First, things first: growth in articles published each year has outpaced the scientists doing the publishing. With #PublishOrPerish, we all face an ever-increasing workload (writing, reviewing, editing…). It’s been rough.

Strain itself is neutral: this could be a welcome change! Are we becoming more efficient? Are we combatting biases (academic racism, positive result bias)?

If that’s all it were, the solution to strain would be to build a better infrastructure.

But… well… it’s not. 2/n

We see that certain groups are major drivers of this article growth, in some cases seemingly out of nothingness. This includes your classic publishers like #Elsevier and #Springer, but also the upstarts #Frontiers and… most significantly #MDPI.

In numbers, there were nearly 1 million more articles per year published in 2022 (2.8m) compared to 2016 (1.9m). MDPI takes the lion’s share at 27% of that growth, with Elsevier (16%) a distant 2nd.

How did we get to this point? 3/n

I could be nuanced (it's in the preprint!). But let’s be frank: it’s special issues.

“Dear Dr ___, your preeminent work in [FIELDYOUDONTWORKIN] drew our attention to your [COPYPASTEPAPERTITLE] and we were thoroughly aroused. We invite you to submit to special issue with us, who love your preeminence. Yours faithfully, [AROUSED].”

The figure speaks for itself. With my leftover characters, instead I wanna ask y’all to send me screenshots of your favourite SI invitations! Hit me! 😀 4/n

So still… is it worth it? Strain itself is neutral. Maybe these special issues are just giving a voice to authors with less privilege?

Or maybe not. The publishers hosting special issues drastically reduced their turnaround times (TATs: submission to acceptance) - and let’s be clear, that’s INCLUDING revisions. 5/n

Now, it’s not our place to judge what an average TAT is supposed to be, but we’re very confident it’s not 37 days across all research fields. Experiment requests in fruit flies take weeks, whereas mice will take months.

TATs are also supposed to vary from article to article: some articles are great on 1st draft, some need a little TLC, and some need… a lot… Yet #MDPI journals in particular, across the board, accept everything in a blistering 37 days with almost no variation. 6/n

But it’s not just #MDPI: #Frontiers and #Hindawi also grew their share of special issues. One might argue: “These are just labels publishers use. The peer review process is the same.”

Au contraire mon ami : no it’s not. Special issues have lower TATs. They’re intended to be lax. They’re for authors to voice ideas that could turn out to be wrong, but advance the conversation in the field. That’s what they used to be at least… and what made them “special.” But I digress… 7/n

We also looked at rejection rates (RRs), with some caveats: we took a publisher’s word at what their RRs were, and don’t know underlying methods. But we figured RRs will at least be calc’d consistently within groups. We compared relative RRs over time and RRs compared to proportions of special issues.

Again, #MDPI was the maverick, with a unique decline in RRs over time. Not only that, but in both #Hindawi & MDPI, more special issues means lower RRs. The review process *is not* the same. 8/n

@MarkHanson

Indeed, there's a flagrant conflict of interest: each paper accepted pays APCs, each paper rejected costs time and money to handle and pays nothing.

For journals to be honest, they should charge for submission to acknowledge the processing cost – presumably a smaller sum than current APCs – or not charge at all: decouple income from accepting papers.

#ScientificPublishing

@neuralreckoning @MarkHanson

Was talking about community journals. For-profit journals shouldn't exist to begin with.