If I had to characterize 2024 in the realm of scholarly publishing, the word I would choose is “uncertainty”. Although this might be an apt term for the last decade, 2024 was filled with unanswered questions. Plan S largely came to an end with no real vision of “what’s next”. The Nelson Memo remains on track in the US, but that could all go out the window as a new administration intent on cost cutting takes charge in a few weeks. We know AI is going to play a significant role in the future of both research and research communication, but its true capabilities, what’s hype and what’s real, remain an open question. And the ongoing increase (or at least increase in awareness) of research integrity problems leaves us uncertain as to how much to trust the literature.

Before we plunge into a year where we might find a few answers to the questions above, a look back at 2024 in The Scholarly Kitchen.

the numbers 2024 printed on paper, with a torn area next to it revealing underneath the numbers 2025

We published 245 posts in 2024, seven fewer than in 2023, encompassing some 342,000 words. Readership was up by around 10% over 2023, although I have little confidence in these numbers as we saw an enormous (and as of yet unexplained) temporary spike in page views from Ireland in the middle of the year, inflating our numbers with what I assume is some sort of indexing/spidering glitch. Removing Ireland from the equation still puts us at 3% readership growth year-on-year.

One of the more interesting shifts we saw this year was in referrers to the site, or how readers come upon our articles. In previous years, Twitter has been, by far, the largest source of traffic to The Scholarly Kitchen other than search engines. While this remained true (barely) in 2024, things started to shift, with LinkedIn replacing Twitter as our top referrer for the latter half of the year. At year’s end, Twitter and LinkedIn were neck and neck, separated by a mere 293 clicks. The rise of Bluesky was also apparent later in 2024. The ratio of referrals from Twitter to Bluesky for the year ended at 12:1, but a change is evident when one looks on a smaller time scale. For the last quarter of the year, that ratio is 4:1, and for the last 30 days, it stands at 1.8:1. Social media change, at least in the realm of scholarly publishing, is afoot.

Around 35% of our posts were by “Guest Chefs” rather than our regular bloggers, about the same amount as last year, many of whom participated on our ongoing series on Mental Health Awareness in the workplace.

Or top ten most read posts during the year were:

  1. Dead as a Doornail
  2. Guest Post — The Perplexing Puzzle of the Top 2% Scientists List
  3. The Latest “Crisis” — Is the Research Literature Overrun with ChatGPT- and LLM-generated Articles?
  4. Ask the Community — Thoughts on a Class Action Lawsuit Brought Against Scholarly Publishers
  5. Tracking the Licensing of Scholarly Content to LLMs
  6. Silverchair Buys ScholarOne from Clarivate
  7. Guest Post – MDPI’s Remarkable Growth
  8. Green Open Access – Free for Authors But at a Cost for Readers
  9. Guest Post — Reputation and Publication Volume at MDPI and Frontiers
  10. Guest Post — There is More to Reliable Chatbots than Providing Scientific References: The Case of ScopusAI

I have no idea why a 2021 post on the derivation of the idiom “dead as a doornail” remains so popular, but such are the vagaries of search engines. If one only looks at posts published in 2024, the top ten most read for the year were:

  1. Guest Post — The Perplexing Puzzle of the Top 2% Scientists List
  2. The Latest “Crisis” — Is the Research Literature Overrun with ChatGPT- and LLM-generated Articles?
  3. Ask the Community — Thoughts on a Class Action Lawsuit Brought Against Scholarly Publishers
  4. Tracking the Licensing of Scholarly Content to LLMs
  5. Silverchair Buys ScholarOne from Clarivate
  6. Green Open Access – Free for Authors But at a Cost for Readers
  7. Guest Post — There is More to Reliable Chatbots than Providing Scientific References: The Case of ScopusAI
  8. Transitional Agreements Aren’t Working: What Comes Next?
  9. Leveraging Transformative Agreements for Research Integrity
  10. Wiley Leans Into AI. The Community Should Lean With Them

These ten pretty much sum up the conversation for the year:  AI, research integrity, and continuing concerns about finding functional and sustainable models for open access. My prediction for the coming year is more of the same. AI will continue to develop, better research integrity tools will give us both a better handle on how much of the literature is reliable as well as slowing the pace of fraud (though new scams will arise and the ongoing game of whack-a-mole will continue), and regardless of whether the Nelson Memo comes to fruition, the obvious flaws and significant costs of existing open access models will continue to drive unintended consequences.

David Crotty

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

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