While Japan has weathered the COVID-19 storm better than most, new data shows Japan’s infectious diseases research effort has been lagging behind for years, drawing criticism from the country’s researchers.

“We are standing on the brink of a global crisis in infectious diseases. No country is safe from them. No country can any longer afford to ignore their threat.”

Dr Hiroshi Nakajima (1928–2013) Former Director-General of WHO (1996)

These prophetic words from the late Dr Hiroshi Nakajima headlined the release of the World Health Organization’s World Health Report 1996, warning of “fatal complacency among the international community” and urging preventative action in the face of impending crises for the globe. Just one generation later, all nations globally have been subjected to a one-in-100-year pandemic that has so far killed more than 6.6 million people and infected more than 650 million.

One wonders what Dr Nakajima would say of his home country, Japan, which has fared better during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with most nations, with 52,000 dead among more than 26 million cases (source: Johns Hopkins University). But new data and the voices of key researchers suggest Japan has been ignoring Dr Nakajima’s warning – and the threat – for too long, by not investing enough in infectious diseases research, despite Japan’s economic status and various strengths in research and innovation.

This exclusive analysis – using data from the Dimensions database of 130 million publications and journals included in the Nature Index – builds a picture of how infectious diseases research in Japan has stalled over the last few decades, and in particular in the years leading up to and including the start of the pandemic. It’s data that comes as no surprise to some of Japan’s leading researchers in the field.

“Cancer is king”

Concerns about the level of Japanese government funding for infectious diseases research have been held by scientists in Japan’s top universities, hospitals and research centres for years.

“Cancer is king, and the genome is queen. Infectious disease is just a pathogen,” quips Professor Makoto Suematsu, Dean of the School of Medicine at Keio University, one of Japan’s research hospital universities. Professor Suematsu, who is keenly interested in biology and public health, describes funding in Japan for infectious diseases research as being “very weak” and “very minor”, the majority of which goes to the government-controlled National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) – with not enough to share around.

Exactly why “cancer is king” is a matter of demography. “The Japanese are suffering from an ageing population, so the budget has increased for taking care of old people. The budget for the elderly is huge – imagine it is a watermelon and one seed is the budget for infectious diseases research. But it [ageing] is a big problem – two-thirds of the Japanese population will be over 60 in 2040,” Professor Suematsu says.

He says funding is also hampered by regulations within Japan and a lack of private investment: “Unlike in the UK, there is no Wellcome Trust or similar bodies.

“Only prestigious institutions get funding from the government, so Tokyo University for example gets lots of funding. Keio and other private universities get limited government support so it’s quite tough for staff supporting COVID research.”

His comments are echoed by Dr Norio Ohmagari, Director of Disease Control and Prevention at Japan’s National Center for Global Health and Medicine (NCGM). He also is not surprised to learn that the data shows Japan lagging behind on infectious diseases research.

“There is little interest in infectious diseases in Japanese medical research,” says Dr Ohmagari, who is also Head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Prevention, Preparedness and Response to Emerging Infectious Diseases.

“I have been an independent infectious disease physician for 18 years now. During this time, however, infectious disease research has been at a low ebb. The development of new drugs has gradually declined in activity.”

Dr Ohmagari confirms that the ageing population’s health is taking priority: “There is a high level of interest in regenerative medicine, genome medicine, cardiovascular disease, which has a large number of patients, lipid disorders and diabetes mellitus.”

Among the indicators of low research activity in the field, Dr Ohmagari points to a lack of collaboration between Japanese infectious disease researchers and colleagues internationally.

“I have the impression that there are not many researchers actively collaborating with foreign countries, perhaps because there are not many researchers in infectious diseases to begin with. Personally, I am conducting research in Vietnam, and I have exchanges and joint clinical trials with researchers in Europe and the United States,” he says.

Professor Masanori Fukushima raises a further issue: the pandemic could have enabled Japanese researchers to better understand the impact on patients, but due to a lack of access to patients at research hospitals this hasn’t been possible on a large scale.

“COVID-19 patients are not concentrated in university hospitals with research capabilities, and the annual number of COVID-19 patients at university hospitals itself is small,” says Professor Fukushima, Representative Director of the Learning Health Society Institute (LHSI) and Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University.

“Patients admitted to university hospitals are referred from other hospitals, seriously ill, and typically emergency cases, making it difficult for university hospitals to establish a system for continuous research on them.

“COVID-19 patients admitted to university hospitals are not treated by specialists in infectious diseases but by specialists in respiratory medicine and cardiology, as respiratory management is the primary treatment for these patients. In addition, hematologists will be in charge of treating patients with thrombosis; COVID-19 is out of the scope of the study due to their expertise (respiratory medicine, cardiology, and hematology).”

Professor Fukushima says that according to the Ministry for Health and Welfare’s policy, patient samples and other data have been concentrated at the NIID, which is under the direct control of the Ministry. “This makes it difficult for university hospitals with research capabilities to plan and develop virological studies,” he says.

He also says that expert advice has also not always been followed. In spring 2021, Professor Fukushima published a paper (Asking about measures to combat the novel coronavirus – Clinical recommendations: COVID-19 control – Critical appraisal and proposals; Rinsho Hyoka (Clinical Evaluation), May 2021) in which he proposed that all strategic and practical measures against COVID-19 in Japan be left to medical associations and university hospitals, and that specialized hospitals be created or designated and patients concentrated there. “Together with Dr Yokokura, the former president of the Japan Medical Association, I submitted the report to the government, the heads of local governments, and the media, but there has been little response so far,” he says.

“Japan used to be at the forefront of vaccination”

Despite these concerns about the lack of support for infectious diseases research, some scientists are quick to point out that Japan has fared relatively well during the pandemic compared with many nations, and in some ways has handled it better.

Professor Suematsu says: “Despite the size of the limited budget, researchers have very actively investigated infectious diseases. Data sharing has been good with COVID, but it should have been much better with infectious diseases.” 

One leading researcher who was actively involved in the effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Japan is Professor Hiroaki Kitano, President & CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. and Professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School (OIST), who was contacted by the Japanese government to work with the Office for Promotion of Countermeasures against Novel Coronavirus Infections.

Professor Kitano assembled a team of researchers including Dr Makoto Tsubokura of RIKEN who carried out a series of hi-tech simulations to better understand and predict the impact of the contagion on Japanese people within real-world environments, including some important work on the spread of the virus in indoor environments, such as restaurants and bars, and on trains. He has also been involved in international collaborations to produce a global “COVID-19 Disease Map”. See below: Research critical to Japan’s success.

But even Professor Kitano says Japan’s lack of infectious diseases research had impacted on the country’s ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve failed to create any effective vaccine so far,” he says. “We haven’t got a domestically developed vaccine approved yet – even now.

“Japan used to be at the forefront of vaccination; we had a very strong vaccination program, and very strong companies that would create vaccinations. Many companies have actually withdrawn from the vaccine business, so that has substantially reduced the capability for manufacturing and quick response. At the same time, the research funding for infectious diseases has not been that abundant.”

Perhaps recognizing that it had been slow to develop its own vaccines and needing to catch up, the Japanese government recently pledged US$2 billion for vaccine research against future epidemics.

Professor Kitano’s assessment was that it could take up to three years before Japan has its own approved and manufactured COVID-19 vaccine. On that front, he says: “The game is pretty much over, unless vaccines desired for the next stage of infection control – such as nasal vaccines potentially more effective for infection prevention – are to be developed.”

Nevertheless, Professor Kitano praised the Japanese government for its handling of vaccine contracts with the major pharmaceutical companies, and for its leadership in appointing Mr Taro Kono as a Minister in charge of vaccinations. “I think the end result is that their actions saved many people’s lives – I’m sure of that,” he says.

Japan falls behind – what the data shows

In early 2022, data from Nature Index and Dimensions started to point to a disparity in Japan’s reputation as one of the world’s leaders in research, with the amount of research focusing on infectious diseases surprisingly low compared to other leading nations. Furthermore, it was dramatically lower in the case of COVID-19.

But Japan itself is highly regarded for its research, so how did this occur?

Stung by criticism of the lack of research funds by high-profile researchers such as 2012 Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka – and perhaps cognisant of league tables that show Japan slipping behind arch-rivals South Korea and China in publications – the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced a major overhaul of research funding in 2017, followed up in 2020 with the establishment of a ¥4.5 trillion (US$43 billion) fund for research. However, researchers such as Yamanaka have pointed out that funding allocation can be mixed, with some areas losing out over other hot topics. 

When we look at how these factors play out on the world stage, we can see in data from Nature Index that Japan’s overall research output had been in steady decline from 2015-2019. It saw a rise in 2020 but resumed its decline in 2021 and into 2022. (see Figure 1).

Data derived from Dimensions shows that while Japan ranked fifth in the world in terms of all article outputs in 2019-2021 (see Figure 2), it was ranked below 11th globally for infectious diseases articles (Figure 3).

All infectious diseases publications* in Dimensions (2019-2021)

To put Japan’s research output across all areas in context, between the years 2015 and 2021 Japan accounted for 3.8% of total publications with nearly 1.3 million according to Dimensions data, making it the fifth biggest in the world in terms of output. However, while this position rises to fourth when it comes to cancer research with 5.5% of publications, it drops markedly to below 11th for infectious disease research, accounting for only 2.5%, and this drops to 2% when we look at just the last two years in 2020 and 2021 (see Figure 4).

Japan 2015-2021 – publications* and rank

When we flesh this out with the performance of other countries in related areas, we can see that while China, the UK and Germany have surged ahead in recent years when it comes the output of research across 90 different infectious diseases in Nature Index (tracked in Dimensions), Japan has fallen behind the likes of Switzerland and The Netherlands. Even more starkly, it has failed to match the huge spikes in coronavirus-related research seen in other major industrialized countries (in Figure 5, the US has been removed due to it being so far ahead).

As stated earlier, while much of the Japanese government’s funding for infectious diseases research is directed to the National Institute of Infectious Disease (NIID), and despite being regarded as one of the top institutions in Japan for infectious diseases by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), NIID does not even appear in the top 10 of Japanese institutions by number of publications on COVID in 2020 and 2021, with only 287 articles out of a total of 14,960 articles for Japan – or only 1.9% of the country’s output – while the University of Tokyo had 1,417 articles or 10% of overall publications.

Patents pending?

Further to the earlier criticism about Japan’s reduced vaccine development capacity, by exploring data of patents recorded during the first two calendar years of the pandemic we can see that Japan’s activity has mirrored that of its research performance, ranking 11th in the total number of COVID-19 patents recorded. The countries and regions ahead of it, however, are quite different, with South Korea, India and Taiwan all well ahead of Japan (see Figure 6).

COVID-19 patents recorded in Dimensions (2020-2021)

“We must prepare for the next pandemic.”

While COVID-19 isn’t showing any signs of going away, what lessons can Japan learn from its experience? And what does the future hold for its infectious diseases research and collaborations?

The recent announcement of a concerted vaccination research program to protect against future epidemics in Japan will see a US$2 billion injection of funds into this critical area, which is no doubt welcome news. And while the experts say there needs to be increased government funding for research, that’s not their sole focus.

Dr Ohmagari says despite the lack of infectious diseases research being conducted in Japan, the country already has a good base to build upon. “I think the level of Japanese research on infectious diseases, especially basic research, is high by global standards. However, epidemiological and clinical research is not so active. The number of researchers is small,” he says.

The pandemic might already be spurring on that change: “In recent years, young researchers have gradually become interested in clinical and research work on infectious diseases. I hope that they will quickly build up their strength and produce results.”

Professor Suematsu says Japan must learn from the research and healthcare systems in place in other countries. In particular, he’s “very impressed” with the UK’s approach to foster researchers with integrated biotechnology training, something he says “has never happened in Japan”. He also envies the UK government’s central information overview and a network of data sharing.

Professor Kitano agrees that improved data sharing needs to be an outcome from the pandemic. He also proposes that the government pool all of its experts and learn from their collective experience, “in case the next thing comes”.

“That structure is yet to be seen but I am proposing that we need to have this – a group of people who have gone through this kind of ‘wartime emergency’ and understand how chaotic things can be.”

He says this group would be “more of a permanent structure, to provide the government with expert advice next time we have a pandemic”.

“There is a stronger awareness that Japan may need to do better on this front for the benefit of the population,” he says.

Dr Ohmagari says Japan needs to be ready now for what’s next. “COVID-19 has revealed that there is room for improvement in research and development in the field of infectious diseases in Japan. We must prepare for the next pandemic,” he says.

“We have already started to build a system in terms of policy in Japan. However, the same problem was pointed out after the 2009 pandemic influenza, but no measures had been taken. We must reflect on this. We must continue to promote these policies without interruption.

“This will require political will backed by a deep understanding of the public. And our generation of researchers must do our best to ensure that this trend will never be halted,” he says.

In the words of the late Dr Nakajima, Japan must learn the lessons of its past or risk “fatal complacency”.

About Dimensions

Part of Digital Science, Dimensions is a modern, innovative, linked research data infrastructure and tool, re-imagining discovery and access to research: grants, publications, citations, clinical trials, patents and policy documents in one place. www.dimensions.ai 

About Nature Index

The Nature Index is a database of author affiliations and institutional relationships. The index tracks contributions to research articles published in 82 high-quality natural-science journals, chosen by an independent group of researchers.

The Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level and, as such, is an indicator of global high-quality research output and collaboration. Data in the Nature Index are updated regularly, with the most recent 12 months made available under a Creative Commons licence at natureindex.com. The database is compiled by Nature Portfolio, part of Springer Nature.

Image credits:
Main image: Masked commuters in Osaka, Japan. Source: Stock image.
Face masks on sale in Japan. Source: David Swinbanks.
Glove dispensers in a Japanese restaurant. Source: David Swinbanks.
Masked geisha dolls. Source: Rafael Randy Cardoso Garcia.
COVID-19 test and Tokyo 2020 Games concept. Source: Stock image.
Masked commuters in Tokyo, Japan. Source: Stock image.

Simon has 20 years’ experience in scholarly communications. He has lectured and published on the topics of bibliometrics, publication ethics and research impact, and has recently authored a book on predatory publishing. Simon is also a COPE Trustee and ALPSP tutor, and holds Masters degrees in Philosophy and International Business. He lived and worked in Japan for three years in the 1990s.

David has 30 years’ experience in media and communications. With a background in broadcast journalism, his career focus has been in research communication – including science, health science and medicine – spanning 25 years of service in the university sector. His experience also includes both internal and external communications in the health and manufacturing sectors.

David is Chairman for Springer Nature in Australia and New Zealand and Founder of Nature Index. He is also a Senior Advisor to Digital Science. Following a postdoc in deep-sea research at Tokyo University, David began his career with Nature as Tokyo Correspondent in 1986 and established Nature Japan KK in 1987 with two Japanese colleagues, which expanded to 120 employees by 2012 spanning the Asia-Pacific region.

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Sci Foo, as it’s known, is an “unconference” with no fixed agenda, and brings together researchers, innovators, technologists, communicators and policy makers from around the world who are doing groundbreaking work in diverse areas of science and technology. Attendance is by invitation only.

Since the first event in 2006, Sci Foo has aimed to do things differently. Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media, had created a format to bring together thinkers from different fields in the Friends of O’Reilly (FOO) Camp format, but it was Linda Stone who suggested that Timo Hannay (of Nature), Chris DiBona (of Google) and Tim should come together in creating a camp that brought computer scientists together with researchers and technologists.

From Digital Science, I as Head of Strategic Events and our CEO Daniel Hook are co-organisers of the event, along with Cat Allman at Google, Tim O’Reilly and Marsee Henon from O’Reilly, and Magdalena Skipper from Nature. We are ably assisted by many stalwart colleagues from across all four collaborators, who freely give their own time to support the event each year.

The topics of discussion are truly wide-ranging, and include: climate, medicine and disease, machine learning, AI, food systems, astrophysics, sustainability, neuroscience, digital society, and the various health, social, political, technological and economic impacts of the pandemic. No matter what area is being discussed, this diverse group brings a unique level of insight and expertise to the discussion, often sparking new thinking and ideas that can help to drive each individual to continue their work with renewed passion.

At Sci Foo 2022, we’re looking forward to many conversations, “lightning talks” and catching up with our fellow organisers and attendees, old and new. For those attendees unable to attend in person, there will be opportunities to join some sessions virtually. It’s our first ‘hybrid’ event, and if successful we hope to continue with this approach.

To understand more about Sci Foo, see this video from 2018 in which we asked a number of scientists what the future might hold. You can also read about past events, such as Sci Foo 2018, 2019, or the virtual Sci Foo 2021.

If you’re lucky enough to be attending this year’s event, please don’t hesitate to say hi to our Sci Foo crew, including Daniel, Amarjit, Suze Kundu from Dimensions L&C, Steve Scott, Leslie McIntosh from Ripeta, and John Hammersley and Jessica Lawshe from Overleaf.

Look out for online chat about the event via the official hashtag #scifoo and discussion on Twitter and LinkedIn from the Digital Science team.

About the Author

Amarjit Myers is Head of Strategic Events at Digital Science.

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Charlatans in science are sadly not new. Persons making grandiose claims about their knowledge and outrageous cures for diseases have peppered medical history for centuries. With charismatic personalities and opportunities to influence, such individuals have professed false cures in the house of Tsar Nicholas (Rasputin) and misled ailing Londoners during an epidemic (Gustavus). Charmers playing by their own rules – gaslighting others.

Even in the least nefarious circumstances, lone actors can emerge to try to falsify science. Immense pressures placed on scientists to conduct research, publish results and have those results cited would tempt anyone to search for shortcuts. Researchers are humans, after all. Implement these requirements in an environment that supports gamifying just about anything, and even the most honest person could fail under the pressure that’s exerted.

In one case where citations were required for someone’s work, a researcher created fictitious authors in plagiarized papers to cite that work. Their work, in fact. Dr Yibin Lin posted six papers and attempted to submit eight more to preprint servers (see one example here). The case of attempting to accelerate promotion resulted in a 10-year ban from scientific research within the US.

In other cases, the motivations can only be understood from the people themselves, for example those individuals who fake being scientists. There is a long history of people outside of science providing advice as if they were experts. Some amazing citizen scientists exist, but the signal-to-noise ratio favours chaos more than substance.

There are parallels with predatory journals and those who publish their articles in them. In her seminal article on the motivations of authors published in such journals, Tove Faber Frandsen identified two main groups – the unaware and the unethical. The former claim to be ignorant of the existence of predatory journals, and innocent in succumbing to the tried and tested tactics of predatory publishers, the latter, on the other hand, exploit their existence to ensure publications – sometimes to ensure they reap the incentives in place for them, sometimes to publish unsubstantiated research. Most clearly, this has occurred during the pandemic with everything from 5G conspiracy theories to the promotion of debunked drugs and therapies appearing in fake journals.

As harmless as acting alone may seem in such an expansive scientific ecosystem, the consequences of a lone wolf pale in comparison to targeted attacks. Science mercenaries, well-funded by and coordinated with varying industries, can intentionally fracture the confidence in a topic. Seitz and Sanger – trained physicists later hired to undermine the harms of tobacco and climate change – worked on the atomic bomb and had legitimate education and training as physicists. As described in depth in the Merchants of Doubt, the two scientists would eventually testify in court as if they were experts in epidemiology, environmental science, virology, and dozens of other areas to undermine the confidence of overwhelming scientific evidence in the harm of tobacco and the impact of climate change. They are not alone. A whole industry exists to profit from undermining science. Worried that second-hand smoke may kill your industry? The answer seems to be to kill the research by overwhelming the regulatory agencies and polluting the scientific literature.

As with other pandemics, we have seen a plethora of charlatans emerge during the COVID-19 pandemic. From the MBAs who would ‘set the record straight on COVID’ to the self-proclaimed experts on COVID and policy. To illustrate one scam: a scientific piece would be written, typically with one author having credentials in a scientific field. The co-authors either do not exist (e.g. Yan report) or do not have supporting credentials (e.g. research conducted by Walach). In some cases, the ‘papers’ appear in repositories with little proofing evident. In other cases, the work gets published in ostensibly peer-reviewed journals – meaning the peer review, if it happened at all, was not rigorous, such as those articles published in predatory journals. Success in the eyes of the authors would see a scientific social media outcry happen where someone eventually shreds the methodology. But the authors have won. It’s a misinformation strategy: i) Put out bad-faith information on Topic X; ii) Methodology of Topic X is deeply refuted; iii) Topic X is discussed; iv) Words of Topic X are propagated. Win for the bad-faith actors.

This would be like writing an article: Squirrels – Wonderful Companions in the Garden. As everyone knows, evil squirrels steal tomatoes from the garden and throw acorns from trees maliciously trying to deprive the owners of any peace. Cute con artists at best. The authors’ intent would be to spread the lie of the delightful aspects of squirrels – intentionally putting in the key phrase they want propagated in the article title. So when a social media argument ensues, and good scientists cite the title as-is and the bad-faith actor’s message sticks: squirrels are lovely garden mates. And the lie spreads – because we as scientists playing by scientific rules indulge in critiquing the methodology before deciding on the legitimacy of the source. We legitimize their argument.

An individual infiltrating published science with falsehoods still pollutes the ecosystem. But the motivation to put profit over protecting society causes harm at scale. In the end, the tactics of the few will overpower an ecosystem lacking a robust strategy.

Countering nefarious acts and actors must be coordinated throughout the scholarly community – publishers, institutions, and funding agencies, to name a few. Policies and practice must move from the current defensive, reactive position, to the offensive – taking proactive measures to prevent harmful players entering the ecosystem and promoting automated quality checks that scale with the pace of scholarly communication.

For more information about how Ripeta can help make better science easier – for publishers, funders, researchers and academic institutions – please visit the Ripeta website.

About the Author

Dr Leslie McIntosh, CEO | Ripeta

Dr McIntosh is the founder and CEO of Ripeta, a company formed to improve scientific research quality and reproducibility. Part of Digital Science, Ripeta leads efforts in automating quality checks of research manuscripts. Academic turned entrepreneur, Dr McIntosh served as the executive director for the Research Data Alliance (RDA) – US region and as the Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Washington University School in St. Louis. Over the past years, she has dedicated her work to improving science.

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A year into a global pandemic Cathy Holland, our Director of Global Publisher Business Development, looks ahead at how the pandemic has changed the state of open monographs in a post-COVID world.

This month marks one year since everything started shutting down due to COVID-19. In March of 2020 I, along with many others in our industry, had planned to attend the London Book Fair, but that was not to be. While many parts of life were shutting down, scholarly content was opening up, and in particular, monographs. In April, Charles Watkinson wrote that many publishers, and particularly University Presses, had started to make monographs, journals, and other types of content freely available for a period of time.

As the pandemic lingers on even though 2020 is OVER in all senses of the word, we thought it would be interesting to look ahead and predict what may come next for monographs in a post-pandemic world. My personal prediction is that we will see more grants for monographs include earmarked funds for getting works published. This may take a year or even two, but what we have seen through this pandemic is that ‘Open’ is here to stay, and this will need to be supported.

We asked various industry experts to share their thoughts. Here’s what they had to say:

Dr Frances Pinter – Executive Chair Central European University Press and Founder of Knowledge Unlatched:
Post pandemic I’d be looking for more clarity on the three main funding sources for Open Access (OA) books; research funders, institutions and library budgets. This should enable simplified fund flows after we’ve arrived at a consensus on a handful of business models.
I would prioritise retention of excellent editorial standards and quality control, along with cost-reduction of all non-editorial functions through aggregated and automated backroom and workflow services.
I hope we can maintain the diversity, number and range of small- and medium-sized university presses and specialist publishers. Books are important, and keeping the 80% of humanities and social science (HSS) monographs that do not have research funder book processing charges (BPCs) closed is not an option at a time when STEM journal articles are travelling towards a full OA flip.

Emily Poznanski – Director, Central European University Press:
I expect OA books to be the next wave in publishing. My immediate prediction is that an increasing number of authors will expect unrestricted sharing of their books stemming from a general change in authors’ expectations.
However, I expect that not many of these authors will have funding for full book processing charges (BPCs), which leads me to say that publishers, librarians and funders should think creatively of ways to support this now.

Niels Stern – Director, OAPEN Foundation:
The pandemic highlighted the limitations of print books. Libraries witnessed severe e-book price increases, challenging researchers and students. As people explored new routes to digital books, they discovered open access (OA) academic books. The past year has seen a dramatic increase in downloads from the OAPEN Library (hosting 15,000+ OA books). I think this trend will continue.
The pandemic also demonstrated an urgent need for more OA content, including books. To support this, I feel funders will accelerate OA policy development for books. Publishers will experiment with and embrace open publishing with new business models.
Over the last 3-4 years we have seen a fivefold increase in the number of peer-reviewed OA books hosted in the OAPEN Library. This trend will not only continue but also speed up, with new usage patterns caused by the pandemic, new OA book policies, and new business models for open book publishing. In five years we will see a scholarly publishing landscape where open is the default.

Laura Ricci – Consultant, Clarke & Esposito:
The next phase of development will require further investments in infrastructure to support Open Access (OA) throughout the books supply chain.
OA books require different approaches compared to traditional (print and paid-access digital) books – not just in terms of technology, but also standards and incentives.

Dr Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei – Co-Director, punctum books:
The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has once again shown that lack of public access to scholarly research – not only medical literature but also the entire sphere of knowledge production that investigates and reflects upon our human condition – costs millions of lives.
Keeping research closed behind article processing charges (APCs), book processing charges (BPCs), paywalls, and outdated notions of intellectual property will continue to be detrimental to humanity’s chances of survival on this planet.

Ros Pyne – Global Director, Research and Open Access, Bloomsbury:
Even before the pandemic, 2021 was set to be a landmark year for Open Access (OA) books, with policies due to be announced from both UKRI and cOAlition S. Publishers have long offered OA book publishing options, but we’re now seeing increased engagement and innovation which will surely continue. Experiments in collaborative funding models are particularly exciting as they have the potential to substantially expand OA book publication, much as transformative agreements have done for journals.
So where does the pandemic come into this? Over the last year, publishers have seen a significant increase in demand for e-books compared with print; this shift is good news for OA, which is primarily a digital initiative. Finally, as OA monograph publishing becomes more established, I think we’ll also, and not before time, see more attention given to ensuring it supports a diverse authorship as well as a diverse readership.

Elea Giménez Toledo – Director Human and Social Sciences Center (CCHS), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC):
The pandemic has caused small- and medium-sized academic publishers around the world to look more closely at the digital environment as a way to circumvent the obstacles posed by this situation. Digital transformation has emerged in this period as an imperative for the survival of publishers. But in addition, the transition to Open Access has appeared like a not so distant issue for small- and medium-sized publishers who have often considered that it was something that concerned the big ones.
Both issues, critical in scholarly publishing, are now also being analyzed by small and medium imprints. Therefore, one of the predictions that can be made is that the way has been paved for bibliodiversity to also be present in the open scholarly book space. That in those countries where there are no national strategies to promote open publishing programs, the debate can be opened to come up with innovative solutions to enable open publishing or to participate in projects already underway, such as the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). These options are especially necessary to preserve bibliodiversity and multilingualism in the digital environment.

Andrew Joseph – Digital Publisher, Wits University Press:
If publishers have learnt anything from the COVID-19 experience, it’s that OA monographs are very likely to be the way in which scholarly books will be produced in the future. The challenge is to ensure that all publications are included in this shift.
If access is to be meaningful, we need to ensure that technology and funding gaps are bridged for all. Global South publishers need to articulate their needs and drive this shift.

Please join our enthusiastic book group! We would love to amplify more voices on all topics concerning books, monographs, edited works, and more. If you are interested in sharing your thoughts with the wider scholarly communications and research community and would like to write about a topic please reach out to Suze Kundu.

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post Forward Looking Thoughts: Monographs in a Post-COVID World appeared first on Digital Science.

Online learning is fragmenting the traditional model of the university as a single site for both education and research. In this LSE Blog post, Jon Treadway and our Daniel W Hook, discuss how this digital transition is reshaping universities and how altmetrics might enable higher education institutions to redefine themselves in an increasingly aspatial academic environment.

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Few areas of higher education and research have been left untouched by the Covid-19 pandemic – and during 2020, trends emerged that the academic community will be keeping a close eye on in 2021. In this article published in The Times Higher Education, Simon Baker uses the Dimensions platform to look at what the coming months may bring

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In this paper published in Frontiers Research Metrics and Analytics, Daniel W Hook, Simon J Porter, Hélène Draux and Christian T Herzog propose the concept of “real-time” bibliometrics as a new capability for researchers, policymakers and analysts across the sector.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted a different set of needs to analyze trends in scholarship as they occur: Real-time bibliometrics. The combination of full-text search, daily data updates, a broad set of scholarly objects including pre-prints and a wider set of data fields for analysis, broadens opportunities for a different style of analysis. A subset of these emerging capabilities is discussed and three basic analyses are presented as illustrations of the potential for real-time bibliometrics.

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The post Dimensions as a Resource for Analyzing COVID-19 appeared first on Digital Science.

One in every 25 publications that appeared on Dimensions in 2020 refers to COVID-19. Daniel Hook and Simon Porter look at where the resources to support all this research activity have come from, and which research fields are losing out. You can read the full article published in Nature Index.

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The post The COVID brain drain appeared first on Digital Science.

Six months on, has the collaboration worked at addressing that need? What is the impact on peer review? Our guest authors, Dr Sarah Greaves and Jon Treadway are here to reveal the results in the first of three blog posts.

Dr Sarah Greaves has over 20 years of experience within STM editorial and publishing. She was originally an academic researcher before joining the editorial team at Nature Cell Biology after which she became the Publisher for Nature. Sarah launched Nature Communications and Scientific Reports and was recently the Chief Publishing Officer at Hindawi. Throughout her career, she has focused on creating innovative new products and services aimed at solving key researcher pain points whilst ensuring the academic scientist remains at the heart of any publishing decision. Sarah is involved in numerous STEM outreach initiatives, is a volunteer with InToUniversity and is chairing the C19 Rapid Review group. Sarah is also a keen tap dancer and avid support of Norwich City Football Club.

Jon Treadway is the Director of Great North Wood Consulting, where he helps mission-driven organisations understand their businesses and develop actionable strategy. Jon has held strategic and operational leadership roles in the public sector, digital entities positioning for growth and large commercial organisations. He was most recently Chief Operating Officer for Digital Science for four years, before which he worked in the strategy team at Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, and held senior roles in a number of the group’s entities including Nature Publishing Group and Macmillan Education. He spent four years running the largest cultural funding programme in the UK and became a Chartered Accountant (CPFA) while working at KPMG. He is a trustee of Conway Hall Ethical Society. Jon is based in South London, and will happily discuss the merits of Angela Carter or Sproatly Smith.

COVID-19 and the rise in volume of research outputs

During March it was clear that publishers were being swamped with submissions on COVID-19, and that this was impacting multiple elements of their work. The speed of decision making and the robustness of peer review were being affected but, critically, publishers were unable to fast track papers through peer review that were likely to make the biggest difference in treatment or understanding of the virus. Key researchers were also being swamped with requests to review. At the same time, preprint sites saw an explosion in COVID-19 submissions and had to alter their processes to handle these.

A group of publishers led by PeerJ, The Royal Society, Hindawi, F1000 Research, PLOS and eLife joined together to try and address the key issues at the time. They specifically set out to find ways to::

• find enough peer reviewers without always asking the same group of academics
• provide fast turnarounds for authors
• allow quick resubmission to an alternative title
• allow peer reviewer reports to migrate with a paper to an alternative publication venue if it was rejected at the original journal

A wide range of partners came together to create and support the initiative

The group was endorsed by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and supported by the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). The group of publishers worked alongside PREreview, the preprint site, to create a letter of intent for the academic community to sign up to. The group also created a sign-up process for rapid reviewers. Reviewers who signed up committed to fast turnaround times, portable and even open peer review.

A global effort for a global challenge

The response from potential reviewers surprised all those involved – over 1,000 reviewers signed up within two weeks, with further growth continuing in subsequent months as reviewers signed up from across the globe:

Highest volume reviewer sign-ups over time by geography

Total reviewer sign-ups by geography

There are now more than 1,800 rapid reviewers. The response was global, and the pattern of those signing up appears to closely mirror the incidence of disease in different countries, as shown below. The USA and India are comfortably higher than in other countries, with Italy and Brazil closely behind. (Note – for transparency and clarity, COVID-19 sign-ups have been shown on a logarithmic scale while total reviewers signed up are not):

Analysis of reviewer sign-ups & total Covid-19 instances to June 30 by geography. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

Collaboration and its collective impact on the research community

Other publishers have now signed the letter of intent and joined the group, all inspired to try and prevent slower turnaround times and reduce peer review pressure for COVID-19 papers. The group currently has more than 20 members and has signed up publishers including Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press, LifeScience Alliance, University College London and MIT Press, alongside more preprint sites including AfricaRxiv and SSRN, and the Research on Research Institute (RoRI, which Digital Science co-founded) who will help analyse the impact of the collaboration in more detail.

It is clear the collaboration has been a success in terms of impact but has it achieved the aims around peer review and paper transfer? The group has expanded to such an extent that it has impacted many facets of research. In our next blog in two weeks time, we will present an analysis of how the publishing process has been affected, how publishers have used the reviewers who have signed up, and what the experience has been like so far for those reviewers.

The post Does Creating a Rapid Reviewer Pool Improve Trust in COVID-19 Peer Review? appeared first on Digital Science.

Karim joined us from his home in marvellous Massachusetts. Although an MIT graduate, Karim is now based across the river at Harvard Business School. His research involves analysing a range of open source systems to better understand how innovation in technology works. One of his specific research interests is in contest-driven open innovation and how, by throwing problems open to the wider world, we are often able to engage with a range of as yet unexplored solutions, owing to the different approaches a fresh perspective can bring.

Having determined that science is both a collaborative and competitive process, Karim and his team run experiments to better understand how teams are formed, and how different novel ideas are evaluated. Karim is also investigating the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on organisations in terms of optimising scale and scope and gathering insights to help shape future business strategy.

Mirroring the experiences of Digital Science’s own Catalyst Grant judges and mentors, Karim has seen a rise in machine-learning based tech solutions at innovation contests. His latest book,  Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World, includes examples of how AI is now not only having an impact on technology and innovation but also on our everyday lives. Karim’s work informs best practice in research and innovation by conducting research on research.

In this episode of RoRICast, Karim gave us some examples of how AI is not just confined to sci-fi movies and Neal Stephenson novels, though such stories give a great many examples of what is termed ‘strong AI’, capable of carrying out many tasks extremely efficiently. However, ‘weak AI’, that is tech that has been created to do one narrow task very well, has already permeated our everyday lives, whether that is through some of the NLP solutions we have discussed in this blog series, or whether it is something as commonplace as our voice-activated smart devices capable of playing Disney songs on demand, our email spam filters, or even our Netflix recommendations.

Karim discussed some of the potential applications of AI in research, from facilitating collaboration between researchers to writing papers. He also discussed how research can implement aspects of NLP within the research process that relate to peer review. For example, by using an NLP-driven tool such as Ripeta, researchers can receive recommendations on how to improve a paper prior to submission. Ripeta analyses the reproducibility and falsifiability of research, including everything from a well-reported methodology to the inclusion of data that adheres to FAIR principles.

With the rise of the open research movement, preprints have been gaining momentum as an important research output alongside the more traditional journal publications. This is particularly relevant in these current COVID-19 times, where research output is being produced at an unprecedentedly high volume, and many researchers are opting to share their work via preprint that undergoes an ongoing and dynamic review process rather than the more formal journal peer-review process.

A rise in preprint publication has been seen across almost all fields of research in 2020, in part due to the fact that many research areas contribute to solving the challenge of a global pandemic. This has however led to some concern over preprints, and whether they are a trustworthy research output without more formal peer review practices. It is here that a tool like Ripeta could add some level of trust, transparency, robustness and reliability to research shared via preprint even before the work is shared. The Ripeta team investigated this perceived lack of confidence in COVID-19 related preprints and found that although reporting habits in pandemic-related preprint publications demonstrated some room for improvement, overall the research being conducted and shared was sound.

The use of AI in peer review is a hot topic. There are many reasons to use AI in peer review, such as eliminating the potential conflict of interest posed by a reviewer in a very closely related field, or as a means to quickly assess the vast volume of submissions, again for example during a global pandemic. However, there are limitations to the technology, and factors that must be considered when determining whether the AI could be propagating and amplifying any areas of bias within the process, simply by failing to consider the bias within the training data fed to the programme, or by failing to eliminate said bias. As Joris van Rossum explained in his article on the limitations of tech in peer review, AI that has learned from historic decisions made is potentially able to reinforce imbalances and propagate the impact of unconscious biases in research.

Karim went on to describe the way that AI can be built to mitigate such circumstances that would actually lead to breaking down many barriers to inclusion by using AI, providing we as a community invest the time and effort into creating good data, testing the technology and ensuring that programs work fairly and ethically; an aspect of social science research that RoRI is particularly interested in. Furthermore, complementary AI could be used in other parts of the research process to eliminate many stumbling blocks that could be presented by reviewers on submitting a paper.

Using AI in peer review is just one example of open innovation to improve an aspect of research, but when can we expect to see this and other AI solutions being widely adopted as part of the research process? There is already a lot of tech around us, but within the next few years, this field will expand further as we learn more about how research works. By conducting research on research, researchers like Karim can uncover trends and connections in a range of research processes, and work towards creating tech solutions that will alleviate the burden and increase the efficiency of research.

We would like to thank Professor Karim Lakhani for giving up his time to join us for this episode of RoRICast. You can hear this whole episode of RoRICast here.

SEE MORE POSTS IN THIS NLP SERIES

We’ll be staying on the topic of peer review and pandemics by kicking off a mini-blog series tomorrow on the PREreview Project. Earlier this year a collaboration of publishers, industry experts and a preprint site (PREreview) joined together to respond to overwhelming levels of COVID-19 papers. Using information and feedback from the parties and reviewers involved, our authors Jon Treadway and Sarah Greaves examine what happened, whether the initiative succeeded, and what the results can tell us about peer review.

The post Artificial Intelligence and Peer Review appeared first on Digital Science.