Have the “mega-journals” reached the limits to growth?

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Abstract

A “mega-journal” is a new type of scientific journal that publishes freely accessible articles, which have been peer reviewed for scientific trustworthiness, but leaves it to the readers to decide which articles are of interest and importance to them. In the wake of the phenomenal success of PLOS ONE, several other publishers have recently started mega-journals. This article presents the evolution of mega-journals since 2010 in terms of article publication rates. The fastest growth seems to have ebbed out at around 35,000 annual articles for the 14 journals combined. Acceptance rates are in the range of 50–70%, and speed of publication is around 3–5 months. Common features in mega-journals are alternative impact metrics, easy reusability of figures and data, post-publication discussions and portable reviews from other journals.

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Most cited references 10

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The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals

Bo-Christer Björk, David Solomon (2013)

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Is Open Access

Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure

Mikael Laakso, Bo-Christer Björk (2012)

Background Open access (OA) is a revolutionary way of providing access to the scholarly journal literature made possible by the Internet. The primary aim of this study was to measure the volume of scientific articles published in full immediate OA journals from 2000 to 2011, while observing longitudinal internal shifts in the structure of OA publishing concerning revenue models, publisher types and relative distribution among scientific disciplines. The secondary aim was to measure the share of OA articles of all journal articles, including articles made OA by publishers with a delay and individual author-paid OA articles in subscription journals (hybrid OA), as these subsets of OA publishing have mostly been ignored in previous studies. Methods Stratified random sampling of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (n = 787) was performed. The annual publication volumes spanning 2000 to 2011 were retrieved from major publication indexes and through manual data collection. Results An estimated 340,000 articles were published by 6,713 full immediate OA journals during 2011. OA journals requiring article-processing charges have become increasingly common, publishing 166,700 articles in 2011 (49% of all OA articles). This growth is related to the growth of commercial publishers, who, despite only a marginal presence a decade ago, have grown to become key actors on the OA scene, responsible for 120,000 of the articles published in 2011. Publication volume has grown within all major scientific disciplines, however, biomedicine has seen a particularly rapid 16-fold growth between 2000 (7,400 articles) and 2011 (120,900 articles). Over the past decade, OA journal publishing has steadily increased its relative share of all scholarly journal articles by about 1% annually. Approximately 17% of the 1.66 million articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers, most articles immediately (12%) but some within 12 months of publication (5%). Conclusions OA journal publishing is disrupting the dominant subscription-based model of scientific publishing, having rapidly grown in relative annual share of published journal articles during the last decade.

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A study of open access journals using article processing charges

David Solomon, Bo-Christer Björk (2012)

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Author and article information

Contributors

Bo-Christer Björk

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PeerJ

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): PeerJ

Journal ID (pmc): PeerJ

Journal ID (publisher-id): PeerJ

Title: PeerJ

Publisher: PeerJ Inc. (San Francisco, USA )

ISSN (Electronic): 2167-8359

Publication date (Electronic): 26 May 2015

Publication date Collection: 2015

Volume: 3

Electronic Location Identifier: e981

Affiliations

[-1]Hanken School of Economics, Department of Management and Organisation , Helsinki, Finland

Article

Publisher ID: 981

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.981

PMC ID: 4451030

SO-VID: 026a1c6e-71f4-4dc3-8c36-5d58b14719d6

License:

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

History

Date received : 7 April 2015

Date accepted : 7 May 2015

Funding

This work has been conducted as part of my professorial position at my University with no external funding. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Have the “mega-journals” reached the limits to growth?

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Perspectives in Scholarly Publishing

Most cited references 10

The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals

Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure

A study of open access journals using article processing charges

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