Flipping academic journals to diamond open access: Notes on community governance

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In this blog post, Dr Caroline Edwards, Executive Director, Open Library of Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature & Culture, Birkbeck, University of London asks: How do we ensure that a flipped diamond open access journal can remain independent? How do we prepare for the long-term financial security of flipped journals and protect against their potential vulnerability to commercial acquisition in the decades to come?

Flipping academic journals to diamond open access (OA) presents a series of challenges to an academic publisher. You need certain niche competencies. Firstly, nothing happens without the complete trust of an editorial team that shares your appetite for risk. Then, you need the backing of an entire academic community, willing to follow the editorial team to a new journal (in cases where editors don’t own the journal IP, which is most cases) and undertake a boycott of the old “zombie” title. Underpinning all of this, you need the financial and technological resources to provide the necessary infrastructure for the flipped journal in perpetuity, to offer it a safe home with a long-term future that doesn’t require any author fees. This involves things like setting up and maintaining a new journal site, running a digital publishing platform for managing submission, review, and production processes, having the capacity to manage metadata integration with university library catalogues and discoverability databases, providing memberships at robust digital preservation organisations, and ongoing research and development to stay abreast of rapid changes within the digital publishing landscape. The list goes on.

The growing list of journals flipping to diamond OA from their commercial publishers is well known. Retraction Watch keeps an up-to-date list of editorial boards that have resigned from for-profit models and moved their titles to not-for-profit, community-governed models. Each has its own story, told across published statements, academic blogs, and in newspaper articles covering high-profile editorial resignations and academic boycotts. But what gets talked about less frequently is the community governance structure that will support the journal moving forwards. How do we ensure that a flipped journal can remain independent? How do we prepare for its long-term financial security and protect against future vulnerability to commercial acquisition in the decades to come?

At the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), I spend much of my time talking to editors about their journals. There is a depressingly common story. It usually goes something like this. Many academic journals were launched between the 1960s and 1980s, in a collaboration between university professors and small or independent publishing houses. Things worked pretty well until their small publisher was bought out in the 1990s or 2000s by a larger company, often overseen by a global parent company. They muddled along with a high turnover of staff on the publisher side. Over time, the publishing managers became harder to get hold of, production was outsourced overseas, and editors became increasingly aware of a decline in production quality. 

With the acceleration to open access in the 2010s, editors came under pressure to double or triple their article acceptance rates – with a drop in subscriptions revenue, commercial publishers had to recoup costs via article processing charges (APCs). The more volume they could pump out, the better their profit margins. Even when journal editors rejected unsuitable or poor-quality articles, publishers found a way to fast-track this academic content by surreptitiously channelling it through their digital platforms to their hundreds of other journals using the same platform. Not all editors were even aware that the transfer of rejected articles had taken place.

If the Editor(s)-in-Chief had the temerity to stand up for their academic principles and refuse to increase their journal’s article acceptance rates, at this point they could face legal challenges or dismissal. In several explosive cases in recent years, Editors-in-Chief have been fired by their commercial publishers after refusing to back down over these issues. Sacking an internationally renowned editor whose reputation has become synonymous with the journal’s own reputation isn’t for the faint-hearted. It says something about the desperation of commercial publishers and their shrinking profits that they would be willing to trash a journal’s reputation so comprehensively – among the very academic communities whose uncompensated labour produced that reputation in the first place.

At this point in my conversations with editors, I ask a difficult question: Who owns the journal? “The publisher” they say, or “we don’t know.” Sometimes they reply: “The founding editor has passed away; we’ve asked their children, but no one can find any paperwork.” Without the rights to the journal title, its name, and logo, editors must set up a new journal. Ensuring the continuity between the old (now trashed) journal title and the new journal title requires coordinating a mass resignation of editors and authors from the old journal, preferably along with a boycott by peer reviewers for the foreseeable future.

At the OLH we’ve spent almost a decade flipping academic journals to diamond OA, supported by a growing number of libraries worldwide who share our vision for a not-for-profit academic publishing future. It wasn’t called “diamond” when we launched in 2015, but the term has come to mean not-for-profit and community-governed OA. Our publishing model is inspired by an explicitly political project – if the OLH and similar university-owned journal publishers are to thrive, they need to divert university library funding away from the big 5 commercial publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer). This happens hand-in-hand with library advocacy. When expensive journals flip to diamond OA, librarians are empowered to cancel individual journal subscriptions. In the age of big bundles and journal packages, journal flipping allows them to renegotiate extortionate deals with commercial publishers in light of the shrinking number of titles in each package.

Since launching as a publisher in 2015, the OLH has flipped 20 journals in this way. It hasn’t always been easy, and we have learned a lot along the way. In cases where journals own their own intellectual property (IP), usually via a scholarly association or legal governing body, the process of migrating decades of back content requires highly complex, skilled technical work. In cases where journals don’t own their IP, editors are unable to take the journal title with them. In these cases, a new journal needs to be established to continue the mission of the original title. This leaves behind zombie journals; the undead husks of formerly respected titles, that commercial publishers refuse to close but cannot run when the entire scholarly community has agreed to boycott it. The case of Wiley’s Journal of Political Philosophy, which relaunched with the OLH as Political Philosophy in February 2024, is a case in point.

Some of the journals that the OLH has flipped to diamond OA have set up a nonprofit organisation to protect themselves. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, a former Wiley journal that dates back to 1966, was able to do this because the original editors had the foresight to protect their IP before their publisher Blackwell was taken over by Wiley in 2007 (the journal had previously been published by two different university presses, the University of Chicago Press (1966–1978) and Wilfrid Laurier University Press (1979–1989)). The Zygon editorial team set up its own not-for-profit scholarly corporation in Chicago in 2019, following a joint venture established in 1965 among founding partners. As a 501(c)(3) organization, the Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science NFP not-for-profit scholarly corporation is a charitable organisation exempt from federal income tax. This route is being taken by other OLH journals including Theory & Social Inquiry (formerly Theory & Society), Political Philosophy (formerly the Journal of Political Philosophy), and Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs (formerly Philosophy & Public Affairs).

Several of the OLH’s journals have been owned by scholarly associations since their inception, including Quaker Studies (founded by the Quaker Studies Research Association (QSRA)), Architectural Histories (founded by the European Architectural History Network (EAHN)), Digital Studies / Le champ numérique (founded by the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN), Marvell Studies (founded by the Andrew Marvell Society), Open Screens (founded by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS)), and The Parish Review (founded by the International Flann O’Brien Society).

In other cases, independent journals joining the OLH have made the decision to affiliate themselves with scholarly societies. This has been the case for [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, which has become the official video essay journal of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), and C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, which became the official journal of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) when the new association was founded in 2017. This kind of affiliation secures the community governance of journals. Scholarly associations have articles of association that usually include the criteria for appointing journal editors, terms of office, and processes for collectively undertaking decisions about the journal’s functioning and health. 

Another route to long-term protection against commercial acquisition is for journals to join forces. This was the approach taken by 3 of the OLH’s journals who resigned en masse from Elsevier in 2015 – Lingua (which relaunched as Glossa), LabPhon, and the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics. Editors of these titles set up a community organisation, LingOA: Linguistics in Open Access as a Dutch Stichting (literally a “foundation”), a not-for-profit legal entity with limited liability similar to a trust, which is controlled by a board of directors and cannot have any shareholders. 

With support from the Center of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Leiden, Radboud University Library, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU), and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), LingOA was able to provide financial support for the journals beyond their funding agreement with the OLH. One of the OLH’s newest journals, Syntactic Theory and Research (STAR, which left Wiley) has also joined the LingOA Stichting.

Other journals that have joined the OLH in 2023-2024 will need to establish their own legal and ownership entities, and we continue to offer help and advice to editorial teams undertaking this important work. Our goal at the OLH is to liberate university research from commercial control. Flipping journals to diamond OA is the first step; enshrining community governance is the crucial next step. As more funding bodies mandate diamond OA and not-for-profit academic publishing infrastructure (such as this recent announcement by the NWO), the tide is turning against commercial actors. Now is the time for editors and scholarly communities to regain control of their scholarship.

This post does not necessarily reflect the view of Cambridge University Libraries.

Data Diversity Podcast #3 – Dr Nick H. Wise (4/4)

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Thank you for staying with us throughout this four-part series with Dr Nick Wise, scientist and an engineer, who has made his name as a scientific sleuth. By now, it is hoped that he needs no introduction (though if you would like one, please look back at the previous posts).

In this final post, we get Nick’s take on what he thinks the repercussions should be for engaging in fraud, and we get a parting tip from Nick on what researchers should do when performing a literature search on papers in their field. Below are some excerpts from the conversation, which can be listened to in full here.

Most people don’t go into science wanting to fake stuff. With such cases, it can often be a sign that there’s a real problem in the lab or in the group. Why else would someone feel so compelled to do this? If the pressure is coming from the university demanding papers from them, then it’s the problem with the university. 

Repercussions for research fraud 

LO: You have mentioned that some editors have been let go from their positions as editors – are there any other repercussions for getting involved with fraud? 

NW: Often, institutions are the worst in terms of responding. Recently, I was at the World Conference on Research Integrity in Athens and spoke to other investigators like me, including publishers and people in the research integrity space. Some publishers have informed me that even when they want to make a retraction and have gone to the author’s or editor’s institution to inform them that a staff member has been involved with fraud, often the institution doesn’t reply at all, or even if they do, they will not do anything. They are very defensive, and they do not want any bad publicity for the institution and so they will not respond at all. Even in a well-regarded western University where someone has been caught fabricating their data, the response could just be that they have been relieved of teaching duties for six months, but they’ve kept their job and there will be no publicity that we know.  

In Spain, a professor that has just been made Rector, the Head of the University of Salamanca, the oldest university in Spain, has been linked to questionable publication practices for the last decade or so. He was found to have his name on an incredible number of papers which have been cited an incredible number of times, including by people who don’t exist. There has been a fight in the Spanish press to try highlight this. But despite of all this press, including national press in Spain, this person has become the Rector of the University of Salamanca. And it’s basically the same the world over: institutions very much go into protection mode even if publishers have agreed on retracting the papers. Often there are no career repercussions at all. Sometimes, they will just go and be editor of a different journal or for a different publisher. 

LO: In your opinion, what should happen to an academic or researcher who has engaged in fraud? 

NW: I think it really depends on the nature of the fraud and the position that the researcher holds. If a PhD student has done something and if they have been caught after, say, the first offence, then I think there should be leniency. Regardless of if they have bought an authorship, or if they have tried to fake some data, they still have a way out and it should be offered to them. Again, a lot of the drive for PhD students faking some data is because their P.I. (Principal Investigator) is demanding results, demanding that things happen faster, or demanding ground-breaking results. At some point, people become desperate. Most people don’t go into science wanting to fake stuff. With such cases, it can often be a sign that there’s a real problem in the lab or in the group. Why else would someone feel so compelled to do this? If the pressure is coming from the university demanding papers from them, then it’s the problem with the university. A lot of this drive is external to researchers. But if you have someone that is a tenured professor who has been doing this for a long time and they have been caught out on a decade or more of fabricated results, those feel like that should be the end of the road. It really depends on the nature of what has been done, the stage of career of the person, and how much fraud has been committed. 

LO: Do you ever worry about being called out for being sued for defamation? 

NW: I have thought about it, and I try to err on the side of caution and make sure that there is fairly hard evidence for anything I say publicly. You can have suspicions without saying anything publicly – you would just go to the publisher. But when I find an advert for a named paper and then six months later a paper with that same title is published, then it is clear cut that someone should investigate. But fortunately, so far, I have not been threatened with anything. 

I think it is also partly due to the fact that accusing people of making up their data is more personal. When authorship is bought, by the time I find it, some of these people would have already got what they needed. If they needed to have a publication in order to graduate, once they have graduated, they do not care if the publication is retracted. Often when you read a retraction notice after the authorship has been sold, they will normally say that none of the authors responded. This may also be down to the fact that they know that they have been caught but there is nothing to defend. But when you are accusing someone of making up data, I think that is far more personal attack. When someone has bought authorship, they do not have a personal connection to the paper, so they move on. They are probably annoyed, but they cannot do anything about it. 

Parting advice

LO: To end, are there any takeaways that you would like to share? 

 NW: I would encourage all researchers to download the PubPeer plugin, which means that whenever they are looking at a paper, it will flag whether there are any comments about that paper, or indeed any comments in the reference or the reference papers on PubPeer. If someone else has found a problem with that paper, they can just quickly go and check and be more informed. 

We are grateful for Dr Nick Wise sharing his perspective on the publishing industry and research culture that many of us are not privy to. Nick has highlighted many issues which raise pressing concerns for research integrity. We thank him for his time speaking with us and we hope that readers will take his advice on using PubPeer when they embark on literature searching (and of course, refrain from committing fraud, lest you will have Nick on your case).

Data Diversity Podcast #3 – Dr Nick H. Wise (3/4)

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Welcome back to the penultimate post featuring Dr Nick H. Wise, Research Associate in Architectural Fluid Mechanics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. If you have been with us for the previous two posts, you would know that besides being a scientist and an engineer, Nick has made his name as a scientific sleuth who, based on an article on the blog Retraction Watch which was written in 2022, is responsible for more than 850 retractions, leading Times Higher Education to dub him as a research fraudbuster. Since then, through his X account @Nickwizzo, he has continued his investigations, tracking cases of fraud and in some cases, naming and shaming the charlatans. In this four-part series, we will learn from Nick about some of the shady activities that taint the scientific publishing industry today.

In part three, we learn from Nick about how researchers try to generate more citations from a single piece of research through a trick called ‘salami slicing’ and the blurred lines between illegality and desperately coping to meet with the unrealistic expectations of academia (to the point of engaging with fraud). Below are some excerpts from the conversation, which can be listened to in full here. 

Citation count was once a proxy for quality and now it is citation count regardless of quality. People are only looking at the citation count, and not the actual quality. Actually assessing quality takes a lot more effort. 

‘Salami slicing’ and the Game of Citations

LO: What do you think is better for science? A slower, more thoughtful process of publishing and everything in between? Or more information, more research, but then things like fraud slip through and occur more frequently?

NW: I don’t think there’s necessarily more research. Another phenomenon that paper mills take advantage of is salami slicing. Imagine you have completed a research project. Now you could write this up as one, thirty-page paper or two, twenty-page papers. You could write two comprehensive papers or try to put out multiple ten-page papers where you have some minor parameters changed. I see this happening in nanofluids research because it is an area of research close to mine. The nanofluid is simply a base liquid – it might be water, it might be ethanol – and into that you mix these very small nanoscale particles of some other material, such as gold, silver, or iron oxide. And in this sort of mixture of liquid and particles, you want to investigate its fluid flow and describe this with some differential equations. You can use computers to solve the differential equations and then plot some results about velocity profiles and heat transfer coefficients, etcetera. Now, you could write a paper for a given situation where you say, I’m not going to specify the liquid, but here is a general and viscosity of this liquid. If you want to apply this to your own research, you plug in the density and viscosity of your liquid, and likewise the particles. I’m not going to specify which particles are used, because all that changes is their density and their heat transfer coefficient properties. So that’s one way you could do it.

Another way to do it is to go I’m going to write a paper about water and gold particles; that’s one paper. Then you can write another paper which has water and silver particles, and then you can write one with ethanol and iron oxide, and there are so many varieties. You can also vary the geometry that this flow is going around, and you can add in an electric field and a magnetic field, etcetera. You can build up in this n-factorial way. There are thirty possible liquids multiplied by a hundred possible particles and multiplied by however many geometric configurations. You can see that this is what they are doing. Rather than writing a few quite general comprehensive papers, they are writing hundreds of very specific papers which enables them to produce more papers and sell more authorships and put more citations in. But this overwhelm of papers produced; there’s still only so many peer reviewers, and so many editors. And this phenomenon happens in lots of fields, they find something where there are just these variables that they can keep writing almost the same paper. Yet, the paper is original. It has not been done before. It is incredibly derivative, but that is not necessarily a barrier to publication.

LO: What I’m getting from this is, this is part of the whole system, and the issue at hand is definitely enabled by certain motivations like getting more citations. You can take one big piece of salami or publish that in one book, or you can slice the salami thirty ways. And if they are in the position to slice the salami, they say why not, I suppose, right? A game is there to be played.

NW: Right, they are playing the game that is in front of them. And again, there are people who do this who are not from a paper mill. They just want to maximize the number of citations and publications. The question is why are they doing this? Why do they want to maximize their publications? Because they want a promotion, or they want a tenured job. There are also countries where you get a cash reward for publishing a paper in a good journal so the more papers you publish, the more money you get paid. Your government might have told all the universities that they need to increase their ranking in the World University rankings. How do you do that? By increasing your research output and the citations you get. That is another driver. These drivers come from all sorts of places but there is always an emphasis on numbers. Citation count was once a proxy for quality and now it is citation count regardless of quality. People are only looking at the citation count and not the actual quality. Assessing quality takes a lot more effort.

LO: Citations used to be a proxy for quality, but that is not the case anymore. But it still implies the quality of the research, or you would hope.

NW: You would hope, but only because there is an assumption that the only reason something has a lot of citations is because it is good quality. Citations are also easier to count. Quality is much harder to account for, but that incentivizes people to do things like cite their colleagues. Again, you could still track it if people from the same university were citing each other. But then you get bigger scale things with middlemen who organize people from across the world to cite each other or just do it for cash. If you are publishing and you are producing papers to order, each one of those papers has a reference section which is real estate. You can throw in and have some genuine references which are relevant to this paper, but you can also throw in some irrelevant references that someone paid you to include. You can also pay someone to include references that are actually relevant to a topic.

LO: If it is relevant to a topic, it is almost like merely encouraging someone to be aware of certain work as opposed to a scam, which sounds like a gray area.

NW: Well, I would say that as soon as someone is paying money, then it starts to be illegitimate. But I mean if someone emails you and says “I’ve just published this paper, I think you might be interested, it’s in your research field: maybe read it or maybe you do cite it”, it’s different from someone emailing you to say “I’ll pay you £50 if you cite my paper” and you do. Then I would say that you have crossed a line. So, it does get very gray. Then there are these organized paper mills who are doing this as a business and that is where I think it becomes quite clear that it is probably not legitimate.

Facebook (authorship) marketplace

NW: You could go on Facebook and there are people selling authorship of their paper as a one off. There are PhD students in some country with no research funding who say “it costs $2500 for the article processing charge for me to publish where I would like to publish, I do not have $2500 so if you pay the $2500, you can be first author on the paper” and that is the only way they can get their paper published. They’re not doing this as a business, they’re just doing this once for this one paper. And you get people responding. Quite often professors or more established academics with access to budgets are the ones who will say yes. And the only thing that the person has done is to provide the funding for the publication.

The minimum thing that one is supposed to have done to be considered an author is to have either written the draft or reviewed and edited the paper. You might have also done data analysis or conceptualization. I think we would agree that if all this person does is just pay the fee for publication, then that is not acceptable. But what if they read the paper and then made a couple of comments? Now they have reviewed and edited it, and so now they have done review, editing and funding. There are many big labs around the world that have some very senior scientist whose name is on every single paper that comes out of the lab. And what have they done? Well, they provided all the funding, and they have reviewed the paper. I bet there are some who have barely glanced at the paper. But let’s say that they have reviewed the paper, and they provided the funding for the publication. Is that what makes it different to the person on Facebook who has found some random professor from another country to pay for their publication? Where is the difference? I don’t think it is an easy line to draw. In this way, the move to Open Access publishing requiring large fees for publication has also driven quite a bit of this phenomenon.

LO: It also seems like you have developed a bit of empathy. Maybe you’ve looked at so many cases and you see that it’s not always clear.

NW: Absolutely. Again, if you have the people running a paper mill, or if you have some professor who is being bribed and waving through dozens of papers, I don’t have much empathy for them. But the Masters or PhD student who has been told that they have to publish papers to get their PhD or even a Masters and they have this demand placed on them, or they even have produced a paper but they need this on the all this money to get it published, I don’t blame them for what they’re doing. It’s the situation they’ve been placed in. It is the system that they are part of. I have a lot of empathy for them.

Look out for the final post coming next week, where we get Nick’s take on what he thinks should be the repercussions for engaging in fraud, and we get a parting tip from Nick on what researchers should do when performing a literature search on papers in their field.