KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A recent study found that millions of published works are not stored in a digital archive.
• This lack of archiving means articles are at risk of being lost from the scientific record.

In an evolving publishing landscape that faces challenges ranging from paper mills to AI-generated content, protecting the integrity of the scholarly record is perhaps more important than ever. But, as Sarah Wild describes in a recent Nature News article,  current inadequacies in digital preservation risk the loss of millions of scholarly articles.  

Wild reports on a study by Martin Paul Eve published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication that examined almost 7.5 million publications to see if they were sufficiently archived. The publications all had digital object identifiers (DOIs), but only 58% had been preserved in a major digital archive. Twenty-eight percent of articles had not been preserved in an archive.

Twenty-eight percent of articles had not been preserved in an archive.

Eve acknowledged that the study had its limitations; for example, the authors only examined works with a DOI and did not check every available repository. Nonetheless, the analysis raises important issues. Firstly, articles stored in just one digital archive may be lost if the link were to stop working or the organisation shut down. Secondly, smaller publishers are at a greater risk of insufficiently preserving works compared with larger publishers, due to a lack of funds, expertise, or technology. Eve suggests implementing various measures to improve digital preservation, including tighter requirements from DOI registration agencies and education on the issue.

Wild highlights the need for greater awareness on the risks associated with poor digital preservation methods and calls for researchers to consider “long-term sustainability” in research archiving.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Hijacked journals imitate authentic journals and breach research ethics by publishing plagiarised, fabricated, or non-peer reviewed papers.
• Over 60 hijacked journals have been identified in the indexing database Scopus, prompting Elsevier to remove all source homepage links from the database.

Journal hijacking is an increasingly recognised form of publishing fraud, in which the identity of legitimate journals is stolen. Many papers in hijacked journals have been found to be plagiarised, fabricated, or published without peer review. But just how concerned should we be?

A ScienceInsider article by Jeffrey Brainard highlighted a recent study revealing that 67 hijacked journals were documented in the renowned scholarly database Scopus up to September 2023. Of these journals:

• 33 had indexed unauthorised content
• 23 had compromised the journal’s homepage link
• 11 had done both.

These hijacked journals represent a small minority of the more than 27,000 active, peer-reviewed journals indexed in Scopus. Nevertheless, Anna Abalkina, the study author, argues that the indexing of hijacked journals in scholarly databases can have far-reaching effects. Unauthorised content may be cited and thus imported into other databases, corrupting the scholarly record.

Indexing of hijacked journals in scholarly databases can have far-reaching effects. Unauthorised content may be cited and thus imported into other databases, corrupting the scholarly record.

In order to create an illusion of authenticity, journal hijackers often use or mimic a legitimate journal’s title, ISSN, and other metadata. They then use a variety of methods to infiltrate indexing databases, known as ‘indexjacking’, including:

• compromising a journal’s homepage link to instead link to a cloned website
• hacking the website of a legitimate journal
• registering an expired domain of a legitimate journal
• targeting print-only journals with inactive or unestablished homepage links.

In response to Abalkina’s study, Elsevier launched an investigation into the journals in question and confirmed that they had already removed 13 illicit journal homepage links from Scopus. In December 2023, the publisher went a step further and announced the decision to remove all source homepage links from the database. However, Abalkina cautions that this may not be enough to prevent hijacked journals from infiltrating databases, and encourages researchers to also use the Hijacked Journal Checker she launched in 2022 in partnership with Retraction Watch.

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KEY TAKEAWAY

• Crossref has acquired the Retraction Watch database, resulting in the largest freely available database of retracted articles to date.

Launched in 2018, and curated by The Center for Scientific Integrity, the Retraction Watch database has grown to include approximately 43,000 retracted research papers. In September 2023, it was announced that the database had been acquired by Crossref and made freely available.

Combined forces

This new approach marries Retraction Watch’s large database with Crossref’s focus on open metadata, digital object identifiers, and collection of over 130 million records. Publishers will now register retraction notices with Crossref, and Retraction Watch will continue to update the database. Crossref’s dataset also contains over 14,000 retracted articles, meaning that the combined database will be the largest of its kind, comprising around 50,000 retractions. This combination of volume, metadata, and open access will be a first and is an approach that Crossref and Retraction Watch hope will ensure sustainability in the long term.

This sustainability is important as the volume of research articles continues to grow. The retraction of inaccurate publications is vital to maintaining the integrity of the scientific record. Retractions should be clearly publicised to prevent the spread of inaccurate or misleading information by researchers unknowingly citing retracted works.

Looking forwards

Retraction Watch co-founder, Ivan Oransky, and Crossref’s Director of Product, Rachael Lammey, hope that the organisations’ shared expertise will “…greatly increase the openly available information on retractions [which] … in turn helps the community benefit from and rely upon more comprehensive information…”.

The organisations’ shared expertise will “…greatly increase the openly available information on retractions [which] … in turn helps the community benefit from and rely upon more comprehensive information…”.

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]]> https://thepublicationplan.com/2024/01/23/crossrefs-acquisition-of-the-retraction-watch-database-combined-forces-for-research-integrity/feed/ 0 14996 https://thepublicationplan.com/2021/10/01/improving-diversity-and-inclusivity-in-scientific-publishing-can-editormetrics-help/ https://thepublicationplan.com/2021/10/01/improving-diversity-and-inclusivity-in-scientific-publishing-can-editormetrics-help/#respond Fri, 01 Oct 2021 11:56:36 +0000 https://thepublicationplan.com/?p=10035 Membership on a journal’s editorial board can translate into meaningful career growth and confer prestige for researchers. However, journal editors must make judgement calls that may, at times, be unintentionally biased.

To enable insights into the editorial composition of journals and the potential biases influencing editorial decisions, Andreas Pacher, Tamara Heck, and Kerstin Schoch have created Open Editors, a dataset containing public information on nearly half a million journal editors across 6,833 journals run by 22 academic publishers. For each editor or editorial board member, the following data—or ‘editormetrics’—are collected:

• name
• institutional affiliation
• editorial position
• journal name
• ISSN
• publisher
• URL linking to the journal’s editorial board information
• date of data collection (‘web-scraping’).

The initiative, first outlined in a SocArXiv preprint article in March 2021, has received support from researchers, who believe that it will improve transparency around decision-making in scientific publishing. For instance, it could shed light on gender bias among editorial boards, encouraging publishers to improve equity within these groups. The database could also make it easier to verify key facts such as the editors’ authentic affiliation with the journal, to help identify predatory journals. Aligned with industry efforts toward greater open science, Open Editors is freely available and will be updated annually through at least 2023.

The authors note that “editormetric analyses aim to detect biases and inequalities that are sustained by editorial power within the scientific publication system”.

Pacher and colleagues suggest that the editormetrics they have collected would be even more valuable, and inform on more aspects of diversity, when linked with other datasets. We look forward to seeing how researchers use Open Editors and how these analyses help to improve equity in scientific publishing.

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With predatory publishing continuing to escalate, there is a need to evaluate the extent to which it has infiltrated academic practice. In a recent analysis of Scopus, a leading scholarly database, researchers found that almost 3% of indexed studies had been published in potentially predatory journals.

As highlighted in a recent Nature news article, researchers searched Scopus for the names of “potential, possible or probable” predatory journals and publishers identified by Beall (2016). A total of 324 suspected predatory journals were identified; these titles published over 160,000 articles between 2015–2017, accounting for 2.8% of the studies indexed during this period.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated problem — predatory journals have previously been found to be indexed on other databases such as PubMed. It is widely recognized that predatory publishing threatens research integrity, however defining “safelists” and “watchlists” isn’t easy and they are difficult to maintain as these journals constantly evolve their practices.

Although a spokesperson for Scopus told Nature that it has stopped indexing new content for 65% of flagged journals, old content remains. This means that their  citation counts still increase, and may continue to misinform important institutional decisions such as employee evaluation and funding. The authors of the analysis suggest that the current filters used to assess journals are proving ineffective against the more convincing predatory journals, and call for fact checking and upgraded selection criteria to address the issue.

They warn that “unless the selection criteria are upgraded and/or the bar for inclusion is raised significantly, fake scientific journals will keep creeping in the database”.

We look forward to seeing how scholarly databases adapt to this evolving threat.

After reading the article, click here for a brief survey and to receive your authorization code for your Credit Tracker. This serves as documentation for the activity.

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Medical Publishing Insights & Practices (MPIP) have launched their new Enhanced Publication Options Navigator (EPON). This tool is meant to replace the Open Access Journal Tool for Industry (OA-JTI).

The EPON is a free, easy-to-use tool that collates data from over 450 journals regarding open access publishing, enhanced publication content and plain language summaries. Some of this information may not be readily available on journal websites, making the tool a particularly valuable resource for when deciding on appropriate journal for your publication – particularly if you wish to include any of these features.

The EPON is searchable by journal title, keyword, publisher and/or therapeutic area. It also allows you to narrow down your target journal search by the following characteristics:

• Open access
  • Journal model (full, hybrid, none)
  • Article policy for industry (gold, green, other)
  • Copyright licenses for industry (CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-ND)
• Enhanced publication content
  • Type (video, infographics, podcasts, etc)
  • Whether this is peer-reviewed
  • Whether this is freely accessible
• Plain language summaries
  • If they are accepted
  • Whether they can include graphics
  • Whether they are tagged and linked in PubMed to the original article
  • Whether they are freely accessible

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Summary by Kristian Clausen MPH from Aspire Scientific

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With thanks to our sponsor, Aspire Scientific Ltd

You have followed the mandate from your funding body and published your prized research in an open access (OA) journal, assuming that it will be publicly available forever. But is long-term storage guaranteed? What happens if your OA journal disappears? Will your article be lost?

A report by M. Laakso, L. Matthias and N. Jahn posted on the on the arXiv preprint server in September 2020 found that 176 OA journals had disappeared since 2000. As noted by M. Shelomi, in his comment on the article, this number could have included predatory journals that have been de-listed by the bibliographic indexes analysed in the study. However, this does raise an interesting question around the preservation of OA journals and articles.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists over 15,000 peer-reviewed OA journals. Digital preservation is one of the 7 criteria that must be fulfilled to receive the DOAJ seal, representing best practice in OA publishing. In addition, under Plan S, the open access initiative launched by the European consortium cOAlition S that came into effect in January, one of the mandatory publication venue requirements is deposition of content with a long-term digital preservation or archiving programme (such as CLOCKSS, Portico, or equivalent).

So, long-term storage is recognised as a condition of best OA practice. However, Laakso et al indicated that the limited funds of smaller journals may result in them opting for “lightweight technical solutions” that do not protect against technical instabilities.

The limited funds of smaller open access journals may result in them opting for “lightweight technical solutions” that do not protect against technical instabilities.

This has prompted a joint initiative by the DOAJ, the CLOCKSS Archive, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry/ISSN International Centre and Public Knowledge Project to improve OA journal preservation. The plan to provide an affordable archiving option, announced in November 2020, is specifically directed at small-scale, article processing charge-free OA journals, as these are the journals thought to be at risk of disappearing. The collaboration will also aim to raise awareness of the importance of OA journals joining a long-term preservation programme.

Hopefully, this initiative will ensure that all OA publications remain accessible for future generations and scholarly learnings will not just disappear.

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Summary by Jo Chapman PhD from Aspire Scientific

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With thanks to our sponsor, Aspire Scientific Ltd

A sponsored article from Taylor & Francis Group

Transparency, speed and open access are key drivers in 21st-century scientific publishing. From funder driven initiatives like Plan S, to individual organisations recognising the benefits of open access and fast publication, demand for publishing models to change to meet the needs of the medical and scientific writing has never been higher. This has never been more keenly demonstrated than by the immediate response required from researchers to publish urgent research to meet the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

As research needs have adapted, so too have publishing models, with investment and a focus on audience needs driving innovation and experimentation.

With the demand for full open access to peer-reviewed research growing, Taylor & Francis Group acquired Dove Medical Press, a leading open access publisher, which aims to combine the highest editorial standards with the ‘best of breed’ new publishing technologies. The need of researchers for greater flexibility in publishing choices continues to grow, meaning only journals with the most attractive publication choices will be successful. At the start of 2019, in response to this continued demand for flexibility, Taylor & Francis introduced open access choices to established journals, such as Current Medical Research and Opinion, Expert Opinion & Expert Reviews Series, and Journal of Medical Economics.

What kind of impact does the increased range of publication choices have for research?  We see regular examples of the decision to publish open access having an immediate positive effect on the reach and impact of researchers’ work, with an example of this being the article Application of a simple point-of-care test to reduce UK healthcare costs and adverse events in outpatient acute respiratory infections. Published in early April 2020, it already has an Altmetric score of 63 and over 1,700 views on the Taylor & Francis platform alone.

In January 2020, Taylor & Francis Group acquired the successful and innovative platform, F1000 Research. F1000 Research is about more than the article – it enables all research outputs to be open and transparent, driving reproducibility, already a key issue in research, which is becoming even more important in a pre-vaccine pandemic world.

Whether it is adding open access choices to established journals, or launching new journals and services to meet demand, the only thing that can be said with certainty is that the publication landscape looks very different today from 10 years ago.

This will continue to change and adapt as all stakeholders – funder, publisher, researcher – push for speed and openness. As part of our response to COVID-19 we are working with our editors to prioritise peer review of all relevant research. We are also focusing our workflow to ensure that materials related to the outbreak are fast-tracked through the publication process once they are approved. Editors are proactively encouraging authors to publish and share the data that forms the basis of their research in line with FAIR data principles, and our own data policies.

As signatories to the National Institute of Health (NIH)’s Access to Research initiative, along with the Wellcome Trust’s coordinated action on sharing research data and findings relevant to the outbreak, Taylor & Francis has been working with the WHO to ensure that our new microsite that aggregates and organises all recently published COVID-19 research in one easy to navigate, free to read, portal, is clearly signposted. Taylor & Francis is also aligning with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) initiative to centralise resources on PubMed, to ensure rapid human and machine-readable access where possible to research articles and data through the National Library of Medicine (NLM)’s Litcovid portal.

The opportunities to share knowledge through conferences is another aspect of the research landscape to have been impacted by COVID-19. Taylor & Francis has responded to this challenge by offering an open access conference material supplement option that is peer-reviewed, permanent, and citable.

It is no longer the case that research outputs must fit into a one-size fits all publishing model. With Taylor & Francis, Dove Medical Press and F1000 Research offering a variety of formats, publishing timelines, and access models, there is a solution that showcases your research in the most beneficial fashion, rather than the research always having to fit into guidelines of a standard journal article. If you would like to discuss your publishing options please get in touch.

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A sponsored article written by Taylor & Francis Group

Recent years have seen growing support for making data more readily accessible, with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) data sharing requirement coming into force. The benefits for authors and researchers in sharing their data is beginning to be realised. However, challenges in accessing data and factors limiting data sharing have also been recognised.

In a recent opinion piece for STAT, Prof Ross and colleagues share their first-hand experience of data sharing with the Yale Open Data Access (YODA) Project. The YODA Project, which is co-directed by Ross, was launched in 2011 and partnered with Johnson & Johnson in 2014. It facilitates access to data via a controlled-access model that requires investigators wishing to use data to submit proposals to the YODA team for approval. Data are predominantly from non-Phase I clinical trials that have been completed for at least 18 months and around 95% of the trials available are sponsored by Johnson & Johnson. At the time that the article was published:

• Data were available from 350 trials – this has since grown to 389 trials.
• 117 requests for data access had been granted (using an average of three trials each).
• 26 manuscripts reporting data obtained from the YODA Project had been published in peer-reviewed journals.

The authors point out that data from over 75% of listed trials had been shared with and used by external investigators, far outstripping the 15% reported for other data sharing platforms.

Data from over 75% of listed trials had been shared with and used by external investigators, far outstripping the 15% reported for other data sharing platforms.

So, what has made the YODA Project so successful? The authors highlight the transparency of the controlled-access model, which makes information like clinical trial metadata publicly accessible, ensuring that investigators are aware of the available data. In fact, transparency and responsible practices are promoted throughout the process, with data sharing requests, reviews and results all made publicly available. The authors also note that while data had to initially be retroactively prepared for dissemination, Johnson & Johnson now begin all new trials with data sharing requirements in mind. Importantly, concerns surrounding the risk of breaching patient privacy, inappropriate use of data for commercial purposes, or publication of spurious safety findings, have so far been unwarranted.

The authors acknowledge the early challenges faced by the Project – particularly when preparing data from older trials. Subsequently, however, they have found that a lack of expertise among those requesting data has posed the most significant obstacle to the completion of analyses. The YODA Project is currently funded by the companies who use the platform, such as Johnson & Johnson. Looking to the future, the authors note the need to develop sustainable funding models to ensure that as data sharing increases, the costs can still be covered.

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Summary by Beatrice Tyrrell, DPhil from Aspire Scientific

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With thanks to our sponsors, Aspire Scientific Ltd and NetworkPharma Ltd

PubMed is one of the most widely accessible biomedical resources globally. However, there is accumulating evidence that articles published in predatory journals are being indexed in PubMed. In a report published in The Scientist, Diana Kwon investigates concerns among the research community that the presence of low-quality predatory journals on PubMed is affecting its reliability.

Two studies conducted by Professor Andrea Manca and colleagues found that over 10% of predatory journals in neuroscience, neurology and rehabilitation were listed on PubMed. According to Prof Manca, content from predatory publishers may have leaked into the PubMed database through PubMed Central (PMC), one of three citation databases that feed in to PubMed. However, research conducted by Professor Catherine Smith found a higher rate of predatory journals on other digital resources like Scopus and Google Scholar than on PubMed. Peace Ossom-Williamson agreed that the presence of predatory publishers on PubMed is not an urgent concern, based on her research published in JMLA.

Jerry Sheehan, Deputy Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), told The Scientist that the NLM is aware of the concerns regarding the transfer of articles from predatory journals to PubMed via PMC. He explained that a legal or policy requirement means that all research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must be included on PMC. In a bid to resolve the issue of articles from non-reputable journals entering PubMed, the NIH issued guidelines for authors and several university libraries have released tools to help researchers identify legitimate journals.

As stated by Williamson, “ultimately, it’s important for both authors and readers to be mindful of the journals they submit to or the articles that they read.”

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Summary by Tracey Warren PhD from Aspire Scientific