Publisher’s Panel: Issues and Trends in Nursing Journal Publishing

Presenters:

• Mercedes Simoncelli: Associate Director and Senior Account Manager · Wolters Kluwer
• Dawn Nahlen, Senior Publisher at Elsevier
• Meredith Krebs-Smith, Associate Director at Wiley
• Marilyn Oermann: Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Educator and the Thelma M Ingles Professor of Nursing at Duke University
• Jacqueline McGrath: Co-Editor in Chief of Advances in Neonatal Care

Moderator: Julia Snethen

Summary: This session featured publishers from Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier, and Wiley, plus two editors, who discussed current issues and trends facing the nursing journal publishing industry. It was a lively discussion!

(Author note: The following is an abbreviated summary of a lively and fast-paced conversation. I encourage your comments below if you feel that I have missed anything important or misrepresented anyone’s comments.)

Question 1: What are your thoughts on the current political climate in the United States, regarding the silencing of researchers, especially in respect to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

Panel Answer Summary: From a publisher’s perspective, one panelist expects a decrease in DEI research output because of changes with this recent administration, at least coming from researchers within the United States. She states that over the past several decades, many publishers invested considerable resources in developing DEI initiatives, and to see many of them being rolled back is tough to witness. Another publisher echoed that we expect to see a decrease in this work from US researchers but that the good news for authors and editors that wish to contine this work is that many publishers have not changed their policy, position, or their work culture regarding DEI research. However, as far as grant funding, that might be drying up in the United States; however, if the work is still done, they will continue to publish it. The publishers agreed that they will defer to editorial judgement as usual. A third publishing panelist spoke about the importance of soliciting scientific debate and how it is key to continued global collaboration, preserving values of scientific rigor, and the free exchange of ideas. Oermann (Nurse Educator) spoke about how nurses are often at the forefront of this type of work, especially in education, and that she hopes authors continue to submit this type of work.

Question 2: What do editors suggest to manage the exponential and overwhelming increase in the number of manuscript submissions?

Answer: McGrath (Advances in Neonatal Care) said that the rise in submissions to her journal is primarily attributable to international work, which adds more work for reviewers, and therefore, more time for editors communicating with authors about the author guidelines and the readership of their particular journal. She offered the following recommendations: 

1. Make sure your websites are clear about the mission of the journal. 
2. Update your author guidelines, both in the print journal and on your website. Many researchers (especially international researchers) will only access the guidelines on the journal website. 
3. Have someone not associated with your journal look at the author guidelines, give feedback on what type of research they seem to solicit, and clarify accordingly. 

Question 3: What efforts are being made by publishers regarding protections for journal editors regarding political hostility towards certain types of research?

Answer: The publishers were unanimous that they have not changed their stances and values in this regard and that they fully respect the international standards of independence of professional publishing societies and are prepared to uphold these standards as well. They reiterate that publishing is global, and although a lot of political change is happening in the United States, the one nation will not change the standards globally. Krebs-Smith (Wiley) mentioned that Wiley has been around for 200 years, and that they are committed to research integrity, and that they work with industry groups and other stakeholders, and they are in line with the recent statement on this topic from the Committee on Publication Ethics. Simoncelli (Wolters Kluwer) stated that they have it written in their proprietary publication contract that the editorial content is the sole responsibility of the editors and guarantees editorial independence. The editors on the panel concurred that they have always felt supported by their publishers regarding editorial independence. But it’s not just about what publishers are doing to ensure editorial freedom, but also for societies that own journals, to make sure that they are also supporting their editors.

Question 4- For the editors: What kind of education or resources can editors offer their reviewers?

Answer: Oermann (Nurse Educator) offered the following suggestions: 

1. All the publishers have guidelines on peer review, which need to be updated by the publishers and shared with reviewers and potential reviewers.
2. Consider offering CEs for peer reviewers. 
3. Email potential reviewers outside of the editorial management system to solicit them. Send them an email from your personal/academic. Make sure to comment on why you need their area of expertise. Attach the CE guidelines from your publisher to the email. 
4. Consider writing and distributing a quarterly peer reviewer newsletter, including tips for reviewing, and also information or guidelines for publishing/writing, like information on impact factors, etc.
5. Don’t ask the same reviewers too often. Consider keeping track of who you ask manually (and not relying on the editorial manager program). Some journals are asking people every 2 weeks! That is too much! 
6. Try to balance the types of reviewers you ask to review an article (and not, for example, send the same article to too many new reviewers or to reviewers who often reject articles). 
7. Structured review checklists for reviewers to use can be helpful, but the editor really wants to read the narrative review. 
8. Consider sending a sample peer review to new reviewers that they can use as a guide.

Answer: McGrath (Advances in Neonatal Care) offered the following suggestions:

• Use your newsletter to educate authors and potential reviewers by providing educational resources on reviewing and directing them to use your website more. 
• She reiterated not asking for too many reviews from the same people! 
• She concurs that it is important to keep track of who you have asked to review and when manually as some editorial managers will flag only if you are an alternate reviewer, NOT the first reviewer, so it makes it difficult to tell if who has just been assigned as a reviewer. So editors need to be aware of that. 
• Peer reviewer master courses are also available.

Question 5- For the Publishers: How can editors address these submission overloads?

Answer Krebs-Smith (Wiley): She reports that Wiley has recently launched a peer review platform called Research Exchange. This was done because the existing systems were not working well regarding integrity screening, and the publication output has gone up across the board. This system should help editors be more efficient in deciding whether an article should move on to peer review.

Answer Simoncelli (Wolters Kluwer): WK is building out large manuscript cascades so that if an article is not appropriate for one journal, it can be cascaded to another journal seamlessly. One area that will really be impacted by AI will be this area in particular. We have to find a way for editorial offices to identify if a manuscript is appropriate for the journal, and then move it forward only if applicable. She knows that there is a lot of conversation around using AI in peer review, and she thinks there is a case for using it, at least initially. However, these types of AI tools will likely be the most effective way to ease the burden of editors. The system as it is now is unsustainable. The sheer number of articles that journals have to process is enormous. There are significant cases for AI in this process. 

Answer Nahlen (Elsevier):  Reevaluate your editorial team structures. Consider your “triage” structure. Do you need to add more associate editors? Research exchange does use AI to read the paper and structure it out so authors do not have to rekey everything. AI prescreening tools are helping to weed out papers that could be from paper mills, look at the references, and check if they exist. Have the references been retracted? Are the references too old? These features are built in. It doesn’t use AI in terms of “peer reviewing”, publishers still want a human element in this.

Question 6- From the audience: What percentage of publishers provide these AI tools up front instead of the editors doing their own “first pass” triage?

Answer: The panel did not have that exact answer.

Question 7- For editors: What concerns you the most about rapidly advancing AI technology?

Answer Oermann (Nurse Educator): What worries her the most is that authors won’t disclose it. She also worries about inaccurate or biased AI-generated information in a paper, and then that paper gets published, and then the erroneous information gets cited in another article. She worries about references because typically reviewers are not familiar with every style of reference citations and therefore, erroneous or fake references can get missed. She worries about people using AI to conduct their peer reviews. Then, if that article is rejected, that scholarly work has already been input into the AI machine learning algorithm and, therefore, can be used for training within the AI system. She asserts that peer review should remain CONFIDENTIAL. She personally only supports peer reviews that are blinded. She also spoke about an experiment she conducted where she took multiple manuscripts in one reference format and had ChatGPT convert the reference formats. What resulted was many errors and even hallucinated references that ChatGPT added to the converted reference list that were not in the original reference list! She believes this highlights the problems with using AI to format references. 

Answer: McGrath (Advances in Neonatal Care): McGrath added that AI is new for everyone. Authors are worried about disclosing the use of AI in any capacity, for fear of being rejected or judged unfairly, so editors have to make it okay for authors to disclose AI use. The AI disclosure guidelines must be in your journal’s author guidelines. However, she acknowledges that this is hard in an environment where things related to AI are changing day to day.

Question 8—From the Audience: When we look at journal analytics on various rejection rates, is there any way to remove those that are rejected because they are outside the scope of the journal so that the rejection rates aren’t artificially inflated? Is there a way to reference them differently?

Answer Krebs-Smith (Wiley): There are many different ways to report rejection rates, and editors should have access to all of them from their publishers. 

Answer Simoncelli (Wolters Kluwer): Recommends speaking to your publisher if you think your rejection rate is unfairly inflated due to a high rate of “out of scope” rejections, especially if you think it is a barrier to getting proper author submissions, because you might have to consider this and change your editorial/marketing strategy.

Question 9—From the Audience: One editor has been receiving article submissions that are already in a format of being reviewed. She has been rejecting them outright. What do you recommend?

Answer from the publishers: They defer to editorial judgement.

Answer from the editors: Send it back to the author and tell them they need to review the peer review from the prior reviewer and make the appropriate changes before they can resubmit.

Question 10- From the audience: What if eventually 100% of the manuscript submissions that we receive disclose the use of AI? What do we do then? Will AI disclosure even matter in that scenario?

Answer: The panelists agreed that 100% adoption of AI tools by authors is not the issue. AI is here to stay. However, they still feel that it is essential to have strict guidelines on AI use and have the authors appropriately disclose AI use because when they do, they have to be open about how they have used the AI and confirm that they have checked the content for accuracy and integrity.

One panelist offered STM as a resource for ethical & practical guidelines for the use of generative AI in the publication process. 

Question 11- From the audience: What is the panel’s take on how any paper placed onto a preprint server can get a DOI number? Any thoughts on preprints in general? 

Answer Simoncelli (Wolters Kluwer): A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier for a digital object, such as a journal article, book, or report, that ensures its location can be reliably found online. It’s like a permanent address for digital content, even if the URL changes. Therefore, many things can have a DOI number, not just published journal articles, as DOIs are managed by the International DOI Foundation, an independent organization. As far as preprint servers, it is up to each individual journal, association, or publishing house to decide for themselves if something posted on a prepreint server is consdered for acceptance within a journal. She reminds everyone that preprint servers were initially conceived of as the “answer” for the backed-up peer review process, so that authors could get feedback on their manuscripts and edit them before sending them to journals, which was hoped would lessen the burden on peer reviewers down the pipeline. However, preprint servers are not a big thing in nursing.

Answer Nahlen (Elsevier): Elsevier does not consider preprints to be prior publications because the servers are not publishers. She notes that other disciplines benefit more from the public comment period than does nursing. Preprints are only a first draft of a apper that hasn’t been peer reviewed. It establishes “we have done this first” which might be more important for other disciplines. 

Answer Oermann (Nurse Educator): Preprint servers are here to say. They are no different than a Sigma repository or a repository that is part of a university. Recently, a study looked at how many articles are placed on preprint servers and how many are actually commented on, and it was a low percentage. For large publishers, when an article comes from a preprint, the information goes with it when it eventually gets published.

Answer: McGrath (Advances in Neonatal Care): Preprints were born out of COVID, where we saw them escalate because researchers wanted to get their research out ASAP. It served and still sometimes serves a purpose. But she agrees that there is not as much commentary as was initially predicted and hyped about.

Question 12- From the audience: Can you talk about interactive publications? How do you see see your publishing companies using multimedia to engage readers?

Answer Oermann (Nurse Educator): Videos are very popular on social media. However, we don’t know if they stimulate article readership, but it still might help disseminate the information the author wrote about. Podcasts are very easy to do with Zoom, and that is how she tapes her own podcast. The editors can then just send the videos of their podcasts to the publishers for dissemination. So podcasts are not very high intensity for the editor to do. 

Answer from the publisher’s perspective: They use interactive media to promote articles on social media. Articles are more likely to get attention if there is a video or picture to post with them. There are many things available, such as graphic abstracts and video abstracts, but they are not used much in nursing.

For publishers, one issue that they have been having is tying engagement on social media to revenue creation. We don’t really know if it will help your impact factor either. In the future, in all honesty, one publisher does not think that we are going to see a lot of these “multimedia extras” because we need plain language summaries for the AI machine because everything we put online now is being mined for data. 

Question 13: So many journals have entirely moved to online publishing. Will we ever go back to paper?

Answer from the Publishers: There are certainly a lot of answers to that. We might miss the paper but when you look at the economic advantages of online to society, it makes a lot of sense to bring journals online unless you have an enormous budget. Sustainability is another standpoint. Sustainability movements will not bring paper back. Shrinking resources are also a thing. One panelist asks, “Honestly, how many of us are keeping copies of journals in a file cabinet, and if we are, how many of us are actually pulling out old paper copies to find articles? For the archival reasons alone, online makes sense. Also, people “don’t read issues,” rather, they search by topic. Also, as a business model, paper doesn’t work anymore. The paper journal business model relies on supply and demand, and having enough advertising revenue to keep paper going. Also, authors love data (like usage metrics). Then, there are also supply chain issues for paper supply, which were highlighted during the pandemic. Not to mention the cost of paper. Therefore, if you want print in the future, you will have to pay extra for it. It might not completely disappear, but you will have to pay for it. Printing is not going to be as cheap as it used to be. 

If a journal is still in print at the moment, that means that, economically, due to advertising revenue, it is still viable to keep printing it. But if that changes, the journal will likely be moved entirely online. 

Answer: McGrath (Advances in Neonatal Care): Paper isn’t entirely going away tomorrow, but time will tell. 

Answer Oermann (Nurse Educator): Most people read their articles online. That’s why we need to have good search terms in our articles. Editors need to be clear when they ask for MESH terms and keywords, and ensure that the ones submitted are good to get that article into searches. The other thing is that journals have different policies, we do “early access” publishing ahead of print, but then we don’t put the final publication information on until it is in print for the actual issue. Some faculty at some schools don’t get credit for a publication if it is early access. Other publishers give a publication date as soon as it’s put online. Some editors might consider abandoning the “issue” format and just give a publication date when it is first placed online. 

Question 14: Editorial manager and Scholar One are legacy programs with archaic user interfaces. What are the chances that modern updates and user-friendly systems will be implemented in the future? Or will it be small incremental changes to an antiquated system? 

Answer Krebs-Smith (Wiley): Wiley recently developed and unveiled a new peer review platform called Research Exchange, which is more modern and user friendly, with more AI tools to make things go faster for editors by looking at the submissions and checking references/weeding out inappropriate submissions before they are given to the editors. Scholar One was not updating their system. They were recently purchased by SilverChair so she expects that they will make updates but the timeframe of when is in question. There are many benefits of Research Exchange to help with the research integrity problem (screening upfront) and it is also quicker and easier for authors upon submission. 

Answer Nahlen (Elsevier): There are 7000 journals (Elsevier has 3000) on Editorial Manager. There are very large changes on the horizon, in both how papers are submitted and with research integrity checks so that when editors get a paper they can focus on vetting the science or novelty of it. There will also be a complete overhaul of the review process itself, so that all three parties will be on the same page (author, editor, & reviewer). She suspects that they will be rolled out over the next 6 months. 

Answer Simoncelli (Wolters Kluwer):  Editorial manager is archaic, and she expects small incremental changes. 

Question 15: How effective have you found multimedia extras to affect your downloads and impact factors? 

Answer: McGrath (Advances in Neonatal Care):  Multimedia does not impact in that way, in her experience. The only video abstract so far that had impact was the video on nhow to make video abstracts! Authors don’t really know what they are doing. Don’t just put up a PowerPoint of your abstract! So she thinks for nurse researchers, multimedia expertise is not the same as scholarly writing expertise. Therefore, it’s hard for many authors, and they don’t get much support to do the multimedia extras. Therefore, multimedia is treated as an extra after thought by many authors. On the journal website, you can see the downloads of the videos or podcasts, but whether those people then look at the article, we don’t know. Therefore, they don’t affect the impact factor. 

The publishers agreed that they don’t really see a change in the impact factor. However, it might have a small impact on the article downloads. 

Your INANE 2025 reporter is Melissa Anne DuBois, BSN, RNC-OB, PhD Student.

Content for this post was obtained from the INANE 2025 website, the conference guidebook, internet searches, speaker submitted bios, and live reporting from each session. Any errors in content are purely accidental and not intended to offend. If you notice an error you would like corrected, please contact Melissa Anne at melissadubois2 at gmail dot com and she will be happy to make corrections.