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Looking back: our operations in 2022

Operations
Posted on 2023-04-19  by Jean-Sébastien Caux
This blog post aims at providing you with a somewhat detailed overview of various aspects of our operations during 2022. It is by no means meant to be exhaustive, leaving out many aspects such as internal technical, editorial, financial and organizational matters. Nonetheless, we hope this overview provides a faithful approximation of how it is all going with our initiative.
Image for operations-in-2022

Number of publications in SciPost journals per year, 2016-2022.

TL;DR

  • We have had a bit of an explosive growth in 2022: 728 publications, more than doubling 2021's 361

  • Our editorial systems are undergoing a big update

  • We published our first papers in SciPost Physics Codebases

  • SciPost Physics Proceedings: overheating

  • The first publications in Migration Politics are out

  • Personnel changes have given us challenges at the editorial office

Quick lookback at operations in 2022

Editorial side

Publications

The following table gives the number of publications per year, for each of our Journals. SciPost Physics has grown by about a quarter, but SP Phys Proc has exploded (due to a number of large issues to get out of the door).

Number of Publications per Journal

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

Total

16

65

117

222

281

361

728

SP Phys

16

65

111

160

187

265

331

SP Phys Core

2

27

33

53

SP Phys Lect Notes

6

5

9

14

31

SP Phys Proc

55

57

45

286

SP Phys Codeb

18

SP Astro

1

0

2

SP Astro Core

1

0

SP Chem

3

2

MigPol

5

The simple observations we can make are:

  • SciPost Physics is growing at an almost predictable rate

  • SciPost Physics Codebases had a very strong start: this venue is clearly filling a gap

  • Other physics journals are doing OK, except Proceedings, which ballooned

  • Migration Politics is under very strong and committed leadership and had a strong start

Submissions

We can build a similar table for the number of submission streams (i.e. not counting resubmissions) targeting each Journal:

Number of Submission streams per Journal

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

Total

33

103

166

327

396

1078

1135

SP Phys

33

103

162

240

334

576

699

SP Phys Core

3

22

59

73

SP Phys Lect Notes

4

10

17

35

27

SP Phys Proc

74

20

402

312

SP Phys Codeb

8

SP Astro

3

3

2

SP Astro Core

1

1

SP Chem

2

5

MigPol

8

Statistics and Metrics

More detailed statistics than those have now been made visible on each Journal's detail page. For example, to get info on SciPost Physics, you can follow the Journals link in the navbar, click on SciPost Physics (namely: scipost.org/SciPostPhys) and then on the About navbar item. You will see a little box with simple metrics, but you can also follow the view detailed metrics link (namely: scipost.org/SciPostPhys/metrics) where you will find more detailed graphs, and have the ability to filter by each Specialty covered by the Journal. All our Journals have this metrics page active, and the data is automatically kept updated.

Staff issues

Since early November, paper output has been lower due to the staff changes. The production team is satisfyingly productive and properly scaled up. The problem is more on the EdAdmin side, where staff changes coupled with the ongoing insecurity of our financial position made it difficult to quickly act on hiring to alleviate these problems.

Editorial systems upgrade

Our editorial systems have undergone quite a few internal changes to our systems over the last months. Although most of the changes are on the backend (which you won't see, except for things going faster than they were), these changes are meant to greatly:

  • increase our transparency and the quality of the information we make available to everybody

  • facilitate everybody's work by making all protocols clearer and easier to follow

Perhaps you have already noticed that our editorial workflow is now graphically illustrated on our editorial procedure page (if you scroll to the bottom). This graph will also be made visible on the Submission's detail page, where it will eventually carry submission-specific information.

Currently, the Incoming, Preassignment and Assignment stages of editorial handling have been released under the new system. The remaining set of stages will be released within the next few months.

Submission processing timescales

We are still experiencing a lot of unnecessary delays in editorial processing of submitted manuscripts (you can see some basic indications at our Submissions monitor). The situation has perhaps not been this bad since the start of our initiative.

The three main bottlenecks are

  1. assignment of submissions

  2. voting on recommendations

  3. publishing step once proofs are accepted.

Understaffing at EdAdmin is one of the main causes; on the other hand, there are extreme inefficiencies which need to be cleared out of our process. Email communications are very time consuming, and the assignment stage is one of the biggest irritants for our authors. The editorial systems redesign is meant to solve that particular problem. The voting worklfow is next in line for an update. With increased efficiency, the third bottleneck above can be handled.

Business side

On the financial side, you will find all relevant details on our situation starting from our finances page . In particular, you will now see a graphical representation of the expenditures versus sponsorships.

The main conclusion is that our income has been just sufficient to cover our running costs, so (unlike the last two years) we are not digging into our future resources. That said, it remains a great challenge to ensure that increase in our income keeps up with the increase on the publishing side.

Expenditures

An itemized table summarizing our expenditures looks like this:

Category

Subcategory

Expenditure

Operations

banking services

563.22

accommodation

4646.40

financial services

3624.61

archiving

242.04

infrastructure

7186.27

memberships

300.00

Subtotal ops

16562.54

Personnel

staff

104454.62

production office

20543.92

developers

10584.13

pensions

42017.39

taxation, benefits

66785.73

insurance

6414.23

arbo

1120.37

Subtotal personnel

249799.66

Total

266362.20

This compares to around €220k for 2021. Note that our account expenditures were factually higher, by an amount of 45k euros, representing an ERC subsidy which we had to pay back following the torpedoing of the metadata project (that project ended up representing a loss of about 30k for us in personnel costs, even when fully discounting J-S's voluntary time (about 10 weeks full-time equivalent)).

APEX

Our business model defines an APEX (average publication expenditure) by spreading our yearly expenditures on to the publishing output. You can find detailed breakdowns on our APEX page .

As an example, we ascribe €444 expenditures per paper for SciPost Physics (Lecture Notes are rated 50% higher at €665, while Proceedings are rated at half, €222). This is quite a substantial reduction (about 25%) from our results of the previous year.

The medium-term goal remains of scaled-up operations stabilizing somewhere in the region of €500.

Sponsorships

A good number of new institutions have joined as sponsors in 2022. You can for example look at our news page but also at our list of subsidies.

Despite a reasonable level of success in convincing academic institutions to support our cost-slashing model, the fact remains that we still suffer from a much too large proportion of non-supporting organizations out of those which benefit from our activities. The proceeds of our sponsorship gathering activities are barely sufficient to maintain current levels of operation, let alone fuel expansion. This is particularly disappointing because Diamond initiatives such as ours clearly demonstrate the feasibility of academic publishing at more reasonable cost levels than competing systems (in particular: APC-based ones).

Despite much Open Access-friendly discourse from many parties holding the purses, the rational assessment is that proper sustainable funding for Diamond initiatives remains dramatically insufficient in scale, and that there is little evidence of this changing at significant scale in the short term. As things currently stand in the Open Access publishing money harvesting competition, the APC system is the undisputed winner against Diamond.

An aside about social media

You might have noticed that we shelved our Twitter activities at the turn of the year, for hopefully obvious reasons. Instead, we will devote ourselves to the Fediverse (which offers a much more compelling framework), starting with our own Mastodon server at scipost.social. We intend to keep operating this server at a small scale (the federation concept meaning that it's still accessible throughout the Fediverse).