Juan Pablo Alperín

Parth Sarin, Juan Pablo Alperin, Adam Buttrick et al.

Accurate parsing of citations is necessary for machine-readable scholarly infrastructure. But, despite sustained interest in this problem, existing evaluation techniques are often not generalizable, based on synthetic data, or not publicly available. We introduce RenoBench, a public domain benchmark for citation parsing, sourced from PDFs released on four publishing ecosystems: SciELO, Redalyc, the Public Knowledge Project, and Open Research Europe. Starting from 161,000 annotated citations, we apply automated validation and feature-based sampling to produce a dataset of 10,000 citations spanning multiple languages, publication types, and platforms. We then evaluate a variety of citation parsing systems and report field-level precision and recall. Our results show strong performance from language models, particularly when fine-tuned. RenoBench enables reproducible, standardized evaluation of citation parsing systems, and provides a foundation for advancing automated citation parsing and metascientific research.

Lisa Matthias, Juan Pablo Alperin, Mikael Laakso

While much attention has been paid to journals transitioning toward Diamond Open Access (OA), comparatively little is known about those moving in the opposite direction. We introduce the concept of "diamond fractures"--instances in which journals that once published freely for both readers and authors subsequently abandoned that model, transitioning to subscription-based or article processing charge (APC)-funded publishing. Drawing on publisher OA portfolio records, historical APC lists, removal logs from the Directory of Open Access Journals, and a survey of journals using Open Journal Systems, we identified and characterized more than 440 journals that have undergone such fractures and analyzed how they are distributed across publisher types, disciplines, and regions; which models journals transition to and at what price points; how old journals are when they fracture; and how publication volume shifts in the period surrounding the transition. This paper reports on more than 440 confirmed fractures, the majority of which involve transitions to charging APCs, ranging from $8 to $5,300. These findings raise urgent questions about the stability of diamond OA as a publishing ecosystem. The transition to APCs--even at initially modest price points--follows well-documented warnings about the hyperinflationary tendencies of author-pays models, in which charges introduced as a pragmatic stopgap have repeatedly escalated over time. The rate of fractures are likely to intensify as APC-based publishing continues to be normalized through funder mandates and commercial OA incentives. Diamond fractures demand to be treated not as isolated institutional decisions but as a systemic risk--one that can only be addressed through sustained investment in community-governed infrastructure and funding models that reduce the conditions under which abandoning diamond OA becomes the path of least resistance.

Saskia van Walsum, Lisa Matthias, Juan Pablo Alperin et al.

When editorial boards resign from their journals and publishers and declare their independence, two competing journals can result: the original journal under a new editorial board (a "zombie" journal), and a new journal established by the departing editors (a "breakaway"). The bibliometric community saw such an event when the board of Journal of Informetrics left Elsevier to found Quantitative Science Studies. We analyzed 39 breakaway-zombie journal pairs that have formed since 1989 and their declarations of independence to understand why and how they happen. Results show that declarations of independence were motivated by concerns related to governance and business model and overwhelmingly happened at journals owned by the Big Five publishers. Breakaway editors tended to found new journals at smaller publishers and adopt diamond publishing models. These findings suggest that dissatisfaction with commercial publishing models is growing, and that community-led alternatives can motivate change.

Parth Sarin, Juan Pablo Alperin

A key type of resource needed to address global inequalities in knowledge production and dissemination is a tool that can support journals in understanding how knowledge circulates. The absence of such a tool has resulted in comparatively less information about networks of knowledge sharing in the Global South. In turn, this gap authorizes the exclusion of researchers and scholars from the South in indexing services, reinforcing colonial arrangements that de-center and minoritize those scholars. In order to support citation network tracking on a global scale, we investigate the capacity of open-weight language models to mark up manuscript citations in an indexable format. We assembled a dataset of matched plaintext and annotated citations from preprints and published research papers. Then, we evaluated a number of open-weight language models on the annotation task. We find that, even out of the box, today's language models achieve high levels of accuracy on identifying the constituent components of each citation, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the smallest model we evaluated, Qwen3-0.6B, can parse all fields with high accuracy in $2^5$ passes, suggesting that post-training is likely to be effective in producing small, robust citation parsing models. Such a tool could greatly improve the fidelity of citation networks and thus meaningfully improve research indexing and discovery, as well as further metascientific research.