The April 2022 issue of Learned Publishing has now been published online. 

ALPSP members: Login to access the latest content online (Volume 35, Issue 2)

The Editor's choice for this issue are:

• Scholarly journal publishing in Australia
• Why do journals discontinue? A study of Australian ceased journals
• Questionnaires mentioned in academic research 1996–2019: Rapid increase but declining citation

This issue includes articles on the following topics:

Interested in ethics …

• Journals in Beall's list perform as a group less well than other open access journals indexed in Scopus but reveal large differences among publishers – reveals that being included reduced the impact of the listed journals
• Academic journals' usernames and the threat of fraudulent accounts on social media – warns all publishers and journals to beware
• Declaration of conflict of interest in medical researchers: A cross-sectional study from China reveals that COI declarations are not well used by Chinese researchers
• Non-author entities accountable for retractions: A diachronic and cross-disciplinary exploration of reasons for retraction asks who is responsible for retractions if not the authors
• Fortification of retraction notices to improve their transparency and usefulness – suggests improvements can – and should – be made

Editing and the editorial office …

• Publons as a source of high volume, poorly targeted reviewer requests: The need for better standards of practice by publishers – warns publishers that researchers don’t like the way Publons is using their data
• Is a journal's ranking related to the reviewer's academic impact? (An empirical study based on Publons) – found that high-ranking individuals only want to review for high impact journals
• Editors publishing in their own journals: A systematic review of prevalence and a discussion of normative aspects – and also Citation rules through the eyes of biomedical journal editors – concludes that editors should just not publish in their own journals, not matter what.
• Linguistic changes in the transition from summaries to abstracts: The case of the Journal of Experimental Medicine considers how language and article structures have changed

Marketing, sales and promotion …

• Expanding Nature: Product line and brand extensions of a scientific journal – provides a great case study of how one publisher developed and built on its brand
• Can promotion on WeChat official accounts improve scholarly journals' academic impact? A micro-level correlation comparison study – shows the impact of running WeChat accounts
• University press selection of e-book vendors for US academic libraries: Why work with X but not Y? Compares different vendors and the reason why publishers work with them
• Philosophers' perceptions of pay to publish and open access in Spain: Books versus journals, more than a financial dilemma – reveals mixed feelings bout paying to publish with more support for books than journals

University and book publishing …

• For alma mater: Publishing institutional histories of higher education and university presses: Purposes, genre and scholarly value provides a great overview of how US presses have developed

Open Access …

Are journal archiving and embargo policies impeding the success of India's open access policy? Reports that India will never achieve its OA targets unless either India or target journals change their policies.

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