The death of open access mega-journals? | Justin Jackson

The entire scientific publishing world is currently undergoing a massive stress test of quantity vs. quality, open access (free) vs. institutional subscriptions (paywall), and how to best judge the integrity of a publication.

The traditional model in scientific journal publishing has historically been to collect fees from universities and research institutions, and publish articles by researchers connected to those institutions through a slow and exhausting peer-review process. To read any published studies, you would need to be affiliated with an organization that has a subscription, or pay a hefty fee to read a single study online. This subscription service allowed institutions unlimited access to current published research as well as a pathway to publishing and recognition of their research for gaining grant funding.

For the traditional publishing industry, this model provided a consistent source of revenue based on the number of journals they provided, not the number of papers published within them. Instead of actively attempting to attract more papers, the growth was seen in having more specialty journals.

Open-access scientific journals came along with the promise of free access to information. No longer would the availability of research papers be hidden behind paywalls, and papers could be submitted from any institution equally. Instead of subscription fees, these journals charged researchers for submitting papers on an individual basis.

(more)

READ MORE: Phys.org