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Throwing Out the Rulebook: Case Studies in Innovative Journal Publishing Models
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Throwing Out the Rulebook: Case Studies in Innovative Journal Publishing Models
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Segment:0 .
Mr Good afternoon. If you would like, feel free to come towards the front. There's a few down here as well, if you wish. Even easier to get to. If you really want me to. I can ask people to scoot over, too.
All right. Good afternoon. Welcome to session three. Throwing out the rule book. Rule book. Goodness case studies in innovative journal publishing models. I would love to warn all of you. Now, there is no one in this room as powerful as this microphone, so anything and everything you say may show up here.
As has been happening and will possibly here too. So that was a power I was unaware of for our session until just now. But here we are. So all right to kick us off today, I first want to start with the fact that we have a code of conduct. I would guess you've seen the code of conduct a couple of times already.
Is there anyone to whom this is completely brand new. Generally speaking, be nice, but specifically these ways. OK do read also available for you to scan. So with that we're going to talk about innovative journal publishing models. Today we have three speakers. I will let them introduce themselves each more as they come up as well. But we're really got a variety here today.
So to kick it off Nicola, would you like to start. Hi so I'm Nicola. I'm from eLife. So I'm going to talk a bit about our new publishing model. So first of all, it's a bit about eLife. We were established in 2012 as a nonprofit led by scientists in life and medical sciences. We originally launched as a selective journal with a consultative peer review process, but at the end of January 2023, we switched to a new publishing model where we provide expert public review and assessment of preprints, and then after review, these are published on our website as a reviewed preprint in the new model.
Authors can then decide what revisions they'd like to make and when they want to proceed with declaring their latest version of the work. The final version of record, which is equivalent to a traditional journal article without any final accept or reject decision from us. So to get to this point, it was an evolution. We tried various iterations previously, which were successful, so we introduced preprint review as an opt in process in May 2020, and we started exclusively reviewing preprints in 2021 and making reviews public for all authors invited for revision on making the reviews public on the preprint server.
We'd also seen previously seen a striking increase in authors who already had a preprint on a preprint server when they sent their submission to us for review. So the flowchart on this slide gives an overview on how the new process works. So the first stage is that we need authors to submit to us. So one of the things that we had to factor in was setting up a new site for submissions and making sure that the workflows on that made sense for what we were asking of authors and editors and reviewers.
So authors can submit to us with a preprint already from bioRxiv archive. And we've streamlined things such that we will pull in some of the information from their preprint on their behalf. So, for example, the author list or if they don't already have a preprint, authors can ask us to submit one on their behalf. And in and we'll do that in the event that we proceed with peer review.
And we can send them to you via archive and archive for them. So unfortunately, we can't review every submission that we receive. So editors will first assess new submissions to see, which would be suitable for review and papers, where we have willing editors to oversee and take on the review process will be sent out to reviewers. And the main question that we ask is whether we can produce high quality reviews that will be of significant value to the community.
So we will prioritize submissions for review, or really where we believe there will be broad interest and where having public assessments of the work is most important. So when we send a submission for review, we ask the reviewers to split their comments into a short statement on the significance of the findings and the strength of the evidence. A public review with guidance for readers on how to interpret the work and highlighting any important findings.
Mentioning any caveats. And then we ask for them to provide some recommendations to the authors with more specific feedback, such as when they have line by line comments, et cetera. So after peer review, we ask the editors and reviewers to consult further, which we did do in the old process. But for the new model, we don't ask editors to make an accept reject decision anymore. So at this point, this is for the editor to compile an eLife assessment.
And I'll go into that a bit more on the next slide. So this eLife assessment is then included along with the reviews in a letter, in place of the traditional decision letter to the authors that they would have received previously. So once this letter is sent out and before we publish, we do allow the authors a couple of weeks to provide provisional responses and a chance to let us in case that they think that there's any factual errors in the assessment that need correcting.
And once we're all ready to go, we'll publish the review preprint on the eLife website. And this has a Doi and can be cited as a publication. So this has involved setting up new workflows and building new technology to support this. And then finally it is the authors choice what to do next. So most authors will submit revisions for assessment and we'll publish a revised review preprint. But authors can also choose if and when to declare their manuscript.
The final version of record for indexing, or they may choose to submit their manuscript to another journal. So, as mentioned, as part of the review process, the editors and reviewers should decide on an eLife assessment. This should be a summary of the assessment of the preprint. So what the editors and the reviewers thought, and it should be in plain language. So as part of the review, we ask for reviewers to select terms from a common vocabulary to describe the significance of the findings and the strength of the evidence.
The editors and reviewers then decide which of the terms to use in the eLife assessment to be included on the review preprint. So one of the things that we're trying to achieve with the new model is to promote scientific evaluation. Based on what. Not where they publish. So the E life assessment with the common terms is designed to provide a more nuanced assessment than would be conveyed by published in life.
So as part of preparing for the changes, we set up a series of working groups to engage editors and to allow them to be part of shaping the new model. And this framework for the assessments was an output of that based on ideas from two of our editors. So the common vocabulary that we use for the terms that we use for the common vocabulary were actually introduced in the legacy process.
This means that we can compare the use of the terms between the models. So these graphs show the use of each term being selected by the reviewers in the new model in the dark pink, and the legacy model in the light pink. So it's clear from these that the distribution of the use of terms is similar. So as far as we can tell, we can infer that the quality of papers that we're reviewing has remained similar whilst we switched to the new model.
And it's not shown on the graphs, but it is worth noting that we're seeing that the terms used for the strength of the evidence are improving after revision. For example, of 80, which originally used incomplete in the iLife assessment, 62 of these improved. So that suggests that authors are taking the comments into consideration and using these to improve their work, rather than just saying that's that and moving on.
So one of the things that we had to consider when shifting to the new model was how review preprints would be displayed once they're published on the website, and this is the very nice result. So the eLife assessment is presented under the abstract. So it's clear and it's hard to miss. So the terms of the strength of the evidence and the significance are highlighted in bold.
So this provides immediate context for a reader on how the work has been assessed before, that before they continue to read and make sure that this assessment is transparent. So there's an indicator at the top to highlight that this is a reviewed preprint. So there's a clear indication of the current status of the current version. And readers can navigate to public peer reviews from the tabs at the top.
And any author responses that the author might have chosen to provide will be shown under this tab as well. And then finally, we display the article review history at the site with details of when the preprint was originally posted at preprint server and when it was sent for peer review. And this also becomes really useful when we have a revised review preprint, as all versions of the reviewed preprint will be accessible from this site.
And the. Is that the lights are going off. So I'm going to switch into karaoke. And so readers can easily navigate through the history of the work from the links on the side. Sorry, bear with me. So how is it going so far. From February 2023 to end of January 2024, we received over 6,000 submissions to the new model.
And of these, we sent 22 7.7% of them for public review. So this is a similar proportion to how many were sent for review in the legacy model the year before. So it's a reassuring sign. We're also seeing encouraging signs that the model is inclusive with submissions from 73 different countries. And we're seeing that the gender distribution of corresponding authors and reviewers has remained broadly the same.
This is a really good sign, as there were concerns that the new process might introduce more biases, or we might deter certain groups from submitting. Feedback from a recent author survey showed that authors rated the overall quality of the assessment of our public reviews and assessments highly at 4.4 out of 5, and there's more data and how it's going on the eLife one year on blog post, which you can easily find online if anybody's interested in having a look at that.
So there were challenges along the way, although we have seen signs of success. So the new model has drawn a lot of attention, for example, from nature's strife for life article, and it proved impossible to bring all of the editors along with us. And there were concerns around the model itself and whether we should, whether it would affect the reputation of the journal, and that we should have maybe instead launched a new journal.
Now, as I mentioned, there were concerns that we'd deter certain groups from submitting and also concerns around the speed at which it was introduced, with some editors suggesting that we should have introduced changes more slowly. However, while we have ended up losing some editors, we have recruited more and we have engagement from our editorial board. And it was also a lot of work for all of the teams.
So to introduce new workflows, to assess and publish papers, and to support reviewed preprints and all of the work to promote and communicate the changes that we've been making to our various communities. So as we've been working on the new model for over a year now, we're in a position where we can reflect and improve on workflows and to improve frames and streamline things in our processes.
We want to ensure that editors fully understand how the new model works, and how to write iLife assessments in a consistent way. And finally, we'd like others to adopt the model, as we can't create systemic change alone, and we want it to be as easy as possible for groups who are interested in experimenting to do so without necessarily having to take on all of the parts of the process as we've done it.
Thank you. Thank you so much for that. All right. Adriana is our next speaker here to talk about relaunching the journal. All right. Thanks, Anna.
And again, there are a few seats, especially one up here in front. I promise not to stare at you uncomfortably the entire time. But Hi, everybody. My name is Adriana Borgia. I'm a managing editor at the American Society for Microbiology, and my kind of unconventional case study for you today is how we relaunched our journal, microbiology spectrum.
So a little bit about ASM. So we are a member driven organization with over 30,000 members across the globe. And as a scientific nonprofit, we do have a number of different programs that we sponsor from meetings and advocacy, global public health and Dea. But our largest program, of course, is our journals program. We have 15 soon to actually be 16 journals that collectively publish over 6,000 articles each year.
And these journals and articles span the entire range of microbiology. So it's everything from basic to clinical to applied and environmental. We also have journals that are fully focused on reviews as well as data announcements. And we also do have an education journal as well. So our main editorial vision is that our journals should be the home of all research that advances the microbial sciences.
So if has anything to do with microbiology, you should be able to find a home within our journals program. So that brings me to one of our newest journal, but actually not so new microbiology spectrum. So it was originally launched back in 2013, primarily as a venue to publish scholarly monographs and some reviews as well. And it did fairly well.
However, in the past six or so years or so, ASM made the strategic decision that we wanted to really focus more so on original research again, still having reviews, but diverting that type of content instead to our reviews focused journals. So as a result of that decision, as you can see, the pipeline very quickly dried up. So the journal wasn't really doing much. I mean, it was still a good quality journal in that it had a high impact factor.
In 2020, the impact factor was slightly. Just to give you context, the impact factor of the same year of our flagship open access journal and bio was around a 7.8. So again, good if but not really doing anything for the community per se. And we also had another challenge for our overall journals program is that, as I said, we do publish in many different areas of microbiology.
We have topically focused journals, but all of those journals were very selective. So there really wasn't any place for an author who, let's say, have a more sound science approach, or maybe at a study that had a more regional focus or interdisciplinary focus that really wasn't a home for that type of research. Now, normally when you have a portfolio like this, of course, people tell you, OK, you need a cascade journal, which is a good option.
But again, that involves launching a new journal and then years in terms of indexing and getting an impact factor, it's a struggle. So we thought, well, we have this other journal already. It's not really doing anything. We could close it or we could give it a new life. So in 2021, we relaunched the journal as an open access, broad scope sound science journal. So we did a lot of marketing around this relaunch.
We also had a editorial in the inaugural newest issue of the journal, explaining that the approach of the journal was now to have a focus on rigorous methodology, reproducibility and high technical quality. We were no longer accepting reviews, articles, again, just focusing on primary research and short formats. We also hope that the journal could possibly be a home for studies that had again, specialized or regional focuses, confirmatory results, and also negative and null results studies.
And of course, again, this would be a transfer option for nine of our primary research titles for authors to go to now because of the projected volume, but also the fact that we're trying to accept a large span of types of subjects. We knew that we needed very large editorial board to handle this. And so we figured from the very beginning to be very intentional in putting this together to not only ensure that all of those specialties were recognized, but also that the demographics and the makeup of this board reflected that of the community, which is why we did and still have an open board approach in which any microbiologist with a PhD or equivalent can apply to be a part of our open board, and three years later, we have over 300, actually more over 350 microbiologists from across the globe representing 41 distinct countries.
So again, that was about mid-year 2021. So the first full year of data that we have is 2022. So the first full year of the journal being relaunched, we saw a large increase of course, in submissions and publications. In that year alone, we published over 2000 articles, which I know is a big number. But what I want you to really focus not on that number, but who is actually publishing those articles.
Who are these people and where do they come from. Well, we looked at the corresponding author emails and matched them against anything that was published in an ASME journal from 2018 to 2020, and we found that 78% not 70, 72% of those people were completely new. They had not published with us in those past three years. And even more significant of that, new contingents of authors that we were seeing, 78% of them were coming to us via transfers.
So that told us something very important. These were people who were probably already trying to publish with us, but we were turning them away. They had nowhere else to go. And in relaunching the journal, we gave them a home and we gave them a new purpose. And also we did see more diversity and inclusion in terms of the global authorship.
So 40% of those new authors were also from China. And both then as well as today, China is the number one authorship country that we see in terms of both our submissions and publications, with the US, of course, close behind. And again, while we had done transfers in the past between journals. It wasn't really very large. So in relaunching and creating this cascade journal, we saw a 400% increase in the transfer uptake across the portfolio.
All good things. But I know there's the elephant in the room. And that's a big thing called the impact factor, which I know we all love to talk about. And especially as some we love to not talk about it because we are a signatory of Dora, meaning that we see evaluation of a journal by its impact factor as having a lot of challenges and issues. Again, it's a flawed metric, and it should be.
It has its own purpose and use, but it should be looked at in the context of a number of different types of metrics. So we were a little naive in thinking, OK, we made it very clear. Yes, we're taking this large impact factor journal actually, in 2021, the impact factor even rose. But again, because of its history of monographs and reviews journal.
Is that OK. Well it's there. But again, as signatories of Dora, we don't advertise that. It's not on our website. We don't put it in our marketing materials. We're very clear at the scope of the journal and what it is. So we expected it. We expected, of course, in 2022 when that impact factor was normalized.
That wasn't a surprise to us. In fact, it was something that was some it was something we expected and actually wanted because it makes more sense to have. It's the same thing as other sound science journals in the same focus. And so we thought, our editors understand this. Our authors must understand this. People are just coming to us because they like us.
They don't care about impact factor. Well, July 2023 we did. When that impact factor was released, there was a 45% overall decrease in submissions compared to May 2023. But again, that number alone is not the story. It's looking at the people behind that number who's leaving us. Who are these people.
Well, the main decrease was in our de Novo submissions. So the direct submissions to the journal. But however, the transfer volume of people coming from the upstream journals remain steady and still has remained steady. Which again, is showing us that, Yes, there are some people who will always just be more interested in an impact factor than a community. But we still do have a strong sense of community among authors, especially those who come to ASME.
So it was very reassuring to see that uptake. But of course, again, we understand most of our authors understand, our editors understand maybe not everybody who is not ASME will understand. I mean, you see, just on its number a 9 to a 3.7, that looks weird. That's not something you usually see. So we said, OK, we should probably communicate that to the public and make that clear why this has happened.
So we wrote very shortly after we wrote an editorial that was authored by the chair of our publications committee, as well as the editor in chief, once again clarifying the Journal's scope, our position about the impact factor, and why we relaunched the journal to be what it is today. And we got a lot of really great positive engagement on social media, in particular Twitter, but also on WeChat. When we posted the editorial on our WeChat account, that was actually one of our highest performing posts on the platform that past year.
So where are we today. Well, of course, if this taught us anything, we did all these things. We did something a little bit weird and unconventional because we wanted we had a purpose. We wanted to make a journal that was useful to a community of authors that we were previously excluding. And we have to make sure that as we move forward, we continue to be that useful resource.
So again, continuing, we find that we do have a lot of support from our editors on this, which is great. We always ask them in our surveys, what do you like about being an editor, particularly for this journal. And of course, you get the normal things like oh, I'd like to keep up with the latest research. I'd like to progress in my field, but a lot of our editors will say we just like the scope of the journal.
We like that. We're just looking at the science and know nothing. No bells or whistles there. But also, more importantly, they see it as an opportunity to mentor, to basically reach out to these authors who might have been might need a little bit more help with their research. They have good stuff, but they're just not communicating it in the clearest way.
So how can we further help them publish and be successful in their careers. And again, that's what we really hope this journal will be about, is about encouraging new and underheard voices. Also, for example, finding areas where maybe it's difficult to publish a certain type of study for laboratory equity. That's one area where we are having an open call. So that's particularly for ensuring equitable access to diagnostics for patient populations, regardless of their geographic location of their economic status, other demographics or potential biases against them as people.
And we're also inviting commentaries from our more early career board members as well, on papers that they have reviewed, just again, so they get more visibility in their field. And also seeing how can we use our editorial board as a way to promote and mentor as well. So going having a very clear pathway from how do you go from an early career board member up to the editor and then even the senior editor position over time.
I have a whole poster about it in the poster Hall, if you're interested in learning more about that. But yeah, that is spectrum. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much, Adriana. So, as we always say before the last presentation, but wait, there's more. And with that, we'll talk to with Brian michels about a whole other transition.
All right. Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Hibbert. I'm the senior editorial operations manager for the Society of petroleum engineers. I'll be talking a little bit about consolidating our four journals into one journal, which is something we did this year. And so let me tell you a little bit about our society first.
So we're focused on engineers and related professionals and upstream oil and gas and associated energy resources. Energy transition is a big deal in the oil and gas world right now. So we're moving more and more in that area. We have about 127,000 members in over 145 countries. So we're very global organization. We publish over $5,000 conference papers and 400 journal articles a year.
We also manage one Petro, which is the multi-society library, where we publish all of our publications as well as other publishers that are in our field. So what I want to talk about is what we did with our journals here back in the day when the society started, we had one journal, as would make sense as that journal grew, and it was in the print era, we split off into subdisciplines because people didn't want to receive a giant tome of research.
They wanted to focus on their subdiscipline. And so there was a time when we had nine journals. And then as disciplines became less popular, we had to close journals. And that was really hard on our research community. And one of the big things we found is when we closed those journals, even though there was a home for their research in our other journals, they didn't go to those journals.
They went somewhere else. And so we really lost those researchers. So when I came in to look at the journals we had, we were down to four journals. Sp journal was our flagship journal. It was doing really well. Our other three were more specialized. And honestly, they were struggling. The main reason for that was sp journal had gotten the higher impact factor and it was focused on fundamental research, whereas the other ones were more focused on applications.
And so we were finding more and more of our authors were submitting to sp journal whether it fit the scope or not. And then they would get transferred to our other journals. And so we were struggling. The journals were slowing down. So what we did is we took all these journals and we combined them into one under the SP journal name so that we could keep it consistent, keep the impact factor still going.
The scope was already a general scope, so it need to be changed that drastically. And we created robust sections to cover everything that was done in these old journals. So we had along with reviews, we had a fundamental research article type and applications article type. And then we had seven sections. And not only did we cover the sections that we had historically done, but we were able to create new sections based on what we were seeing research going.
We created a data science section, which we were already seeing a lot of papers. And then aspirationally we created a sustainability and energy transition section. That's still a really heated topic in the petroleum engineering world. But we're. We want to see more and more research in that area. So why do we make the change.
I talked about some of it, but really we wanted to rescue the content that was in these struggling journals, not necessarily the journal itself. We wanted to stop our journals from competing with each other. We had this weird dichotomy where there was kind of if you're an sp journal, you're this top level, researcher, and if you're publishing these other journals, it's not as good.
That was a perception. It really wasn't true. But it was a struggle we were seeing. The other thing, it allowed us to increase collaboration flexibility. So we took all of our editors, put them all on one board together, which that was interesting because as I said, SP journal editors had this lofty view of themselves.
And so it was interesting, but putting them together and putting them all on the same level playing field, we found there was a lot more collaboration and it allowed us to be more flexible with how we assign papers amongst all our editors. We also took all of our associate editors, put them all into one board, gave us a single home for research, which makes it easier for authors to submit their just one site to submit to easier for our readers.
There's one place to find it. We have our sections, so it's clear if you are drilling and completions, you can find that section and find the research you're looking for. A big one was options for new and emerging research. So as I said energy transition is a heated topic. We wanted to create a new journal in energy transition and we could not get the support for that.
But starting a section within a already reputable journal, that wasn't an issue. And so it allowed us to do that. And the model is such that we're going to review our sections every three to five years, and we will grow and change those sections to reflect the research as it's changing. We're hopeful to see that it will increase impact factor. What we've seen in our area is that in general, a journal that has a more general scope and is larger, assuming the quality is good, is going to have a higher impact factor.
So we expect to see with the larger footprint of all of our research in one journal to gradually increase that impact factor. And as I mentioned, because we're keeping the title the same on issn, we were able to keep all the metrics, the same. So how do we implement it. First step was editorial board buy in. To be honest, the first meeting I had with my editors to explain this.
I got almost kicked out of the digital room because there was very much like, why Are you killing my journal, I don't understand. And I realized I had to go back to the drawing board. These are engineers. So I got data and I showed them. Here's why. This is what's happening. Here's the trajectory of your beloved journal, and here's how we can save it.
And once I explained how it would work. And what we do. And I got my editor in chief on board. Everyone fell into line and kind of saw that it made sense that it was the best way forward for our journals. From there, we went to a comprehensive awareness campaign, starting with the editors. And then to our reviewers and authors and then readers and general membership.
And we did. We did webinars where our editors went on and talked about what was happening. My editor in chief wrote an editorial in our member magazine. So we did a lot to really get the word out and make sure that people understood what we were doing, because there was a lot of misinformation. And then we had a step transition plan.
The way publishing journal articles, we had to start about six months before we were ready to publish that first issue, which was January 2024. So we started moving papers over into the new journal. That transition process went much smoother than I expected, even. None of our authors had any problem with having their paper moved from our old journals to the new journal.
I think the reputation, the impact factor was a big part of that, but we had no complaints. So then what was the early reaction. The biggest concern was, are we going to lose this historic content that we've published in these journals that we're closing. And so by explaining the sections and how they would work, and also really by having those Article types of fundamental research and applications, and each of those articles, the top right of the PDF.
And then also in the HTML view it says this is a fundamental research applications. We can keep that historic research. And so that was the big concern. As I said no complaints about transition for authors. That was great. So something I wasn't expecting was our overall submissions. When you compare our four journals to the one journal, we saw a 20% increase in our submissions once we made this announcement about the new journal.
So just people hearing about this new journal and how we're going to do things, we increase submissions. As I said, we have our one Petro, which is where most of our subscribers are. We also have individual subscribers to the journal. It's been steadily declining because more people are using our multi-society library. But the. Individual subscription revenue is up 30% since we started doing this new journal.
So we actually got more people interested in subscribing to the journal individually. And then with the new sections that we launched, we're not sure how is that going to work. Would we get people to submit and data science, which was one of the new ones. That one blew up. It's already going to be probably our second largest section by the end of the year.
So that was great. And the energy transition is growing. We're getting submissions. We learned from that we put out a somewhat general scope for that because we weren't quite sure. And we're getting a lot of submissions that were kind outside of what we were looking for. And so we've had to adapt those. Now, what I didn't mention before is how we did our sections.
We had a general scope for the journal. And then we had section descriptions that worked like sub scopes. And we've been gradually changing those to make them work for the New journal. So then some questions for the future. Will the change translate to an increased reputation impact factor. It's going to take we just did this in 2024.
It's going to take a few years before we have any answers on that. Initial numbers look good, but we'll see. I'm curious to see how the sections are going to grow and change. Since we have this very fluid model, I'm interested to see what areas of research are going to become more important or less important, and how is the journal going to change throughout that.
And then another question is what new opportunities does this bring for new journal products. We're not fine with just the one journal. We do want to look at other options, but when we had the model where we had three struggling journals. And one good journalist trying to add another journal in the mix just sounded a little crazy. But now we have option two.
Can we try to start that energy transition journal once we have some grassroots support for that. Can we do a sound science journal that would support this one big journal. So we have lots of options to look at for the future. OK all right. Thank you very much. Thank you.
All right. We have left plenty of time for questions. I guess you're welcome to say you don't want to answer any one of those questions as they come up to if you want. I have some questions to start us off as well, but would anyone in the audience like to start with a question. Pretty sure.
Yep I have a question for the journal consolidation from four journals to one journal. You mentioned the journal is still under subscription model. So how do you deal with the subscription subscription then. Would you decrease the subscription price or increase how you address the revenue. Thank you. Yeah so as I mentioned, we have our multi-society library where the vast majority of our subscription revenue comes from, and they're subscribing to all of our content as well as other providers.
So changing this journal made absolutely no difference to that. As for our individual subscriptions, we had a bundled price for the four journals, and we actually lowered the price from that quite drastically to encourage people to do the new journal. But it was more expensive than buying just one individual journal was before. So there was a change and there was some concern about that.
But as I mentioned, revenue is up. So obviously our readers are still interested in reading the New journal. Thank you. Would anyone else like to ask a question. All right. I have a couple as well. So for each of you, I would just be interested to hear who actually kind of ran the more comprehensive awareness campaign.
Was it your journal staff. Was it marketing staff. Was it a combination of both. Did you have authors or even editors come back and say, I'd like more resources to be able to explain this. I'll go. I'll go first. Sure Yeah.
So I ran point on this. Our marketing team is smaller, and so we can't just hand something to them and say, here you go, have fun. So I actually I made a very detailed document about here's how we're going to do things. And when I share with the marketing department, they're like, can you help us do this for everything. Because this is really helpful. The other thing, talking about the editors there and giving them resources, we were really careful to make sure that a lot of the information was coming from our editors and not from us, because we wanted to show that our community is on board for this.
And it's not just something our company is doing to make more money or something, because that was are you doing this because you're losing revenue or are you trying to find new revenue. We really wanted to show, no, this is what our community needs because we want to support the journals.
Yeah this really echoing that. This is a really importance of working with your marketing team and having a comprehensive plan on exactly what you want to communicate and who you want to communicate that to. And I think also to I think in terms of having your editors on board, I think that's why when we relaunched the journal, just having the editorial written by the primarily by the editor in chief of the Journal, again, just gave it a lot of more sort of ethos and trust in that.
This is, again, because we are it's because we're a scientific society. All of our editors are people who are active in the field. So that does give it a little bit more weight as well. And so similarly as well. Yeah Yeah. Sorry Yeah. So similarly we kind of have a very nice marketing team who dealt with a lot of preparing everything to communicate all the changes.
So we had an editorial from the editor in chief and also a lot of just more general articles to explain to authors about how the new model was going to work. And we've also got resources for editors if they want to go and speak about it to and so at their institution and to make sure that they're prepared as well. Thank you so much.
Do we have anyone else. I've got a couple. Oh, I've got one right back here. Thank you for all these stories. They're really inspiring. I think what I'm thinking about is these are big changes. And to make a big change is scary. And to know when it's the time or to prompt it.
How did you make the leap. Or even to start questioning all of these sort of fundamental things about how you've been operating. So from that perspective, we all set up originally to ultimately make change. So it was kind of never a question of are we going to change things. It was more just to what do we do and when do we do it.
So yeah, we kind of did iterations originally and then decided that it needed to just be a big move to make it happen, so we can see how it goes from there. I'll answer as well. So the journal consolidation, my previous boss had been working on it for about 10 years and had gotten a similar response to me every time it was presented.
Like, you're crazy. Why would you do that. She literally. There was a previous journal we closed, and she had an old member that every time she'd see him, he'd come up and say, are you going to kill another one of my journals. And so it was a lot of work and just setting the idea.
And that's when there's these big changes, especially when you need your editors buy in, I've learned. Just get the idea out there first, and then you're going to get the backlash and then get past that and then explain why you think it makes sense and really work with them and try to show them that you're on their side and you really do understand their concerns. But sometimes the hardest thing is just getting that idea idea out there, especially when it's really big and add on to what Brian was saying earlier about just the power of data as well, just being aware of what is the data of your submissions, your publications, what is that telling you.
I know that's particularly why we made the change, and I think we were working with a consultant at the time and they're saying, OK, this is what's happening to all your rejected articles. They're going somewhere else. Again, just looking at the rejected article tracker. These are going to your competitors. Some are society, but a lot of them are not. A lot of them are for profit publishers.
So these are three things you can do. You can launch a new journal, you can relaunch an existing journal, or you can do nothing and see what that does for you. So again, there are varying levels of risks for each of those options. So it's really just taking a look at what are your what are your submission data telling you. And also what are the people in your community telling you. Like what's also again, there's always something behind a number.
A number isn't big or low because of well, because of no reason. It's because there are people that are researchers who have an issue and are able, whether that's not being able to publish a few or not wanting to publish a few, and having a better understanding of what those motivations are, can help point you toward which of the options available to you is going to be the most beneficial.
I just had a question for Eli. Did you have a quicker turnaround time when you implemented this new process for the life cycle of the article. So with the new model, because we published the first version as a reviewed preprint. It's a lot quicker to get the first reviewed version of the article out.
So from submission to publication through preprint, it's a lot quicker than it was previously, from submission to final acceptance and publication of that article. I have another question for you. Knowing what you know now, a year later, and if you were going to do it over again, would you start a new journal or would you do what you did, which is convert an old journal, an existing journal.
I think it was to start a new journal. It would take a lot longer to do things and it would make it a lot more difficult. So I think it would have been the same. Great OK. We also have someone who noted as well there's a cell phone on top of the water cooler. If that happens to be yours, feel free to pick it up before you go as well.
Or leave it there. Who knows. OK, so we've got a couple questions from the app as well. And this one I would love for all three of you to address as well. Will rebuilding the rule book bring more accessibility in the process to everyone, and is that even possible. So I'd love to hear if any of you feel like it's actually more accessible now for your authors or your reviewers based on what you've done or your editors.
Awesome I mean, there are a lot of definitions of accessible, but I think a lot of it is can make a change, but you have to have that idea of accessibility in mind from the beginning. It's not something that you kind of do after the fact. That's again why when we decided to completely rebuild the editorial board from scratch, we're like, OK, we know what we need.
The easy thing to do is just to pick a bunch of people that we already know. But there are a lot of issues with that. So we want to be intentional in that. If we are going to create a new journal for the community, it has to reflect that community. And we have to be very deliberate about having targets of making sure that we have a lot of balance among those editorial board members with, again, both for subject area, but also in terms of demographics and geographic location.
And for that reason, that's why we were able to make the journal more accessible in that sense, in that we were trying to make sure that diversity was something that was at the forefront of what we were doing. So I'm not sure our focus specifically on accessibility, but along those lines, equity, equity was a big part of what we were doing.
So we had with our old journal model, we had our fundamental research authors who were mostly in universities, who had the higher impact factor and reputation, who saw themselves as more important than our applications, authors that were in the field that were writing about what they were doing. And so by putting this together, giving them an equal playing field and saying they're all important.
And I mean, what's been interesting to us is the traditional some of our most application focused journals, which was drilling completion and production operation. Those sections are the ones that have grown the most since we launched the new journal. So those authors are there and they're happy to have a bigger platform for their research. So it's been great.
Yeah so I think to echo other points, it's really important to just consider like diversity. And as long as you go along and make sure that you are consulting with the relevant groups and making sure you consult with everybody. So I think we do that with Eli. We have sort of an early career advisory group, and we have open calls for editors with specific demographic areas to make sure that they're sort of brought along on the journey and that they are not excluding people along the way to try and see what the best thing to do is to make it accessible to everybody.
And one of the things that we considered when we were sort of figuring out what to do with the new models, we had working groups, which editors could get involved in, and some of the things that we did consider was would sort of adopting a model like this exclude people or what might be barriers to participation in it I think it's really important to consider it as you're going along to see what you can do.
Thank you very much. OK we have a couple more from the app. Some of them are specific. This one is for regarding the SB journals consolidation. How do you manage and display your archive. Do these individual journal names still exist on your platform. They do.
So we have a note on each of those journals that says after this date, this research is now being published under a consolidated journal. But all the old content is still there under the old journal. And it's searchable, just like anything else on our platform. So it's a little clunky, but it's still clear where everything is. Great Thank you. OK we actually have one for the audience as well.
Have any of our attendees been through similar processes and do you still work there now. Yeah Yeah. So yeah No has anyone else been through actually changing completely the way that you did your journals. We have three brave souls. Thank you very much for doing that as well. So here's one that I think is also then going to probably be aimed for sp from the app that says speaking to the competition between journals, how have you tried to address those feelings regarding the flagship versus other smaller journals within the society.
So have you sent them to some retreats? That's a good idea. I mean, so a big thing we did is just telling the editors you are all on the same level now. You're all working together, putting them on. We had where we'd have separate meetings for each journal to talk about what we were doing. And then we put all the editors in the same room and put them on equal playing field, and just getting them together and allowing them to share their voice, that made a difference.
We didn't have to do much more than that, which was surprising. I thought that we'd have to do a lot more of vision casting to really get them on board, but I didn't. It didn't take much. It's just getting them together and showing them that they're all working together for the same goal. Can add on to that, actually. Yeah because even with I even relaunching spectrum, there was I know it sounds weird that you're launching a sound scope like sound science journal and other journals in the portfolio will feel threatened by that.
But again, when they saw how much spectrum was getting, they said, wait a second, you're stealing my authors. Again, that's always what they're thinking. And a lot of it was there was some concern that's like, OK, the only explanation in their minds that we could have the volume that we had was because we were poaching from people who are trying to go to them.
And that's why the data point of the corresponding author is something that I really did stress and something we stressed to them. We said, look, these are people that you didn't want. These are people like you were turning them away. We're not stealing them from you. We're saving them from you. So again, it's this coming down to just showing, again, showing data, but also and after that, it's also speaking to, you learned how can we best communicate that transfer cascade on our sites.
And that's something that we're still sort of working on trying to make sure that what we're putting on there is, again, accurate from the author's perspective, but also something that is overall, everybody can understand what their role and their place is within this transfer cascade. I just wanted to mention, along with that talking about data. I didn't get to say this earlier, but when we're making these big choices, they're not in the void.
We're not just like, oh, this sounds like fun. Let's try it. These were data driven decisions. And we really we looked at the data and said, where are the trends going, what's going to happen and what can we do to deal with those problems. And so I really do your research, get the data before you make a big move. Great and this one is more for Nicolette as well.
And again you're welcome to say that you don't have a favorite preprint servers anywhere, like children or dogs or anything else. If you don't have favorites, fine. But are there any specific preprint servers that eLife plans to either always be recommending people use to be posting as well, or will be posting to on their behalf. So the vast, vast majority of authors use bio archival Med archive.
So they're the two that we support authors submitting from. And we can export to them to post it on their behalf. And we look at the other preprint servers, but there's no other sort of specific one preprint server that we could think, oh, we should actually start working with them as well because it's mostly bioRxiv. Med archive are the two that we work with. Wonderful sure.
Hello OK, perfect. So my question is also for eLife. I think a running trend in the conversation is like reputation and perception is an important part of any journal transition. I was actually wondering how institutions and funders look at Eli's new model and the like, particularly the final version where authors choose not to revise anymore. And if they stay with you, it's cited.
Have you received any pushback from it. I know some funders are picky about where a paper should be published, and if that counts as publication for their eyes. So it's a very good question. So the version of record is this same as a traditional journal article would have been. And there are some organizations that recognize review preprints and would accept that. And so that's something that we want to promote and increase acceptance of.
This is a question for Nicola. So Thank you so much for sharing the insight from your authors and your editors about the change. I'm wondering about the readers, and if you have done any investigation into whether or not in moving away from, say, a reject decision, that you're finding that readers of eLife are consuming not only the research paper, but also all of the context and critique that might have come out of the review process and what you've learned from that.
That is a very good question, and one that I honestly don't know the answer to. So I can't. Yeah sorry. Yeah go ahead. I'm not taking your time. Yeah, I probably should introduce myself.
I'm Paul, head of technology life. So our user experience team have been measuring the impact of the change that we've had. And in fact, we are now implementing a slightly adjusted design based on those findings we've done over the last year. So we're finding that the dwell time around the assessment block that Nicola showed is actually quite high. And people are reading that it's an inexact science to know whether people will bother reading it at all.
But Yeah, so far the main thing we noticed was that people were not seeing quite the distinction between a review preprint and the version of record, because they look quite similar. So we're going to be enhancing that with the new design that's coming out in the next few weeks. Thank you, thank you. You should always go to your coworkers presentations.
You never know. Yeah OK. So I have one more question as well. And we're happy to take a few more as well. Do any of the panel have questions for your panel. So sorry I can't talk for your fellow panelists. OK I guess we weren't ready for that one.
I guess for me this was already slightly addressed, but I guess for both of you a lot about getting editor buy in. But I also just even higher up buy in. What are the typical challenges that you see and what's been useful in overcoming those. So I'd say relationships are key. Spending time listening to your editors and hearing their concerns.
I hadn't when I started SPI, I had an editor who second day sent me an email with was a nine page document on all the things he wanted changed in the journals. No, I didn't change all those things, but I went through them line by line, and I talked to him about it and showed him, I understand where you're coming from, and I want to give you an answer. And that went a long way.
So I really think building those relationships, showing these editors that you really are on their side and that you want the same things. They want, and listening to what they're going to say is going to go a long way. I think I sort of agree with that, though. It's just really important to communicate and have more of a conversation about what's happening. So one of the things that we've had since we launched is we have regular Q&A calls with our editors, so they can ask sort of questions about what they're expected to be doing.
And they can also give insight as to how their experience of it is. And so I think Yeah, it's really important to communicate. I'll mention two. One thing I started doing is so we have our executive editors. And then underneath that we have associate editors. And the associate editors didn't really have much of a voice other than what they were doing with the editorial process. And we started doing associate editor her forearms and the point of it was simply, come tell us your concerns.
Things you like, things you don't like so we can hear about it. And then my executive editors were there to hear them. And then we were there as staff. And that's been really beneficial to get people on board, just giving them a space where they can talk. Great OK. I think we've got one last question, which is, and I know some of you have addressed a little bit about this, how soon can we come to you for an update on how it's going.
Yeah, for me, a lot of the initial stuff looks really great. I think there's a lot of buzz about the new journal product in a year. I want to see is it still there. And then in a couple of years I want to see, like, what did we do to our impact factor. I know they're not as important as they used to be, but especially my old sp journal editors were like, well, if we bring these other journals on, our impact factor is going to go down.
It's not going to go up. And they might be right. We're going to find out. So I want to know. I mean that's always the question. I mean I think it's always a year to year thing. Seeing again, we're at a place where we're not having as many submissions as we did before.
Frankly, that's something we're happy with because it was unsustainable. It felt very bad for editorial associates. So it's a much it's still a high volume, but it's not the level of insanity. But again, our goal is we would like to see how can we appropriately scale the journal from here, now that we have a better handle of what the community is looking for.
What are some areas where we can further sort of solicit in a direct way rather than a transfer, because the transfers are steady, but trying to see, OK, things like, again, the laboratory equity or other ways we can further promote the fact that we publish negative and null, null, null results studies. I think that's going to see year to year. Are we increasing those types of sections, and are there new sections that we can be considering.
And so I think we have quite a lot of good insights so far, which we got from the after a year. So we've already published as a one-year-old blog post. I'm not sure exactly when we'll have another update like that, but I think we've got some good insight as to how it's going so far from that. All right. Thank you very much. So if you would please help.
Thank me. Help thank the panel Good Lord. No no no no. What I also wanted to say was, thank you for still being here. As we know, the reception is about to start, so please join us there and ask additional questions there as well. Thanks
Segment:0 .
Mr Good afternoon. If you would like, feel free to come towards the front. There's a few down here as well, if you wish. Even easier to get to. If you really want me to. I can ask people to scoot over, too.
All right. Good afternoon. Welcome to session three. Throwing out the rule book. Rule book. Goodness case studies in innovative journal publishing models. I would love to warn all of you. Now, there is no one in this room as powerful as this microphone, so anything and everything you say may show up here.
As has been happening and will possibly here too. So that was a power I was unaware of for our session until just now. But here we are. So all right to kick us off today, I first want to start with the fact that we have a code of conduct. I would guess you've seen the code of conduct a couple of times already.
Is there anyone to whom this is completely brand new. Generally speaking, be nice, but specifically these ways. OK do read also available for you to scan. So with that we're going to talk about innovative journal publishing models. Today we have three speakers. I will let them introduce themselves each more as they come up as well. But we're really got a variety here today.
So to kick it off Nicola, would you like to start. Hi so I'm Nicola. I'm from eLife. So I'm going to talk a bit about our new publishing model. So first of all, it's a bit about eLife. We were established in 2012 as a nonprofit led by scientists in life and medical sciences. We originally launched as a selective journal with a consultative peer review process, but at the end of January 2023, we switched to a new publishing model where we provide expert public review and assessment of preprints, and then after review, these are published on our website as a reviewed preprint in the new model.
Authors can then decide what revisions they'd like to make and when they want to proceed with declaring their latest version of the work. The final version of record, which is equivalent to a traditional journal article without any final accept or reject decision from us. So to get to this point, it was an evolution. We tried various iterations previously, which were successful, so we introduced preprint review as an opt in process in May 2020, and we started exclusively reviewing preprints in 2021 and making reviews public for all authors invited for revision on making the reviews public on the preprint server.
We'd also seen previously seen a striking increase in authors who already had a preprint on a preprint server when they sent their submission to us for review. So the flowchart on this slide gives an overview on how the new process works. So the first stage is that we need authors to submit to us. So one of the things that we had to factor in was setting up a new site for submissions and making sure that the workflows on that made sense for what we were asking of authors and editors and reviewers.
So authors can submit to us with a preprint already from bioRxiv archive. And we've streamlined things such that we will pull in some of the information from their preprint on their behalf. So, for example, the author list or if they don't already have a preprint, authors can ask us to submit one on their behalf. And in and we'll do that in the event that we proceed with peer review.
And we can send them to you via archive and archive for them. So unfortunately, we can't review every submission that we receive. So editors will first assess new submissions to see, which would be suitable for review and papers, where we have willing editors to oversee and take on the review process will be sent out to reviewers. And the main question that we ask is whether we can produce high quality reviews that will be of significant value to the community.
So we will prioritize submissions for review, or really where we believe there will be broad interest and where having public assessments of the work is most important. So when we send a submission for review, we ask the reviewers to split their comments into a short statement on the significance of the findings and the strength of the evidence. A public review with guidance for readers on how to interpret the work and highlighting any important findings.
Mentioning any caveats. And then we ask for them to provide some recommendations to the authors with more specific feedback, such as when they have line by line comments, et cetera. So after peer review, we ask the editors and reviewers to consult further, which we did do in the old process. But for the new model, we don't ask editors to make an accept reject decision anymore. So at this point, this is for the editor to compile an eLife assessment.
And I'll go into that a bit more on the next slide. So this eLife assessment is then included along with the reviews in a letter, in place of the traditional decision letter to the authors that they would have received previously. So once this letter is sent out and before we publish, we do allow the authors a couple of weeks to provide provisional responses and a chance to let us in case that they think that there's any factual errors in the assessment that need correcting.
And once we're all ready to go, we'll publish the review preprint on the eLife website. And this has a Doi and can be cited as a publication. So this has involved setting up new workflows and building new technology to support this. And then finally it is the authors choice what to do next. So most authors will submit revisions for assessment and we'll publish a revised review preprint. But authors can also choose if and when to declare their manuscript.
The final version of record for indexing, or they may choose to submit their manuscript to another journal. So, as mentioned, as part of the review process, the editors and reviewers should decide on an eLife assessment. This should be a summary of the assessment of the preprint. So what the editors and the reviewers thought, and it should be in plain language. So as part of the review, we ask for reviewers to select terms from a common vocabulary to describe the significance of the findings and the strength of the evidence.
The editors and reviewers then decide which of the terms to use in the eLife assessment to be included on the review preprint. So one of the things that we're trying to achieve with the new model is to promote scientific evaluation. Based on what. Not where they publish. So the E life assessment with the common terms is designed to provide a more nuanced assessment than would be conveyed by published in life.
So as part of preparing for the changes, we set up a series of working groups to engage editors and to allow them to be part of shaping the new model. And this framework for the assessments was an output of that based on ideas from two of our editors. So the common vocabulary that we use for the terms that we use for the common vocabulary were actually introduced in the legacy process.
This means that we can compare the use of the terms between the models. So these graphs show the use of each term being selected by the reviewers in the new model in the dark pink, and the legacy model in the light pink. So it's clear from these that the distribution of the use of terms is similar. So as far as we can tell, we can infer that the quality of papers that we're reviewing has remained similar whilst we switched to the new model.
And it's not shown on the graphs, but it is worth noting that we're seeing that the terms used for the strength of the evidence are improving after revision. For example, of 80, which originally used incomplete in the iLife assessment, 62 of these improved. So that suggests that authors are taking the comments into consideration and using these to improve their work, rather than just saying that's that and moving on.
So one of the things that we had to consider when shifting to the new model was how review preprints would be displayed once they're published on the website, and this is the very nice result. So the eLife assessment is presented under the abstract. So it's clear and it's hard to miss. So the terms of the strength of the evidence and the significance are highlighted in bold.
So this provides immediate context for a reader on how the work has been assessed before, that before they continue to read and make sure that this assessment is transparent. So there's an indicator at the top to highlight that this is a reviewed preprint. So there's a clear indication of the current status of the current version. And readers can navigate to public peer reviews from the tabs at the top.
And any author responses that the author might have chosen to provide will be shown under this tab as well. And then finally, we display the article review history at the site with details of when the preprint was originally posted at preprint server and when it was sent for peer review. And this also becomes really useful when we have a revised review preprint, as all versions of the reviewed preprint will be accessible from this site.
And the. Is that the lights are going off. So I'm going to switch into karaoke. And so readers can easily navigate through the history of the work from the links on the side. Sorry, bear with me. So how is it going so far. From February 2023 to end of January 2024, we received over 6,000 submissions to the new model.
And of these, we sent 22 7.7% of them for public review. So this is a similar proportion to how many were sent for review in the legacy model the year before. So it's a reassuring sign. We're also seeing encouraging signs that the model is inclusive with submissions from 73 different countries. And we're seeing that the gender distribution of corresponding authors and reviewers has remained broadly the same.
This is a really good sign, as there were concerns that the new process might introduce more biases, or we might deter certain groups from submitting. Feedback from a recent author survey showed that authors rated the overall quality of the assessment of our public reviews and assessments highly at 4.4 out of 5, and there's more data and how it's going on the eLife one year on blog post, which you can easily find online if anybody's interested in having a look at that.
So there were challenges along the way, although we have seen signs of success. So the new model has drawn a lot of attention, for example, from nature's strife for life article, and it proved impossible to bring all of the editors along with us. And there were concerns around the model itself and whether we should, whether it would affect the reputation of the journal, and that we should have maybe instead launched a new journal.
Now, as I mentioned, there were concerns that we'd deter certain groups from submitting and also concerns around the speed at which it was introduced, with some editors suggesting that we should have introduced changes more slowly. However, while we have ended up losing some editors, we have recruited more and we have engagement from our editorial board. And it was also a lot of work for all of the teams.
So to introduce new workflows, to assess and publish papers, and to support reviewed preprints and all of the work to promote and communicate the changes that we've been making to our various communities. So as we've been working on the new model for over a year now, we're in a position where we can reflect and improve on workflows and to improve frames and streamline things in our processes.
We want to ensure that editors fully understand how the new model works, and how to write iLife assessments in a consistent way. And finally, we'd like others to adopt the model, as we can't create systemic change alone, and we want it to be as easy as possible for groups who are interested in experimenting to do so without necessarily having to take on all of the parts of the process as we've done it.
Thank you. Thank you so much for that. All right. Adriana is our next speaker here to talk about relaunching the journal. All right. Thanks, Anna.
And again, there are a few seats, especially one up here in front. I promise not to stare at you uncomfortably the entire time. But Hi, everybody. My name is Adriana Borgia. I'm a managing editor at the American Society for Microbiology, and my kind of unconventional case study for you today is how we relaunched our journal, microbiology spectrum.
So a little bit about ASM. So we are a member driven organization with over 30,000 members across the globe. And as a scientific nonprofit, we do have a number of different programs that we sponsor from meetings and advocacy, global public health and Dea. But our largest program, of course, is our journals program. We have 15 soon to actually be 16 journals that collectively publish over 6,000 articles each year.
And these journals and articles span the entire range of microbiology. So it's everything from basic to clinical to applied and environmental. We also have journals that are fully focused on reviews as well as data announcements. And we also do have an education journal as well. So our main editorial vision is that our journals should be the home of all research that advances the microbial sciences.
So if has anything to do with microbiology, you should be able to find a home within our journals program. So that brings me to one of our newest journal, but actually not so new microbiology spectrum. So it was originally launched back in 2013, primarily as a venue to publish scholarly monographs and some reviews as well. And it did fairly well.
However, in the past six or so years or so, ASM made the strategic decision that we wanted to really focus more so on original research again, still having reviews, but diverting that type of content instead to our reviews focused journals. So as a result of that decision, as you can see, the pipeline very quickly dried up. So the journal wasn't really doing much. I mean, it was still a good quality journal in that it had a high impact factor.
In 2020, the impact factor was slightly. Just to give you context, the impact factor of the same year of our flagship open access journal and bio was around a 7.8. So again, good if but not really doing anything for the community per se. And we also had another challenge for our overall journals program is that, as I said, we do publish in many different areas of microbiology.
We have topically focused journals, but all of those journals were very selective. So there really wasn't any place for an author who, let's say, have a more sound science approach, or maybe at a study that had a more regional focus or interdisciplinary focus that really wasn't a home for that type of research. Now, normally when you have a portfolio like this, of course, people tell you, OK, you need a cascade journal, which is a good option.
But again, that involves launching a new journal and then years in terms of indexing and getting an impact factor, it's a struggle. So we thought, well, we have this other journal already. It's not really doing anything. We could close it or we could give it a new life. So in 2021, we relaunched the journal as an open access, broad scope sound science journal. So we did a lot of marketing around this relaunch.
We also had a editorial in the inaugural newest issue of the journal, explaining that the approach of the journal was now to have a focus on rigorous methodology, reproducibility and high technical quality. We were no longer accepting reviews, articles, again, just focusing on primary research and short formats. We also hope that the journal could possibly be a home for studies that had again, specialized or regional focuses, confirmatory results, and also negative and null results studies.
And of course, again, this would be a transfer option for nine of our primary research titles for authors to go to now because of the projected volume, but also the fact that we're trying to accept a large span of types of subjects. We knew that we needed very large editorial board to handle this. And so we figured from the very beginning to be very intentional in putting this together to not only ensure that all of those specialties were recognized, but also that the demographics and the makeup of this board reflected that of the community, which is why we did and still have an open board approach in which any microbiologist with a PhD or equivalent can apply to be a part of our open board, and three years later, we have over 300, actually more over 350 microbiologists from across the globe representing 41 distinct countries.
So again, that was about mid-year 2021. So the first full year of data that we have is 2022. So the first full year of the journal being relaunched, we saw a large increase of course, in submissions and publications. In that year alone, we published over 2000 articles, which I know is a big number. But what I want you to really focus not on that number, but who is actually publishing those articles.
Who are these people and where do they come from. Well, we looked at the corresponding author emails and matched them against anything that was published in an ASME journal from 2018 to 2020, and we found that 78% not 70, 72% of those people were completely new. They had not published with us in those past three years. And even more significant of that, new contingents of authors that we were seeing, 78% of them were coming to us via transfers.
So that told us something very important. These were people who were probably already trying to publish with us, but we were turning them away. They had nowhere else to go. And in relaunching the journal, we gave them a home and we gave them a new purpose. And also we did see more diversity and inclusion in terms of the global authorship.
So 40% of those new authors were also from China. And both then as well as today, China is the number one authorship country that we see in terms of both our submissions and publications, with the US, of course, close behind. And again, while we had done transfers in the past between journals. It wasn't really very large. So in relaunching and creating this cascade journal, we saw a 400% increase in the transfer uptake across the portfolio.
All good things. But I know there's the elephant in the room. And that's a big thing called the impact factor, which I know we all love to talk about. And especially as some we love to not talk about it because we are a signatory of Dora, meaning that we see evaluation of a journal by its impact factor as having a lot of challenges and issues. Again, it's a flawed metric, and it should be.
It has its own purpose and use, but it should be looked at in the context of a number of different types of metrics. So we were a little naive in thinking, OK, we made it very clear. Yes, we're taking this large impact factor journal actually, in 2021, the impact factor even rose. But again, because of its history of monographs and reviews journal.
Is that OK. Well it's there. But again, as signatories of Dora, we don't advertise that. It's not on our website. We don't put it in our marketing materials. We're very clear at the scope of the journal and what it is. So we expected it. We expected, of course, in 2022 when that impact factor was normalized.
That wasn't a surprise to us. In fact, it was something that was some it was something we expected and actually wanted because it makes more sense to have. It's the same thing as other sound science journals in the same focus. And so we thought, our editors understand this. Our authors must understand this. People are just coming to us because they like us.
They don't care about impact factor. Well, July 2023 we did. When that impact factor was released, there was a 45% overall decrease in submissions compared to May 2023. But again, that number alone is not the story. It's looking at the people behind that number who's leaving us. Who are these people.
Well, the main decrease was in our de Novo submissions. So the direct submissions to the journal. But however, the transfer volume of people coming from the upstream journals remain steady and still has remained steady. Which again, is showing us that, Yes, there are some people who will always just be more interested in an impact factor than a community. But we still do have a strong sense of community among authors, especially those who come to ASME.
So it was very reassuring to see that uptake. But of course, again, we understand most of our authors understand, our editors understand maybe not everybody who is not ASME will understand. I mean, you see, just on its number a 9 to a 3.7, that looks weird. That's not something you usually see. So we said, OK, we should probably communicate that to the public and make that clear why this has happened.
So we wrote very shortly after we wrote an editorial that was authored by the chair of our publications committee, as well as the editor in chief, once again clarifying the Journal's scope, our position about the impact factor, and why we relaunched the journal to be what it is today. And we got a lot of really great positive engagement on social media, in particular Twitter, but also on WeChat. When we posted the editorial on our WeChat account, that was actually one of our highest performing posts on the platform that past year.
So where are we today. Well, of course, if this taught us anything, we did all these things. We did something a little bit weird and unconventional because we wanted we had a purpose. We wanted to make a journal that was useful to a community of authors that we were previously excluding. And we have to make sure that as we move forward, we continue to be that useful resource.
So again, continuing, we find that we do have a lot of support from our editors on this, which is great. We always ask them in our surveys, what do you like about being an editor, particularly for this journal. And of course, you get the normal things like oh, I'd like to keep up with the latest research. I'd like to progress in my field, but a lot of our editors will say we just like the scope of the journal.
We like that. We're just looking at the science and know nothing. No bells or whistles there. But also, more importantly, they see it as an opportunity to mentor, to basically reach out to these authors who might have been might need a little bit more help with their research. They have good stuff, but they're just not communicating it in the clearest way.
So how can we further help them publish and be successful in their careers. And again, that's what we really hope this journal will be about, is about encouraging new and underheard voices. Also, for example, finding areas where maybe it's difficult to publish a certain type of study for laboratory equity. That's one area where we are having an open call. So that's particularly for ensuring equitable access to diagnostics for patient populations, regardless of their geographic location of their economic status, other demographics or potential biases against them as people.
And we're also inviting commentaries from our more early career board members as well, on papers that they have reviewed, just again, so they get more visibility in their field. And also seeing how can we use our editorial board as a way to promote and mentor as well. So going having a very clear pathway from how do you go from an early career board member up to the editor and then even the senior editor position over time.
I have a whole poster about it in the poster Hall, if you're interested in learning more about that. But yeah, that is spectrum. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much, Adriana. So, as we always say before the last presentation, but wait, there's more. And with that, we'll talk to with Brian michels about a whole other transition.
All right. Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Hibbert. I'm the senior editorial operations manager for the Society of petroleum engineers. I'll be talking a little bit about consolidating our four journals into one journal, which is something we did this year. And so let me tell you a little bit about our society first.
So we're focused on engineers and related professionals and upstream oil and gas and associated energy resources. Energy transition is a big deal in the oil and gas world right now. So we're moving more and more in that area. We have about 127,000 members in over 145 countries. So we're very global organization. We publish over $5,000 conference papers and 400 journal articles a year.
We also manage one Petro, which is the multi-society library, where we publish all of our publications as well as other publishers that are in our field. So what I want to talk about is what we did with our journals here back in the day when the society started, we had one journal, as would make sense as that journal grew, and it was in the print era, we split off into subdisciplines because people didn't want to receive a giant tome of research.
They wanted to focus on their subdiscipline. And so there was a time when we had nine journals. And then as disciplines became less popular, we had to close journals. And that was really hard on our research community. And one of the big things we found is when we closed those journals, even though there was a home for their research in our other journals, they didn't go to those journals.
They went somewhere else. And so we really lost those researchers. So when I came in to look at the journals we had, we were down to four journals. Sp journal was our flagship journal. It was doing really well. Our other three were more specialized. And honestly, they were struggling. The main reason for that was sp journal had gotten the higher impact factor and it was focused on fundamental research, whereas the other ones were more focused on applications.
And so we were finding more and more of our authors were submitting to sp journal whether it fit the scope or not. And then they would get transferred to our other journals. And so we were struggling. The journals were slowing down. So what we did is we took all these journals and we combined them into one under the SP journal name so that we could keep it consistent, keep the impact factor still going.
The scope was already a general scope, so it need to be changed that drastically. And we created robust sections to cover everything that was done in these old journals. So we had along with reviews, we had a fundamental research article type and applications article type. And then we had seven sections. And not only did we cover the sections that we had historically done, but we were able to create new sections based on what we were seeing research going.
We created a data science section, which we were already seeing a lot of papers. And then aspirationally we created a sustainability and energy transition section. That's still a really heated topic in the petroleum engineering world. But we're. We want to see more and more research in that area. So why do we make the change.
I talked about some of it, but really we wanted to rescue the content that was in these struggling journals, not necessarily the journal itself. We wanted to stop our journals from competing with each other. We had this weird dichotomy where there was kind of if you're an sp journal, you're this top level, researcher, and if you're publishing these other journals, it's not as good.
That was a perception. It really wasn't true. But it was a struggle we were seeing. The other thing, it allowed us to increase collaboration flexibility. So we took all of our editors, put them all on one board together, which that was interesting because as I said, SP journal editors had this lofty view of themselves.
And so it was interesting, but putting them together and putting them all on the same level playing field, we found there was a lot more collaboration and it allowed us to be more flexible with how we assign papers amongst all our editors. We also took all of our associate editors, put them all into one board, gave us a single home for research, which makes it easier for authors to submit their just one site to submit to easier for our readers.
There's one place to find it. We have our sections, so it's clear if you are drilling and completions, you can find that section and find the research you're looking for. A big one was options for new and emerging research. So as I said energy transition is a heated topic. We wanted to create a new journal in energy transition and we could not get the support for that.
But starting a section within a already reputable journal, that wasn't an issue. And so it allowed us to do that. And the model is such that we're going to review our sections every three to five years, and we will grow and change those sections to reflect the research as it's changing. We're hopeful to see that it will increase impact factor. What we've seen in our area is that in general, a journal that has a more general scope and is larger, assuming the quality is good, is going to have a higher impact factor.
So we expect to see with the larger footprint of all of our research in one journal to gradually increase that impact factor. And as I mentioned, because we're keeping the title the same on issn, we were able to keep all the metrics, the same. So how do we implement it. First step was editorial board buy in. To be honest, the first meeting I had with my editors to explain this.
I got almost kicked out of the digital room because there was very much like, why Are you killing my journal, I don't understand. And I realized I had to go back to the drawing board. These are engineers. So I got data and I showed them. Here's why. This is what's happening. Here's the trajectory of your beloved journal, and here's how we can save it.
And once I explained how it would work. And what we do. And I got my editor in chief on board. Everyone fell into line and kind of saw that it made sense that it was the best way forward for our journals. From there, we went to a comprehensive awareness campaign, starting with the editors. And then to our reviewers and authors and then readers and general membership.
And we did. We did webinars where our editors went on and talked about what was happening. My editor in chief wrote an editorial in our member magazine. So we did a lot to really get the word out and make sure that people understood what we were doing, because there was a lot of misinformation. And then we had a step transition plan.
The way publishing journal articles, we had to start about six months before we were ready to publish that first issue, which was January 2024. So we started moving papers over into the new journal. That transition process went much smoother than I expected, even. None of our authors had any problem with having their paper moved from our old journals to the new journal.
I think the reputation, the impact factor was a big part of that, but we had no complaints. So then what was the early reaction. The biggest concern was, are we going to lose this historic content that we've published in these journals that we're closing. And so by explaining the sections and how they would work, and also really by having those Article types of fundamental research and applications, and each of those articles, the top right of the PDF.
And then also in the HTML view it says this is a fundamental research applications. We can keep that historic research. And so that was the big concern. As I said no complaints about transition for authors. That was great. So something I wasn't expecting was our overall submissions. When you compare our four journals to the one journal, we saw a 20% increase in our submissions once we made this announcement about the new journal.
So just people hearing about this new journal and how we're going to do things, we increase submissions. As I said, we have our one Petro, which is where most of our subscribers are. We also have individual subscribers to the journal. It's been steadily declining because more people are using our multi-society library. But the. Individual subscription revenue is up 30% since we started doing this new journal.
So we actually got more people interested in subscribing to the journal individually. And then with the new sections that we launched, we're not sure how is that going to work. Would we get people to submit and data science, which was one of the new ones. That one blew up. It's already going to be probably our second largest section by the end of the year.
So that was great. And the energy transition is growing. We're getting submissions. We learned from that we put out a somewhat general scope for that because we weren't quite sure. And we're getting a lot of submissions that were kind outside of what we were looking for. And so we've had to adapt those. Now, what I didn't mention before is how we did our sections.
We had a general scope for the journal. And then we had section descriptions that worked like sub scopes. And we've been gradually changing those to make them work for the New journal. So then some questions for the future. Will the change translate to an increased reputation impact factor. It's going to take we just did this in 2024.
It's going to take a few years before we have any answers on that. Initial numbers look good, but we'll see. I'm curious to see how the sections are going to grow and change. Since we have this very fluid model, I'm interested to see what areas of research are going to become more important or less important, and how is the journal going to change throughout that.
And then another question is what new opportunities does this bring for new journal products. We're not fine with just the one journal. We do want to look at other options, but when we had the model where we had three struggling journals. And one good journalist trying to add another journal in the mix just sounded a little crazy. But now we have option two.
Can we try to start that energy transition journal once we have some grassroots support for that. Can we do a sound science journal that would support this one big journal. So we have lots of options to look at for the future. OK all right. Thank you very much. Thank you.
All right. We have left plenty of time for questions. I guess you're welcome to say you don't want to answer any one of those questions as they come up to if you want. I have some questions to start us off as well, but would anyone in the audience like to start with a question. Pretty sure.
Yep I have a question for the journal consolidation from four journals to one journal. You mentioned the journal is still under subscription model. So how do you deal with the subscription subscription then. Would you decrease the subscription price or increase how you address the revenue. Thank you. Yeah so as I mentioned, we have our multi-society library where the vast majority of our subscription revenue comes from, and they're subscribing to all of our content as well as other providers.
So changing this journal made absolutely no difference to that. As for our individual subscriptions, we had a bundled price for the four journals, and we actually lowered the price from that quite drastically to encourage people to do the new journal. But it was more expensive than buying just one individual journal was before. So there was a change and there was some concern about that.
But as I mentioned, revenue is up. So obviously our readers are still interested in reading the New journal. Thank you. Would anyone else like to ask a question. All right. I have a couple as well. So for each of you, I would just be interested to hear who actually kind of ran the more comprehensive awareness campaign.
Was it your journal staff. Was it marketing staff. Was it a combination of both. Did you have authors or even editors come back and say, I'd like more resources to be able to explain this. I'll go. I'll go first. Sure Yeah.
So I ran point on this. Our marketing team is smaller, and so we can't just hand something to them and say, here you go, have fun. So I actually I made a very detailed document about here's how we're going to do things. And when I share with the marketing department, they're like, can you help us do this for everything. Because this is really helpful. The other thing, talking about the editors there and giving them resources, we were really careful to make sure that a lot of the information was coming from our editors and not from us, because we wanted to show that our community is on board for this.
And it's not just something our company is doing to make more money or something, because that was are you doing this because you're losing revenue or are you trying to find new revenue. We really wanted to show, no, this is what our community needs because we want to support the journals.
Yeah this really echoing that. This is a really importance of working with your marketing team and having a comprehensive plan on exactly what you want to communicate and who you want to communicate that to. And I think also to I think in terms of having your editors on board, I think that's why when we relaunched the journal, just having the editorial written by the primarily by the editor in chief of the Journal, again, just gave it a lot of more sort of ethos and trust in that.
This is, again, because we are it's because we're a scientific society. All of our editors are people who are active in the field. So that does give it a little bit more weight as well. And so similarly as well. Yeah Yeah. Sorry Yeah. So similarly we kind of have a very nice marketing team who dealt with a lot of preparing everything to communicate all the changes.
So we had an editorial from the editor in chief and also a lot of just more general articles to explain to authors about how the new model was going to work. And we've also got resources for editors if they want to go and speak about it to and so at their institution and to make sure that they're prepared as well. Thank you so much.
Do we have anyone else. I've got a couple. Oh, I've got one right back here. Thank you for all these stories. They're really inspiring. I think what I'm thinking about is these are big changes. And to make a big change is scary. And to know when it's the time or to prompt it.
How did you make the leap. Or even to start questioning all of these sort of fundamental things about how you've been operating. So from that perspective, we all set up originally to ultimately make change. So it was kind of never a question of are we going to change things. It was more just to what do we do and when do we do it.
So yeah, we kind of did iterations originally and then decided that it needed to just be a big move to make it happen, so we can see how it goes from there. I'll answer as well. So the journal consolidation, my previous boss had been working on it for about 10 years and had gotten a similar response to me every time it was presented.
Like, you're crazy. Why would you do that. She literally. There was a previous journal we closed, and she had an old member that every time she'd see him, he'd come up and say, are you going to kill another one of my journals. And so it was a lot of work and just setting the idea.
And that's when there's these big changes, especially when you need your editors buy in, I've learned. Just get the idea out there first, and then you're going to get the backlash and then get past that and then explain why you think it makes sense and really work with them and try to show them that you're on their side and you really do understand their concerns. But sometimes the hardest thing is just getting that idea idea out there, especially when it's really big and add on to what Brian was saying earlier about just the power of data as well, just being aware of what is the data of your submissions, your publications, what is that telling you.
I know that's particularly why we made the change, and I think we were working with a consultant at the time and they're saying, OK, this is what's happening to all your rejected articles. They're going somewhere else. Again, just looking at the rejected article tracker. These are going to your competitors. Some are society, but a lot of them are not. A lot of them are for profit publishers.
So these are three things you can do. You can launch a new journal, you can relaunch an existing journal, or you can do nothing and see what that does for you. So again, there are varying levels of risks for each of those options. So it's really just taking a look at what are your what are your submission data telling you. And also what are the people in your community telling you. Like what's also again, there's always something behind a number.
A number isn't big or low because of well, because of no reason. It's because there are people that are researchers who have an issue and are able, whether that's not being able to publish a few or not wanting to publish a few, and having a better understanding of what those motivations are, can help point you toward which of the options available to you is going to be the most beneficial.
I just had a question for Eli. Did you have a quicker turnaround time when you implemented this new process for the life cycle of the article. So with the new model, because we published the first version as a reviewed preprint. It's a lot quicker to get the first reviewed version of the article out.
So from submission to publication through preprint, it's a lot quicker than it was previously, from submission to final acceptance and publication of that article. I have another question for you. Knowing what you know now, a year later, and if you were going to do it over again, would you start a new journal or would you do what you did, which is convert an old journal, an existing journal.
I think it was to start a new journal. It would take a lot longer to do things and it would make it a lot more difficult. So I think it would have been the same. Great OK. We also have someone who noted as well there's a cell phone on top of the water cooler. If that happens to be yours, feel free to pick it up before you go as well.
Or leave it there. Who knows. OK, so we've got a couple questions from the app as well. And this one I would love for all three of you to address as well. Will rebuilding the rule book bring more accessibility in the process to everyone, and is that even possible. So I'd love to hear if any of you feel like it's actually more accessible now for your authors or your reviewers based on what you've done or your editors.
Awesome I mean, there are a lot of definitions of accessible, but I think a lot of it is can make a change, but you have to have that idea of accessibility in mind from the beginning. It's not something that you kind of do after the fact. That's again why when we decided to completely rebuild the editorial board from scratch, we're like, OK, we know what we need.
The easy thing to do is just to pick a bunch of people that we already know. But there are a lot of issues with that. So we want to be intentional in that. If we are going to create a new journal for the community, it has to reflect that community. And we have to be very deliberate about having targets of making sure that we have a lot of balance among those editorial board members with, again, both for subject area, but also in terms of demographics and geographic location.
And for that reason, that's why we were able to make the journal more accessible in that sense, in that we were trying to make sure that diversity was something that was at the forefront of what we were doing. So I'm not sure our focus specifically on accessibility, but along those lines, equity, equity was a big part of what we were doing.
So we had with our old journal model, we had our fundamental research authors who were mostly in universities, who had the higher impact factor and reputation, who saw themselves as more important than our applications, authors that were in the field that were writing about what they were doing. And so by putting this together, giving them an equal playing field and saying they're all important.
And I mean, what's been interesting to us is the traditional some of our most application focused journals, which was drilling completion and production operation. Those sections are the ones that have grown the most since we launched the new journal. So those authors are there and they're happy to have a bigger platform for their research. So it's been great.
Yeah so I think to echo other points, it's really important to just consider like diversity. And as long as you go along and make sure that you are consulting with the relevant groups and making sure you consult with everybody. So I think we do that with Eli. We have sort of an early career advisory group, and we have open calls for editors with specific demographic areas to make sure that they're sort of brought along on the journey and that they are not excluding people along the way to try and see what the best thing to do is to make it accessible to everybody.
And one of the things that we considered when we were sort of figuring out what to do with the new models, we had working groups, which editors could get involved in, and some of the things that we did consider was would sort of adopting a model like this exclude people or what might be barriers to participation in it I think it's really important to consider it as you're going along to see what you can do.
Thank you very much. OK we have a couple more from the app. Some of them are specific. This one is for regarding the SB journals consolidation. How do you manage and display your archive. Do these individual journal names still exist on your platform. They do.
So we have a note on each of those journals that says after this date, this research is now being published under a consolidated journal. But all the old content is still there under the old journal. And it's searchable, just like anything else on our platform. So it's a little clunky, but it's still clear where everything is. Great Thank you. OK we actually have one for the audience as well.
Have any of our attendees been through similar processes and do you still work there now. Yeah Yeah. So yeah No has anyone else been through actually changing completely the way that you did your journals. We have three brave souls. Thank you very much for doing that as well. So here's one that I think is also then going to probably be aimed for sp from the app that says speaking to the competition between journals, how have you tried to address those feelings regarding the flagship versus other smaller journals within the society.
So have you sent them to some retreats? That's a good idea. I mean, so a big thing we did is just telling the editors you are all on the same level now. You're all working together, putting them on. We had where we'd have separate meetings for each journal to talk about what we were doing. And then we put all the editors in the same room and put them on equal playing field, and just getting them together and allowing them to share their voice, that made a difference.
We didn't have to do much more than that, which was surprising. I thought that we'd have to do a lot more of vision casting to really get them on board, but I didn't. It didn't take much. It's just getting them together and showing them that they're all working together for the same goal. Can add on to that, actually. Yeah because even with I even relaunching spectrum, there was I know it sounds weird that you're launching a sound scope like sound science journal and other journals in the portfolio will feel threatened by that.
But again, when they saw how much spectrum was getting, they said, wait a second, you're stealing my authors. Again, that's always what they're thinking. And a lot of it was there was some concern that's like, OK, the only explanation in their minds that we could have the volume that we had was because we were poaching from people who are trying to go to them.
And that's why the data point of the corresponding author is something that I really did stress and something we stressed to them. We said, look, these are people that you didn't want. These are people like you were turning them away. We're not stealing them from you. We're saving them from you. So again, it's this coming down to just showing, again, showing data, but also and after that, it's also speaking to, you learned how can we best communicate that transfer cascade on our sites.
And that's something that we're still sort of working on trying to make sure that what we're putting on there is, again, accurate from the author's perspective, but also something that is overall, everybody can understand what their role and their place is within this transfer cascade. I just wanted to mention, along with that talking about data. I didn't get to say this earlier, but when we're making these big choices, they're not in the void.
We're not just like, oh, this sounds like fun. Let's try it. These were data driven decisions. And we really we looked at the data and said, where are the trends going, what's going to happen and what can we do to deal with those problems. And so I really do your research, get the data before you make a big move. Great and this one is more for Nicolette as well.
And again you're welcome to say that you don't have a favorite preprint servers anywhere, like children or dogs or anything else. If you don't have favorites, fine. But are there any specific preprint servers that eLife plans to either always be recommending people use to be posting as well, or will be posting to on their behalf. So the vast, vast majority of authors use bio archival Med archive.
So they're the two that we support authors submitting from. And we can export to them to post it on their behalf. And we look at the other preprint servers, but there's no other sort of specific one preprint server that we could think, oh, we should actually start working with them as well because it's mostly bioRxiv. Med archive are the two that we work with. Wonderful sure.
Hello OK, perfect. So my question is also for eLife. I think a running trend in the conversation is like reputation and perception is an important part of any journal transition. I was actually wondering how institutions and funders look at Eli's new model and the like, particularly the final version where authors choose not to revise anymore. And if they stay with you, it's cited.
Have you received any pushback from it. I know some funders are picky about where a paper should be published, and if that counts as publication for their eyes. So it's a very good question. So the version of record is this same as a traditional journal article would have been. And there are some organizations that recognize review preprints and would accept that. And so that's something that we want to promote and increase acceptance of.
This is a question for Nicola. So Thank you so much for sharing the insight from your authors and your editors about the change. I'm wondering about the readers, and if you have done any investigation into whether or not in moving away from, say, a reject decision, that you're finding that readers of eLife are consuming not only the research paper, but also all of the context and critique that might have come out of the review process and what you've learned from that.
That is a very good question, and one that I honestly don't know the answer to. So I can't. Yeah sorry. Yeah go ahead. I'm not taking your time. Yeah, I probably should introduce myself.
I'm Paul, head of technology life. So our user experience team have been measuring the impact of the change that we've had. And in fact, we are now implementing a slightly adjusted design based on those findings we've done over the last year. So we're finding that the dwell time around the assessment block that Nicola showed is actually quite high. And people are reading that it's an inexact science to know whether people will bother reading it at all.
But Yeah, so far the main thing we noticed was that people were not seeing quite the distinction between a review preprint and the version of record, because they look quite similar. So we're going to be enhancing that with the new design that's coming out in the next few weeks. Thank you, thank you. You should always go to your coworkers presentations.
You never know. Yeah OK. So I have one more question as well. And we're happy to take a few more as well. Do any of the panel have questions for your panel. So sorry I can't talk for your fellow panelists. OK I guess we weren't ready for that one.
I guess for me this was already slightly addressed, but I guess for both of you a lot about getting editor buy in. But I also just even higher up buy in. What are the typical challenges that you see and what's been useful in overcoming those. So I'd say relationships are key. Spending time listening to your editors and hearing their concerns.
I hadn't when I started SPI, I had an editor who second day sent me an email with was a nine page document on all the things he wanted changed in the journals. No, I didn't change all those things, but I went through them line by line, and I talked to him about it and showed him, I understand where you're coming from, and I want to give you an answer. And that went a long way.
So I really think building those relationships, showing these editors that you really are on their side and that you want the same things. They want, and listening to what they're going to say is going to go a long way. I think I sort of agree with that, though. It's just really important to communicate and have more of a conversation about what's happening. So one of the things that we've had since we launched is we have regular Q&A calls with our editors, so they can ask sort of questions about what they're expected to be doing.
And they can also give insight as to how their experience of it is. And so I think Yeah, it's really important to communicate. I'll mention two. One thing I started doing is so we have our executive editors. And then underneath that we have associate editors. And the associate editors didn't really have much of a voice other than what they were doing with the editorial process. And we started doing associate editor her forearms and the point of it was simply, come tell us your concerns.
Things you like, things you don't like so we can hear about it. And then my executive editors were there to hear them. And then we were there as staff. And that's been really beneficial to get people on board, just giving them a space where they can talk. Great OK. I think we've got one last question, which is, and I know some of you have addressed a little bit about this, how soon can we come to you for an update on how it's going.
Yeah, for me, a lot of the initial stuff looks really great. I think there's a lot of buzz about the new journal product in a year. I want to see is it still there. And then in a couple of years I want to see, like, what did we do to our impact factor. I know they're not as important as they used to be, but especially my old sp journal editors were like, well, if we bring these other journals on, our impact factor is going to go down.
It's not going to go up. And they might be right. We're going to find out. So I want to know. I mean that's always the question. I mean I think it's always a year to year thing. Seeing again, we're at a place where we're not having as many submissions as we did before.
Frankly, that's something we're happy with because it was unsustainable. It felt very bad for editorial associates. So it's a much it's still a high volume, but it's not the level of insanity. But again, our goal is we would like to see how can we appropriately scale the journal from here, now that we have a better handle of what the community is looking for.
What are some areas where we can further sort of solicit in a direct way rather than a transfer, because the transfers are steady, but trying to see, OK, things like, again, the laboratory equity or other ways we can further promote the fact that we publish negative and null, null, null results studies. I think that's going to see year to year. Are we increasing those types of sections, and are there new sections that we can be considering.
And so I think we have quite a lot of good insights so far, which we got from the after a year. So we've already published as a one-year-old blog post. I'm not sure exactly when we'll have another update like that, but I think we've got some good insight as to how it's going so far from that. All right. Thank you very much. So if you would please help.
Thank me. Help thank the panel Good Lord. No no no no. What I also wanted to say was, thank you for still being here. As we know, the reception is about to start, so please join us there and ask additional questions there as well. Thanks
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