This article explores a journal’s turnaround time (TAT) trends across ten of the largest publishers that, as of 2020, accounted for more than 2/3 of all journal papers. It utilizes the timestamps of articles that were published in the period 2011/12 compared to the period 2019/20. The author explains why publishing speed matters to authors and why the production stage and the peer review have become faster in the last 10 years. The author concludes that slowing down is evitable and points out an example showing it is possible to have high editorial standards and be fast at the same time.

In September 2022, the SciELO Program has updated the document Criteria, policy and procedures for the admission and permanence of journals in the SciELO Brazil Collection with a new version. The document is referred to as SciELO Brazil Criteria for its purpose and function of contributing to the development of Brazil’s journals, and at the same time, it serves as a reference for the indexing criteria of all SciELO Network collections. The purpose of this evaluation is to monitor, promote and strengthen the development of the SciELO Brazil Collection of journals and its alignment with the open science modus operandi.

The key principle of Plan S states that “from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms.” The Guidance document defines “scientific publications” further as “peer-reviewed scholarly publications”. In light of the accelerating development of journal-independent peer-review services, cOAlition S would like to explicitly state that ‘peer reviewed publications’ – defined here as scholarly papers that have been subject to a journal-independent standard peer review process with an implicit or explicit validation– are considered by most cOAlition S organisations to be of equivalent merit and status as peer-reviewed publications that are published in a recognised journal or on a platform.

The scale of ‘predatory publication practices’ and ‘predatory publication journals’ is global and can have far-reaching consequences. In 2019, to counter what has been termed ‘predatory’ publishing, over 40 academics and publishers from ten different countries reached a consensus definition. David Moher, Director of the Canadian Centre for Journalology  is aware of the threat and calls for change in the research ecosystem. His team’s goal is to help enhance the reporting quality of biomedical journals. They are currently developing a tool that gathers information about journals’ peer-review practice and openness to help authors make better decisions about the journal they should submit their work to.

There are currently 651 active Australian journals. The oldest started in the 19th century, and the 1990s was the top decade in terms of starting new journals. Australian journals mostly belong to or are affiliated with non-profit organizations, or educational institutions. While most of the journals are self-published, the publication of 162 journals has been outsourced to international commercial publishers, with most of these linked to non-profit organizations. About 40% of Australian journals are open access and most of them do not charge author-processing charges. Half of the Australian journals (326) are indexed in Scopus and slightly less than half (301) are included in Web of Science (WoS).

China plans a sweeping makeover of mainland academic journals, turning them into world-class organs similar to British weekly Nature and peer-reviewed US publication Science, to raise the profile and influence of domestic scientific research. The initiative was announced at a press conference co-hosted by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), a government-affiliated organization that serves local scientists, to follow up on the country’s journal of excellence plan drawn up in 2019.

Scholastica has launched its “State of Journal Production and Access” survey of independent scholarly society and university publishers.  The survey explores how these publishers are approaching core aspects of journal production and access. Questions span: article production processes & formats; metadata tagging standards & priorities, OA journal development approaches & funding models, subscription & hybrid access plans. The report will build off of the first survey on journal production and access run in 2020. Responses will be accepted until the 25th of August 2022. Click here to take the survey.

This interview with Petr Knoth, Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at the Open University and Head of CORE , served as the opening segment of the NISO Hot Topic virtual conference, Text and Data Mining, held on May 25, 2022. Todd Carpenter spoke at length with Knoth about the many ways in which text and data mining impacts the present as well as the future. They discussed just how innovative this technology can be for the needs of researchers in the information community. The recording is available at Vision Interview with Petr Knoth

This article, one of three posts published in April 2022 and in July 2022, raises important issues about the peer review process, such as the under-representation of female reviewers, and reviewers from low-income countries. The authors of these 3 posts suggest that payment for reviews should be trialed to address these issues. Hilary Humphreys expresses his views.

The twenty years of HAL (Hyper Article en ligne, a French open repository) and the setting up of the Assembly of Partners are the events in 2021 to be remembered about the Centre pour la Comunication Scientifique Directe (CCSD)’services. Its activity report is online. The year was of course marked by the celebration of 20 years of HAL. It was an opportunity to assess how far CCSD has come and to outline future prospects with the key parties involved in its creation and development.