The day today is Tuesday 11th June 2024. It marks at least 193 days now since the subscription access journal Heterocycles (e-ISSN: 1881-0942) was taken offline by its publisher. Published since 1973, it is a “key” journal in chemistry and contains over 17,000 articles which have been cited at least 164,000 times. The journal is preserved in the CLOCKSS archive.

UPDATE 2024-06-11 posted here. At the time of writing this (2024-04-11), the entire content of a “key” chemistry journal called Heterocycles , with over 17,000 articles in it, from 1973 to 2023, has been knocked offline due to what the publisher vaguely describes as “various circumstances”. The journal has been unavailable to access online since December 2023, which means the content has been offline for four or five months now!

In December last year, it was widely publicized e.g. in Science magazine [1], that Scopus has been instrumental in legitimizing publication scams whereby authors pay to bypass real scholarly peer review and have their work published on a website that looks like a real scholarly journal but is in fact not a proper journal, merely an impersonation of one.

How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals? To seek an answer to the question posed in the title, I sought out reliable data on open access journals.

As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services can be a relatively easy target.

This is just a quick post of appreciation for PCI Registered Reports. I’ve recently joined the PCI RR community as a ‘recommender’. One thing that spurred me to join is a rather unsatisfactory experience I had as a peer-reviewer, reviewing a manuscript where the experimental design was deeply insufficient.

“In statistics, a central tendency (or measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages. The most common measures of central tendency are the arithmetic mean, the median, and the mode.” — Wikipedia. In the UK, we teach school kids how to calculate the mean, median, and mode in Year 6 (kids aged 10-11), it’s simple stuff.

On the 26 ^th October 2021, Springer Nature published version 1 of a (not peer-reviewed) “white paper” titled “Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of Gold open access articles in hybrid journals” by Christina Emery, Mithu Lucraft, Jessica Monaghan, David Stuart, and Susie Winter.

On Monday 29th June 2020, I learned from Retraction Watch that Clarivate, the for-profit proprietor of Journal Impact Factor ™ has newly “suppressed” 33 journals from their indexing service.

In late 2016, Martin Eve, Stuart Lawson and Jon Tennant referred Elsevier/RELX to the Competition and Markets Authority. Inspired by this, I thought I would try referring a complaint to the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about some blatant fibbing I saw Elsevier engage-in with their marketing spiel at a recent conference.