daleywhite Academic Publishing

The Art of Research: How Journal Covers Influence Readers and Research

When you think of a research journal, what do you picture? Is it a vivid, detailed art spread, or a simplistic and minimalist design? Journal cover art is a surprisingly polarized medium—most journals feature either highly graphic, detailed, and aesthetically pleasing art or subdued, uniform designs, but there aren’t many journals that fall somewhere in-between. Each style of journal covers communicates a different subtextual message and can play an important role in signaling the target audience of the publication.

Vivid and Graphic Journal Cover Art

Some journals feature highly graphic covers for each issue, similar to the magazine approach of drawing a potential reader’s attention by using vivid, striking design to stand out among its many competitors. As such, we’ll call these ‘magazine-style’ covers for the purpose of this article. Pioneers in the use of magazine-style journal covers are Science, Nature, and the Lancet. Magazine-style cover art must fulfill several critical roles to be successful:

Simplistic and Uniform Journal Cover Art

On the other end of the spectrum is the minimalistic cover art. For these journals, issue covers typically look nearly identical and feature no images at all, with only the text changing from issue to issue; we’ll call these ‘uniform’ cover designs. It may be surprising to see that the journal with the highest impact factor across all of academia—CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, with a whopping 2022 journal impact factor of 254.7—uses a uniform cover art style. Many smaller journals will also use uniform cover art, as this strategy is more cost-effective. With uniform cover design, the journals are aiming to achieve a distinct set of goals:

  • Enhance readability. By using a uniform template for each issue, readers know exactly where to look to gain the information they need. It’s typically quicker to identify the journal issue number or key articles.
  • Prioritize content, not appeal. These articles aren’t aiming to draw in readers—they can trust that readers will read the issues due to the intrinsic content without needing to be drawn in by cover art.
  • Express academic rigor. Some readers may interpret a uniform cover design as a signal of its focus on scientific content rather than mass appeal, improving their impression of the journal’s research value.
  • Build a brand. Similar to highly graphic cover art, these covers still play a large role in establishing a journal’s brand. Even minimalistic covers will be used to establish a journal’s typography, color palette, logo, and other features that will be consistent across all of the journal’s materials, including their website, presentation materials, and more.

What Cover Art Says About the Journal

Ultimately, the most important task that cover art performs is establishing the brand of a journal. Branding is a vital tool for establishing a journal’s reputability, respectability, and target audience (Gringarten et al., 2011). Branding can also be used to align a journal with its publisher or connected organization—for example, some journals published by Harvard University use the University’s distinct red and white colors and Proxima Nova/Merriweather fonts to align with the University’s established brand.

Cover art can play a key role in subconsciously communicating the publication’s target audience. Many journals that focus on a narrow target audience of researchers within the journal’s field of study use uniform journal covers. For these journals, cover designs don’t have to entice readers—they rely on their readers having an established pattern of reviewing every issue or being brought to the publication to read a specific article, not by the issue cover. On the other hand, many journals with magazine-style cover art aim to attract a wider audience of lay people or scientists outside of the specific discipline the journal publishes in. Because they can’t rely on readers independently seeking out research articles, they invest more resources in attracting attention. Having a wider scope also means that they’re up against more competition for attention, so there’s more emphasis on catching readers’ eye.

Which Cover Art Style is Better?

There’s no clear-cut better or worse cover art style. Magazine-style and uniform cover art serve separate purposes and communicate distinct brand identities to the reader. Regardless of cover art style, a journal should be evaluated on the merits of its scientific content; however, the art can serve as a shortcut toward understanding the journal’s intentions.

daleywhite Academic Publishing

Understanding Gray Literature: The Value of Nontraditional Publications

As a standard practice, many literature reviews exclude ‘gray literature,’ a category that describes research and literature published outside of the traditional academic publishing industry. However, completely overlooking gray literature results in a wide array of valuable and excellent research being excluded from the overall body of scientific knowledge. A thorough understanding of what gray literature is and the ideal circumstances and cautions for using it could help you uncover hidden evidence that greatly improves your research.

What’s Considered Gray Literature?

In the broadest sense, gray literature comprises any material that isn’t published through a traditional academic publisher (e.g., published through a journal). Importantly, this typically means that the piece hasn’t undergone the traditional peer review process. These pieces may report on a research study, an individual’s opinion, an event, a stakeholder or advisory board discussion, an organizational policy, and more. They’re usually published online only.  Some common examples of gray literature include governmental or industry resorts/white papers, graduate dissertations, conference proceedings, newsletters or mail-outs, policy documents, and blog posts.

When Should Gray Literature Be Used?

Early during the information synthesis process for a research project, it’s a good idea to complete at least a cursory review the gray literature. By searching through gray literature, you could find niche or null-results studies that may influence your research direction—for example, for a hypothesis-driven research study, you may find a report from researchers who attempted to answer the same or similar question but ran into unexpected hurdles or null results. Often, null-result studies aren’t accepted published traditional academic journals, but this type of crucial information could affect how you choose to proceed.

In many cases, gray literature expresses findings and opinions that are more indicative of the ‘real world’ than the often contrived or carefully constructed scenarios used in academic research. Additionally, gray literature often includes a more diverse range of authors who may often be excluded from the profit-driven traditional publishing industry.

However, there are some times when gray literature isn’t appropriate to include. Gray literature often isn’t used in highly regimented systematic reviews with strict inclusion/exclusion criteria. Fast-paced or urgent projects that must be published quickly may be hampered by the time required to sort through the large pool of gray literature available online.

Cautions of Using Gray Literature

It’s absolutely crucial to critically evaluate all gray literature that contributes to your research. While you should never fully depend upon peer review and blindly trust the reliability and rigor of journal-published research, it’s especially important to note that gray literature undergoes no such review. Some gray literature sources (such as governmental reports or conference proceedings) may be less inclined to bias and misinformation than others (such as blog posts), but all sources should be critically reviewed. Consider using medical librarian Jess Tyndall’s AACODS checklist for evaluating gray literature, which includes:

  • Authority. Who wrote the piece? Do they have the expected credentials or experience to speak knowledgably on the topic?
  • Accuracy. Does this piece have adequately rigorous methodology, evidence, or data to support its claims? Are their sources properly cited?
  • Coverage. Does the piece outline its limitations or the authors’ biases/conflicts of interest? Is the scope of the piece clearly outlined?
  • Objectivity. Do the authors or the organization have any explicit bias, such as financial interest in promoting specific results or opinions? Are counterarguments or conflicting evidence/perspectives presented?
  • Date. How long ago was the piece published? Have new advancements or discoveries been made that might disprove, support, or otherwise affect the information in the piece?
  • Significance. Does the piece include enough important, feasible, and relevant information that enriches your own research to justify its inclusion in your citation list?

Additionally, it should be noted that including gray literature in your evidence synthesis will greatly expand the scope of your search. Plan to budget in extra time to evaluate the relevance of sources as well as their credibility.

Tips for Finding Gray Literature

There are a few key strategies you can use to help you navigate the wide range of resources available online. For example, be sure to make the most of Google search techniques! Some helpful search modifiers include:

  • Phrase searching, or using quotation marks around a word or phrase to only pull results that use the exact same words. Example: “Art in sustainability” university programs
  • Site type searches, or using site: in combination with specific website extensions (e.g., .edu, .org., .gov) to only pull results from those pages. Example: Biophysics of mitosis site:edu
  • File type searches, or using filetype: in combination with a specific file extension (e.g., ppt, pdf, xlsx [for excel documents]) to only generate results for a specific document type. Example: Romanesque vs classical art filetype:.ppt

You can also explore databases that collect high-quality gray literature, such as WorldCat, Open Grey, and GreyNet International. Consider also talking to your colleagues about your search— they may know of subject-specific resources that would be hard to discover independently!

Mike Bisaccio Academic Publishing, Peer Review

PRW 2023: “Peer Review and The Future of Publishing”

Each year, our team at Cabells celebrates Peer Review Week (PRW) and recognizes the fact that so much of the work we do each day revolves around peer review, which is the backbone of scholarly communication and the key to maintaining research quality. The theme this year for PRW is “Peer Review and the Future of Publishing,” which would be an appropriate theme every year. To work as intended and as needed, peer review will need to continuously adapt and evolve along with publishing.

The importance of peer review to the quality and overall success of a journal can’t be overstated. For a journal to be recognized in the academic or medical community as legitimate, a robust peer review system must be in place. In recent years, the scholarly community has been shown time and again the results of substandard (or nonexistent) peer review. It has also become clear that identifying an effective and efficient model of peer review has proven to be a challenge for publishers.

Our friend, Daley White, a research scientific editor with the Moffitt Cancer Center, has written an excellent piece discussing the current state of peer review and highlighting a few promising alternative strategies. That piece, along with another by Daley discussing the role of generative artificial intelligence in peer review, should not be missed.

The bedrock of scholarly publishing

At its core, peer review is about benefiting the knowledge base by establishing quality control with respect to published research, which is then used to generate more knowledge. By publishing research papers that have been thoughtfully peer reviewed, academic journals make it possible for researchers around the world to learn about the latest findings in their field. This helps advance knowledge and to foster collaboration amongst researchers. Researchers, funders, and the public all expect that research has been reviewed, is sound, and worthy of being built upon.

Peer review helps to ensure published work is high-quality with findings that are accurate and reliable by helping to identify and correct errors, omissions, and biases. Ultimately, authors are responsible for conducting sound research and not fabricating data or results. Unfortunately, the immense pressure to publish along with the industry’s unwillingness to publish null results, both contribute to making this responsibility an insurmountable challenge for some.

For a journal to be considered for inclusion in Journaltyics, our evaluators must have evidence of a rigorous peer review system.

To be effective, peer review must be unbiased and transparent though the extent to which journals are open about their review process varies. Promoting and expanding transparency and accountability in the research and peer review processes shows readers how the paper was evaluated and helps them understand the reasons for its acceptance or rejection, which helps to build trust in the publication process and the research itself.

Time after time

Can it be assumed that peer review is consistently conducted with the necessary rigor when in most cases it is added to the workload of already very busy and time-strapped reviewers? Most workplaces don’t provide an allowance of time for peer review, and there is no compensation for conducting reviews. So, without incentives, peer review is conducted solely to contribute to a knowledge base that needs to be carefully managed and safeguarded.

Along with pressure on scholars to find the time to conduct reviews, there is pressure on journals to review papers quickly. But can speed be reconciled with quality? Speedy peer review, when taken to an extreme, is an indication of the type of substandard or virtually nonexistent peer review often found in predatory journals.

While it’s important to authors that articles are published in a timely manner (which requires timely peer review), there is a correlation between speed and quality that the industry as a whole is working under. Often, the state of a journals peer review process comes down to which journals have more resources available. Not all journals can swing having an in-house statistician to review research statistics on staff. Training in peer review as part of PhD programs would also be valuable – while early career researchers are very knowledgeable in their fields despite being relatively inexperienced, having ECR’s conduct peer review with no training is less than optimal.

So, this PRW we will consider these and other ideas as we continue our work as champions of peer review – and Cabells team member Clarice continues her work as a member of the PRW Steering Committee. Our work at Cabells will adapt and evolve right along with peer review and publishing into the future. What won’t change is the key role played by peer review in maintaining the quality, transparency, and accountability of research and the integrity of knowledge.

Mike Bisaccio Academic Publishing

Introducing the All-New Journalytics Academic & Predatory Reports

We have some exciting news to share – a new and improved Journalytics Academic & Predatory Reports platform will soon be here. Our team has been working on multiple updates and enhancements to our tried and true platform that will benefit users in multiple ways. Along with our ongoing addition of new verified and predatory journals, users will experience better search results, new data points and visualizations, increased stability and speed, and more secure logins.

In addition to the visual elements and expanded analytics of this redesign, a key component is the full integration of our Journalytics and Predatory Reports databases. This integration will allow for comprehensive searches that present the full range of publishing opportunities and threats in a given area. Our goal is to facilitate journal discovery and evaluation so our users know the journals and know the risks.

Last month we hosted a webinar to give users a sneak peek at the upcoming changes, which include a new guided search page to jumpstart journal discovery, updated platform and journal card designs, and new data points such as fees and article output. Check out the video below or visit our YouTube channel where you’ll find a time-stamped table of contents in the description for easy navigation to specific points in the video.

A preview of the all-new Journalytics Academic & Predatory Reports.

A fresh look with more data

Guided search

The path to journal discovery now begins on our guided search page, where users can

  • search for a journal by title, ISSN, or keyword
  • access our database of legitimate and predatory journals
  • seamlessly sort verified journals with one of our featured metrics shortcuts
  • jump directly to one of 18 academic disciplines
Our guided search page with shortcuts to journal platforms, featured metric sorting, and disciplines.

New fully-integrated platform

Our redesigned platform now features full integration of verified and predatory journals into the same environment. First rolled out as part of our Journalytics Medicine & Predatory Reports platform, the integration has proven to be an invaluable enhancement. Users can feel confident with fully comprehensive search results that capture both legitimate and deceptive publishing opportunities, and they’ll also have the ability to filter out one or the other with just one click.

NO MORE GUESSWORK: Search results now include both legitimate and predatory journals

Search for publications by title, ISSN, disciplines or other keyword and know that we’ve left nothing to chance – verified and predatory journals each have their own design and data type, making clear whether the journal is listed in Journalytics or Predatory Reports.

Redesigned journal cards with new data points

Judging the quality of a journal, the likelihood of manuscript acceptance, publication timelines, and the potential impact of a journal can be difficult. To assist with clear and confident publication evaluations, we have added a few new data points to verified records to facilitate decision-making:

  • Open Access details – copyrights, archiving, and access details
  • Fees – who pays for publishing articles and how much?
  • Article output – how often does a journal publish per year?
  • We have reminaged the visualization of our CCI citation-backed metric, which shows the historical “influence” or citation-activity for each discipline in which a journal publishes.

The new Journalytics Academic will include the beta version of a new metric: The SDG Impact IntensityTM (SDGII), developed in partnership with the Saint Joseph’s University Haub School of Business.

The SDGII seeks to contextualize and understand the relevance of academic research in terms of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Climate change, sustainability, and equity are among the most powerful forces for change in society, and yet they are ignored by traditional citation-based metrics. We hope to help lead the charge to change this dangerous oversight.

This is a pilot program that is currently included in a limited number of business journals but will soon be expanded to increase awareness of sustainability-minded journals publishing impactful research.

For more information, see our videos covering the SDGII on our YouTube channel.

New look, same deceptive operations

In recent years, awareness of the nature and scope of the problem presented by predatory publishers has increased within the scholarly community. At the same time, predatory publishers themselves have become more aware of what they need to do to appear to legitimate and avoid detection. Their tactics are evolving right along with efforts to combat them, and their numbers are growing – we currently have reports on more than 17,000 predatory publications.

  • Journal identification – each report provides the title, publisher, discipline(s), ISSN (if available), and website links for journal discovery and confirmation.
  • Violation categories – journal reports monitor the areas in which the deceptive behaviors occurred.
  • Violation severity – reports also track the severity of the deceptive behaviors.

By providing not just identifying information for predatory journals, but also a report on the nature, scope, and severity of their behaviors, we aim to equip our users with an understanding of the varied tactics predatory publishers employ. Our goal is to educate and inform researchers on the different profiles and archetypes of predatory journals we uncover, so they are better able to identify and avoid them as their career continues.

What’s next?

Be on the lookout for further updates on the timing of the release of the updated platform, as well as information on the upcoming new website that will serve as the central hub for all of our resources, complete with a portal for platform access, links to product information and criteria, and our blog.

We will also host another webinar as we move closer to the launch date for a final look at the upcoming enhancements. Stay tuned!

daleywhite Academic Publishing

Countering Systemic Barriers to Equity in the Academic Publishing Process

In recent years, improving diversity has been a core priority of many industries, including scholarly publishing and academia. Almost every large publisher has a dedicated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion page, and most have published statements dedicating resources toward diversifying their staff, editorial board members, and authors. However, few initiatives have targeted the systemic barriers in place that fundamentally contribute to this inequality. Here, we’ll explore some underlying issues within the overall research publication system that must be addressed in order to achieve equity in academic publishing.

Understanding the Problem

In order to explore potential mechanisms to counter systemic barriers to research publication, we need to start by defining the problem. Systemic barriers describe “policies, procedures, or practices that unfairly discriminate” against marginalized groups, including racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, disability, and religious minority groups. Because of these barriers, authors from minority groups do not have equitable access to high-quality publication avenues as their non-minority counterparts; as a result, almost every academic publishing specialty area suffers from a lack of diverse perspectives and inequality. Likewise, members of minority groups who want to pursue careers in academic publishing industries face additional blockades and challenges than those who are not in minority groups.

There are many systemic barriers that create injustice in academic publishing. In this article, we’ll focus on two barriers that have been the focus of extensive research in recent years, with an exploration of some evidence-supported practices that can help counteract them.

Unequal Access to Education

Unequal access to education, especially due to race, is fundamentally connected to the United States’ history. As Dupree and Boykin (2021) explain, during America’s founding, it was generally illegal for slaves to receive education. Following the abolishment of slavery, the “separate but equal” precedence led to establishment of Black higher education institutions that were woefully unequal to White institution counterparts in quality and accessibility. As integration spread throughout America, minority scholars gained increased access to historically White higher education institutions but faced near intolerable levels of discrimination from students, professors, and administrators. Additionally, academia’s role in racial devaluation through research, such as publication of the biological determinism and the cultural deficit models, cannot be ignored. Similar processes of begrudging integration and enrollment into higher education spaces can be seen across the dimensions of gender, disability, religion, and more.

To this day, higher education institutions are affected by their histories of inequality and the systems that were originally designed to operate within these frameworks of discrimination. Generally, becoming an academic researcher in any field requires at least an undergraduate degree, if not a Master’s or Doctoral degree; as such, limited access to these degrees translates to limited access to research and publication participation.

Evidence-based solutions

Employment & Promotion Inequality

Inequality affects both those who work within academic publishing industry (journal editors, article reviewers, publication specialists, etc.) and the authors seeking publication in academic journals. Within academia, members of minority groups experience discrimination during the interviewing and employment process; this discrimination extends into promotion and tenure opportunities. In the publication industry, the lack of diversity is a known problem, with many initiatives targeted toward countering inequality. Many publishers have released statements acknowledging the inequities in their hiring practices, with Nature recognizing its own role in being “complicit in systemic racism” and publishing a lists of actionable commitments they’ve made toward improving diversity. However, the efficacy of these commitments remains unclear.

Evidence-based solutions

Advocate for funding equality. Many large funding bodies, such as the National Institutes of Health, and universities alike have been recently criticized for inequality in research funding and grant awardees. Because their available funding is minimized, researchers from minority groups are at a disadvantage to demonstrate publication excellence and research experience, which then leads to inequitable tenure and promotion decisions. To counteract this, organizations should evaluate their own funding demographics and overtly advocate for transparency and equality in funding allocation.

daleywhite Academic Publishing, Uncategorized

Originality in Academic Writing: The Blurry Lines Between Similarity, Plagiarism, and Paraphrasing

Across disciplines, most manuscripts submitted to academic journals undergo a plagiarism check as part of the evaluation process. Authors are widely aware of the industry’s intolerance for plagiarism; however, most of us don’t receive any specific education about what plagiarism is or how to avoid it. Here, we’ll discuss what actually constitutes plagiarism, understand the important differences between similarity and plagiarism, and discuss easy strategies to avoid the problem in the first place.

What actually is plagiarism?

The University of Oxford defines plagiarism as “presenting work or ideas from another source as your own… without full acknowledgement.” This is a fairly fundamental definition, and for most of us, this is the extent of our education on plagiarism.

When we think of plagiarism, we usually imagine an author intentionally copying and pasting text from another source. This form of plagiarism, called direct plagiarism, is actually fairly uncommon. More commonly, plagiarism takes the form of:

  • Accidental plagiarism. Citing the wrong source, misquoting, or unintentionally/coincidentally paraphrasing a source that you’ve never seen before is still considered plagiarism, even when done without intent.
  • Secondary source plagiarism. This is an interesting and challenging issue to tackle. This form of plagiarism refers to authors using a secondary source, but citing the works found in that source’s reference list—for example, finding information in a review but citing the initial/primary study instead, not the review itself. This misattribution “fails to give appropriate credit to the work of the authors of a secondary source and… gives a false image of the amount of review that went into research.”
  • Self-plagiarism. There’s still an ongoing debate over the acceptability of reusing one’s own previous work, with differing answers depending on the context. It’s widely agreed that reusing the same figure, for example, in multiple articles without correct attribution to the original publication is unethical; however, it’s less clear whether it’s acceptable to use the same verbatim abstract in a manuscript as you previously published as part of a conference poster. Copyright law can play a major factor in the permissibility of self-plagiarism in niche cases.
  • Improper paraphrasing plagiarism.Some of us have heard from teachers or peers that, to avoid plagiarism, all you need to do is “rewrite it in your own words.” However, this can be misleading, as there’s a fine line between proper and improper paraphrasing. Regardless of the specific language used, if the idea or message being communicated is not your own and is not cited, it’s still plagiarism.

Plagiarism vs similarity

Many publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, and SpringerNature, perform plagiarism evaluations on all manuscripts they publish by using software iThenticate. However, ‘plagiarism evaluation’ through iThenticate is a bit of a misnomer: iThenticate checks for similarity, not plagiarism. Though the difference between the two is minor, their implications are entirely different.

Whereas plagiarism refers to an act of ethical misconduct, similarity refers to any portion of your paper that recognizably matches text found in previously published literature in iThenticate’s content database. Similarity can include text matches in a manuscript’s references, affiliations, and frequently used/standardized terms or language; it’s natural and nonproblematic, unlike plagiarism.

A similarity report, such as the one generated by iThenticate, is used by editors as a tool to investigate potential concerns for plagiarism. If an iThenticate similarity report flags large sections of text as similar to a previously published article, the editors can then use this as a starting point to evaluate whether the article is, in fact, plagiarized.

Strategies to avoid plagiarism

Being accused of plagiarism—especially direct, intentional plagiarism— can be a serious ethical issue, with long-term implications for your job prospects and career. The best way to avoid this issue is to use preventative measures, such as the ones discussed here.

  1. Educate yourself about what plagiarism truly is and how it occurs. If you’ve made it this far in the article, you’re already making great progress! Consider reviewing the sources cited in this article to continue your education.
  2. Start citing from the note-taking phase. Many times, accidental plagiarism is the result of forgetting the source of an idea or statistic during quick, shorthanded note-taking. To avoid this, start building your reference list from the beginning of your research phase. Consider adding a quick citation for every single line of text—including citing yourself for your own ideas! Reference management software like EndNote and Zotero are great tools for this.
  3. Understand proper and improper paraphrasing. Learn how to correctly paraphrase someone else’s work and the importance of citing your paraphrased text. If you come across a phrase of sentence that perfectly summarizes an idea, don’t be afraid to include it as a direct, cited quotation!
  4. Consider cultural differences in plagiarism policies. This article aligns with the United States’ view of plagiarism as a serious ethical offense. However, this isn’t the case in all countries. In some East Asian countries, for example, the concepts of universal knowledge and memorization to indicate respect leads to a wider cultural acceptance of instances that would be considered plagiarism in America. If you’re unsure about what the expectations are for a certain journal, it’s always recommended to ask the editors.
  5. Use a similarity checker. While a similarity review won’t directly identify plagiarism, it can be great as a final scan for any text you may have copied and pasted with the intention of removing but forgot to erase, and it can help pick up accidental plagiarism! If your institution doesn’t have access to iThenticate, Turnitin, or CrossRef, there are several free similarity scanners available online.
Mike Bisaccio Academic Publishing

Catch Us If You Can

The theme of last month’s AACSB International Conference and Annual Meeting (ICAM) – a can’t miss event for Cabells every year – was “Pathways to Impact” and thought leaders and educators from the world of business gathered in Chicago to share the pathways their organizations are taking to positively impact society. We were thrilled to be able to continue our annual tradition of attending and lending our support to AACSB and our shared community.

Cabells at AACSB’s ICAM in Chicago, April 2023

The fact that so much of our work at Cabells revolves around impact made this year’s event as good a fit as ever. We connect researchers to journals that will help maximize the impact of their work. We also fully embrace the importance of harnessing the power of research to positively impact society, in part by moving from ‘quality’ to ‘impact’ when assessing academic publications. Our work with SJU in developing the SDGII as a tool for measuring and reporting faculty impact on the SDGs through published research has been rewarding and continues to evolve. (News on recent exciting developments soon to come.)

ICAM in Chicago was the second leg of our journey this conference season, the first coming earlier last month when we were excited to find ourselves in Glasgow for the 46th annual United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) conference, which was as engaging and exciting as always.

Cabells at UKSG in Glasgow, April 2023

The fun doesn’t end in Glasgow and Chicago for Cabells, we’re looking forward to more adventures throughout the year – keep an eye out for us at:

  • The 45th annual Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) meeting, May 31-June 2 in Portland, OR. We’re excited to serve as sponsors of the evening reception at SSP and fortunate enough to be speaking as part of an outstanding panel in a session discussing, “Sustainability, Open Science and Scholarly Communications”  

If you plan on attending any or all of the above events, travel safely and be sure to say hello…we sometimes have chocolate.

daleywhite Academic Publishing, Sustainability

Current and Future Trends of the Academic Publishing Industry’s Environmental Effects

As the academic publishing industry becomes increasingly cognizant of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and begins to develop best practices for weaving sustainability into our operations, it’s crucial that we acknowledge the environmental effects of our industry. By reviewing those effects along with shifts in the industry, we can project—and influence—our future trajectory toward reduced environmental impact.

Current Environmental Outputs of Scholarly Communications

Anyone involved in scholarly communications knows that we’re currently in a time of rapid change and process development. Print-based academic journals are part of the commercial print sector, and researchers from HP have identified paper waste byproducts resulting from the publication production process as a primary source of its industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, over the last twenty years, scholarly publishing has largely shifted toward digital processing and publishing, leading to a complex set of environmental benefits and drawbacks.

Digital publishing and open access are inextricably linked concepts, and there’s much to be said both supporting and criticizing this paradigm shift’s impact on our industry. Digital publishing has massively reduced demand for print versions of materials, from the printed manuscript drafts once mailed to journal editors for evaluation to the finalized journal issues sent to journal subscribers, leading to reduced paper waste. This also results in a reduction in print material mailing/transport emissions and impacts.

These improvements, however, come at the cost of increased email and website use. Though there are doubtlessly many improvements of electronic communication compared with mail—for example, a single email requires around 1.7% of the energy of a single paper letter delivery—there are still consequences to these digital shifts. The physical components of electronics are major contributors to environmental detriment both in their manufacturing requirements and inefficient waste strategies. Data generation and use is also a large area of concern, especially as big data becomes increasingly widespread. This is especially concerning for the academic publishing industry, as big data is rapidly expanding throughout both the research sectors our industry works with and within the scholarly communications industry itself.

Future Trends

As our industry continues to evolve in pace with technological developments and growth in adjacent sectors, such as medical technology and digital publications, we’ll likely continue to see rapid shifts, both in expected and unexpected directions. Here are a few trends we expect will continue to flourish in upcoming years:

Increasing industry recognition and support for of social causes. Recently, many publishers have placed increased focus and attention on diversity and equity in publishing. Relevant industry shifts range from initiatives to improve diverse hiring practices to strategies to financially assist authors from low- and middle-income countries who may not be able to afford rapidly increasing article processing charges, with many publishers offering waivers for qualifying authors. In the last three years, sustainability has become another forefront social issue that publishers are addressing by both promoting awareness and through policy development.

Reduced in-person office presence. Though the industry’s shift toward the work-from-home model was primarily catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend toward remote work seems to be here to stay. This results in reduced office space requirements and, conseenergy consumption (air conditioning, lighting, technology, etc) and paper waste products.

Increased research publication focus on climate change. A literature review found that the number of climate change–focused academic journal publications increased over six-fold between 2005 and 2014; in more recent years, research has continued to grow, with the number of publications steadily growing annually since 1997. The more we support systematic, reproducible environmental research, the better we’ll understand our current crisis and opportunities to counteract climate change.

Increased burden of websites/portals. Digital publishing practices aren’t a panacea for our industry’s environmental impacts. Data and websites generate their own carbon emissions and environmental impacts, and as the industry continues shifting toward digital publishing, we must stay aware of the fact that it has its own drawbacks.

Influx in sheer number of publications requires more resources. In today’s current publishing landscape, authors are rewarded for their number of publications, not quality. This has led to a staggering increase in the number of research manuscripts published each year. Each of these publications require resource use, and as the size of our industry expands, so does our environmental impact.

How you can impact scholarly publishing’s environmental effects

If you want to become more involved in our industry’s efforts to promote sustainability, there are several ways to do so:

  1. Research and consider joining the SDG Publishers Compact Fellows. This group acts to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals within the publications industry by providing action tips, resources, and policy initiatives.
  2. Direct interested research staff toward the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This group has an open requests for volunteer authors to contribute on research manuscripts through a variety of roles, ranging from lead authors, review editors, chapter scientists, and expert reviewers. There are opportunities for non-researchers, too: IPCC also welcomes technical support unit volunteers, who assist with report preparation, organization, and editing.
  3. Advocate for digital publication, carbon neutrality/offset, and sustainable paper use. By acting as a sustainability champion in your workplace, you can potentially affect your employer’s practices within your team and company-wide. Sustainability initiatives tend to have a domino effect—one small action on your part could lead to industry-wide change!
Mike Bisaccio Academic Publishing, Sustainability

SDG Publishers Compact Fellows and HESI to Hold Sustainable Solutions Summit

Immediate action is the only hope for realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by (or anywhere near) 2030. The SDGs are 17 interlinked targets put forth by the United Nations in 2015 as the backbone of its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. According to The Sustainable Development Goals Report for 2022, the SDGs are in “grave jeopardy due to multiple, cascading, and intersecting crises. COVID-19, climate change and conflict predominate.”

Despite admittedly painting a “sobering picture,” the report stresses that the SDGs can be rescued with concentrated global effort in three crucial areas:

  • armed conflicts and the senseless loss of lives and resources that accompany them must be ended in favor of diplomacy and peace – preconditions for sustainability
  • the blueprint laid out by the SDGs must be met with urgency
  • a global economy that works for all must be created to ensure developing countries are not left behind.

Those are no small tasks and there is no denying that moving the planet forward on the path to sustainability will require coordinated worldwide action. Fortunately, the SDG roadmap is clear and as Liu Zhenmin, former Under-Secretary-General for the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs points out in the 2022 Report, “just as the impact of crises is compounded when they are linked, so are solutions.”

We must rise higher to rescue the Sustainable Development Goals – and stay true to our promise of a world of peace, dignity and prosperity on a healthy planet.

António Guterres
Secretary-General, United Nations

The SDG Publishers Compact Fellows are working to ensure research and education are key parts of the solutions. The purpose of the Fellows is to support the “publishing industry in creating a sustainable future through action.” They do this in part by providing key tools and practical actions that different groups within the scholarly community can take to embed SDGs into research and education and forge a connection with practitioners.  

To help in this effort, researchers, authors, educators, reviewers, and editorial boards are invited to join the SDG Publishers Compact Fellows and the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI) in a Sustainable Solutions Summit next month. The virtual event will focus on the top recommended actions and trends to better align academic research, education materials, and the sharing of research findings with making the world a better place through connections to the SDGs.

click here to register for the summit

SDG research output is increasing and it is clear that scholarship and science must be driving forces behind the push for the Global Goals. But to succeed, the gap between researchers and practitioners must be closed. Groups like the SDG Publishers Compact Fellows and HESI, and events like the Sustainable Solutions Summit, will be key to leveraging the power of scholarly publishing to help solve the SDGs.

daleywhite Academic Publishing, Open Access

Open Access: History, 20-Year Trends, and Projected Future for Scholarly Publishing

It’s hard to imagine where the scholarly publishing landscape would be today without open access. As we reach two decades from the inception of open access, it’s important to evaluate how this model has revolutionized research and its potential future directions.

A Brief History of Open Access

1991: The beginning of the open access movement is commonly attributed to the formation of arXiv.org (pronounced ‘archive’), the first widely-available repository for authors to self-archive their own research articles for preservation. ArXiv.org is still widely used for article deposition, with over 2 million articles included in January 2023.

1994: Dr. Stevan Harnad’s ‘A Subversive Proposal’ recommended that authors publish their articles in a centralized repository for free immediate public access, leveraging the potential of the up-and-coming internet and combating the rapidly increasing publication costs and slow speed of print publishing (ie, the ‘serials crisis’). Though this was not the first traceable mention of what would become open access publication, it’s widely considered as the start of an international dialogue between scientific researchers, software engineers, journal publication specialists, and other interested stakeholders.

2000-2010: Open access journals began appearing within the publishing landscape. Throughout the decade, a heated back-and-forth debate persisted between open access proponents and traditional non-OA publishershttps://www.bmj.com/content/334/7587/227.

2001: The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) resulted in a declaration establishing the need for unrestricted, free-to-readers access to scholarly literature. This initiative is considered the first coined use of the phrase ‘open access.’

2003: As a follow-up to BOAI, the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities expanded upon the definitions and legal structure of open access and was supported by many large international research institutes and universities.

2013-present: Multiple governments have announced mandates supporting or requiring open access publishing, including the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, Spain, China, Mexico, and more.

2018: cOAlition S was formed by several major funders and governmental bodies to support full and immediate open access of scholarly literature through Plan S.

Current State of Open Access

Today, there are four primary submodels of scholarly open access article publishing:

  • Gold: all articles are published through open access, and the journal is indexed by Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The author is required to pay an article processing charge.
  • Green: manuscripts require reader payment on the publisher’s website but can be self-archived in a disciplinary open access archive, such as ArXiv, or an institutional open access archive. A time-based embargo period may be required before the article can be archived. The authors are not required to pay an article processing charge.
  • Hybrid: authors have the choice to publish their work through the gold or green open access models.
  • Bronze: a newer and less common option than gold, green, or hybrid open access, bronze open access means that manuscripts are published in a subscription-based journal without a clear license.

Though open access isn’t yet the default for publishing, it’s a widely available option that’s quickly becoming an expected option for journals. Additionally, research funding bodies are increasingly requiring open access publication as a term for funding, such as the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health.

Since its launch in 2015, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has risen to the forefront as one of the most comprehensive community-curated lists of reputable open access journals. Unfortunately, however, the rise of open access has also enabled a widespread increase in predatory publishing practices, and counteracting predatory publishers is expected to be a primary focus of future open access development.

Open Access Growth Trends

Before diving into the numbers, it’s important to note that open access reporting is unstandardized. Depending on the databases assessed and definitions of open access, document types, and related terms, the reported number of open access articles per year can differ dramatically between reports. However, overarching trends remain relatively consistent across reports.

In 2018, the European Commision of Research and Innovation, an official research group of the European Union, found that 30.9% of open access publications were open access in 2009, which increased to 41.2% in 2016, then slightly tapered off to 36.2% in 2018. As of 2019, 31% of funders required open access publishing of research, 35% encouraged open access publishing, and 33% embraced no overt policy or stance.

In 2022, the Research Information Observatory partnered with the Max Planck Digital Library and Big Data Analytics Group to compile and publish their data paper, “Long Term Global Trends in Open Access.” Their report found that the percentage of articles that are accessible without paywall subscriptions has increased substantially: around 30% of articles published in 2010 were openly accessible, which jumped to around 50% of articles published in 2019.

Future Expectations and Projections for Open Access