelines on how generative AI could be used, although they varied on how the tools could be applied, says Giovanni Cacciamani, a urologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who co-authored the work, which has not yet been peer reviewed. He and his colleagues are working with scientists and journal editors to develop a uniform set of guidelines to help researchers to report their use of LLMs. Nature (Gemma Conroy) American Society of Plant Biologists announce new peer review report policyThe new peer review reports will closely replicate all comments from editors and reviewers to the authors during the peer review process for each draft of the manuscript, as well as the authors’ responses. Barring any other exceptional circumstances, the reports will only redact the following information that may appear in the decision letters: 1) The names of specific Associate or Monitoring Editors; 2) unpublished data submitted confidentially in response to reviewer comments (e.g., figures, tables; data not intended for the manuscript under review but only to support responses to reviewer comments) at the author’s request. American Society of Plant Biologists (press release) Community CornerThis newsletter tends to focus on biomedical publishing partly because that’s the subject area that I know best, but also because I use PubMed searches to identify likely content. I’m always on the lookout for news stories and opinion articles on HSS topics, so please do send them along if you see them. Hopefully Pooja will approve of the first story in this week’s issue. OpinionBuilding a Voluntary Contribution Transaction SystemEvery recognized voluntary contribution by an individual (volunteer) to the scholarly system, as listed above, will have points, which will be called ‘Contribution Points’ (CP). For example, reviewing a manuscript could be worth 10 points, organizing a panel 20 points, speaking at a webinar 10 points, mentoring someone for six months 30 points, and writing a 500-word blog post 5 points. How these points will be determined, accumulated, and used as currency are explained below. The Scholarly Kitchen JB: Surely the next step will be to create a Fantasy University competition (you know, like this one). Or has someone done that already? Dear journals: stop hoarding our papersThe multiple-submission ban stems from the pre-digital era, in which copyrights were more difficult to enforce, journal editors sifted through physical manuscripts and peer reviewers were scarce. But today, digitization has automated much of the administrative work. Identifying relevant reviewers, no matter their location, is easier and more straightforward than before. The fear that multiple submissions would overwhelm the peer-review system lacks empirical evidence and is outweighed by the burden placed on researchers. This is particularly detrimental to early-career scientists and those from under-represented backgrounds, for whom the delay isn’t just frustrating; it’s a barrier to career advancement. Nature (Dritjon Gruda) The Peer Review Renaissance: An Urgent Call for TransformationPeer review’s significance lies in its role as a quality control mechanism for knowledge dissemination. It’s like a tea strainer. Imagine a cup of tea that hasn’t been strained. It would be difficult to drink it. In an era when information was scarce and often unreliable, peer review emerged as a means to ensure the accuracy and credibility of scientific discoveries. Much like the tea strainer, it sieves out the errors, the biases, and the unsubstantiated claims and leaves you a paper that can be readily consumed. However, just as a tea strainer may not catch every single stray leaf in your cup of tea, peer review might not identify every minor error or potential flaw in a research paper. Nevertheless, it significantly diminishes the likelihood of encountering papers riddled with inaccuracies or ethical concerns. The Scholarly Kitchen (Roohi Ghosh) Measuring protocol sharing: are we on the right track?Preliminary analysis of the locations of protocols associated with PLOS articles indicates that a clear majority (84%) appear as peer-reviewed publications, with Nature Protocols and the Springer Protocols collection as the most cited sources. Sharing in dedicated repositories like protocols.io and Protocol Exchange became less common over the reporting period, falling from 11% in 2019 to 2% in the first half of 2023, while sharing via supplementary information became more common. The use of repositories is often viewed as a best practice for protocol sharing because these protocols can be updated as they evolve over time. The Official PLOS Blog (Marcel LaFlamme) Registered Reports: what we’ve learned so farPeer-reviewing a Registered Report requires a different mindset from that of a typical paper — something that some of our reviewers struggled with. We understand that it can be quite challenging to evaluate a paper based solely on the experimental design rather than the results. One piece of feedback we received suggested that reviewers might introduce their biases at the experimental design stage, for example by insisting that authors use a particular approach. Another common comment was that reviewers might ask for too many unnecessary experiments — something we have indeed observed during the review process of several Registered Report submissions. We have found that the role of the editor in evaluating the reviewer reports and communicating which experiments are essential and which are optional is crucial for the success of this format. Nature Methods (unsigned editorial) Working for Global Equity through Digital Object IdentifiersIn this post, we present the facts about DataCite and Crossref DOIs and their infrastructures, their use, their growth, their governance, their transparency, and their cost—so that organisations that care about the rigour of the scholarly record can make more informed decisions. By doing so, we dispel some misconceptions that may risk damaging a healthy open research ecosystem for future generations. Upstream (Ginny Hendricks and Matt Buys) PLOS Biology at 20: Reflecting on the road we’ve traveledLooking to the future, I’m interested to see whether, how, and if the publishable unit is further refined. While successfully switching from print to online, research publishing has clung to the same article format that has existed since the 1600s. Perhaps PLOS Biology can move towards more modular publishing, with research questions, methods, results, data, code, and interpretations available as independent but interlinked objects. I hope that PLOS Biology and PLOS can leverage technology to continue to innovate and explore possibilities, pushing the needle for what is considered the norm. PLOS Biology (Hemai Parthasarathy, Theodora Bloom, and Emma Ganley) Open peer review urgently requires evidence: A call to actionAs the arc of scholarly communication bends towards greater transparency and openness, addressing these evidence gaps is urgently necessary. We call upon all stakeholders—particularly researchers, publishers, and funders—to contribute in achieving this aim. To inspire that process, we have sketched out a preliminary research agenda containing what we assess to be the most pressing questions, including the most promising research approaches to be used in addressing them. The initial step should be to extend and validate the agenda itself through cocreative methods. Although our prioritization of questions and methods draws heavily from a recent preprint that surveys the literature, we believe that to maximize uptake, the plan of action should be community driven. PLOS Biology (Tony Ross-Hellauer, Lex M. Bouter, Serge P. J. M. Horbach) Journal ClubBiomedical publishing: Past historic, present continuous, future conditionalHuman curation will of course still play a role, be it via informal, trusted sources like colleagues and social networks or more organized tertiary material. Will this mean the return of the brand or the revenge of the community? Journal front sections (News & Views, Mini-Reviews, Perspectives, etc.) already play an important role highlighting work of potential interest. As journals cease to be venues where research itself first appears, providing context and analysis should become more important (much as newspapers are increasingly venues one looks to for analysis rather than places one first hears about events). PLOS Biology (Richard Sever) JB: This essay is worth reading in full as it provides a good overview of the history and future challenges in scholarly publishing. An essential goal within reach: attaining diversity, equity, and inclusion for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute journalsAs part of the commitment to increasing diversity of authors, peer reviewers, and Editorial Board members, the journals will begin to collect demographic information for use in evaluating our progress. Our submission system, Editorial Manager, is developing the ability to anonymously collect demographic data from users. Our publisher, OUP, is a member of the Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing and committed to sharing anonymized author data publicly, as have other major publishers, to create subject-specific benchmarks. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute (K Robin Yabroff et al) The role of results in deciding to publish: A direct comparison across authors, reviewers, and editors based on an online surveyIn the present study, we studied publication bias by examining it at the author, reviewer, and editor level simultaneously. We asked a sample of academics in their role as either editor, reviewer, or author to fill out a survey in order to see whether they were more likely to accept for publication (editor), recommend publication of (reviewer), or write up/submit (author) an article with significant versus non-significant statistical results. We also made a direct comparison between these potential differences across the three scientific roles. We think that the advantage of getting insights into publication bias simultaneously is that it enhances the comparability between publication bias induced by authors, by reviewers, and by editors. By doing it simultaneously, it was possible to keep the fictitious scenarios constant across the three roles, and in turn, it was possible to make a direct comparison between publication bias induced by the three scientific roles. PLOS ONE (Jasmine Muradchanian et al) And finally...In just over a month’s time I will be hosting an EASE webinar: How should editorial performance be monitored, evaluated and incentivised? Here’s the blurb: There is increasing tension between editorial and publishing teams, caused by the transition from subscription to open access business models. Publishers need to increase article volumes to maintain financial sustainability; editors often prefer to maintain selectivity and are concerned about creating financial barriers that prevent some authors from publishing in their journals.
This session will explore these tensions with regards to monitoring, evaluating and incentivising editorial performance. How should article volumes be decided? What parameters should editorial teams work within? How should publishers evaluate Editors-in-Chief (EiCs) and how should EiCs monitor and incentivise their teams? How should editors be compensated?
There’s no ‘right answer’ to any of these questions. We’re hoping to have an open discussion to help attendees work out what’s the best way to address this topic within their own organisations. Please do join us if you can. Until next time, James |
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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