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 #57: Consolidation
Hello fellow journalologists, With only a few weeks to go before the Christmas holidays, publishing organisations have been releasing announcements left, right and centre about acquisitions, reports, rebranding exercises and much more. There’s lots to read and digest this week. I suggest you grab a mince pie and pour yourself a festive glass of mulled wine before settling down to catch up on the week’s news. There were some important developments that are worth keeping on top of. NewsWiley to stop using “Hindawi” name amid $18 million revenue declineIn the current fiscal year, Wiley expects $35-40 million in lost revenue from Hindawi as it works to turn around journals with issues and retract articles, Matthew Kissner, Wiley’s interim president and CEO, said on the earnings call. The company expects revenue to begin to recover in its next fiscal year, he said.
“To that end, we feel that now is the time to sunset the Hindawi brand and begin to fully integrate its 200 journals into Wiley’s 2,000 journal portfolio,” Kissner said on the call. “This reflects the now close alignment of the practices and infrastructure behind the two portfolios, and it enables a much wider audience.”
Retraction Watch (Ellie Kincaid) JB: Nearly 8500 Hindawi articles have been retracted, according to this spreadsheet (source: comment in the Retraction Watch article); Retraction Watch says its aware of 7100 retracted Hindawi articles in 2023. You can read the earnings call slide deck here and read the transcript here. Submissions are up 9% year-on-year to Wiley journals (excluding Hindawi), with published articles +1% vs last year (the discrepancy is because the extra submissions haven't been processed yet, apparently). In response to a question from an investor, Jay Flynn (Executive Vice President & General Manager, Research, Wiley), said: We’ve installed a new management team and we put a team of research integrity experts in place, not just for Hindawi but across our entire research portfolio. This has had a dampening effect on article volume coming through Hindawi. As you know, I’m sure this is a model where it's entirely volume driven. And so when we look at those controls, we feel like that's the right thing to do long term for the business. We also feel very much like the portfolio will benefit from being part of the larger Wiley publishing organization. And so we’ve taken steps to that effect over the last six months and really bringing editorial teams together, bringing marketing teams together, bringing our operations groups together to form a single journals group. And so those decisive steps together, I think, give me confidence in where we’re going to go with Hindawi. Scenario modelling for Open Research EuropeThis report offers guidance on the operating and financing model(s) to establish Open Research Europe (ORE), the European Commission’s open access publishing platform, as a collective non-profit publishing service from 2026. It identifies considers a range of internal and external factors influencing likely growth in published outputs and operating costs of ORE between 2026-2030 and proposes an operational model for the service. It puts forward a central planning scenario based on the publication of 6,600 articles over five years, supported by €17.6 million of funding. Steady rather than exponential growth is preferable for ORE, allowing quality to be maintained and financial support to be marshalled over time as the platform gains acceptance within the author community. JB: The report is worth reading and bookmarking because it provides a reasonable estimate of the cost-per-article (€3400 in 2026 moving down to €2000 by 2030) for an initiative such as this. Too often costs of €500 per article are thrown around, which are far too low. Importantly, Rob Johnson, the author, has made his financial models freely available here. By way of disclosure, I was one the people that Rob interviewed as part of this piece of work. This week, ORE also published a procurement document for ORE, starting in 2026, which says: Open Research Europe (ORE) is the open access peer-reviewed publishing platform offered by the Commission as an optional service to Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries at no cost to them. It was launched in March 2021 and currently has approximately 500 publications and 900 peer-reviews. ORE follows an innovative open access publishing model for articles, which is based on open peer-review after publication (post-publication peer-review). The Commission’s vision, in collaboration with a number of national funders, is that as of 2026 ORE will transition from a publishing platform for Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries into a publishing platform for which responsibility could be shared with Member State funders and possibly also research performing organisations. The Commission is herewith tendering the open source publishing platform that will underpin ORE as of 2026, which will be largely based on existing open source software for scientific publishing. The estimated value for the project is €1 million. Springer Nature developing new peer review platform to better meet needs of academic community and support growth in OA publishingSpringer Nature has embarked on a bold new project to build the next generation in peer review platforms. Being designed in-house and in stages, adapting to user feedback as part of its ongoing development, it puts editors, authors and reviewers firmly at the centre. Snapp (Springer Nature’s Article Processing Platform) aims to improve the publishing process and provide a more agile response to the growth in Open Access (OA). Its rollout marks a key investment from the company in the future of publishing.
Today marks a milestone of the platform’s rollout having now supported over 1 million submissions, 75% of which were OA. Since initial introduction in 2019, Snapp has supported over 5.6 million authors, 55,000 editors and over half a million reviewers. Over a third of Springer Nature owned journals and nearly half of its OA journals are now live on Snapp, with the rest of its portfolio to follow.
Springer Nature (press release) JB: The timescale is worth noting. It was “initially introduced” in 2019 (so software development started before then); the announcement included a link to an infographic, which says “Over a third of Springer Nature owned journals and nearly half of its OA journals are now live on Snapp”. So after 5 years just over a third of journals have been migrated from the likes of Editorial Manager (which is now owned by Elsevier) and eJournalPress (which was acquired by Wiley in 2021). Migrating journals to new peer review systems is hard, akin to changing the wheels on a moving bus. There needs to be a clear benefit from the considerable investment that’s needed. In that regard, this sentence from the infographic poses more questions than it answers: “30% of the journals that have been on Snapp for at least 10 months have seen their submission to accept TAT [turnaround times] decrease by between 10-70% since 2022.” I can’t help but ask: what about the other 70% of journals? Presumably the TATs have stayed the same or increased on those journals. You can read the Snapp product roadmap here. New project to strengthen diamond OA in AfricaEIFL, AJOL (African Journals Online) and WACREN (the West and Central African Research and Education Network), with support from Wellcome, are launching a three-year project that will strengthen the quality and sustainability of diamond open access (OA) publishing services across Africa while maintaining their diversity.
The project will identify challenges for diamond OA publishing in Africa through community consultation and a landscape study, and issue two open calls for proposals for funding to strengthen the quality of diamond OA publishing services across the region. The first call for proposals will be issued in 2024. The funding process will be participatory, with input and advice from the African diamond OA community.
EIFL (announcement) Biomedical Publisher Future Science Group Joins Taylor & FrancisKnowledge services provider Taylor & Francis has today announced the addition of Future Science Group (FSG), publisher of medical, biotechnological and scientific research. As well as bringing a portfolio of cutting-edge journals and digital hubs, FSG’s leading publishing solutions program will enable Taylor & Francis to offer researchers and medical communication planners a host of additional services.
Taylor & Francis now becomes the fourth largest publisher of pharma-funded research, with the addition of 32 peer-reviewed FSG journals and five digital hubs. These complement the existing range of over 340 Taylor & Francis medical and healthcare journals, including the Expert Collection, which is the world’s largest series of review journals in research, development and clinical medicine.
Taylor & Francis (press release) JB: More market consolidation. One consequence of the move to open access publishing is that economies of scale are becoming increasingly important. The big publishers are likely to get larger as they hoover up small to mid-sized companies. In that regard... (see next story). Dataset of UK learned society publishers 2015-2023This dataset provides information about 277 UK learned societies that published peer reviewed journals in 2015, illustrating how the nature of their publishing activities had changed by 2023. The dataset includes information such as outsourced publishing partners, number of journals published (1, 2 or 3+), incoming resources, publishing revenues and publishing models.
Learned society publishers represent a critical part of the publishing and scholarly communications ecosystem and the impact of changes in the landscape on this group of stakeholders as a whole is not well studied or understood. This dataset provides important insights into how learned society publishing in the UK has changed over time, showing that the number of self-published societies has reduced by 35% since 2015, that outsourcing relationships have become more complex and that societies' revenues from publishing have, in the main, failed to keep pace with inflation.
Research Consulting (Rob Johnson et al) JB: This is another example of consolidation in the industry. Small publishers are likely to need to partner with commercial publishers in order to survive. It’s clear from eyeballing the data that the smallest publishers in 2015 are more likely to have joined forces with a commercial partner. The publishers that have grown the most, in terms of revenue, are almost all self-published. The table below is adapted from the Research Consulting data set and includes publishers where publishing revenue data was available for both the 2015 study and the 2023 study. IOP Publishing and the Royal Society of Chemistry are the two publishers that have grown the most, in terms of revenues. New white paper launch: Generative AI in Scholarly CommunicationsA followup to AI Ethics in Scholarly Communication which STM released in April 2021, this new publication is a resource for stakeholders in scholarly publishing and addresses the increasingly significant role of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies.
The paper looks at the ethical, legal, and practical aspects of GenAI, highlighting its potential to transform scholarly communications, and covers a range of topics from intellectual property rights to the challenges of maintaining integrity in the digital age. The paper provides best-practice principles and recommendations for authors, editorial teams, reviewers, and vendors, ensuring a responsible and ethical approach to the use of GenAI tools.
STM (announcement) JB: This Nature news feature is a useful backgrounder too: Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science? Current State and Future Directions for Open Repositories in EuropeIn the spring of 2023, OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR conducted a survey of the European repository landscape. The survey found that collectively, European repositories acquire, preserve and provide open access to tens or possibly hundreds of millions of valuable research outputs and represent critical, not-for-profit infrastructure in the European open science landscape. They are well-placed to support the expansion of open science practices and research assessment reform across Europe. OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR (Kathleen Shearer et al) ResearchGate and Emerald partner to drive journal readership and visibility with Journal HomeResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and Emerald Publishing, one of the world's leading digital-first publishers, today announced a new partnership to add 18 Emerald journals to ResearchGate – making these journals seamlessly discoverable and accessible by ResearchGate's millions of members globally.
Emerald's publishing portfolio encompasses a broad range of applied and mission-driven research across fields including social sciences, economics, management, education, health social care, and engineering. The new partnership will see the pilot Emerald journals benefit from ResearchGate's innovative Journal Home offering. This will provide enhanced journal visibility through dedicated journal profiles, each journal being prominently represented on all associated article pages and other relevant touch points on the platform that are accessed regularly by ResearchGate's 25 million members, including nearly 7 million users in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
Emerald Publishing (press release) JB: OK, hands up, is there anyone who hasn’t partnered with ResearchGate in the past few months?!? BioOne Announces Subscribe to Open PilotBioOne, the leading nonprofit aggregator in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences, today announces a bold plan to offer up to 80 society titles as part of a Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot beginning in January 2026.
This decision, unanimously endorsed by the BioOne Board of Directors, follows 18 months of careful feasibility analysis and extensive interviews with BioOne’s community of society and library partners in search of an equitable and sustainable path to open.
BioOne Publishing (announcement) JB: Or announced an S2O pilot? PubScholar: China tries again on open access (paywall)The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) recently launched PubScholar, an academic database that offers free access to about 170 million science resources, including over 87 million articles, more than 1 million dissertations and nearly 63,000 books. A range of CAS institutions and national partners have supported the project, which describes itself as being designed to “meet the basic needs of guaranteeing academic resources” for society as a whole.
PubScholar is regarded as an attempt to rebalance the distribution of academic resources away from CNKI, the country’s largest academic database, which was fined after an anti-monopoly investigation last year and over privacy breaches this September.
Times Higher Education (Jing Liu) Discovering relationships between preprints and journal articles… we developed a new automated strategy for discovering relationships between preprints and journal articles and applied it to all the preprints in the Crossref database. We made the resulting dataset, containing both publisher-asserted and automatically discovered relationships, publicly available for anyone to analyse.
Overall, based on the number of existing and newly discovered preprint–journal article relationships, it seems that employing automated matching strategies would approximately double the number of these relationships in the Crossref database. In the future, we would like to match new journal articles on an ongoing basis. We also plan to make all discovered relationships available through the REST API.
CrossRef Blog (Dominika Tkaczyk) Board of Editors in the Life Sciences Announces Certification Maintenance ProgramNow, more than 30 years later, BELS continues to maintain and promote a standard of proficiency in editing in the life sciences. However, since launching the credential, technology has reshaped how we work and what skills we need. In addition, style guides, ethical guidance, and reporting guidelines have expanded; scientific publication practices have evolved; and scientific and medical advances have burgeoned. Editors must keep up with these advances to be effective in their work.
Thus, to ensure the ELS credential remains a relevant and accurate indication of skill and to bring the program in line with current best practices, BELS is introducing certification maintenance.
Science Editor (Lisa Kisner) JB: You can read more about the certification maintenance programme here. JASPER: a cross-industry collaboration making a real difference!JASPER is a cross-industry collaboration with one main goal: to help open access journals be preserved long-term. It sounds simple, but there are challenges. Lack of resources and understanding around why preservation is neededmeans that many journals aren’t ever preserved.
The JASPER partners—CLOCKSS, DOAJ, Internet Archive, The Keepers Registry, and Public Knowledge Project (PKP)—collaborated to build on existing trusted infrastructure and services. Journals indexed in DOAJ can apply to be included in a variety of long-term digital preservation services if they meet a range of selection criteria. Journals can choose one or more preservation routes: currently, Internet Archive, the PKP’s Preservation Network (PKP-PN), or CLOCKSS.
DOAJ (announcement) Request your next PREreview on bioRxiv and SciELO Preprints via the COAR Notify ProtocolWe are thrilled to announce the launch of our new request-a-review feature on PREreview.org! Powered by the COAR Notify Protocol, and built in collaboration with eLife and Sciety, this new feature will help you improve your research ahead of wider distribution or publication.
bioRxiv and SciELO Preprints have joined PREreview as our first collaborators in this work to bring this request-a-review feature to life. That means that the next time you submit a preprint to either repository, you’ll be able to request reviews from the PREreview community with the click of a button.
PRereview (announcement) ICMJE Seeking New Member JournalsThe International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) is seeking new member journals to be represented by their Editors-in-Chief. Information about the ICMJE is available at www.icmje.org. We seek candidates to broaden the diversity of the committee. ICMJE (announcement) JB: The ICMJE is an influential organisation, but has always had a reputation for being an old boys’ club. Improving the diversity of the group is much needed. The membership currently includes: Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Deutsches Ärzteblatt (German Medical Journal), Ethiopian Journal of Health Sciences, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), Journal of Korean Medical Science, المجلة الطبية التونسية (Medical Tunisia), Nature Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, New Zealand Medical Journal, PLOS Medicine, The Lancet, the U.S. National Library of Medicine, and the World Association of Medical Editors. Other newsEditage Joins Forces with Becaris Publishing to Enhance Research Communication Services Bibsam joins the movement to support the Directory of Open Access Journals Italian Publishers Call for Tougher AI Regulations in Europe ALPSP Strengthens Scholarly Publishing Training Programme and Mentorship Scheme for 2024 PLOS partners with the Global Young Academy to advance Open Science principles Reflections on the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access Professor Sarah Main Joins Elsevier as Vice President for Academic and Government Relations, UK OpinionWhere Did the Open Access Movement Go Wrong?: An Interview with Richard PoynderAs part of this initiative, cOAlition S has launched a consultation process designed to give the impression that researchers are being put back into the driving seat. It is also implied that they will be able to decide when, where, and how to publish – which might suggest that OA is again becoming a bottom-up voluntarist movement.
But (as you have pointed out) “Scholar-Led” is a misnomer here, not least because cOAlition S has already published a set of pre-established principles, and we can be confident that whatever emerges from the consultation researchers will need to sign up to the new vision, and abide by the principles, if they want to be funded. This is top-down by any other name.
The Scholarly Kitchen (Rick Anderson and Richard Poynder) JB: There are so many passages in this exchange that I could have pulled quotes from. I agree with the vast majority of the points that Richard makes. It’s worth remembering how “Plan S” got it's name. To quote the 2022 book ‘Plan S for Shock’ (page 195): And, finally, Robert-Jan [Smits] admits the ‘S’ in ‘Plan S’ did not stand for science, shock, solution or speed… It was in fact the name of the file that he created on the day of his appointment as open access envoy: Plan Smits. Plan S has never been a bottom-up initiative, driven by the academic community. Rather, it was the personal project of a Brussels bureaucrat / academic, who went from being director-general overseeing “an EU budget of €10bn per year and a 2,000-strong staff body” to leading a team of three. Unsurprisingly given that backstory, he wanted to make an impact. Plan S was a stone thrown in the water: it rocked the world of scientific publishing off its feet and accelerated the transition to full and immediate open access. But at what cost? Preprints, conspiracy theories and the need for platform governanceThe prevalence of conspiracy theories has been amplified by social media platforms. Conspiracy theorists—individuals who consume, discuss, and share such narratives—use social media to connect and find audiences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that the popularity of conspiracy theories on social media is intertwined with one innovation in scholarly communication: preprints. Preprints help scientists communicate their preliminary findings quickly, but they can also be misused to provide legitimacy to conspiracy theories. Impact of Social Sciences (Mareike Fenja Bauer and Maximilian Heimstädt) Journal editors are like gods – but I’d rather be mortal (paywall)From my perspective, the editing game is not worth the candle. As for whether I admire or pity those who do take on the role: it depends. I spend a lot of time cussing, arguing with and occasionally being obsequious to them when it might help my case, but I’ve also come across quite a few editors I deeply admire and respect.
Apart from being sharp-witted and broad-minded, the key criterion is to take on the job for the right reasons. Dictators, misanthropes and crooks should content themselves with making their immediate colleagues miserable, rather than their entire field.
Times Higher Education (Adrian Furnham) Other opinion articlesThe Problem at the Heart of Public Access Cyberstalking pits Harvard professor against PubPeer A Year of Editor Spotlights: Tips from Academic Editors A Year of Editor Spotlights: Thoughts on Open Science and Community Engagement Peer review infographic: A Brief History of Peer Review In defense of quantitative metrics in researcher assessments Ask Athena: Artificial Intelligence in Editing and Publishing Do you speak rights retention and open licensing? How to cover academic research fraud and scientic errors INFORMATE: Where Are the Data? Journal ClubPaper mills: a novel form of publishing malpractice affecting psychologySecond, if paper mill articles get included in a journal, then it also does a disservice to authors who submit their genuine work to the journal in good faith. Once it is recognised that there is weak or absent editorial scrutiny of the publication process, the journal will suffer reputational damage. The quality of articles is often judged by the company they keep. Just as authors may benefit from publishing in a journal with a high impact factor, they will suffer if their work appears in a journal with a high notoriety factor – regardless of the quality of the published paper. Once again, it is honest academics who suffer from the behaviour of the dishonest. Meta-Psychology (Dorothy Bishop and Anna Abalkina) Slavery and the Journal — Reckoning with History and ComplicityThe Journal did little to confront slavery before the Civil War. It perpetuated theories of race difference and White supremacy before and long after the war. It has now taken on the task of reckoning with its past. This history must be remembered and must motivate action: there is much work to be done. The unjust and unequal medicine that was practiced for centuries and the silences that enabled it demand that physicians and journal editors commit themselves to confronting inequities in health and health care. We cannot allow injustice to go uncontested again. New England Journal of Medicine (David S. Jones et al) And finally...If, by some miracle, you’ve managed to get to the end of this bumper issue and have five minutes left to spare, then you may want to consider responding to one or more of the following surveys. Mithu Lucraft asked me to flag a survey that TBI Communications is doing on the key strategic marketing priorities in academic publishing. Nicola Jones, who I worked with on the Springer Nature SDG programme, asked me to include the following: At January’s Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) conference, the SDG Publishers Compact Fellows have convened a panel to debate the role of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the scholarly publishing sector – and the sector’s role in changing the world. Ahead of the conference, we would like to gauge how well people in publishing understand the goals, how strongly they are supported, and what the opportunities and challenges are in terms of expanding SDG activities.
Please share your perspective on these issues via our pre-conference survey.
Finally, since we’re on the subject of surveys, I thought I’d include a link to SSP’s Fourth Annual Professional Skills Survey. Until next time, James P.S. Next week will be the final issue of the year. If you would like to send me a Christmas gift, a testimonial would be much appreciated. |
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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