Signs of trouble are turning up at the biggest scientific journals and the publishers that host them. In December, nearly every member of the editorial board of the pre-eminent Journal of Human Evolution walked out on Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific papers, because of changes the staff said jeopardized the quality of the 53-year-old publication.
A couple of months earlier, in October, nearly two dozen scientists excoriated Scientific Reports, the largest individual journal, in an open letter that accused its publisher, Springer Nature, of failing to “protect the scientific literature from fraudulent and low quality” research. And in the past two years, Web of Science, an influential index of scholarly literature, delisted at least four high-volume journals for not meeting quality standards and placed four more on hold while it investigates their work.
...In the past decade, every major for-profit publisher has dramatically upped its output, according to a November analysis by a group of scientists who found that scientific publishers printed 47% more papers in 2022 than they did in 2016. “Wiley, Springer and Elsevier are in an articles arms race at the moment,” said Dean Smith, director of Duke University Press, naming three top publishers...
Today, most of the best-known journals are published by big, for-profit companies, such as Elsevier and Springer Nature. Institutions purchase subscriptions, typically for bundles of journals, to make the material available to faculty researchers, which can cost a university more than $1 million a year.
In addition, following demands from foundations and government agencies to make the research they fund publicly available, publishers now charge scientists to post “open access” papers outside their paywalls. These “article processing charges” can run from a few hundred dollars to more than $10,000 a paper...
Full story at https://www.wsj.com/business/media/scientific-journals-quality-publishers-6399fc95.
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