Open Editors: A dataset of scholarly journals’ editorial board positions

Abstract

Editormetrics analyses the role of editors of academic journals and their impact on the scientific publication system. Such analyses would best rely on open, structured, and machine-readable data about editors and editorial boards, which still remains rare. To address this shortcoming, the project Open Editors collects data about academic journal editors on a large scale and structures them into a single dataset. It does so by scraping the websites of 7,352 journals from 26 publishers (including predatory ones), thereby structuring publicly available information (names, affiliations, editorial roles, ORCID etc.) about 594,580 researchers. The dataset shows that journals and publishers are immensely heterogeneous in terms of editorial board sizes, regional diversity, and editorial role labels. All codes and data are made available at Zenodo, while the result is browsable at a dedicated website (https://openeditors.ooir.org). This dataset carries implications for both practical purposes of research evaluation and for meta-scientific investigations into the landscape of scholarly publications, and allows for critical inquiries regarding the representation of diversity and inclusivity across academia.

Mapping science through editorial board interlocking: connections and distance between fields of knowledge and institutional affiliations

“…This study represents an effort to visualize connections in sciences through EBI (Andrikopoulos & Economou, 2015;Baccini & Barabesi, 2010;Burgess & Shaw, 2010;Goyanes & de-Marcos, 2020;Mendonça et al, 2018) and social network analysis. More specifically, drawing upon data from the Open Editors initiative (Nishikawa-Pacher et al, 2022), we provide several inter-related empirical contributions to further our understanding of the scientific, geographical, and institutional connections across different fields of research. Beyond the main empirical findings outlined below, this study embodies the empirical endeavor of holistically comprehending through the analysis of social networks the reach and intensity of connections within and between most fields of sciences through EBI.…”

“…Open Editors gathered data semiautomatically by scraping the web pages of the main academic publishers. Although it covers only a portion of all publishers, the editors recorded in Open Editors were responsible for and processed approximately a fifth of the total scientific production in 2021 (Nishikawa-Pacher et al, 2022). Open Editors provides the name, affiliation, and role of editors as reported in the web page of the journal, and the name, publisher, and ISSN of the journal.…”

“…Understanding these gaps is important for mapping geographical structures in research evaluation and determining the institutional footprint of the gatekeepers of science (Braun et al, 2007). This study, drawing upon data from the Open Editors initiative (Nishikawa-Pacher et al, 2022), considers 215 scientific fields, over 3000 journals, and over 300,000 EB members. The objectives are to: 1) map the connections between fields of knowledge through EBI, 2) understand the EBI connections and distance within and between social sciences and hard sciences, and 3) visualize and discover the institutional representation at university level of sciences through EBI.…”

Editors with multiple retractions, but who serve on journal editorial boards: Case studies

“…Ultimately, a journal's choice to maintain individuals with multiple retractions on their editorial boards is their individual choice, although academia should have the freedom to discuss the issue openly, given that information and editors tend to widely spread across the Internet and given that the RWD and the RWL are currently open and public resources. Even though an "Open Editors" tool claims to hold information about 590,000+ editors in 26 publishers' journals (Nishikawa-Pacher et al, 2022), a search for the first academic in Table 1, Bharat B. Aggarwal, yielded zero results. Similarly, no positive results were found for the remaining five individuals listed in Table 1.…”

Predatory Journals on Twitter: The Lack of Community Engagement

“…Recently, predatory journals started to copy and republish papers from legitimate journals with only slight modifications, and without referencing the original source and authors (Siler et al, 2021). Notwithstanding that their supply of quick-and-easy-and-open-access-publications addresses real demands by researchers who are incentivized to publish as much as possible for job prospects and financial promotion (Mertkan et al, 2021), predatory publishers taint the credibility of science, put untested findings into broader circulation (Akça & Akbulut, 2021), and potentially pulp the reputation of otherwise serious scholars who may feel trapped to contribute their names to them (Nishikawa-Pacher et al, 2022). In the end, predatory journals are nothing but 'a threat to the integrity of science, as well as an increasing challenge to all research publishing stakeholders: authors, editors, researchers, research institutions, funding bodies, research assessment bodies, and governments' (Baas et al, 2020, p. 380).…”