Learned Publishing: Volume 36, issue 4, October 2023.

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We are pleased to announce that the October issue of Learned Publishing (Vol. 36, issue 4) is now available to read. The final issue of 2023 includes articles on subjects ranging from the impact of the pandemic on scholarly communications, to tips on the writing of plain language summaries. We hope all our readers will find the content interesting and useful in their work.

Editorial processes are what many of us work on from day to day, and this issue kicks off with the most recent article from Nicholas et al., drawing on data from the Harbingers-2 project. In this paper, the authors investigate the beliefs of early-career researchers on whether scholarly communications are changing, whether they are having an impact on this themselves, and also their opinions on whether the pandemic has accelerated change. Peer review is a crucial aspect of the editorial process, underpinning the quality of journal content – and several articles in this issue discuss peer review from a variety of angles. Jiang and Wang reflect on its role beyond its gatekeeping function, as a reflection of journal quality and a connection between authors and the wider academic community. Peer review delay is a topic of ongoing discussion, and in their papers both Argilés-Bosch et al. and Segarra-Saavedra et al. examine this issue; the first looking at factors influencing delay in article acceptance in accounting journals, and the second examining editorial time management in Spanish communication journals. Looking more broadly at business models within publishing, Katarina Krapež builds on previous research to examine how editor–publisher relationships vary based on publishers' commercial orientation. In addition, in his opinion piece, Dennis Gorman discusses the rise of a mega-journal within public health. In examining ethical processes within editorial, Godskesen et al.'s original paper looked at the reporting of ethical approval and informed consent in international palliative and end-of-life care journals.

For those interested in content discoverability and accessibility, this issue contains a variety of interesting articles. In their paper, Fernández-Marcial et al. examine the use of the ORCID iD persistent identifier among faculty in the Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto, and discuss ways its correct adoption could be improved. In their paper, Darvishy et al. describe a survey they conducted to analyse the accessibility of PDFs in online repositories in Switzerland for people with visual impairments. Of course, language can be a barrier both to readers and researchers looking to publish; and in their articles, Zou et al. examined the use of online machine translation by Chinese scholars to support academic writing and publishing, while Li et al. examined the impact of language on journal internationality. Of course, familiarity with the language in which a paper is written does not guarantee accessibility to all who might find the content useful, and in their opinion piece, Wen and Yi provide some tips for the writing of plain language summaries. In a further paper, Xu et al. look at the complex issue of journal evaluation, developing a multidimensional framework for its assessment.

Publishing ethics will always be a topic of great importance to Learned Publishing, and in this issue there is a range of original articles that cover this subject. The issue of retracted papers is discussed in Palla et al.'s original paper, which looks at citations to Indian-authored papers pre- and post-retraction and how the editorial process might be improved to address this problem. In a further original paper, Teixeira da Silva and Nazarovets discuss the principle of 'right to be forgotten', and how (or if) this can be applied to academic publishing. Predatory publishing is a matter of huge ethical concern, and the final papers in the issue make this clear. Two original papers examine the practices of predatory publishers; the first from Mark Freiermuth provides a detailed investigation of the practices of questionable journals in accepting or rejecting low-quality papers, while the second from Anna Abalkina looks at publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill. Finally, this issue includes two contributions from Mike Downes; the first is an industry update examining the problem of potentially thousands of published papers with phantom authors, and the second, an opinion piece that is a call to arms to devote more time and effort to taking action against those responsible for the publication of fraudulent material.

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