Abstract
PurposeOpen-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication landscape. OAMJs, such as PLOS ONE, are large scale, broad scope journals that operate an open access business model (normally based on article-processing charges), and which employ a novel form of peer review, focussing on scientific “soundness” and eschewing judgement of novelty or importance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses relating to OAMJs, and their place within scholarly publishing, and considers attitudes towards mega-journals within the academic community.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a review of the literature of OAMJs structured around four defining characteristics: scale, disciplinary scope, peer review policy, and economic model. The existing scholarly literature was augmented by searches of more informal outputs, such as blogs and e-mail discussion lists, to capture the debate in its entirety.FindingsWhile the academic literature relating specifically to OAMJs is relatively sparse, discussion in other fora is detailed and animated, with debates ranging from the sustainability and ethics of the mega-journal model, to the impact of soundness-only peer review on article quality and discoverability, and the potential for OAMJs to represent a paradigm-shifting development in scholarly publishing.Originality/valueThis paper represents the first comprehensive review of the mega-journal phenomenon, drawing not only on the published academic literature, but also grey, professional and informal sources. The paper advances a number of ways in which the role of OAMJs in the scholarly communication environment can be conceptualised.
Highlights
Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication environment
In order to capture articles focussing on individual mega-journals, additional searches were conducted with the titles of prominent OAMJs as the search terms
Acceptance rates for open access (OA) journals were higher for all five disciplines, ranging from 38 per cent in business to 58 per cent in health. These results suggest that while OAMJ acceptance rates are generally higher than more selective journals, OA journals in some fields show broadly similar acceptance rates to some mega-journals
Summary
Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication environment. The first journal of this type (still seen as an exemplar), PLOS ONE, was launched in 2006, and was the largest peer-reviewed journal globally in 2015, publishing just over 27,400 articles[1] across a wide range of science, technology and medicine (STM) disciplines. Since it gained a prominent place in the scholarly communication landscape, many established publishers have launched. The full terms of this licence may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/3.0/legalcode
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