Learned Publishing: Volume 36, Issue 3, July 2023

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I’m pleased to announce that the July issue of Learned Publishing is now available to read, including articles on a range of topics, from the peer review landscape to the use of artificial intelligence in academic publications.

For those who are interested in the process of peer review, and how this vital aspect of scholarly communication might be improved, it is important to understand the landscape of innovation in this area. In their original article, Waltman et al. build on their related work to define this landscape into four schools of thought, each with a different view on the key problems of the peer review system and the innovations that are necessary to address them.

Open access publication has been, and continues to be, an important and evolving topic for discussion within the journal, and this issue presents several articles on this theme. In their original article, Druelinger and Ma examine publication trends in DOAJ-indexed journals by the income levels of author countries, to examine the impact of the gold open access model on researchers from countries of varying income levels. In a further original article, Borrego reviews the literature on article processing charges, while in their study, Kim et al. describe the development of a framework to assess open access journal publication environments and practices.

The impact of China on global academic publishing is significant and evolving. As stated in Hyland’s original article in this issue, China now has more researchers than the United States, outspends the United States and European Union in research and publishes more scientific papers each year than any other nation in the world. In their article, Hyland reviews the rise of Chinese scholarship, its influence on global publishing and on Chinese scholars, and how the Chinese government is responding to its new role in global academic publishing. In a further paper, Zhang and Wei analyse the conference papers published in double first-class universities from mainland China and hypothesise that new government regulations in the country will likely lead to an increase in these publication numbers in the future.

For those interested in the topics of data sharing and open data, Sakai et al. have conducted a study to understand the status of data sharing; looking at data reuse, integration and dataset release. Fu et al. also examined the effect of publishing separate data papers, and the impact these had on citation counts of the related research papers.

Predatory publishing continues to be a topic of huge concern for the industry. In their study, Fahlevi et al. investigate the impact of research funding and research collaboration on subsequent publication in predatory journals among Indonesian social science academia.

For those interested in editorial issues and publication ethics, the July Learned Publishing includes several opinion papers of relevance. The role of artificial intelligence and other machine learning tools in scholarly publishing are a hot topic, and in their article Teixeira da Silva and Tsigaris examine the principles and ethics of human- and AI-based authorship. Transparency is key to good publishing ethics, and in their articles Xu and Hu look at the appropriate content for retraction notices, while Nuzzo discusses the problem of anonymous editorials in biomedical research journals. In their opinion piece, Moskovitz et al. examine text recycling – the reuse of material from an author's own prior work in a new document – calling for author contracts to specifically allow this use under appropriate ethical guidelines. And finally, Teixeira da Silva and Nazarovets complete the issue with a discussion on the problem of website references and reference rot.

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