Academic communities. The role of journals and open-access mega-journals in scholarly communication
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2018-0067 |
| Pages | 120-139 |
| Published date | 14 January 2019 |
| Date | 14 January 2019 |
| Author | Simon Wakeling,Valerie Spezi,Jenny Fry,Claire Creaser,Stephen Pinfield,Peter Willett |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Academic communities
The role of journals and open-access
mega-journals in scholarly communication
Simon Wakeling
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Valerie Spezi, Jenny Fry and Claire Creaser
Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, and
Stephen Pinfield and Peter Willett
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into publication practices from the perspective of
academics working within four disciplinary communities: biosciences, astronomy/physics, education and history.
The paper explores the ways in which these multiple overlapping communities intersect with the journal
landscapeand the implicationsfor the adoption and useof new players in the scholarlycommunicationsystem,
particularly open-access mega-journals (OAMJs).OAMJs (e.g. PLOS ONE andScientific Reports) are large, broad
scope, open-access journals that base editorial decisions solely on the technical/scientific soundness of the article.
Design/methodology/approach –Focus groups with active researchers in these fields were held in
five UK Higher Education Institutions across Great Britain, and were complemented by interviews with
pro-vice-chancellors for research at each institution.
Findings –A strong finding to emerge from the data is the notion of researchers belonging to multiple
overlapping communities, with some inherent tensions in meeting the requirements for these different
audiences. Researcher perceptions of evaluation mechanisms were found to play a major role in attitudes
towards OAMJs, and interviews with the pro-vice-chancellors for research indicate that there is a difference
between researchers’perceptions and the values embedded in institutional frameworks.
Originality/value –This is the first purely qualitative study relating to researcher perspectives on OAMJs.
The findings of the paper will be of interest to publishers, policy-makers, research managers and academics.
Keywords Scholarly communication, Qualitative methods, Open access, Academic communities,
Discourse communities, Open-access mega-journals
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Since the 1950sa complex journal ecosystemhas evolved, particularlyfor scientific disciplines
(Cope and Phillips, 2014). Therehas been a proliferation ofspecialist journal titlesaddressed to
a niche audience and at the same time the emergence of highly prestigious broad-scope
journals, such as Nature and Science. The volume of published articles grows steadily each
year (Ware and Mabe, 2015, p. 29) and is the predominant type of output, with increasing
importance evenin those disciplines where traditionally the monograph has been the primary
means of publication. Alongside this development, the worldwide higher education
environment has become increasingly prestige and metrics driven (Wilsdon et al., 2015).
Particularly with regard to university research evaluation and performance-based research
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 75 No. 1, 2019
pp. 120-139
Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-05-2018-0067
Received 1 May 2018
Revised 29 July 2018
Accepted 1 August 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
© Simon Wakeling, Valerie Spezi, Jenny Fry, Claire Creaser, Stephen Pinfield and Peter Willett.
Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution
(CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article
(fo r both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and
authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
The research was funded by a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AH/M010643/1) . The authors also than k all focus group par ticipants and int erviewees for the ir
contribution to the research.
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funding systems (the dominant approach in Europe) (Sivertsen, 2017) and National research
evaluation frameworks, such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK and
Excellence in Research (ERA) for Australia (which both rely on peer evaluation in addition to
performance indicators, such as journal article citation analysis, for specific disciplines e.g. the
physical and applied sciences). In 2006 Public Library of Science launched PLOS ONE, a new
type of journal now commonly called a mega-journal. As epitomised by PLOS ONE,mega-
journals have four primary characteristics: broad scope (accepting articles across a range of
disciplines), large output (publishing a high number of ar ticles), an open-access publishing
model (typically based on an Article Processing Charge (APC) paid by the author prior to
publication), and an editorial policy that reviews submissions solely on the basis of their
technical or scientific soundness (Björk, 2015). It is the last of these –soundness-only peer
review –that has emerged as perhaps the defining characteristic of the OMAJ model
(Wakeling, Spezi, Fry, Creaser, Pinfield and Willett, 2017). As stated by PLOS, the motivations
for the launch of PLOS ONE were primarily related to challenging prevailing practices in
scholarly communication, particularly the importance placed on journal impact factor ( JIF) and
associated journal metrics (Patterson, 2009). By removing the requirement for work to be
judged significant, the creators of PLOS ONE intended to facilitate the dissemination of work
that mightnot be published elsewhere, whilealso providing a venue for interdisciplinarywork.
The output of some mega-journals, two of which (PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports) are
now the largest journals in the world, suggests that the model is popular with some authors
and uptake has been more prevalent in particular areas, such as the Biosciences. While
mega-journals are the fastest growing segment of the Open Access (OA) market (Ware and
Mabe, 2015), the proportion of all scholarly output published in open-access mega-journals
(OAMJs) is still small ( just 2.6 per cent of Scopus indexed articles published in 2016 are from
a mega-journal). Thus far, related studies have focused on describing patterns of uptake and
use of mega-journals, but have not provided explanations as to the underlying factors.
In this first qualitative study of researchers’attitudes towards OAMJs we explore the
mega-journal phenomenon from a community perspective. Based on focus groups with
researchers in four disciplines at five institutions, and interviews with Pro-Vice Chancellors
for Research (PVC-Rs), the purpose of this paper is to understand academic publication
practices in a disciplinary context and to explain the role of OAMJs in that context.
It focuses on the adoption of OAMJs in the biosciences, astronomy/physics, education and
history, whilst taking into account institutional frameworks and drivers in the broader
science system (e.g. government and funder policies).
2. Background
2.1 Uptake of OAMJs
Mega-journals are a relatively recent phenomenon, and as such the literature on OAMJs is
sparse but growing. In their review of research and comment on mega-journals in the formal
and informal literature, Spezi et al. (2017) found evidence of polarised and at times animated
debate on the merits or otherwise of the model. While advocates highlight their
democratising potential, critics suggest that OAMJs are little more than “dumping grounds”
for low quality work, and that the eschewing of significance as a criteria for acceptance
leaves readers without a valuable filter ( for an example of suchdebate, see the comments on
Anderson, 2010).
A number of recent papers have used bibliometric techniques to map the emergence of
OAMJs (Wakeling et al., 2016; Björk, 2015). These suggest that OAMJs have the largest
uptake in the Medical and Life Sciences disciplines, and that even within journals with
ostensibly broad subject scope, sub-disciplinary preferences are emerging. Work has also
been done to understand the citation distribution for articles published in OAMJs, finding
significant variation in citation rates for different OAMJs (Wakeling et al., 2016).
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