Obama Signs Act to Make More Federally Funded Research Open Access: NIH Requirement Extended to Other Agencies

Free article for sale: $11 000 — What is free public access worth?

Publishing wars

Traditionally, there have been two important media of academic publishing: scholarly journals and scholarly books. The first scholarly journal, the Journal des Sçavans, was founded by Denis de Sallo, appeared already in January 1665 in Paris, reappeared after the French Revolution as the Journal des Savants, and still exists as a leading journal in the humanities. Only a few weeks later, Henry Oldenbourg, the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, established a second scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions, with a focus on science. The purpose of these journals was to formalize the extensive correspondence between philosophers and scientists.1 In the 18th and the 19th century, more specialized journals gained in importance, most of which were published by learned societies. At the end of the 19th century, university presses too began to publish scholarly journals. Another traditional means of academic publishing are the various types of scholarly books, in particular monographs, edited volumes, reference works (specialist dictionaries, encyclopedias, and specialty reference manuals), and technical handbooks.2 A narrow definition of academic works would exclude textbooks and books for the broader public. Shavell (2010, 337–39) employs four criteria to determine whether a journal or book is academic in nature: (1) the authors and/or the publisher are usually academics; (2) the readers are mainly academics; (3) the content is academic in character; (4) only low royalties are paid, if any. As of today, scholarly journals are the preferred mode of academic publishing in particular in the sciences and some social sciences (e.g., economics), whereas scholarly books still play an important role in the arts, the humanities, and part of the social sciences. Whereas scholarly books are published by a large number of small national publishers in a multitude of languages, the most important scholarly journals are typically in English language and published by a few large commercial publishers. Until the mid-20th century, the most important journals were published by learned societies, before commercial publishers began to enter the academic publishing market in the 1960s and 1970s by launching new titles or acquiring existing ones. This development has led to a significant concentration of (commercial) publishers in the academic journal market.3 It is difficult to say for sure how many scholarly journals are available around the world. Some sources speak of more than 100,000, others of 87,000 or 73,000.4 In August 2018, Ulrich's Web Directory listed 33,119 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals with about 3 million articles a year, complemented by an additional 9,372 journals in other languages. As an important subset, 11,655 journals with 2.2 million articles were included in the Clarivate Analytics' Journal Citation Reports (STM, 2018, 25–26). The Web of Science (WoS) database counted almost 12,500 journals in 2019 (see below, Section 2.2.1). With the mass expansion of academic education and the increasing size of faculty after World War II, publications in peer-reviewed, highly ranked journals have become an important precondition for academic careers in many disciplines, in particular in the sciences, economics, and partly in the other social sciences. In 1964, Eugene Garfield launched the Science Citation Index to calculate the impact factors of journals in science, medicine, and technology. This index was later followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index in 1973, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index in 1978 (Regazzi, 2015, 86–88), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index in 2015. These indices led to the development of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), a metric that serves to rank a scholarly journal based on the number of citations to articles in that journal by articles in other indexed journals within a certain time period. During the same time, commercial publishers have increased their market shares to the detriment of non-for-profit publishers, such as learned societies and universities, becoming the dominant players in the market for scholarly journals. Today, the "big five" commercial academic publishers—Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage—cover more than half of the market for scholarly journals. Since the 1980s, we have seen a sharp increase not just in the number of journals but in particular also in journal subscription prices, forcing many academic libraries to cancel serials subscriptions and to cut back on new monographs (the so-called serials crisis, cf. Eger & Scheufen, 2018, 23–29). These developments induced an increasing number of scholars, initially in the United States, to promote open access (OA) to scholarly articles as a replacement of or an addendum to the subscription model. After some individual initiatives in the late 1980s, the early 2000s saw the emergence of a global movement by scholars, librarians, and research sponsors, resulting in the "Budapest Open Access Initiative" (February 2002), the "Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing" (June 2003) and the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" (October 2003).7 Two roads to OA can be distinguished8: First, gold OA refers to electronic journals with OA for all readers, often based on creative commons licenses. The publishers' costs are covered not by subscription fees but from other sources, such as article-processing charges (APCs)9 paid by authors, libraries, learned societies, or research sponsors, or subsidies from learned societies and other sources. Hybrid OA journals, whose numbers are rising fast, allow the authors to choose between paying an APC, thereby granting the reader OA, or not paying an APC and requiring the reader to pay for access to the article.10 A special branch of gold OA is mega-journals, the first one of which, PLOS One, was first published in 2006. In these journals, the peer review is restricted to examining only the soundness of the submitted articles but not their broader interest or impact. Also, mega-journals are not oriented towards a specific subject matter. The second road, green OA, refers to authors self-archiving pre-prints or post-prints of their papers on so-called OA repositories, potentially in addition to publication in traditional subscription-based journals. OpenDOAR listed 5,713 repositories in July 2021, of which 5,073 were classified as institutional repositories managed by universities, faculties, or other academic institutions, 364 as disciplinary (subject) repositories which aggregate research papers in specific disciplines (e.g., PubMed Central, arXiv, SSRN, and RepEc), 138 as aggregating repositories (including Academia and Scielo), and 139 as governmental repositories.11 Whereas institutional and disciplinary repositories generally respect the authors' or publishers' copyright, so-called Robin Hood or Pirate OA repositories do not. The most prominent example is Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a young scholar from Kazakhstan, which made over 60 million journal articles publicly available. Due to complaints by academic publishers, Sci-Hub had to switch domains several times.12 Recent years have seen the emergence of academic social networks such as Research Gate and Mendeley, as well as a stream of new forms of disseminating scientific content, including blogs, podcasts, and Facebook posts by prominent scholars. Regarding OA books, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in June 2021 listed 43,036 academic peer-reviewed books from 621 publishers.13 The number of academic journals, as listed in the WoS database, has been growing steadily over the past two decades, from around 5,000 in 2000 to almost 12,500 in 2019 (Figure 1).14 Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) The academic journal market is dominated by a few large commercial publishers, with the "big five" accounting for more than half of the academic journals listed by the WoS in 2019: Elsevier (1,754 journals), Springer (1,406), Wiley Blackwell (1,242), Taylor & Francis (1,199), and Sage (642).15 However, due to a downturn by Elsevier that began around 2006, this dominance has declined from around 60% in 2000 to around 51.7% in 2019 (Figure 2). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) Coupled with the advent of the internet and the concurrent increasing digitization of academic works, which through the bundling of different journals and/or formats ("big deals") facilitated second-degree price discrimination, this dominance has led to a drastic increase in subscription prices since the early 1990s (Bergstrom, 2013; Eger & Scheufen, 2018; Ramello, 2010). The resulting serials crisis—with academic libraries having to cut their journal portfolio—gave rise to a new publishing regime that offers OA to journal content. The share of pure (i.e., non-hybrid) OA journals as listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (2021) has been increasing steadily, from around 3% of all WoS-listed journals in 2000 to more than 10% in 2019 (Figure 3). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) Interestingly, pure OA journals also gained ground in terms of quality. Figure 4 shows boxplots of the impact factors16 of closed access (CA) versus OA journals over time. While CA journals enjoyed an impact factor advantage over OA journals for a long time—all location scales of the impact factor for CA journals being above the ones for OA journals—OA journals are nowadays of the same quality, notwithstanding considerable differences between disciplines (see the contribution by Eger et al. to this issue). In 2019, impact factor distributions of both OA and CA journals are at the same level. Thus, advancing both in quantity and in quality, OA journals are becoming ever more relevant. The literature has identified the following advantages of an OA regime for academic works: (1) OA publications are likely read and therefore (2) cited more widely,17 which in turn (3) raises the incentives for academic authors to publish their research results as citations increase their reputation. These observations led to a broad discussion in academia as to whether the copyright regime may impede the evolution towards a universal OA regime, with very different conclusions being drawn regarding the impact of OA from a social welfare perspective (Scheufen, 2015; Shavell, 2010). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) The growing relevance of academic OA publishing warrants a closer look at the development of pure OA journals as the gold road towards OA. Figure 5 shows the number of newly launched OA journals from 2002 to 2020. Following relatively slow growth from 2002 to 2014, with fewer than 500 new OA journals per year (except 2013), the number has exceeded 1,000 in every year since, peaking in 2017, when more than 2,000 new OA journals were added to the DOAJ database. Today, the DOAJ database counts more than 16,000 OA journals in many different fields of research, published in 80 languages by publishers from 126 countries.18 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Notwithstanding this impressive development, the relevance of OA journals varies substantially across academic disciplines (Figure 6).19 The research field with the largest attributed number of OA journals is Social Sciences (3,817), followed by Health Sciences (2,785), Technology and Engineering (1,416), and Language and Literature (1,153). By contrast, the natural science fields of Mathematics & Statistics (341), Physics & Astronomy (274), and Chemistry (181) feature only few OA journals.20 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Remarkable differences also exist regarding a variety of OA journal characteristics (Table 1).21 Most (52%) OA journals leave the copyright of published works with the author, whereas the traditional CA regime demands that the exploitation rights are transferred to the publisher. Moreover, only around 28% of all OA journals charge APCs—a remarkable finding, as the OA regime implies the transition from a "reader pays" to an "author pays" model. Other fees (e.g., a submission fee to cover the review process) are charged by only around 2% of all OA journals. Nevertheless, author fees may constitute a significant obstacle for authors to publish in an OA venue, especially for non-tenured researchers seeking to publish in highly ranked journals, which are most likely to charge APCs (Budzinski et al., 2020). This obstacle also applies in particular to many researchers from developing countries, whose institutions rarely cover such costs. Yet 18% of OA journals provide for the possibility to waive such author fees. OA publishing may indeed be considered a form of development aid, for two reasons: First, few institutions in the developing world have so far been able to subscribe to academic journals. The OA regime can thus promote scientific participation and thereby foster the global evolution of science as a "trial and error" process. Free or cheaper access to literature for researchers in the developing world tends to increase both their output (number of publications) and input (number of references) (Mueller-Langer et al., 2020). Second, an OA regime grants access to the latest results in science for groups who were previously excluded because they are not "club" members of a university library. This includes, e.g., corporate researchers, physicians, or farmers. Notwithstanding all the changes discussed above, scholarly journals remain the most important medium of communication in many disciplines. For more than 300 years, they have been fulfilling the four key functions of registration (attribution), certification of articles (peer review), dissemination (distribution, access), and preservation (scholarly memory and permanent archiving). In recent decades, a fifth function must be added: the evaluation of researchers and their institutions.22 The increasing importance of OA articles in scholarly journals has triggered some controversial discussions, in particular regarding the questions as to whether OA negatively affects the quality of journal articles, whether OA improves the dissemination of research results, and how OA affects the competition between academic publishers as well as the distribution between academics and non-academics, between poor and rich universities, and between poor and rich countries. We shall discuss each of these questions and some related points in more detail below. In times when "alternative facts" tend to trump sound research results, academia must provide the public with reliable information. The users of this information should be sufficiently certain that the results are based on proper methods, reflect the state of science in the specific field, and were obtained independently, e.g., of any political or commercial interests.23 For that reason, strict and continuous quality control of research results is a "conditio sine qua non" for academic publishing. Facilitating the communication of content from authors to readers, the academic journal market may be characterized as a two-sided market (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). While readers look for the most important research results in their fields by top authors, the latter are interested in the journal's reputation, in wide readership, and in citations. Thus, journals with high impact factors hold the greatest attraction to both sides. With this in mind, the crucial question arises what effect, if any, OA is likely to have on the quality of academic articles. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, is very skeptical regarding the quality of OA articles, especially those that are financed by APCs: "By adding a financial component to the front end of the scholarly publishing process, the open-access movement will ultimately corrupt scholarly publishing and hurt the communication and sharing of novel knowledge" (Beall, 2013, 590). 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However, this is a of the process, of whether the was submitted to a traditional or an OA and many prominent which that articles are generally more likely to the review than and creative but ones. In their contribution to this special & in a two-sided that OA can be a feature of journals. 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A shift to an open-access model of publishing would clearly benefit science, but who should pay?

This article investigates the discourses of academic legitimacy that surround the production, consumption, and accreditation of online scholarship. Using the web-based media and cultural studies journal (http://journal.media-culture.org.au) as a case study, it examines how online scholarly journals often position themselves as occupying a space between the academic and the popular and as having a functional advantage over print-based media in promoting a spirit of public intellectualism. The current research agenda of both government and academe prioritises academic research that is efficient, self-promoting, and relevant to the public. Yet, although the cost-effectiveness and public-intellectual focus of online scholarship speak to these research priorities, online journals such as M/C Journal have occupied, and continue to occupy, an unstable position in relation to the perceived academic legitimacy of their content. Although some online scholarly journals have achieved a limited form of recognition within a system of accreditation that still privileges print-based scholarship, I argue that this, nevertheless, points to the fact that traditional textual notions of legitimate academic work continue to pervade the research agenda of an academe that increasingly promotes flexible delivery of teaching and online research initiatives.

Critical Care's move to fund open access

The mandatory NIH public-access policy, which became effective on April 7, 2008, requires the NIH-funded principal investigators (PIs) to self-archive to the National Library of Medicine subject repository PubMed Central a manuscript’s electronic version immediately upon publication, which will then be available to the public free of cost the latest after a twelve-month embargo period. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit open-access publisher in health sciences, publishes seven journals in the health sciences field (PLoS ONE, PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogenes and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases) and submits to PubMed Central all the published articles, irrespective of the funder of the research results. The PIs who had published in one of the PLoS journals were chosen based on the journals’ established high impact factor immediately after their creation. The PIs’ motivation to publish in one of the seven PLoS journals was unknown. Whether the NIH public-access policy has affected the PIs’ publishing decisions was also unknown. A random sample of NIH-funded PIs, who had published in one of the PLoS journals between the years 2005- 2009, was selected from the RePORTER database. During the period March-May 2011, forty-two PIs were interviewed using SkypeTM software, and a semi-structured open-ended interview protocol was followed. The participants were divided into two groups; the pre-mandate PIs, who had published in one of the seven PLoS journals during the period 2005-2007 and the post-mandate, who had published in the PLoS journals the during period 2008-2009. The publishing habits of these two groups were compared, in order to reach an understanding about their publishing decisions. Based on the findings, the NIH-funded PIs choose the PLoS journals due to their high impact factor, fast publication speed, fair peer-review system and the articles’ open-access availability. Although the PIs agree with the premise that publicly funded research must be distributed for-free to everyone who has funded it, the steps required to comply with the policy were perceived to be time consuming. Since conformity with the policy is essential, the participants’ goal is to ensure that the manuscripts will appear to PubMed Central, which either can be self-archived by the PIs, by an administrative assistant or by the journal. The NIH public-access policy did not cause either an increase in the PIs’ open-access awareness or a change in their publishing habits. The open-access advocates were supporters of the immediate free access to scientific information before the policy and provided their manuscripts free-of-cost before the policy’s mandate. The non-open-access advocates choose their publications based on quality criteria such as the journal’s prestige, impact factor, speed of publication and the attracted audience, while the article’s open-access availability is considered to be a plus. Furthermore, since a large number of journals comply with the NIH-policy, the participants did not have to change their publishing habits.

One issue that I've been following for a number of years is so called MegaJournals. Mega journal as defined on Wikipedia. Cue ' Open Access and The Dramatic Growth of PLoS ONE' which I wrote for the fig share blog back in 2012. (As you will see, PLOS ONE started publishing papers in 2006). The concept of OA "Megajournals" appears to have started around June 2011 as per this post by Mark Patterson (at that time with PLOS, now with eLife): "Remarkably, PLoS ONE became the largest peer-reviewed journal in existence inside four years (and will publish as much as 1.5% of the articles indexed in PubMed in 2011), and over the past 12 months has been emulated by many other established publishers in various disciplines". doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001235.g001 A large part of the reason for the spike in the dramatic rise since Q1 & Q2 2011 is the fact that that was the time that PLoS ONE received its first Impact Factor That opened the floodgates in a big way and it can clearly be seen from above that this fact has led to a significant effect. Around the same time, Frank Norman posted a more broader and detailed post Megajournals which indeed was the conduit to my own post. The trend towards Open Access has catalysed the creation of many new journals and new publishers. BioMedCentral, established in 2000, was a pioneer of open access publishing, launching a large number of journals. Public Library of Science (PLoS) initially established a small number of high-level journals, then in 2006 it launched PLoS ONE. This was the first of a new kind of journal, later dubbed mega-journal. PLoS ONE aimed to publish any article that met the test of scientific rigour, and eschewed any measure of importance or impact in its editorial and peer review process. In 2010, PLoS ONE published 6,749 articles, making it the largest journal in the world (by volume). Its success helped to persuade the mainstream publishing industry that fee-paid open access was a viable business model. Recently I invited representatives from a number of open access publishers to discuss megajournals. Five of them gave presentations to an audience of scientists here, and one visited me subsequently to inform me about their operations. I then revisited the output of PLOS ONE around a year later. In May 2015, Mike Taylor posted Have we reached Peak Megajournal? Bo-Christer Björk's (2015) new paper in PeerJ asks the question "Have the "mega-journals" reached the limits to growth?", and suggests that the answer may be yes. (Although, frustratingly, you can't tell from the abstract that this is the conclusion.) I was a bit disappointed that the paper didn't include a graph showing its conclusion, and asked about this (thanks to PeerJ's lightweight commenting system). Björk's response acknowledged that a graph would have been helpful, and invited me to go ahead and make one, since the underlying data is freely available. So using OpenOffice's cumbersome but adequate graphing facilities, I plotted the numbers from Björk's table 3. As we can see, the result for total megajournal publications upholds the conclusion that megajournals have peaked and started to decline. But PLOS ONE (the dark blue line) enormously dominates all the other megajournals, with Nature's Scientific Reports the only other publication to even be meaningfully visible on the graph. Since Scientific Reports seems to be still in the exponential phase of its growth and everything else is too low-volume to register, what we're really seeing here is just a decline in PLOS ONE volume. It's interesting to think about what the fall-off in PLOS ONE volume means, but it's certainly not the same thing as megajournals having topped out. What do we see when we expand the lower part of the graph by taking out PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports? So the establishment of new megajournals is very much a good thing, and their growth is to be encouraged. Many of the newer megajournals may well find (and I hate to admit this) that their submission rates increase when they're handed their first impact factor, as happened with PLOS ONE. Onward! Touched upon in the posts by Norman and Taylor is Scientific Reports (SR). SR was launched in 2011 (with little fanfare) by Nature Publishing Group (now Springer Nature) and over the last couple of years has seen significant growth. Interestingly, after its launch, PLOS ran with the following post on their Official Blog:- Welcome, Nature. Seriously. We shall come back to SR shortly. Whilst PLOS ONE has many supporters, it also has its critics, most notably, some of the individuals who blog for The Scholarly Kitchen:- What is clear however was that in terms of output, this seemed to have peaked around 2013/2014 and has subsequently been in decline ever since. In August 2016, Scholarly Kitchen ran with a post:- Scientific Reports On Track To Become Largest Journal In The World An unpredictable publication flow and revenue stream through APCs will have very different effects on the two publishers. Springer Nature has an enormous, diversified stable of journals and revenue streams, which allows them to play a long-term strategy game with Scientific Reports. Annual revenue fluctuations with one journal are not going to put Springer Nature in financial trouble. In contrast, PLOS' income is almost exclusively based on APC revenue, with 97% of their 2014 revenue coming from publication fees. More importantly, 91% of all 2015 papers published in PLOS journals were published in PLOS ONE, the remaining 9% split among six other journals. As revenue from PLOS ONE functions to subsidize the publication costs of these six other titles, downward pressure on PLOS ONE puts the entire organization at risk. Over last weekend, I noted a very recent post on Times Higher Education:- Mega-journals: the future, a stepping stone to it or a leap into the abyss? Nature' s new kid on the block is now the biggest journal in the world. But while such giants are currently overturning the world of scholarly publishing, their long-term future is unclear, says Stephen Pinfield. In September, Plos One was overtaken. Nature's Scientific Reports published 1,940 research articles in that month, compared with Plos One's 1,756. The figures for August were 1,691 and 1,735, respectively. Scientific Reports has grown rapidly since its launch in 2011, a rise that has coincided with (some have suggested, partly contributed to) a decline in Plos One. Like Plos One, Scientific Reports publishes across STEM, although in reality, the former has more papers in health and life sciences and the latter in physical sciences. Pinfield's projected figures for SR in 2016 are based on data from August and September 2016. I them made the following graph based on data from here on SR. After I tweeted details of Pinfield's post any my own graph, things got rather interesting on Twitter. Here's some of what I saw. @McDawg @SciReports Not Yet. Maybe in 2017 Sci Rep 14402 articles (as of Sep 28,2016) PLOS One 15390 articles(as of Sep 9, 2016) Source WOS - Kamatlab (@KamatlabND) October 16, 2016 @Protohedgehog @McDawg @SciReports @PLOSONE Here is the screen shot of data. pic.twitter.com/3WRN32olCd - Kamatlab (@KamatlabND) October 16, 2016 @McDawg @SciReports A declining Impact Factor trend accompanies the growth of Mega Journals, pic.twitter.com/5Z03wJDRKT - Kamatlab (@KamatlabND) October 16, 2016 Assuming a very generous 50% APC fee waiver rate, that's still $12 million in 2016 alone. https://t.co/eyEizVcW2U - Alex Bond (@TheLabAndField) October 16, 2016 @McDawg @Protohedgehog Who publishes most in Mega Journals? Authors from China in @SciReports & @RSC_Adv & USA in @PLOSONE (Source WoS ) pic.twitter.com/Ql3EeJZEKe - Kamatlab (@KamatlabND) October 16, 2016 @Protohedgehog @McDawg See editorial "Know the Difference: Scientific Publications versus Scientific Reports" https://t.co/4ZdRdsJFxy - Kamatlab (@KamatlabND) October 16, 2016 @Protohedgehog @McDawg Also @JBuriak editorial Mega-Journals & Peer Review: Can Quality and Standards Survive? https://t.co/joLVijd20a - Kamatlab (@KamatlabND) October 16, 2016 Cool. It's great that journals that don't use "significance" as an acceptance criteria are growing https://t.co/KC5cL110hG - Alejandro Montenegro (@aemonten) October 16, 2016 @Protohedgehog@McDawg@SciReports it's called NATURE sp - Rubén Rellán-Álvarez (@rrellanalvarez) October 16, 2016 In summary, based upon available data, SR certainly appears to be on track to become the largest Journal in the world overtaking PLOS ONE but possibly not until early next year. I will conclude with the closing paragraph's from Pinfield's post:- What remains to be seen is whether mega-journals, as currently constituted, will prove to be a major innovation that contribute to the reshaping of research publishing in an increasingly open access world, or whether their real importance will lie in being a stepping stone to even more radical forms of scholarly communication. This will partly depend on the extent to which the open access "wild animal" will be domesticated. Signs of that already abound, meaning that any change is more likely to be incremental rather than disruptive. It is, of course, possible that mega-journals will sink without trace: that probably applies to some of the current smaller hopefuls. But there does now seem to be momentum behind some of larger titles, which means they, at least, are likely to continue to prosper. In the short term, though, what is clear is that the battle to publish the largest journal in the world seems to be swinging towards a new form of a very old journal, Nature. Stephen Pinfield is professor of information services management at the University of Sheffield. He is currently principal investigator on an AHRC-funded project investigating mega-journals and the future of scholarly communication.

Open Access Musings

Open access journals: Why are we not there yet? (!)

Some Research Wants to Be Free, Some Follows the Money: Bogus Journals Complicate the Open Access Movement

Purpose: The number of open access (OA) journals is rapidly increasing, and it is very important for librarians to understand the influence of OA journals on the research community. This study investigated the influence of the OA journals listed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) based on various indicators.Methods: The data for this study were prepared by combining the JCR 2014 to 2019 journal list with the number of hybrid OA articles obtained by searching the Web of Science. Each journal’s JCR indicators and article processing charge were added. The influence of OA journals was compared according to OA type, whether they were published by large publishers, and whether they were top gold OA journals.Results: Gold OA journals remained weaker in terms of JCR indicators than hybrid journals. However, the top 20 gold OA journals, accounting for 27.0% of all OA articles in JCR 2014 to 2019, were superior in all JCR indicators. The top three OA publishers (MDPI, BioMed Central, and Public Library of Science) showed potential for development despite concerns regarding poor journals. The top three subscription publishers were very active in OA publishing, but their actual share of hybrid OA articles (Elsevier, 5.1%; Springer, 10.1%; and Wiley, 12.4% in JCR 2019) was still insufficient.Conclusion: Some gold OA journals showed high competitiveness and even the possibility for development beyond traditional journals. The transition of subscription journals to hybrid journals was found to be at the early stage. In light of these findings, librarians should continue monitoring the influence of OA journals.

Open Access Pricing Models would Reduce Journal Expenditure at Most Colleges and Universities

Is there a need for a new journal devoted to preventive medicine?

: Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, contributes to our Tenth Anniversary PLOS Biology Collection by discussing how the Open Access movement has grown up.