Chaos

Chaos

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It is indicative of the chaotic nature of the new US administration that we’ve had to rewrite this portion of the newsletter five six times and it may already be obsolete by the time you read this. But as part of the wave of executive actions, the Trump administration has halted the payment of all federal grants (an action rescinded,but then not really rescinded, and now halted by a federal judge), as well as blocking all external communications from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), including its agencies the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and frozen grant review at the National Science Foundation (NSF). These pauses are said to be temporary, but just exactly what “temporary” means is entirely unknown.

This confusion and poor communication have wreaked havoc on scientific publication activities and meetings schedules – at C&E we’ve heard from journals that have been urgently asked to pull pending papers (more on this below) and seen speakers from federal agencies pull themselves out of long-planned sessions at scientific and publishing meetings scheduled for later in the year. 

Initial reports suggested that DHHS researchers would not be allowed to submit articles to journals nor abstracts to meetings, although a new memo from NIH states that papers that have been reviewed and approved internally are allowed to be submitted, but “posting preprints, or unreviewed manuscripts, online is on hold.” 

Meanwhile, MedPage Today reports:

The CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal, not merely its own internal periodicals…. The move aims to ensure that no “forbidden terms” appear in the work. The policy includes manuscripts that are in the revision stages at journals (but not officially accepted) and those already accepted for publication but not yet live.

The forbidden terms reportedly include in “gender,” “transgender,” “pregnant person,” “pregnant people,” “LGBT,” “transsexual,” “non-binary,” “nonbinary,” “assigned male at birth,” “assigned female at birth,” “biologically male,” and “biologically female.” 

MedPage Today notes that these terms, particularly “gender,” appear in demographic information about the population studied in many researcher papers. The scope of the edict could therefore be large, effecting research on nearly any topic (infectious disease, heart disease, cancer). 

Nelson Memo

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None of the executive orders issued thus far have direct bearing on the Nelson Memo, but that is not surprising. Embargo policies related to journal publication are not exactly top priority for the new administration, which is only just assembling its Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). However, the focus in existing orders on rooting out DEI initiatives from federal agencies does not bode well for the Nelson Memo. For reasons that were never entirely persuasive, the rationale for the Nelson Memo was framed as increasing equity. (One could just as easily argue, and indeed the Impact Statement that accompanied the Nelson Memo acknowledges this point, that the policies described in the memo would decrease equity for many researchers, including early career researchers and those without federal funding.)

This “equity” framing is likely enough to doom the Nelson Memo on its own. But if that were not enough, the new administration has declared that it is rolling back all new regulations created during Biden’s term, leaving the fate of the Nelson Memo all but sealed.

While agencies could, in theory, implement zero-embargo policies even if the memo is rescinded, given the framing of the Nelson Memo policies as a DEI initiative (and a Biden one to boot), this seems unlikely. It’s also hard to square the Nelson Memo’s extensive open data requirements with the administration’s early efforts to remove huge swaths of data from public accessibility. 

We’ll learn more when the nominated OSTP Director and heads of the various agencies are confirmed but suspect the Nelson Memo is, for all intents and purposes, dead. 

Morressier Acquired by Molecular Connections

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News broke last week that start-up Morressier has been acquired by Molecular Connections for an undisclosed sum. Morressier is perhaps best known for its conference abstract and proceedings management software but more recently expanded into research integrity and journal manuscript submission systems. 

Morressier had raised nearly $41 million from venture capital firms (including Cherry Ventures and Owl Ventures) as well as a roster of industry luminaries including Martin Jagerhorn (AVEDAS, ChronosHub), Pote Lee (iGroup), Jan Maier (AVEDAS), Jan Reichelt (Mendeley), and Annette Thomas (Nature, Clarivate, and the Guardian). James Butcher observes that no investors were quoted in the press release, suggesting a valuation well short of expectations (and perhaps even well short of the capital invested). 

While achieving some prominence in the industry, Morressier has long downplayed the amount of competition it faced in the meetings business. For example, the company wrote in 2017 that “Morressier is the first comprehensive solution that takes academic conferences into the digital realm” (a statement emblematic of their many industry presentations) when, even in 2017, it was already a crowded market with competition from organizations like Cadmium, CTI, Mira Conferencing, and many others.

Developing a journal submission system seemed an unlikely pivot for Morressier given the well-entrenched incumbents and the high-profile failures of well-resourced efforts to enter the market by both PLOS and Elsevier (we cataloged these failures and described the steep hill Morressier must climb in the April 2023 issue of The Brief). On the other hand, dissatisfaction with incumbent journal systems is widespread and Morressier’s launch partner, IOP Publishing, lent the effort credibility. 

Morressier’s vision of a manuscript submission system coupled with research integrity software addresses an acute frustration voiced by publishers who have struggled to integrate such software into incumbent systems. It remains to be seen whether Morressier’s new submission system (set to launch in “limited release” in April 2025 according to their website) will support wider modularization (enabling, for example, plug-and-play integration with third-party plagiarism detection or statistical verification services, email systems, and identity management services, among other services), as we have broadly advocated for, or whether it will only tightly integrate Morressier’s (and now Molecular Connections’) own solutions. 

In the short period of time since Morressier announced it was working on a manuscript submission system, the market has changed dramatically. Springer Nature has matured its in-house system, Snapp (which we previously described as “a name that is simultaneously overly optimistic yet exceedingly dull while conjuring to mind a mildly refreshing apple beverage”), effectively shrinking the market for third-party systems. At least one new entrant (eworkflow) has launched a competing service. Wiley has been quietly repositioning its portfolio in this area, which includes eJournal Press, Phenom, and Research Exchange. And most notably and recently, Silverchair announced the acquisition of ScholarOne, energizing one of the largest incumbents and at the same time creating an end-to-end platform solution.

We do not know if these market moves precipitated the sale of Morressier or if there were other considerations. However the acquisition came about, the new ownership by Molecular Connections offers intriguing combinations.

As Roger Schonfeld writes in The Scholarly Kitchen, “The opportunity for Molecular Connections is to provide a platform – Morressier’s – on which a variety of its existing services can more effectively reach the market.” Jignesh Bhate, Molecular Connection’s CEO, terms this “a hub and spoke model, in which Molecular Connections already has several spokes and Morressier can serve as the hub for publishers.”    

One of Molecular Connections’ “spokes” is its AI/ML content classification and semantic tagging. Applying this to Morressier’s corpus of manuscripts, conference abstracts, and proceedings would provide associations with unprecedented content intelligence. Content intelligence is a foundational capability for the AI use cases of today (e.g., AI-driven peer reviewer identification) and the agentic AI use cases of tomorrow. The backbone of AI is highly structured content. Yet for most organizations the content in these systems is loosely structured at best. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity for Molecular Connections.

By connecting this powerful content intelligence to customer data through the right marketing technology (e.g., customer data platforms), the benefits multiply. You gain deeper audience intelligence to make smarter decisions, and deliver better, more personalized customer experience and marketing campaigns. 

Of course, to maximize this value, associations that work with commercial publishers will need full access to their data. This is something we wrote about in our recent post “The Case for Data Sovereignty.” 

But we get ahead of ourselves. The first test for the new combination will be the release of Morressier’s new submission management system, dubbed “Journal Manager,” this spring (one can only assume time saved in naming the product is being put to use on developing it). 

Beyond the APC

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One constant of the last few decades of the open access (OA) movement is that there is little consensus to be found. Almost 25 years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative, there are still ongoing arguments about even the very basic terminology of OA. One exception, however, is that other than native-OA commercial publishers, we’ve reached a point where even the earliest champions of the APC (article processing charge) model for OA have turned on it. The search for new, more equitable models continues, and the last few months have offered some new developments worth noting.

First is the latest wrinkle from CERN regarding their SCOAP³ model. While SCOAP³ has been around since 2014, CERN is introducing a new program that will preferentially pay participating publishers more if they adhere to CERN’s preferred open science principles, such as requiring data sharing or transparent peer review. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for OA models is wanting more for less – increasing demands on the labor and technology needed for the publication process while simultaneously demanding lower prices. Here, CERN should be applauded for recognizing the additional costs involved in the activities they favor and a willingness to provide support for them.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has signed its second “Read and Green” agreement, the first with the Couperin consortium in France and now with the Elektron consortium in Belgium. These deals provide “read” access to consortium members, along with the rights to self-archive green OA zero-embargo versions of their accepted manuscripts from hybrid journals. ACS’s Read and Green deals offer a middle ground between publishers allowing green zero embargo at no cost and those requiring authors to pay fully gold OA fees for compliance. While some funding agencies have tried to block any payments for green compliance, it’s likely that many libraries won’t be affected by such regulations, as funds from grant overheads and other sources don’t seem to be under the same regulatory regime as those controlled directly by researchers.

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is breaking new ground by combining something like a transformative agreement with the Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) model. While many S2O journals act as traditional subscription titles until their threshold earnings level is met and that year’s volume of the journal flips to fully OA, here ASM offers subscribers an upsell that will ensure that authors’ will see their papers published OA, regardless of the journal’s success in S2O. In addition to providing a more concrete value for subscribers, ASM’s model solves the problem inherent in some S2O models where authors may be unsure at the time of submission whether their article will be published OA or not. 

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) offers an update, reaffirming the organization’s 2020 pledge to move its entire portfolio to OA by 2026. ACM notes that there is still “a long way to go before the entire program can be financially sustainable.” The plan has long called for authorship charges to be paid through institutional memberships affiliated with corresponding authors as well as directly through APCs. The ACM Digital Library will be moving to a freemium model at the end of 2025, where the full-text articles, abstracts, and “research artifacts” for published articles will be freely available to all. ACM members and institutions that have paid for the ACM Open program will have access to “a suite of additional features being added over the next few years, including AI tools for language translation, content recommendations, topic collections, enhanced conference data and metadata, thousands of videos and animations, advanced search, the curated index of 3.8M records from non-ACM publishers, and a list of additional features and functionality to assist DL users” in conducting research. It will be interesting to see whether the market, particularly librarians more focused on paying for access rather than platforms or features, consider these additional services worth paying for.

Briefly Noted

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Impacts of the new administration’s far-reaching and ever-changing actions on the many nonprofit research societies are still unknown, although the National Council of Nonprofits has a useful tracking document for what the various Executive Orders may mean for your organization.

Tech companies like Meta wouldn’t be so brazen as to knowingly use databases of pirated material like LibGen and Sci-Hub to train their AI models, right? Right? It turns out that Meta has done just that, as revealed in materials released in Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms (one of the earliest AI copyright lawsuits). Meanwhile, a hearing was held in the case against OpenAI filed by three news organizations, and a decision is pending on OpenAI’s motion to dismiss.

NIH is experimenting with a less-than-ideal approach to research reproducibility. Essentially, NIH asked funded researchers to nominate their own research results for double-checking by contract labs (and offered up to $50,000 to pay for that work). As we’ve argued elsewhere, failing to repeat someone else’s experiments does not mean that those experiments were invalid. There’s more merit in testing someone’s conclusions, which adds new knowledge to a field, rather than just copying what someone else has already done. Apparently, however, we won’t know how effective the NIH’s new program is, because “The agency has no plans to make the resulting data public.”

The Netherlands has proposed cutting higher education funding and, in particular, “funds for Open Science are explicitly being reduced.”

IOP Publishing’s Kim Eggleton offers a look at efforts helping combat research integrity issues and offers a plea to technology developers to do more in bringing new tools into their products. As more and more tools are developed, we need more modular and open systems that allow plug-and-play integration of new services.

The Chinese government announced new measures to crack down on research fraud, including “strict punishment for misconduct such as fabricating or falsifying research findings; buying, selling, ghostwriting, or proxy-submitting research manuscripts or project application materials; buying, selling, falsifying, or tampering of experimental data; and other forms of academic misconduct.”

Back in the November issue of The Brief, we covered eLife’s delisting from the Web of Science (WoS), arguing that while what eLife is doing is a valuable experiment, asking bibliometric databases to index everything, regardless of its nature, fundamentally alters those databases and makes them into entirely different (and in many ways less usable) products. Force11 seems stuck on this notion, however, and put out a “Thought Piece” calling for bibliometric databases to reorient themselves toward innovation and experimentation. While the article offers interesting thoughts on what such a product might be, we suspect that WoS, Scopus, and others will continue to let the market dictate their activities, rather than morphing into testing beds for new publication models.

We at The Brief are increasingly wary of reading great significance into the changing OA policies of high-visibility but relatively low-quantity funders, but the continuing likelihood of unintended consequences remains of interest. Case in point: Wellcome, which spent £7.2M (around $9M USD) in 2021/22 (approximately 0.08% of revenue in the $11B journals market), has updated its OA funding policies as of January 1. Block grants can no longer be used to pay APCs in subscription journals, even those considered “transformative” by Jisc. Such a policy will most likely result in creating more transformative agreements at universities, which will pay for those deals out of library funds not derived from Wellcome’s block grants. While this will allow Wellcome-funded researchers to continue to publish where they want to publish, such agreements further consolidate the market power of the largest commercial publishers, which, we assume, is not Wellcome’s intention here.

Congratulations are due to Curtis Brundy for being named Dean of University Libraries at UMass Amherst and to David Nygren, the new Chief Business Development Officer at Silverchair.

As if we didn’t have enough on our plates! Now we have to learn new names for every virus?

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Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos. —Will Durant