Most PISS comes from journals where only 20-30% of issues are PISS. But when you publish 100s-1000s of special issues per year... oof. Analysing just 904 journals, we find ~16-43k excess endogenous articles in PISS issues. PISS in just these 904 journals rivals #ResearchIntegrity and fraud. 8/n
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And let's be clear: that's a fair comparison. Indexers treat excess endogeny as misconduct. That's why they're putting hard limits on it. The processing fees we spend on PISS could be funding hundreds to thousands of multi-year research grants. This problem sounds niche. It's really not. 9/n
PISS also affects the sum value of the literature: 1 person PISSing in the pool of scientific literature? Largely negligible.
Tens of 1000s PISSing in the pool? The water takes on a different hue...
Luckily, PISS is easy to solve: just enforce EXISTING policies by checking the author list!
10/n
a dog is swimming in a blue po...
Far from enforcing their policies, publishers *hide* PISS. We learned most publisher policies ACTIVELY hide PISS by altering article metadata post-hoc. At a *minimum* #Frontiers, #Elsevier, #MDPI all do it publicly! Yikes. 🤯 Thanks to @deevybee.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy et al. for noting this (see pics). 11/n
And why wouldn't they support PISS? Guest editors may not handle their own articles. But a special issue of ~10 articles can equate to ~$25k in revenue. If an associate editor rejects a paper & the guest editor leaves, the journal loses that money.
Guest-editing creates a COI plain & simple.
12/n
Philosophical Transactions: pr...
Most journals practice special issues fairly responsibly. But it's the worst offenders that contribute most of the PISS. ~90% of PISS in our data come from just 150/904 journals. And it's exactly who you think it is. #MDPI #Frontiers 13/n