Lancet-gate

Lancet-gate

1

You already know the underlying story: “In the first big research scandal of the COVID-19 era, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine … retracted two high-profile papers after a company declined to make the underlying data for both available for an independent audit, following questions being raised about the research. The Lancet paper, which claimed an antimalarial drug touted by President Donald Trump for treatment of COVID-19 could cause serious harm without helping patients, had had a global impact, halting trials of one of the drugs by the World Health Organization (WHO) and others.” The New York Timesasserts, somewhat melodramatically, that the “pandemic claims new victims: prestigious medical journals.” Everybody is piling on. Retraction Watch notes that the journals “retracted the articles because a number of the authors were not granted access to the underlying data.” As scrutiny grew, STATnews reported that three of the four authors on the paper “called for an independent audit … but Surgisphere [the company that supplied the data] was not cooperating with the independent reviewers and would not provide the data.” Spectator Australia calls this “Lancet-gate,” presumably to the relief of NEJM. Industry gadfly Leonid Schneider doesn’t hesitate to call the matter an outright fraud and insinuates that The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet would not have even retracted the papers had there not been such a loud public outcry. Writing in The Guardian James Heathers argues that we should not be surprised by the retractions because our faith in peer review is misplaced. And Wired, the world’s ultimate authority on video games, gadgets, and medical science, makes a blanket condemnation: Scientific journals really don’t do their job: “The idea that journals have a special way to tell what’s good science and what’s bad has always been an illusion.” Note that “always”: we will be coming back to that in a minute.

As we read through these various pieces and countless others besides, we began to wonder: Haven’t things been a bit, um, unusual the past four months? Organizations like The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine were going along as they always have, with dedicated staff, a network of reviewers, and a set of protocols that ensures that readers will receive the kind of material that the publications’ brands are known for. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, everybody is WFH. Millions of people are struggling with ad hoc arrangements (we simply love the dogs and children that show up on our many Zoom calls, but we recognize that they represent disruption and, in many cases, real hardship). And, if you work in medical research, on top of these challenges, there has been an explosion of urgent demands. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, describes the situation well in a profile in The New Yorker (worth reading in full): “Covid-19 is a moral provocation … It’s not just a health emergency.” He describes the operational problem:

“We’ve been deluged with research papers and communications from all over the world,” he said. Submissions to the journal are currently running at four or five times the usual rate; Horton and the editorial team reject about ninety-five per cent of them. “My constant anxiety is, Have we let something go that could be really important?” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where so much knowledge has been produced in such a short space of time.” 

So much knowledge in such a short space of time.

Meanwhile, over at The New England Journal of Medicine, submissions on COVID-19 have been coming in at a rate of 200 per day. No publisher can hire (and train) enough additional editorial staff (who would have to WFH!) in just a few months to keep pace with the surge in papers; no publisher can expand the network of qualified reviewers fast enough (even assuming that there are that many “underexploited” qualified reviewers to be found on the planet). It is worth mentioning as well that only organizations that are, in ordinary times, well managed have the financial resources to step up to the challenge of fighting a global crisis. 

Churchill’s dictum “Never let a good crisis go to waste” is given full expression in the current situation. If you are an advocate of tried-and-true science publication, you note that good science cannot be rushed, that no publication should relax its standards — and “Lancet-gate” proves it. You might also take up arms against a sea of preprints — unfiltered, unexamined — but then you have to deal with the fact that an emergency is, after all, an emergency, and one should expect to change behavior to deal with it. Or you might derive the lesson that open sciencewould solve the problem of verification, but that overlooks the fact that the time to review the data of the challenged papers may not have been available in an emergency environment. Repeat: NEJM is receiving 200 COVID-19 papers each day. The fact is that the extraordinary circumstances we are all living and working in may not tell us very much about how we should conduct our lives in more normal times, when the world has not been inflicted with the biosphere’s equivalent of Grendel. So much for “always.”

Perhaps this is the real scandal, the real Lancet-gate: not the fact that two papers got through the editorial screening of the two leading medical journals but that we are collectively ignoring both what journals are supposed to do in the best of times and the fact that an emergency is an emergency. In the best of times, journals coordinate peer review. They do not now (nor have they in the past) conduct investigative journalism. Journals are not good at detecting fraud. That is not what they are designed to do. Journal editors and peer reviewers are looking for flaws in experimental design or methodology, faulty reasoning, overlooked confounding factors, statistical errors, and other scientific and scholarly pitfalls. They are not conducting the investigative processes necessary to detect whether an author (or, in this case, the compiler of a database) made the whole thing up — if they did conduct such processes journals would cost many times what they do now and getting a paper published would routinely take years instead of months. Presently, NEJM and The Lancet (along with hundreds of other journals) are reviewing and publishing papers in days. 

We are reminded of the software development saying: “Fast, cheap, or good — pick two.” Publishers of medical journals are being asked to publish papers in days and not only keep the review process up to the standards of normal times but in fact exceed that standard. Journal publishers are also expected to make all coronavirus papers openly accessible, adhere to the preferred business models of various institutions and consortia (whose preferences are different from other institutions and consortia — see Item 8), and to reduce prices (see Item 2) even while incurring additional costs (and while seeing revenue streams such as reprints, and in some cases, advertising, take a significant hit). Faster, cheaper, and better all at once and during an emergency that has disrupted both our professional and personal lives. It is a good thing medical publishers are working from home where a stiff drink is likely to be closer to hand.

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Source: Science, The New York Times, Retraction Watch, STATnews, Spectator Australia, For Better Science, The Guardian, Wired, The New Yorker, Inside Higher Ed, The Conversation

Professional and Academic Publishing

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As though we need to be reminded, Jisc and Universities UK are telling us that there will be very tight budgets in the coming year and perhaps longer. In order to accommodate this, the two parties have issued a call for publishers to reduce their fees by 25%, noting that some institutions may be facing reductions in funding as high as 40%. The aim of the coalition is to have no reduction in content even as the price of that content drops sharply. One must wonder if Jisc and Universities UK are asking all organizations that they (or their members) purchase products and services from for such price reductions without concurrent product or service reductions? To begin negotiations with the suggestion that in bad times all of the retrenchment should fall on the side of the publishers is extraordinary (even for these extraordinary times) and seems like maybe not the most productive tactic.

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Source: Jisc

3

Writing in LSE Impact, the blog of the London School of Economics, Kaitlin Thaney, Executive Director of the Invest in Open Infrastructure project, argues that the pandemic has put unprecedented pressure on the entire ecosystem of scholarly communications and that we are witnessing a near-total collapse of open infrastructure. It is now time to prepare for the next crisis and to avoid the actions of many institutions that are choosing to lock in long-term relationships with commercial suppliers. Far better to invest now in open infrastructure because “Openness is going to be more radically accepted (even demanded) than ever before post-crisis.” But maybe not. We are all for long-range planning, but higher education and scholarly communications are not collapsing, they are being recalibrated for a period of diminished resources. It is challenging to focus on the long term when you are concerned with acute, and in some cases, existential, matters on your doorstep. In such a time, even as some cry out for more open forms of communication, there is likely to be a conservative retreat to established brands, which have proven to be resilient over many years.

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Source: LSE Impact

4

SPARC has issued a 2020 Update to its 2019 SPARC Landscape Analysis. Both the Update and the initial report are focused on the move by some of the largest commercial publishers to analytics that support research assessment. The authors are concerned that such a move has the potential to create “lock-in” and reduce competition in analytics. Further, the authors assert that “There is an inherent conflict of interest between assessing and evaluating research, on the one hand, and disseminating it, on the other.” While we disagree with this assertion (does not every peer-reviewed journal in existence both evaluate research and disseminate it?) and the wider concern about publishers moving into analytics, we nonetheless recommend the 2020 Update and its predecessor report as essential reading for anyone interested in scholarly publishing, even if one does not share the concerns and conclusions of the authors. These documents present a sober and clear-eyed assessment of key trends in scholarly publishing. The analysis of transformative agreements in the Update’s Appendix is particularly insightful:

… publishers are going to ask for substantial price increases to agree to transformative agreements (both “read and publish” and “publish and read”) that really advance open access. This is perfectly rational: Elsevier reports that 15% of its journal revenues derive from corporate and individual subscriptions; these revenues can be expected to evaporate completely. It is rational for publishers to attempt to recoup these revenues, and this requires them to raise their charges to the academic sector by 20% on average. 

The 20% “on average” increase does not take into account that, in transformative models, research-intensive universities would ultimately pay much more (though maybe not via their libraries — see the “Multi-Payer Model” in Item 8 below). The report notes “it remains to be seen whether [research-intensive] institutions will be able and willing to accept the radical reallocation of costs logically implied by transformative agreements.”

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Source: SPARC

5

What does the future hold in store for the university press sector in the wake of COVID-19? A survey of US press directors by Ithaka S+R provides some insight. Most intriguing is how well presses have adapted to WFH and a fully virtual operation. This was made possible by the fact that most presses had already invested in digital infrastructure, so the pandemic essentially accelerated the switch from a physical or hybrid operation to one that is mostly mediated by a computer screen. It is clear that some of the new practices will remain in place even when (or should we say if?) offices reopen, for example, holding all-hands meetings on a virtual platform. Some presses have now taken on new tools (e.g., Slack) and are experimenting with fully digital printing. The primary anxiety is what happens in the next fiscal year, which, for most presses, begins in July. Will the market for books, at least print books, be damaged beyond recognition? Some presses have already been told by university administrators that they will be looking at budget reductions of 20% or more, a figure that may become more worrisome if presses’ customers are also receiving cuts of that magnitude. Interestingly, some presses see a strengthening retail sector as an opportunity even as library sales continue to be under pressure.

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Source: Ithaka S+R

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Another not-for-profit publisher has elected to give the Subscribe to Open model a go. Following Annual Reviews, EMS Press, the publishing house of the European Mathematical Society, announced its own Subscribe to Open model, dubbed S2O. Ten journals, including the EMS’s flagship Journal of the European Mathematical Society, will be included in the initial program. Under S2O all material is made open access, provided that the publications’ subscriber base continues to underwrite the program.

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Source: Society for Scholarly Publishing

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The National Institutes of Health has launched what is effectively a clinical registry for COVID-19. “The initiative will create an analytics platform to systematically collect clinical, laboratory and diagnostic data from health care provider organizations nationwide. It will then harmonize the aggregated information into a standard format and make it available rapidly for researchers and health care providers.”

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Source: National Institutes of Health

Dealmaking

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The most discussed deal in scholarly publishing this month was certainly that of the University of California (UCL) and Springer Nature. The deal is remarkable both for its size (the largest read and publish deal struck in North America to date) and structure. UCL calls this deal structure the “Multi-Payer Model.” By multi-payer, CDL means that authors are expected to kick in some of the funds used to pay for publication. CDL will pay for the first $1000 of the publisher’s article processing charge (APC). Authors are then expected to pay for the rest (“utilizing research funds available to them”). If authors indicate that they are unable to pay, UC will cover the entire APC. The full memorandum of understanding can be found here. 
 
The Multi-Payer Model is a creative approach to what we here at C&E call the “buckets of money problem.” The buckets of money problem refers to the problem of there being sufficient money for OA in “the system” but that money is spread out in different organizations (“buckets”). The Multi-Payer Model seeks to bring in money for the deal from a variety of different funders (via authors). The Multi-Payer Model may also (and more importantly for CDL) solve the problem of research-intensive universities like the University of California needing to pay (vastly) more under any agreement based on publishing output (as they have very high output). The deal cut with Springer Nature actually will reduce the amount that CDL (the library) pays to the publisher. But by bringing in monies from funders, it will (presumably) not reduce the amount that Springer Nature receives. Springer Nature has agreed to build technical infrastructure to support the Multi-Payer Model.
 
The deal notably excludes the Nature family of journals (which CDL will continue to subscribe to), saying only that CDL and Springer Nature will “engage in an Open Science Pilot Study for the Nature journals to commence in 2021.” It also allows for authors publishing in hybrid journals to opt out and publish via the subscription (no APC) route. 
 
This deal is an accomplishment for both CDL and Springer Nature and will provide the first real test of the Multi-Payer Model (which has been used in smaller deals by CDL but nothing at this scale). Nonetheless, we are left wondering, would CDL agree to a comparable deal with Elsevier?

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Source: University of California

9

MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. According to MIT, Elsevier was not able to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts. According to Elsevier, negotiations were proceeding productively through 2019, but then MIT moved the goal posts.

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Source: MIT, Elsevier

10

The Ohio State University Libraries and Taylor & Francis Group announced that they have entered into a read and publish agreement. This partnership is OSU’s first read and publish agreement and Taylor & Francis’s first such deal in North America.

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Source: Taylor & Francis

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The American Chemical Society has signed an agreement with University of Campinas in Brazil for ACS’s first open access deal in Latin America.

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Source: American Chemical Society

12

Private equity firm KKR has completed its acquisition of OverDrive.

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Source: PR Newswire

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Noodle, a NYC-based company that creates online and hybrid university programs, raised $16m in Series B funding. Note that Noodle was founded by serial entrepreneur John Katzman, who also founded The Princeton Review.

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Source: FINSMES

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Oxford University Press has announced a notable transformative agreement with the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NSLC). Covering 26 of the institutions of CAS, the 3-year deal is the first read and publish deal in China that we are aware of.

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Source: Oxford University Press

Publishing Services Agreements

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IET (the Institution of Engineering and Technology) and Wiley have signed a publishing services agreement, under whose terms the IET will transition its entire hybrid subscription journals portfolio to a gold OA model. IET’s journals were heretofore independently published.

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Source: IET

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Cochrane renews its publishing services agreement with Wiley for 10 years. Under the agreement Wiley will continue to publish the Cochrane Library, which includes 8,300 Cochrane Reviews and all 2,400 Review protocols as well as other evidence-based resources.

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Source: Wiley

Higher Education

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ACRL released its top trends in academic libraries for 2020, the primary theme being change — driving it, managing it, and navigating it. Trends include integrated library systems, learning analytics (student learning data), machine learning and AI, transformational open access models, research data management services, social justice and critical librarianship/pedagogy, streaming media, and student well-being. An undercurrent of concern about privacy and intellectual freedom runs beneath several of these trends.

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Source: College & Research Libraries News

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In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, thousands of researchers, in addition to numerous university laboratories, scientific societies, technical journals, and others came out in support for #ShutDownSTEM, a one-day strike in which all professional activity was halted. One of the organizers, Strike For Black Lives, asked strikers to “take actions that center Black lives and agitate for change in our communities.”

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Source: Science

The Book Business

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David Lamb of Book Advisors LLC, and our partner in our affiliated firm STM Advisers, which handles mergers & acquisitions and valuations, has written an overview of the landscape for M&A activity in trade publishing. Trade publishing refers to general books — books that you would find in a bookstore — but the analysis also includes some adjacent categories, notably university press books, which operate in the marketplace pretty much the same as trade titles (same vendors, same distributors). Trade publishing is already highly concentrated, with the “Big Five” in the US (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan) controlling half or more of all sales. That concentration is likely to increase now that the parent of Simon & Schuster has put the publisher up for sale: the Five could soon become Four. (We think it is significant that the level of consolidation is similar across all publishing categories. For research journals four players dominate: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis. In college texts there are five: Pearson, Cengage, McGraw-Hill, Wiley, and Macmillan. This suggests to us that there is an underlying economic principle at work here and that attempts to break up large publishers into many smaller pieces are swimming upstream.) 
 
Among David’s observations is that the rate of M&A among trade publishers seems to be independent of broad macroeconomic trends and of the financial performance of the industry itself. M&A activity fluctuates a bit (and a large deal skews any analysis, as the sale of Simon & Schuster will surely do), but over the past six years it has averaged about 20 deals per year. A sizable proportion of these deals are for list sales, not company sales — that is, one publisher buys a category of books from another, betting on the ability to do more with the backlist. Other elements of trade book M&A are the relative absence of purely financial players except for the largest deals, as the cash characteristics of trade publishing and low margins make purely financial transactions undesirable; and the focus on selectivity, purchasing a publishing asset because of its perceived editorial strengths.

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Source: Publishing Research Quarterly

20

There is no book publisher or author who does not want their titles to come up at the top of a list of search items on Amazon or other ecommerce sites. But how does one do that? Thad McIlroy has written a concise how-to on this topic, which begins with the surprising but true point that to be #1 on Amazon search, you have to have a high ranking on Google. The problem with getting a high score on Google is that everyone is trying to do the very same thing, so you have to have a way to break out of the pack. One simple trick is to have your book placed in Google Books, which will then index the entire title, thereby enabling online discovery. But more to the point, and probably of greater comfort to book publishers, is creating high-quality content to give Google’s search engine something to chew on. Thad recommends, among other things, creating a 2,000-word summary of the book and supplementing it with a separate web page for every book on offer and, in some instances, even creating a Wikipedia entry for the book (when Wikipedia will allow it). Many good tips here, and they don’t involve reaching out to an SEO “expert,” who may overplay their hand and run afoul of Google’s terms of use.

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Source: The Future of Publishing Blog

21

Since its launch in January, Bookshop.org has met with favorable press; a breathless headline in Wired trumpets that “This Startup Wants to Help Indie Booksellers Take on Amazon.” Maybe. But you don’t have to “take on” Amazon to have a successful niche business. Indeed, Bookshop.org, which contributes a share of its revenue to independent bookstores, has experienced greater than expected revenue, in part driven by the pandemic, which encourages people to shop from home (and even to read more with all that — alleged — free time). This year Bookshop.org is on track for gross revenue of $40 million, a rounding error for Amazon but a demonstration that it is possible to find a toehold even in a mature market. Most intriguing is how Bookshop.org has done this: it is essentially a marketing site, with all the heavy (literally) lifting on the back end performed by Ingram, which warehouses and ships the books and even provides the metadata for Bookshop’s online catalog. Industry insiders know that Ingram provides these very same services for Amazon itself. Other groups and entrepreneurs can do what Bookshop — and Amazon — do: create a front end for the Ingram infrastructure. We would like to see such a service dedicated to academic books.

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Source: Wired, The New York Times, The Economist, The New York Post

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While we are understandably and rightly absorbed by the sheer number of confounding problems right before our eyes, it may be a useful corrective to think about long-term developments born of vision and cooperation. Such was the arrangement, brokered by Bill Clinton, for two rival attempts to map the human genome to come together. “Genomics is now so embedded in biology that it is hard to recall what things were like before it. Those first human sequences cost billions of dollars to obtain. Today, with the advent of new technologies, a full sequence costs about $200, and less detailed versions are cheaper still. It is as if, to use Apollo [the space mission] as the analogy, regular shuttles to the Moon had become available at prices an average family in the West could afford — and the more adventurous might now be considering a trip to Mars.” Yes, hard to recall what things were like before it.

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Source: The Economist

People

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James Phimister has joined NEJM Group as Managing Director, Market Development, Analytics, and Customer Insights. 
 
Michael Walmsley has moved from The University of California Press to the California Digital Library, where he will be the new Assistant Director for Systemwide Licensing.
 
Harry Hoffman, former head of giant book retailer Waldenbooks, dies at 91.

Briefly Noted

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Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries launches new academic press.

The case for open access museum collections.

Authors share financial information to show racial disparities in their dealings with (trade) publishers.

The wholesaler and library distributor Bertrams entered administration. This will have reverberations in print bookshops and libraries throughout Europe. Gardners is now the sole print wholesaler in the UK.

Did E.T. make it back? Astronomers detected a regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown.

A group of publishers sued Internet Archive, saying that the nonprofit group’s trove of free electronic copies of books was robbing authors and publishers of revenue. The Internet Archive has now ended the “emergency library” early to appease the publishers.

Fascinating research into geology suggests links between volcanoes and aspects of human history, notably an eruption in the Aleutians soon after the assassination of Julius Caesar that may have contributed to poor crops and political unrest.

Building a home for the physical sciences at PLOS ONE.

EBSCO has announced significant job cuts as the company attempts to come to terms with the anticipated market downturn from the pandemic.

Higher education needs government support to survive.

American Cancer Society is reducing its budget by approximately 30%, and eliminating approximately 1,000 staff positions nationwide.

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative awards $2 million to medRxiv.

How to hug during a pandemic. “If you don’t talk or cough while hugging, the risk should be very low.”

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Real epidemiologists don’t shake hands. — T. Christopher Bond