Motivations, understandings, and experiences of open-access mega-journal authors: Results of a large-scale survey.

Simon Wakeling,Claire Creaser,Monica Paramita,Jenny Fry,Valérie Spezi,Peter Willett,Stephen Pinfield

doi:10.1002/asi.24154

Abstract

Open‐access mega‐journals (OAMJs) are characterized by their large scale, wide scope, open‐access (OA) business model, and “soundness‐only” peer review. The last of these controversially discounts the novelty, significance, and relevance of submitted articles and assesses only their “soundness.” This article reports the results of an international survey of authors (n = 11,883), comparing the responses of OAMJ authors with those of other OA and subscription journals, and drawing comparisons between different OAMJs. Strikingly, OAMJ authors showed a low understanding of soundness‐only peer review: two‐thirds believed OAMJs took into account novelty, significance, and relevance, although there were marked geographical variations. Author satisfaction with OAMJs, however, was high, with more than 80% of OAMJ authors saying they would publish again in the same journal, although there were variations by title, and levels were slightly lower than subscription journals (over 90%). Their reasons for choosing to publish in OAMJs included a wide variety of factors, not significantly different from reasons given by authors of other journals, with the most important including the quality of the journal and quality of peer review. About half of OAMJ articles had been submitted elsewhere before submission to the OAMJ with some evidence of a “cascade” of articles between journals from the same publisher.

Highlights

Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) have over the last decade proved to be an important and at times controversial innovation in scholarly communication
Their reasons for choosing to publish in OAMJs included a wide variety of factors, not significantly different from reasons given by authors of other journals, with the most important including the quality of the journal and quality of peer review
It is interesting to note that Speed of peer review was the aspect that OAMJ authors were least likely to rate as “good” or “excellent.” Examining responses by megajournal, we found that of the 15 OAMJs included in the sample, the two largest—PLoS One and Scientific Reports—ranked tenth or lower in each of the 10 aspects of the publication process

Summary

Introduction

Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) have over the last decade proved to be an important and at times controversial innovation in scholarly communication. OAMJs combine four major characteristics that their publishers argue enable them to contribute in new ways to research publishing (Björk, 2015; Spezi et al, 2017). They are large scale: publishing larger volumes of articles compared with most conventional journals; the two largest, PLoS One and Scientific Reports, published 20,395 and 24,318 articles in 2017, respectively. For example: The prepublication peer review process focuses on whether the manuscript is technically correct and original. Concepts of ‘timeliness,’ ‘significance,’ or ‘importance’ are evaluated by the community post-publication through the implementation of online commenting and ranking tools. (AIP Advances)

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Conclusion