The strain on scientific publishing
- Mark Hanson, University of Exeter, UK
- Pablo Gomez Barreiro, Millenium Seed Bank, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
- Paolo Crosetto, INRAE, Grenoble, France
- Dan Brockington, ICTAB, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
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Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was 47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth, if any, in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing. To analyse this strain, we present five data-driven metrics showing publisher growth, processing times, and citation behaviours. We draw these data from web scrapes, requests for data from publishers, and material that is freely available through publisher websites. Our findings are based on millions of papers produced by leading academic publishers. We find specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year, contributing to this strain. Some publishers enabled this growth by adopting a strategy of hosting special issues, which publish articles with reduced turnaround times. Given pressures on researchers to publish or perish to be competitive for funding applications, this strain was likely amplified by these offers to publish more articles. We also observed widespread year-over-year inflation of journal impact factors coinciding with this strain, which risks confusing quality signals. Such exponential growth cannot be sustained. The metrics we define here should enable this evolving conversation to reach actionable solutions to address the strain on scientific publishing.
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Mark Hanson is a biologist interested in immunity and host pathogen interactions using Drosophilamy. He is based at the University of Exeter, UK. He completed his PhD in Dr. Bruno Lemaitre’s lab at l’École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne Switzerland and has since spent some time as a post-doc and research associate in the Lemaitre lab and Dr. Ben Longdon’s lab at the University of Exeter, Penryn, UK funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Starting in late 2023, I will be a Wellcome Trust ECA fellow working with Dr. Longdon to better understand the evolution of host immune signalling.
Pablo Gomez Barreiro is a multi-skilled Agricultural Engineer with a Plant Breeding MSc and +10 years of experience in the Plant & Seed Science sector. Currently working as a Seed Biology Lab. Technician at the Millennium Seed Bank (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) doing laboratory maintenance, specialized training & seed science (germination, phenotyping, data analysis and statistics via R & Fiji/ImageJ).
Paolo Crosetto is a senior researcher (Directeur de Recherche, DR) at INRAE, the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment. He works in Grenoble, France, within the Research Unit GAEL – Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory. Mainly together with Bernard Ruffieux, Laurent Muller, and Sabrina Teyssier focuses on experimental methods and their application to consumer problems, mainly in the domain of food consumption.
Dan Brockington is an ICREA research professor based at ICTA–UAB since 2022. He trained as an anthropologist at UCL, worked in the Geography Departments of the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and Institutes for Global / International Development at the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield. He works on diverse aspects of conservation social science and is the PI of an Advanced ERC on Conservation Data Justice.