Journalology #135: Junkification

Hello fellow journalologists,

I’ll be attending the Academic Publishing Europe (APE) conference in Berlin this coming week, so if you’re there too please say hello.

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With that out of the way, here are the news headlines followed by a deep dive into more specialist stories for paid subscribers.

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News headlines

American Chemical Society to run Environmental Health Perspectives journal after funding cuts

After the top journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) went dark in December after the Trump administration cut funding to its parent organisation, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has stepped in and will now run it. When the ACS announced the deal yesterday, it brought relief to many in the research community who feared the 53-year-old premier publication might be dead. Previously published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), EHP was one of the few peer-reviewed journals funded by the government. It published research on the relationship between the environment and human health and has an impact factor of 10.

JB: In April last year The New York Times reported that Environmental Health Perspectives had been put on hold. The journal now has a new home. As the American Chemical Society (ACS) press release explains:

In 2025, NIH elected to donate the journal to a non-governmental publisher through the Federal Surplus Personal Property Donation Program. ACS, as a federally chartered nonprofit organization and eligible donee under the Program, acted quickly to develop a plan to safeguard the future of the journal. EHP was formally transferred to ACS at the close of 2025.

Previously the journal operated under a diamond OA model. APCs will be waived for articles submitted this year, but then the journal will convert to a Gold OA business model, according to a news story in Chemistry World. The ACS also publishes Environmental Science & Technology Letters and Chemical Research In Toxicology.

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Finance professor in Ireland loses 12 papers in journals he edited

Elsevier has pulled a dozen papers by a finance professor in Ireland who oversaw the review of the articles and made “the final decision” to publish them in three journals he edited, according to the retraction notices. The professor, Brian M. Lucey of Trinity College Dublin, and his coauthors disagreed with the retractions, which came a few days before Christmas.

JB: I first heard about this story on December 26 when a LinkedIn post I stumbled across exploded with activity. There was also a thread on a website called econjobrumours, which I’m not going to link to because it was so awful; the level of vitriol and animosity, written by academics using pseudonyms, was truly shocking.

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Retire ‘seminal’ from the scientific vocabulary

Science evolves, and so should its vocabulary. One term that has lingered for far too long is ‘seminal’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word originates from the Latin sēminālis, meaning “relating to seed”, often “the seed or semen of men”. Therefore, describing a paper or discovery as seminal implicitly aligns ‘groundbreaking’ with ‘male’. There are alternatives: foundational, pioneering, influential. None of these relies on reproductive metaphors tied to one sex. The problem is pervasive: in 2025 alone, more than 1,000 papers in the Nature portfolio used seminal in this way, perhaps unwittingly.

JB: I’m interested to hear whether you agree with this suggestion, so I thought I’d experiment with Substack’s poll function. Please click an option below. The survey will be open for one week.

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‘Precocious’ early-career scientists with high citation counts proliferate

The number of ‘precocious’ scientists — those who become top-cited authors early in their careers — has surged in the past few years, according to an analysis of the publishing records of hundreds of thousands of scientists. Many of these precocious authors publish what the analysis calls an ‘extreme’ number of papers — an average of more than one per week. The analysis also found that these authors often cite their own papers at a rate well above the average. Some level of such ‘self-citation’ is common in scientific papers, but the average rate is around 13%, whereas some of these authors’ rates were 25–50%.

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