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Journalology

Journalology #7: Editormetrics

Published almost 3 years ago • 10 min read

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Hello fellow journalologists,

You’re receiving this email because you signed up to ‘Journalology’, a newsletter about the art and craft of editing scholarly journals.

Every writer wants a wide readership, so please forward this email if you think others may benefit from it. I'm especially interested in trying to reach academics who serve on editorial boards. They can sign up here:

​https://journalology.ck.page​

The main reason I write this newsletter every week is because I enjoy doing it; I also want to give back, in a small way, to colleagues working in the scholarly publishing industry.

However, in the interests of transparency I want to make it clear that in the coming months I plan to offer consulting and coaching services under the umbrella of ‘editorial recruitment, engagement and assessment’ and I will be using this newsletter to alert readers to those services. I will try to do that in an appropriate way; hard selling is not really my style. The main goal of this newsletter will always be to provide a (free) weekly insight into the world of journal editing. I have no intention of turning this newsletter into a subscription product.

Editormetrics

When I launched this newsletter I thought the total market size (i.e. the number of academics working as editors on journals) may be around 200,000. It turns out that my estimate was undercooked and that there are at least 600,000 journal editors, although that number itself is likely to be an underestimate.

This miscalculation is more than a little embarrassing because last year Nature Index ran a news story (which I missed despite being responsible for the Nature journals) entitled Why researchers created a database of half a million journal editors.

This week, an opinion piece in LSE’s Impact of Social Science blog provides an overview of the Open Editors project, a database of editors scraped from the website of 27 publishers; earlier this month the same researchers published a paper in Research Evaluation on the same topic.

The researchers’ goal is to create a database of editors that adhere to FAIR principles. Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher, an academic from the University of Vienna, Austria, writes on the LSE blog:

While data about editors are not “closed” – journals usually list them on their websites – neither are they “open” in the sense that approximates the FAIR principles of open data: they are not trivially findable (F), accessible (A), interoperable (I) and re-useable (R) on a grand scale. Instead, they are scattered across tens of thousands of journal websites in different formats so that one would have to collect the data manually – a dauntingly laborious, time-consuming task.

Andreas makes the very good point that the scholarly community needs to have much better visibility of editors’ behaviour and performance, especially given the challenges surrounding papermills and research misconduct generally. Furthermore, given the power and influence that editors have, it’s important that there’s clear visibility on the diversity (gender, ethnicity etc.) of editorial boards; the research paper contains an excellent description of these complex issues in section 4.

I suspect that most large publishers do not have a particularly clean database of the editors who are responsible for the journals that they publish. This is likely to change with the move to open access; publishers need to have good visibility on editors’ workloads and turnaround times, for example, because providing a good author experience is vital to their success.

There are some notable omissions from the Open Editor database: Wiley and Taylor & Francis are not included in the list of 27 publishers and many of the large society publishers aren’t included either. The Open Editor database is not disambiguated so the 600,000 figure is likely to contain many duplicates.

Ideally Open Editors would use persistent identifiers (PIDs) like ORCiD or ResearcherID so it’s clear which editors are working on multiple editorial boards. The researchers note the potential of PIDs in the research paper:

An analysis that draws from both Open Editors and ORCID could examine the referees’ increased workload that accompanies an editorial position. Or, if ORCID profiles show former institutional affiliations of editors, one could detect the extent to which editors allow researchers from their former organizations to publish in their journals. The addition of PIDs would thus greatly facilitate the task of comprehensive searches and complex analyses based on trustworthy data.

By their own admission, this is an ‘amateur project’, but the authors have made an important start by showcasing the value in this proof-of-concept. In his blog Andreas concludes:

Rather than relying on individual-led projects like Open Editors, a community-driven effort to render the data display about editors uniform across all journals and publishers would be preferable. The best solution may be a central registry where authoritative information about editorial board memberships can be stored according to FAIR principles. CrossRef has already started thinking about it – and with its remarkable developments surrounding open citations and open abstracts, it is not implausible to believe that CrossRef may indeed achieve an opening up of large-scale data about scientific journal editors one day. Then, and only then, can we finally test our suspicions about the extent of ‘gatekeeping’ in our least/favourite journals systematically.

There will always be some aspects of editorial performance that publishers will want to keep proprietary, especially regarding remuneration. That’s why benchmarking studies, like the ones that Clarke & Esposito run, are so important as it allows publishers to get a sense of whether they are competitive in the marketplace.

Briefly quoted

​eLife’s New Model: Changing the way you share your research​

From next year, we will no longer make accept/reject decisions at the end of the peer-review process; rather, all papers that have been peer-reviewed will be published on the eLife website as Reviewed Preprints, accompanied by an eLife assessment and public reviews. The authors will also be able to include a response to the assessment and reviews.
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The decision on what to do next will then entirely be in the hands of the author; whether that’s to revise and resubmit, or to declare it as the final Version of Record.

Source: eLife

(This important development was announced yesterday. I will either write about it in next week’s Journalology newsletter or C&E will cover it in the October issue of The Brief).

​How Long Are We Going to Accept Stark Gender Imbalances Across the Publishing System?​

Nonetheless, evidence from a researcher-led journal showed that senior editors and authors were more likely to select men than women as reviewing editors, even after correcting for the gender imbalance in the pool of reviewing editors available. This clearly illustrates that gender quotas should be one among many tools in the “gender equality toolkit,” which should also include providing training to editors and other editorial staff on inclusion, diversity, and unconscious bias, as well as ensuring digital technologies, such as algorithms used to identify potential reviewers and editors, do not discriminate against women, as has been shown for other artificial intelligence search algorithms.

Source: Science Editor

​COP27 climate change conference: urgent action needed for Africa and the world​

The climate crisis is a product of global inaction and comes at great cost not only to disproportionately affected African countries but to the whole world. Africa is united with other frontline regions in urging wealthy nations to finally step up, if for no other reason than that the crises in Africa will sooner rather than later spread and engulf all corners of the globe, by which time it may be too late to effectively respond. If so far they have failed to be persuaded by moral arguments, then hopefully their self-interest will now prevail.

Source: BMJ (simultaneously published in 250 journals listed here)

​Five measures that chart the rise of Chinese influence in global research​

However, if we look at the main “blocs” – China, the EU and the US we see that the EU (see Figure 2) has historically been the most committed to supporting Gold Open Access, as can be seen in its overall volume. In 2009, China only equalled the UK in Gold OA volumes, but there is a clear inflection around that point, when China accelerated, overtaking the US around 2017, and looking to be on course for overtaking the EU this year (based on an extrapolation of partial year data).

Source: Digital Science

(This is a 'must read' for any scholarly journals publisher.)

​Authorship equity guidelines in global health journals​

Global health specialty journals have widely adopted standardised authorship criteria including the ICMJE authorship guidelines. Nonetheless, despite well-documented authorship inequities in global health research, few global health specialty journals have guidelines specifically addressing authorship equity for research conducted in LMICs. Such guidelines were more common among higher impact journals, which may be reflective of more experience and perhaps a greater commitment to equity. The adoption of guidelines to promote equitable authorship practices in work conducted in LMICs by global health journals is an important step towards reducing authorship disparities in global health research.

Source: BMJ Global Health

​The Door to Data Sharing is Slowly Creaking Open​

Since 2016, Digital Science company Figshare — a data and paper repository provider – together with Springer Nature, have distributed a survey to thousands of researchers globally to try and understand open data sharing and what they do with their own and with others’ data. The results of the 2022 survey were released on October 13th [DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.21276984], with over 5,400 respondents — the largest number since 2019.
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The headline from the 2022 survey is that researchers are moving towards open data… but slowly. It is apparent that huge challenges and misunderstandings remain for all researchers, where knowledge on initiatives such as FAIR data is patchy and incentives for data sharing are often misaligned to researchers’ motivations. Indeed, perhaps most worrying of all is the finding that data management activities as a whole appear to be at a relatively low level.

Source: The Scholarly Kitchen

​Overcoming racism in science: A Nature special issue​

*Nature* has played a part in creating this racist legacy. After the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020, *Nature* committed to becoming an agent of change, and helping to end discriminatory practices and systemic racism.
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This special issue is part of that commitment, and the first in this journal’s history to be guest-edited. It can only scratch the surface of such a vast topic, and will be followed by others that examine different facets of racism in science — to help build a future in which all people can participate in and benefit from the shared experience that is science.

Source: Nature

​Why and how science should respect the dignity and rights of all humans​

This guidance was developed by a cross-imprint Springer Nature group over a period of two years, and underwent extensive consultation with editors, researchers and ethics experts. The guidance is available to all internal and external editors of Springer Nature publications to consider when they are making editorial decisions. The version of the guidance available on the Springer Nature pages includes an extensive bibliography.

Source: Nature Human Behaviour

​Transparent peer review for all​

In short, we strongly believe that publishing peer review files greatly benefits scientists as well as the public at large, serves to increase confidence in the peer review process, and augments the value of peer reviewed work. It also provides greater recognition to reviewers should they wish to be acknowledged for their contribution. The data indicates that a significant majority of our authors already agree, and it is our hope that those who had not considered it previously will realize its benefits. Hence, for manuscripts received from November 2022 onwards, the peer review files will be published alongside every published Nature Communications research article.

Source: Nature Communications

​Title detection: a novel approach to automatically finding retractions and other editorial notices in the scholarly literature​

Despite being a key element in the process of disseminating scientific knowledge, editorial notices are often obscured and not clearly linked to the papers to which they refer. In the present paper, we describe established methods of aggregating notice data, and introduce a novel method of finding editorial notices in the scientific literature. Specifically, we describe how article titles denote notices to existing publications, and how this information can be used to tie notices to papers in an automated fashion. Finally, as part of a broader movement to make science more transparent, we make notices detected through this and other methods publicly available and describe this dataset and how it can be accessed.

Source: arXiv

​A Vision of Metascience​

What we’ll find is a discovery ecosystem in a state of near stasis, with strong barriers inhibiting the improvement of key social processes. We believe it’s possible to change this situation. In this essay we sketch a vision in which metascience drives rapid improvement in the social processes of science. This vision requires a strong theoretical discipline of metascience, able to obtain results decisive enough to drive the adoption of new social processes, including processes that may displace incumbents. It also requires a strong ecosystem of metascience entrepreneurs, people working to achieve scalable change in the social processes of science. In some sense, the essay explores what it would mean for humanity to do metascience seriously. And it’s about placing that endeavor at the core of science. We believe the net result will be a portfolio of social processes far more structurally diverse than today, enabling crucial types of work difficult or impossible within existing environments, and so expanding the range of possible discoveries.

Source: The Science++ Project

Events

​C4DISC Webinar: From Recognition to Action: Strategies for Developing Diversity Training for Editors

Editors play a crucial role in the publication process and are keystones to promoting an inclusive and respectful environment for their contributors. Recognizing that editors are the key to improving equity, diversity, and inclusivity in their journals and books, several publishers have developed formal diversity trainings or written resources for their editors. In this webinar, we will hear from publishers and subject matter experts as they recount their experiences and lessons learned in developing diversity and anti-bias training specifically for editors.

Source: C4DISC; webinar being held on October 26 (register here)

​Webinar: Perspectives on the Nelson Memo: Mandating public access to the outputs of federally-funded research in the US​

In this webinar, we will hear thoughts from experts in scholarly publishing about the possible implications of the Nelson Memo for publishers, authors, and the scientific community more broadly.

Source: Council of Science Editors; webinar being held on October 27 (register here). I am one of the panellists.

Editorial wisdom

The October issue of Learned Publishing came out a few days ago, the last issue that Pippa Smart edited. The issue contains an interesting article on The past, present and future of publishing: Observations to celebrate ALPSP's 50th year and so I thought it might be a nice idea for this week’s piece of editorial wisdom to be taken from Pippa’s contribution to that article.

And finally

Thank you to those of you who have reached out in the last few weeks to tell me that you’re enjoying the newsletter. Feedback (positive and negative) is always welcome. Please do drop me a line, especially if we haven't met before. It would be great to hear from you (james@journalology.com).

Until next week,

James

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Journalology

James Butcher

The Journalology newsletter helps editors and publishing professionals keep up to date with scholarly publishing, and guides them on how to build influential scholarly journals.

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