Shaping the Future of Physical Science Communications IOP Publishing – Did You Know?
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM 2019 Shaping the future of physical science communications IOP Publishing – Did you know? Almost half of all the world’s Nobel prize-winners in physics have published 100% 1998 articles with us As a society publisher, We launched the first fully 100% of the financial open access journal in surplus that we make goes physics, New Journal of directly to the Institute of Physics, in 1998 Physics to support their mission to advance physics for the benefit of society, 83% to meet global challenges, and to develop the future 83% of our journals saw generation of scientists an impact factor increase in 2019 40 27 50 Our journals publish articles We publish 27 journals in the top quartile for impact factor and across 40 subject areas, 50 in the top two quartiles for impact factor reaching beyond physics and into medicine, mathematics, earth science, neuroscience, biophysics, chemistry and engineering, to name For authors publishing in just a few our gold open access 3,000 journals, we offer waivers We have more than 3,000 and discounts to editorial board members lower-income countries in 50 countries Two articles are downloaded 180 from IOP Publishing journals Researchers from 180 countries downloaded journal articles every second from our content platform IOPscience in 2019 1 An overview from Steven Hall, Managing Director Shaping the future of physical science communications 2019 was another year of challenge for scholarly communications. At IOP Publishing we sought further to improve our services to researchers, reviewers, editors and our publishing partners, while at the same time meeting the demands from funders and universities for greater open access. The debate on how to accelerate the growth of open access continues unabated. We have been an open access publisher for more than 20 years, and in the last few years have very significantly increased the open access publishing options for our authors. We have made almost all of our subscription journals hybrid, built up our portfolio of fully open journals to 14 by the end of last year, and made “transformative agreements” that enable all authors at an institution or in a country to publish on an open access basis in our journals. We have continued to argue that high-quality research demands high-quality peer review, and that in any transition to a dominant open access model, the costs of that high-quality peer review must be met. The demands from some funders and universities for immediate green open access under CC BY licences imply that there is no cost in high-quality peer review, or that our investment in the management of peer review and the development of strong journals can simply be appropriated. We must resist that notion and argue for the gold open access model and for funding arrangements that enable research-intensive institutions themselves to transition to open access publication of their researchers’ outputs. During 2019, we negotiated or renewed transformative agreements, in a variety of forms, in 10 countries. More will be agreed in 2020. These agreements combine licensed access to our journals with open access publishing by authors at participating institutions. In some countries, including Austria, Norway and Sweden, we are now publishing close to 100% of eligible articles on an open access basis. They require a great deal of effort on our part to make them work effectively, but we believe that effort is worth it. During 2020, we aim to work with our partners to bring as many of their journals as possible into such agreements from the start of 2021. The introduction of our Open Physics initiative has been another important development, setting out our commitment to access, transparency and inclusivity. Open Physics focuses on how we disseminate high-quality research, increase its visibility, and encourage reproducibility and access to data. It is also our promise to ensure inclusivity and improve diversity at every step of the publishing process. Genuine diversity, inclusion and equality in research means better science. It’s not a numbers game, it’s not about ticking boxes or achieving quotas. As publishers, we need to ensure that our contributors represent the diversity of the physical science community. But to make the most of that diversity, at every step of our publishing process we need to be certain that everyone is treated equally and that the same opportunities are available to all. Over the last 12 months, following a rigorous study of our practices, we have introduced a number of new initiatives, including trialling transparent peer review on a number of our journals and setting stretching targets for the gender and geographic diversity of our reviewers. We will be rolling out some exciting new initiatives in support of better peer review during 2020. Partnerships with other societies remain central to our mission. In June, we were delighted to announce that The Electrochemical Society (ECS) had chosen to publish its journals with us, including the most respected journal in its field, theJournal of The Electrochemical Society. Complementing our existing applied physics programme, the ECS Digital Library went live on our IOPscience platform at the start of 2020. We exist as publishers to ensure that there is trust in scientific research and advance scientific discovery through its widest dissemination. This report details how we have contributed to that in 2019. We have done so through the professionalism, commitment and sheer hard work of our colleagues and all those they work with – authors, reviewers, editorial boards, librarians and partner organisations. I thank you all for your loyalty and support. Steven Hall, Managing Director, IOP Publishing Open Physics – our commitment to improving 2 access, transparency and inclusivity We recognise the incredible value and impact of scientifi c research and, at IOP Publishing, we believe that wider and faster access to this trusted source of knowledge is key to accelerating scientifi c discovery. Daniel Keirs, Associate Director, Journal Strategy Increasing our range of high-quality, open access journals To further expand access to research, we need to be focused on growing the amount and the proportion of open access articles in our journals every year. We now offer an open access option in all of our primary research journals, including 14 journals that exclusively publish on a gold open access basis. New OA journals launched in 2019 include: JPhys Complexity From the publisher of the Journal of Physics series Open access research at the nanoscale iopscience.org/jphyscomplexity iopscience.org/mlst iopscience.org/nanox New partner OA journals in 2019 include: iopscience.org/ijem ISSN 2631-7990 Materials Research Express We also announced the transition of our largest journal, Materials Research Express, to a fully open access publication model with effect from the 2020 volume. Open access in numbers 14 70% 63,000 We now publish 14 fully The number of submissions to The IOP Conference Series open access journals our fully open access journals journals published more than increased by more than 70% 63,000 open access papers in 2019 Accelerating the transition to open access through transformative agreements Transformative agreements are key to accelerating open access growth. We now have licensing agreements in place in 10 countries worldwide. Key: Norway Poland Sweden Hungary UK Austria the Netherlands Switzerland Germany Saudi Arabia Promoting open data sharing To encourage wider sharing of research data, we announced a new open data policy pilot on three of our journals; Environmental Research Letters, JPhys Complexity, and Machine Learning: Science and Technology. The policy requires all published articles to include Data Availability Statements (DAS) stating whether the data is publicly accessible and, if so, its location using a persistent and unique identifier. Enabling transparent peer review We provide a high-quality peer-review experience, with more than 60 staff across our global offices dedicated to managing the process. We believe that peer review itself can become more open to allow others to see the expertise, rigour and discussion that go into a decision to publish an article. We have introduced a model called transparent peer review for three of our journals, Environmental Research Letters, JPhys Materials and Journal of Neural Engineering, as a choice for our authors and reviewers. The move will bring more visibility to the process, as well as improving quality and reducing bias. Embedding equality, diversity and inclusion into everything we do We made significant progress towards ensuring that our publishing options are as accessible to as many researchers as possible. We have established a diversity and inclusion committee; introduced a gender-neutral title option on our peer-review account creation form; provided guidance for reviewers and training for our in-house editorial staff on unconscious bias; and continued to trial a double-blind peer-review option on several of our journals. Key achievements for 2019 include: The appointment of a Agreed targets to help diversify NEW Research Integrity & Inclusion our editorial boards, including Manager to develop a long- increased representation of Becoming a Friend of the term plan and drive our women and researchers from GENERA Network (a group diversity and inclusion work China and India of organisations committed to gender equality in physics research) Ensuring the highest standards in publication ethics We are one