Another year of Developments.

Recognising our community as we head towards JEB's centenary in 2023.

Enliven: Journal of Stem Cell Research & Regenerative Medicine is an Open access, peer reviewed international journal and it aims to publish different types of articles on emerging developments and supports current and upcoming research in the field of stem cell biology. This journal also allows articles on developmental biology and regenerative medicine. This journal will support the budding scientists, scholars, academicians, researchers, and students by providing Open access platform for publishing their work. This journal will follow the peer review policies and will bode Open access in having quality research output. This journal combines the innovative scientific ideas and ways in stem cell biology, developmental biology, regenerative medicine and all other related disciplines to have an innovative output. This journal accepts articles from different disciplines as below but not constrained to only these Stem cell biology Pluripotency Clinical stem cells Germ line stem cells Cell bank Human genome Applied regenerative medicine Human embryology Drug research methodology Transplantation Regeneration and repair Growth disturbance Retinal Imaging Cell culture and protocols Cryopreservation Cell migration assays Cell differentiation and cell immortalization Enliven: Journal of Stem Cell Research & Regenerative Medicine invites articles from authors and we assure authors that articles received will be processed with the best policies and will disseminate the articles to the right field.

Measuring the Impact of Gold and Green Open Access

To question the efficacy of 'gold' open access to published articles. Open access is unrestricted access to academic, theoretical and research literature that is scholarly and peer-reviewed. Two models of open access exist: 'gold' and 'green'. Gold open access provides everyone with access to articles during all stages of publication, with processing charges paid by the author(s). Green open access involves placing an already published article into a repository to provide unrestricted access, with processing charges incurred by the publisher. This is a discussion paper. An exploration of the relative benefits and drawbacks of the 'gold' and 'green' open access systems. Green open access is a more economic and efficient means of granting open access to scholarly literature but a large number of researchers select gold open access journals as their first choices for manuscript submissions. This paper questions the efficacy of gold open access models and presents an examination of green open access models to encourage nurse researchers to consider this approach. In the current academic environment, with increased pressures to publish and low funding success rates, it is difficult to understand why gold open access still exists. Green open access enhances the visibility of an academic's work, as increased downloads of articles tend to lead to increased citations. Green open access is the cheaper option, as well as the most beneficial choice, for universities that want to provide unrestricted access to all literature at minimal risk.

Since our first issue in 1977, with founding editor Michael Harloe, IJURR has been at the forefront of critical urban debates. The year 2015 marks an important moment for the journal since we stand at a crossroads between an increasingly corporate publishing environment, in which many journals are becoming online only, their academic content trapped behind expensive electronic pay walls, and an alternative pathway towards a defence of the modern journal as a printed publication, affordable and accessible to a wide range of readers. Many libraries, for example, especially from the global South, continue to rely on print-only subscriptions. At our most recent editorial board meeting held in Mexico City we had a wide-ranging discussion about the future of academic publishing and reaffirmed our commitment to IJURR as a high-quality academic journal available in both print and online formats. The cornerstone of our defence of IJURR in an increasingly challenging publishing environment is our comprehensive redesign. This has been developed over the last two years in collaboration with the Austrian designer Paulus M. Dreibholz, who has extensive experience with cutting-edge architectural and cultural publications, across a variety of different formats. As part of the IJURR redesign each article will work effectively either as an individual electronic document or as a printed version contained within a specific journal issue. The dual approach extends to precise details of the font, layout and pagination. Given the intense pressures on space we have had to find a solution that does not significantly affect our annual page range for the journal. A key element of the redesign has involved changing the existing typefaces. We have replaced the Times New Roman typeface, which is amongst the least distinctive available, with the clearer and more contemporary Mercury (1997), developed by the New York based typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler. For the headings, captions and block quotes, which had been set in Interstate (used for American road signage), we have switched to Avenir Next (2007), a typeface developed by Adrian Frutiger and Akira Kobayashi, which adds greater versatility between print and digital formats than Frutiger's original Avenir (1988) but retains key elements of geometric sans-serif typefaces such as Erbar (1922) and Futura (1927). With our new look we are aiming to make IJURR more distinctive, more readable, and also more closely engaged with cutting-edge developments in design and publishing, including the necessity to connect with wider audiences such as practitioners and urbanists outside the academy. Our redesign also marks a more serious engagement with the use of visual materials ranging from architectural sketches, film stills and photographs to various explanatory figures and tables. We are not only interested in the quality and legibility of these materials, both for print and online readers, but also their precise role in the context of key urban debates. Additionally, each issue of the journal will feature three images on the cover, connected to the articles, but also providing an opportunity to reflect on broader themes in urban culture. We also intend to use this ‘gallery space' to signal the distinctiveness of key debates or symposia. In parallel with changes to the journal we have also worked with the German web designer Corinna Reetz to revamp our website: gone is the clutter and garish maroon banner. In its place we hope that readers will find the site clearer and more navigable. We will be making greater use of our website in future to enable complementary commentaries and shorter interventions to accompany themes developed within the journal itself but also to allow faster interaction with contemporary debates of potential interest to our readers. As part of our commitment to improving IJURR we have also upgraded the paper quality for the printed journal––contrary to recent publishing trends––to ensure that the journal is attractive, readable, and earns its place on our bookshelves. We are keen that the journal should be available for sale in individual bookshops, alongside other critical journals, and we have negotiated a special single-issue price to facilitate this way of reaching wider readerships. We are also introducing a choice of referencing systems between the Chicago (footnote) and Harvard (in-text citation) models to reflect our commitment towards widening the range of disciplines we wish to feature in these pages: we hope that scholars from anthropology, history, science and technology studies (STS) and other disciplines will consider IJURR as a suitable outlet for innovative work that has hitherto been largely published elsewhere. This flexibility is important because it enables us to handle a wider range of data sources, methodological approaches and styles of writing: we are interested in countering the creeping uniformity of academic scholarship and the tendency towards highly formulaic modes of exposition. Another important area of change in academic publishing that affects IJURR directly is the introduction of ‘open access publishing'. This change is being driven mainly by demands that publications derived from publicly funded research activity should be freely available in digital format. At present, there are two ‘open access' options available: ‘green' and ‘gold'. Under ‘green open access', authors can make the peer-reviewed version of their article (i.e. the accepted version before copy editing and formatting) openly available in institutional and not-for-profit repositories after a set embargo period. Under ‘gold open access', authors who have institutional funds available to pay the so-called ‘Article Publication Charge' can make the published version of their article openly available immediately upon publication. IJURR fully embraces the move to green open access. However, our editorial board has raised significant concerns that the payment of exorbitant fees for gold open access is an integral part of the neoliberal drift in higher education and academic publishing. It is also discriminatory, since it will disproportionately benefit scholars from wealthier institutions in the global North with access to sources of research funding and institutions that can support (and indeed demand) the payment of gold open access fees. Nevertheless, we had to weigh our deep concern about gold open access against the need to find a solution that will not deter publicly funded research from being published in IJURR. Within this complicated publishing terrain we decided to offer green open access to all our authors, and gold open access to those authors who have to comply with gold open access requirements posed by their institutions or research funding bodies. At the same time, we actively explore ways in which gold open access fees can be redistributed to benefit authors from different institutional and geographical settings, in consultation with the charitable wing of our activities, the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies. In recognition that academic publishing, along with its wider institutional and public policy context, is in a state of flux at present we shall regularly review these developments to try and mitigate some of the more iniquitous effects. We are conscious that IJURR is embedded in an asymmetrical environment but do not wish to exacerbate these inequalities further. One additional question linked to the open access debate, is the way in which open access content can be handled in the print version of the journal. As noted earlier, we remain committed to retaining a high quality well-designed print journal, in an era in which commercial and technical advances push for the full ‘digitalization' of academic publications. But what does ‘being open access' mean to subscribers of the print only version of the journal, or to readers who do not have access to digital formats? Although it hinges upon addressing complex legal and institutional issues, we are committed to continue exploring ways for offering equal opportunities for open access to authors and readers alike independently of their geographic location or institutional setting. The significant increase in the quantity of submissions, combined with the increase in quality of papers we receive is a welcome development. Although in 2013 and 2014 we published almost twice our normal content in order to accommodate the increasing number of excellent papers we received, we are now also very close to accepting just 10% of articles submitted. This means we publish only articles that are judged to be truly exceptional in terms of empirical, methodological or conceptual originality and critical insight. What is also important to note, however, is that the journal's high quality is the result of the collective effort and labour put into it not only by authors, editors, and the editorial board and office, but also by our referees, who offer critical comments to improve papers. IJURR is one of the few journals that engage referees at every stage of the reviewing process by communicating all comments and editorial decisions to referees as well as authors. This is made possible thanks to the outstanding support offered by Mel Goodsell and Angela Yeap, under the guidance of Terry McBride, our managing editor. By sharing the anonymized version of the decision letter we send to authors with our international body of referees, we hope to foster the growth of an international community of critical scholars who are sometimes trained in different reviewing traditions. As they can see the comments written by their peers, our reviewers can engage in an international dialogue. Problems of urban and regional development are of growing visibility on a world scale, in rich and poor, socialist and capitalist countries alike. Often … they directly derive from processes which operate on an international level. This journal will compare and contrast such problems as they occur in widely differing situations and social systems. International dialogue has been our mission since the very beginning, a dialogue between scholars from various disciplines and origins, and a dialogue between scholars and activists (and they are oftentimes the same people). In 1998, the editors published a statement reflecting on how IJURR developed with regards to its original objectives. They wrote: ‘Despite the recurrent taste for simple universal models (which can be seen as an indirect form of intellectual domination), we have respected the diversity of urban experience and the usefulness of comparative analysis to enable understanding of the more familiar by contrast to the less familiar'. In 2009, the editors highlighted that international dialogue was more and more reflected in the composition of the editorial board, as well as in the range of articles published in the journal. Moreover, they note that technological changes now allow the journal to be accessible around the world. But, as they note, ‘internationalization is surely above all about acknowledging that theories derived from the experiences of North-West Europe and North America may not be universally applicable, and that those regions may be exceptional from a global perspective. Internationalization is thus a process of reconsidering and challenging theory on a range of levels'. Over the years, the very meaning of IJURR's international mission has changed because the world has profoundly changed. If the language we use to speak of the world has evolved, we remain stuck in dichotomies, despite many calls to break them down. Our efforts in the last decade have been placed on fostering scholarship that attempts to do away with these capitalist/socialist, first world/third world, developed/under-developed, core/periphery, north/south dichotomies in innovative ways. This has meant opening our pages to new epistemological traditions produced outside Europe and North America and in the new transdisciplinary frontiers of social knowledge production. The challenges are great because of language barriers and the continued dominance of English-speaking ways of writing papers and conducting research, which transpires in the reviews we receive. But the journal pursues its work towards internationalization by, for instance, relying on more and more reviewers from outside of Europe and North America. We have recently begun to organize IJURR lectures in other languages than English. The first of such, held in Mexico City in October 2014, will be available online shortly.

Filtering the good from the bad: A focus on kidney development and disease to celebrate John Bertram's long‐standing career in anatomy and renal research

A group of European funding agencies launched an initiative called “Plan S” in September 2018 that would require scientific publications resulting from funded research to be published only in Plan S-compliant open access journals by 2020. A delegation from the European Commission visited the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other federal agencies in December 2018 to gain support for Plan S. Plan S would force authors to publish solely in open access journals and bar researchers from publishing in hybrid journals, such as the Journal of Animal Science, that allow authors to choose between Gold and Green Open Access publishing. Gold Open Access allows immediate open access with articles made freely available at time of publication and requires payment of article processing charges that are usually higher than page charges of subscription-based journals. Green Open Access publishing is subscription-based and defers open access for the publisher embargo period (usually 12 months). Because 85% of journals are hybrid or subscription based, Plan S would limit researcher’s academic freedom to decide where to publish and prevent authors from publishing in most research society journals that are hybrid or subscription-based. Research society-based journals provide rigorous peer review and comprehensive editorial processes and thus, have earned the trust of researchers, professionals, and the public. Funneling research output to non-research society based open access journals may distort the dissemination of scientific research and reduce the quality of scientific communication. Nonprofit research societies use revenues from their publishing operations to finance educational, journalistic, outreach, and other activities and thus, Plan S threatens the financial stability of these research societies. Authors should be allowed to choose the best venue to publish their work. Plan S must be rejected.

As the number of Open Access (OA) journal articles increases dramatically, it is time to assess how journal article indexes, both free and subscription-based, retrieve and indicate OA full text. This study uses 471 samples of OA articles to compare OA article retrieval in Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scopus, with Scopus representing subscription-based journal indexes. This study divides journal articles into two categories: Gold OA and Green OA. Gold OA articles are published in journals that make all their articles freely available on the Internet, and all other OA articles are placed in the Green OA category. The study finds that all three indexes can indicate Gold OA availability in one way or another, but they differ dramatically when indicating Green OA availability: Google Scholar can offer free full-text indicators for 96 percent of Green OA articles, PubMed's rate is 29 percent, and Scopus's is zero. Subscription-based journal indexes and OpenURL link resolvers are, at present, incapable of indicating Green OA full-text availability. Vendors of subscription-based indexes and OpenURL link resolvers must overcome this challenge in order to stay relevant in the age of OA. In the meantime, librarians may want to take advantage of Google Scholar and PubMed to better serve library patrons.

The open access (OA) publication model is evolving and gaining support in the international scientific community. However, there is no evidence regarding the open access pathways being used in educational research or regarding the relationship between its subject categories and various scientometric indicators. The objective of this study was to use InCites to analyse documents published in journals from 2010 to 2016 in the SSCI categories of ‘Education and Educational Research’, ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ and ‘Education, Special’. The percentage of documents published in the Gold OA model increased gradually over the period studied and was higher than in the Green OA model. ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ was the subcategory with the highest percentage of documents published in the Gold OA. There was greater international collaboration on articles and reviews in Gold OA, especially in the pure model (publications in Gold Open Access journals), and the percentage of articles cited was higher in the Green OA and Gold OA models than in a non-OA model. There was no evidence that the Gold OA hybrid was cited more often than Green OA, and both had more impact than Gold OA pure. The Category Normalized Citation Impact values and the presence of documents in first quartile journals were higher in OA than in non-OA models. A more detailed analysis of the percentiles of the most cited publications clearly demonstrates that OA publications dominated the top percentiles of most cited articles to a greater degree than non-OA publications. The ‘Education, Special’ subcategory showed the greatest international collaboration and the highest percentage of cited documents.

Some Research Wants to Be Free, Some Follows the Money: Bogus Journals Complicate the Open Access Movement

Choosing the Target Journal: Do Authors Need a Comprehensive Approach?

Is it wrong for an author to pay a journal to publish a research paper? This has become one of the most common questions audiences ask when I speak at universities and meetings in my role as the editor-in-chief of a medical journal. The proliferation of open-access journals — defined broadly as journals whose content is available freely without barriers apart from those involved from the ability to use the Internet itself [2] — is causing important changes in the world of scholarly publishing. Open access also confuses readers, which should cause journals and the press to promote education and dialogue. Unfortunately, headlines like "Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee" [7] and "The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing" [6] make that dialogue harder to sustain. Let's try to keep it cool for another 900 words or so, and examine the various ways information can be disseminated, as well as the incentives that each approach might create. Before diving in, it is worth remembering what journals actually do, and what "scholarly publishing" means. For a few dollars a year, one can create a website or blog, and post research results on it instantly; most academic departments have websites that likewise allow near-immediate dissemination of new knowledge at no cost to the scientist. Instead, most researchers opt to endure peer review's indignities and delays, and some even pay for the privilege. Reasons for this vary, but the perceived values of scholarly publication include the validation of one's findings by colleagues, the ability to participate in the debate that advances a specialty's knowledge (an essential part of the scientific method), the wider dissemination of one's work afforded by the reach of a good journal or publisher, and the primacy that university promotions committees place on peer-reviewed publications. Most things that have value also have costs. Journals' expenses generally are not offset by advertising revenue [4]. Speaking generally but accurately, some of the remaining costs can be covered in two ways: Charging users or users' institutions to access content in a journal (a subscription-based model), or charging authors to publish in a journal (one common open-access model, though other open-access approaches certainly exist). In broad terms, the subscription model involves dividing costs by the number of readers or users, while a common alternative involves dividing costs by the number of articles published. Subscriptions are premised (and critically dependent) upon the idea that the contents of the journal are worth paying for. This tends to incent particular behaviors on the part of journals, including a focus on quality of the finished product, and a stringency of process that confers an air of selectivity; high-rejection-rate journals in medicine often are considered more prestigious. While no doubt there are some excellent open-access journals, and it is clear that not all subscription-model journals achieve those two aspirational standards, the incentives created by the subscription approach (along with the relative novelty of the open access movement) remain sufficient to allow easy substantiation of the following claim: The best journals in medicine and science still sell subscriptions. Even so, there are some important philosophical and practical reasons why open access is gaining traction, and for why the answer to the opening question of this editorial is unequivocally "no" — or at least "not in all cases". First, governments fund a great deal of research, and taxpayers fund governments. Because of this, there is an ethical case to be made that publicly funded work should be publicly available. Moving the paywall back from the subscriber to the author, as in an open-access model, accommodates this principle. Because of this, major public funders of research in the United States and Europe — including the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom — have open-access mandates. Some university librarians assert that rising subscription costs represent a crisis that impairs their ability to support the academic mission [8]; many libraries support open access for this reason among others [10, 11]. Finally, most [9] open-access models allow authors to retain copyright, allowing them to disseminate their work on university websites, and distribute it elsewhere without further charge. There is evidence that that open-access articles are more influential in terms of usage than are articles placed behind subscription-model paywalls [3, 5], although truly fair comparisons on this question will be difficult to conduct. But open access has a dark side. There is a perception that if journals collect fees from authors rather than subscribers, those journals will accept work of lower quality in order to collect more fees. This perception is what lies behind the opening question of this essay, and was the motivation behind a recent "sting" carried out by the journal Science [1]. The journal found a very high proportion of open-access journals that purport to do peer review appear to be little more than pay-to-play scams [1]. I hasten to add that many others are entirely reputable, some open-access journals have impact factors several times higher than any orthopaedic surgery journal, and as we all know, the quality of subscription-model journals also varies widely. I suspect many subscription-model journals would have been "stung" had Science opted to include them in its recent operation; one need not be a cynic to imagine why a subscription-model journal like Science might not choose to do so. Finally, open access is impractical for many researchers in a specialty like orthopaedic surgery, where most research is not funded extramurally. Open access fees can cost several thousand dollars, and most authors simply cannot or will not pay them. By way of disclosure, Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research® is a hybrid. We remain principally a subscription-model journal, but our publisher, Springer®, offers authors an open access option in which — for USD 3000 — authors can retain copyright on their paper, and the work will be accessible to all users without charge to those users. Few authors choose this option. Importantly (we believe), in a variation on the open-access theme: 1 year after publication, all of the content in CORR® becomes freely available to everyone on PubMedCentral at no cost to authors. The fact that major public funding agencies, large university libraries, and multinational publishers are behind open access suggests it is here to stay. We do not completely know how this emerging trend will change scholarly publishing in general, and orthopaedic publication practices in particular, but I have a strong sense that it will. Stay tuned.

FTC Sues OMICS: Claims Open Access Academic Publisher Scams Academics

Background Hybrid and gold open-access (OA) are common publishing models. The latter requires fees to allow full-text visibility, whereas hybrid journals offer the option to publish gold OA or for free (subscription-based) where users with access can get the full-text. We evaluated the impact of the publishing model and other factors on medical journals’ impact. Methods A sample of hybrid and gold OA medical journals indexed in Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus were included. The effect of the publishing model and other factors on journals’ impact factor (IF), CiteScore, quartile, and number of citations was assessed. Results 402 journals were included, 201 in each group. Hybrid and gold OA journals had a median age of 32 and 21 years, respectively ( P <0.001). While gold OA journals had a slightly higher median IF (3.3 vs. 2.9; P =0.021), more hybrid journals had Q1 ranking in Scopus (57.7% vs. 43.8%; P =0.091). Publishing model, journal’s age, being of an organization/society, and EMBASE indexation didn’t affect IF, CiteScore, number of citations, and WOS quartile ( P >0.05). However, gold OA model wasn’t significantly associated with Scopus Q1 ranking (OR, 0.49; 95% CI, 0.25-0.94; P =0.032), indicating that hybrid journals were more likely to have such ranking. Conclusion These findings indicate that gold OA publishing doesn’t result in higher impact or journals ranking. Therefore, authors can continue to submit their work to high impact hybrid journals if their interest is getting published in reputable prestigious journals regardless of their publishing model. Gold OA journals are encouraged to reduce their fees to facilitate global research access.

The European Journal of Mineralogy (EJM) is owned by four European learning Societies (DMG, SEM, SFMC and SIMP). The journal, published under a commercial publisher, used the open access hybrid model. Early 2018, it was decided to move to full open access. In this talk, we discuss the transformation challenges and its impact. It took us two years to fully complete this transformation. Since 2020, the journal is published as gold open access by a reputable open access publisher offering very moderate APCs. The quality and attractiveness of the journal has improved considerably, namely: wider dissemination, reduction of the processing time for publication, reduction of the cost of production by more than 50%. Notwithstanding, the first nine months of 2020, the number of submissions decreased compared to previous years, but we are now back to the same submission rate as before. It means that the implementation of APCs, which was new for many authors, has only marginally affected the attractiveness of the journal. Nevertheless, in order to help authors adjusting, the current APCs rates are still below the real cost of production. The nominal cost will be reached only in a few years. The learning societies have also launched APCs waiver programs to help authors who have difficulties to pay full rates. The open access revolution of EJM is work in progress. We still have to transform the past hybrid volumes into open access formats. This will be implemented as soon as APCs generated funds fully cover the running cost of the journal. Once all EJM volumes are in open access, the cost of a paper published in EJM will be fully transparent to authors, institutions and tax payers. It will correspond exactly to the APCs paid. It was never the case in the previous hybrid system. This is a major achievement thanks to gold open access.