Aftermath of IIETA Acquiring 7 Lavoisier Journals: Surge in Article Outputs with a Drastic Shift in Authorship Geography
Résumé
Objective. In 2018, 7 established French-speaking journals were sold by the French publisher Lavoisier to the Canadian International Information and Engineering Technology Association (IIETA): ACSM, I2M, ISI, JESA, RCMA, RIA, TS. IIETA turned these 7 subscription-based journals into open-access journals with APCs. Poor communication around this sale and questionable publishing practices led at least 3 editorial boards to resign in bulk. We reviewed the changes these journals underwent pre-sale (2001-2018) versus post-sale (2019-2024).
Methods. For the 7 journals, we retrieved from Crossref the metadata and DOIs minted by Lavoisier and IIETA. We then scrapped IIETA website to (1) check the availability of the articles (2) retrieve the authors' affiliations, which were not available from Crossref. We computed the number of articles for each journal per year and per country.
Results. Three findings stood out. First: 37% of the 7650 DOIs registered with Crossref do not resolve to the expected article page, which is nowhere to be found on IIETA.org or the now-defunct Lavoisier website. The 2828 missing articles were mostly published pre-sale of the journals: 58 DOIs over 2878 (2.0%) resolved successfully for the articles published in 2001-2018. 4764 DOIs over 4772 (99.8%) resolved successfully for the articles published in 2019-2025. Second: The journals saw a 4-fold increase in number of articles after the sale: 169 articles published in average pre-sale versus 859 post-sale, per year. The journals' output was multiplied by a factor ranging from 1.4 for ACSM to 23.3 for TS. Third: Affiliations stated on articles published in 2001-2013 are overwhelmingly in France. In contrast, articles published after 2018 are mainly affiliated to India, China, Iraq, Algeria, and Indonesia (France ranking 10th only). We also noted that the articles published post-sale are mainly written in English, which is unexpected given the French titles of the journals.
Conclusion. These 3 observations stress the clear contrast in authorships and publication output which happened after the sale of the 7 former Lavoisier journals.
Domaines
| Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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