Open Access in 2011
If it seems like a new open access journal launches every day, thats probably because it does! In 2011, on average four OA journals were added daily to the Directory of Open Access Journals. Many of the recent press announcements about Gold OA journal launches are from mainstream STM publishers including Springer, Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, Sage and, of course, Wiley. With Wolters Kluwers, December 2011 acquisition of Medknow, an open access publisher based in India, and De Gruyters recent acquisitions of Berkeley Electronic Presss OA journal list and Versita, there can be no doubt that Gold Open Access is here to stay.
Mega Journals
The latest conversations around OA are about the mega journal, typically defined as a broad-spectrum, low-selectivity, pay-to-publish journal, often more like a database than a journal. The best known example of a mega journal is PLoSOne, which has grown rapidly since its launch in December 2006. In 2010, it published 7,000 articles and became the worlds largest scientific journal; last year, it published 14,000 papers, a 100% increase. Other mega journals have since emerged with similar characteristics as PLoSOne, including BMJ Open, SAGE Open, Scientific Reports , Open Biology and, most recently, SpringerPlus.
Mega journals differ from other journals in that they challenge the notion of traditional scholarly publishing, where the goal is to publish only the best/most novel science (by lowering acceptance rates) and to increase impact factors. Conversely, mega journals publish any paper judged to be technically sound, with no reference to the importance or novelty of the content. By lowering the rejection rate, the journal is able to increase efficiency and, in theory*, increase the speed of publication. With a business model where revenue is based on the number of papers published, this provides a highly scalable model.
Wiley and Open Access
At Wiley we are continually looking for opportunities to expand our open access activities. Four Wiley Open Access Journals (WOAJ) launched in 2011 and to date have published a total of 166 papers. Ecology and Evolution has been especially successful with 122 accepted papers and four issues already published online. The cascade model, where papers not suitable for other W-B published journals are referred to a WOAJ, is proving to be highly successful in creating a pipeline of content. Author uptake of the option to transfer rejected papers to the recommended WOAJ is high, partly as a result of the journal Editors recommendation; but the appeal of transferring their paper to a second journal without reformatting or resubmitting is also likely to be a key factor for many authors. Speed of publication appears to moving up the list of criteria authors use to decide where to publish, and the cascade model, which can eliminate the need for a second peer review, is a highly efficient method of publishing quickly, but without compromising on quality.
Wiley Open Access Journals currently launched or planned include:
- Brain and Behavior (first issue September 2011)
- Ecology and Evolution (first issue September 2011)
- MicrobiologyOpen (first articles published)
- ChemistryOpen (first articles published, published with ChemPubSoc)
- Journal of the American Heart Association (accepting submissions, published for the American Heart Association)
- Cancer Medicine (accepting submissions)
- Food Energy and Security (accepting submissions, co-published with The Association of Applied Biologists)
- Food Science and Nutrition (launching May 2012)
- Geoscience Data and Informatics (launching Spring 2012)
Societies and Open Access
Some societies are also starting to consider launching their own OA journals. The Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) is Wileys first society agreement using the cascade model, with the journal receiving referrals from the 11 other AHA journals. Other societies with multiple journals are likely to follow suit; if you are interested in this option, please get in touch with your usual Wiley-Blackwell contact point.
*A recent blog post on the Scholarly Kitchen noted that PLoSOne publication times have slowed significantly since 2006. The average time from submission to publication increased from 94 days to 213 days or from 3 months to 7months.