Mega Journals 1: Inception and Ideal
— by Fanny Liu
Introduction
Since the establishment of PLOS ONE in 2006, a number of mega journals emerged, such as BMJ Open, IEEE Access, PeerJ, Scientific Reports, and more. While mega journals have secured a niche in scholarly publishing, there are also concerns and controversies.
Characteristics
Mega journals have some major characteristics (Björk, 2021; Siler et al., 2020; Wakeling et al., 2019):
- Large publishing volume
Publishing larger volumes of articles compared with most conventional journals; E.g., two large mega journals, PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports, published 19,920 and 24,806 articles in 2017, respectively (Siler et al., 2020, p. 803).
- Wide scope
Covering an entire disciplinary area or more; For example, PLOS ONE publishes mainly on the life sciences, significantly clinical medicine, biomedical research, and biology; Scientific Reports, in additional to life sciences, also publishes a significant minority of articles from the engineering and physics (Siler et al., 2020, pp. 808-809). See Figure 1.
- Open access (OA)
Adopting open access, typically supported by prepublication article processing charges (APCs).
- Soundness only peer review
Limiting peer review to cover technical or scientific “soundness” only. Judgments on novelty, significance, or relevance to a particular readership are not considered.
- Higher acceptance rates
Generally ranging from 50–70%, higher than the global average.
Regarding publication speed, the review process in the biomedical mega journals takes as long as in conventional selective journals in the same fields, while engineering mega journals are several times faster than conventional journals (Björk, 2021).
Figure 1: Percentage of each journal’s number of articles by discipline, 2000–2017; Created with data by Siler et al. (2020, p. 806)
Niche
Soundness and subjectivity
The soundness-only peer review process offered by mega journals provides scientists with new opportunities to disseminate research (Siler et al., 2020). In general, this way of peer review includes assessing whether the research questions have been addressed by a correct methodology, whether appropriate statistical tests have been applied, and whether the ethical requirements are met (Spezi et al., 2018). In comparison, a few criteria which are critical in reviews for conventional journals, such as novelty, significance, or interest of a particular readership, are deemed “subjective” and not considered in the peer review decision. This may be appealing to scientists, especially whose research may have been of less interest to conventional journals, preferences of which are sometimes abstract and highly selective.
Acceptance rates
The acceptance rates of mega journals generally range from 50–70%, which is higher than an overall global average for scholarly journals across all disciplines of around 40% (Björk, 2021). The perceived lower rejective rates can be of appeal to authors.
Open access
When open access is a key characteristic of mega journals, authors required to disseminate research in open access may find this particularly desirable. In a survey conducted by Wakeling et al. (2019), mega-journal authors from the United Kingdom were significantly more inclined to consider the open access status of the journal as a “very” or “extremely” important factor when selecting journal to publish than authors from any other country (see Figure 2). This could be because of United Kingdom funder requirements for dissemination of results in open access; And especially, publicly funded research councils and medical research charities, such as Wellcome, expressed preference towards Gold open access and funded the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) at the time.
Figure 2: Importance of “The fact the journal is Open Access” in their decision to submit to a specific journal by mega journal authors; Created with data by Creaser et al. (2018)
Conclusion
While mega journals have secured a niche for characteristics such as open access, wider scope, soundness only peer-review and higher acceptance rates, they have also sparked controversies. In the next post, we will discuss some of the concerns and controversies.
References
Björk, B.-C. (2021). Publishing speed and acceptance rates of open access megajournals. Online Information Review, 45(2), 270-277. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2018-0151
Creaser, C., Fry, J., Wakeling, S., Pinfield, S., Willett, P., & Spezi, V. (2018). Open Access Mega Journal survey data Loughborough University. https://doi.org/10.17028/rd.lboro.7211924.v1
Siler, K., Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2020). The diverse niches of megajournals: Specialism within generalism. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71(7), 800-816. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24299
Spezi, V., Wakeling, S., Pinfield, S., Fry, J., Creaser, C., & Willett, P. (2018). “Let the community decide”? The vision and reality of soundness-only peer review in open-access mega-journals. Journal of Documentation, 74(1), 137-161. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-06-2017-0092
Wakeling, S., Creaser, C., Pinfield, S., Fry, J., Spezi, V., Willett, P., & Paramita, M. (2019). Motivations, understandings, and experiences of open-access mega-journal authors: Results of a large-scale survey. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 70(7), 754-768. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24154
