Étiquette : megajournal

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Data Availability Statements in Mega Journals: A Comparative Analysis of Global and Korea-Affiliated Publications in Health and Medical Research

Authors : Sanghee Oh, Yunseo Park, Seyun Sim

Data Availability Statements (DAS) have become a standard mechanism for promoting transparency and reproducibility in open-access mega journals, yet questions remain about how effectively they support meaningful data sharing in practice and how these practices vary across national research contexts.

This study examines data-sharing practices in the medical and health sciences through a comparative analysis of global publications and Korea-affiliated articles in three mega journals indexed in PubMed Central: PLOS ONE, Scientific Reports and BMJ Open (2020–2024). DAS from 176,145 articles were collected from PubMed Central using an automated pipeline with manual validation and classified into a seven-category typology reflecting levels of data accessibility and reuse.

Results indicate that although DAS inclusion increased over time, repository-based data sharing remains limited, while ‘data available upon request’ continues to be prevalent. Clear differences are observed across journals: PLOS ONE shows greater use of repository-based and in-article sharing, whereas Scientific Reports and BMJ Open rely more heavily on ‘data available upon request’. Korea-affiliated articles largely follow global trends, with slightly greater reliance on national public data repositories.

Repository use is concentrated among a small number of international multidisciplinary platforms and selected national biomedical databases. The findings reveal a persistent gap between formal DAS compliance and effective data accessibility, indicating the need for clearer, more actionable data-sharing guidance.

URL : Data Availability Statements in Mega Journals: A Comparative Analysis of Global and Korea-Affiliated Publications in Health and Medical Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2083

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Open Access, Scholarly Communication, and Open Science in Psychology: An Overview for Researchers

Author : Laura Bowering Mullen

Scholarly communication, Open Access (OA), and open science practices in Psychology are rapidly evolving. However, most published works that focus on scholarly communication issues do not target the specific discipline, and instead take a more “one size fits all” approach. When it comes to scholarly communication, research practices and traditions vary greatly across and within disciplines.

This monograph presents a current overview that aims to cover Open Access (OA) and some of the newer open science-related issues that are affecting Psychology. Issues covered include topics around OA of all types, as well as other important scholarly communication-related issues such as the emergence of preprint options, the evolution of new peer review models, citation metrics, persistent identifiers, coauthorship conventions, field-specific OA megajournals, and other “gold” OA psychology journal options, the challenges of interdisciplinarity, and how authors are availing themselves of green and gold OA strategies or using scholarly networking sites such as ResearchGate. Included are discussions of open science strategies in Psychology such as reproducibility, replication, and research data management.

This overview will allow psychology researchers to get up to speed on these expansive topics. Further study into researcher behavior in terms of scholarly communication in Psychology would create more understanding of existing culture as well as provide researchers with a more effective roadmap to the current landscape. As no other single work is known to provide a current look at scholarly communication topics that is specifically focused on Psychology, this targeted overview aims to partially fill that niche.

URL : Open Access, Scholarly Communication, and Open Science in Psychology: An Overview for Researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231205390

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Megajournal mismanagement: Manuscript decision bias and anomalous editor activity at PLOS ONE

Author : Alexander M. Petersen

Since their emergence just a decade ago, nearly 2% of scientific research is now published by megajournals, representing a major industrial shift in the production of knowledge. Such high-throughput production stresses several aspects of the publication process, including the editorial oversight of peer-review.

As the largest megajournal, PLOS ONE has relied on a single-tier editorial board comprised of ∼7000 active academics, who thereby face conflicts of interest relating to their dual roles as both producers and gatekeepers of peer-reviewed literature.

While such conflicts of interest are also a factor for editorial boards of smaller journals, little is known about how the scalability of megajournals may introduce perverse incentives for editorial service.

To address this issue, we analyzed the activity of PLOS ONE editors over the journal’s inaugural decade (2006–2015) and find highly variable activity levels. We then leverage this variation to model how editorial bias in the manuscript decision process relates to two editor-specific factors: repeated editor-author interactions and shifts in the rates of citations directed at editors – a form of citation remuneration that is analogue to self-citation.

Our results indicate significantly stronger manuscript bias among a relatively small number of extremely active editors, who also feature relatively high self-citation rates coincident in the manuscripts they handle.

These anomalous activity patterns are consistent with the perverse incentives and the temptations they offer at scale, which is theoretically grounded in the “slippery-slope” evolution of apathy and misconduct in power-driven environments.

By applying quantitative evaluation to the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge, we shed light on various ethics issues crucial to science policy – in particular, calling for more transparent and structured management of editor activity in megajournals that rely on active academics.

URL : Megajournal mismanagement: Manuscript decision bias and anomalous editor activity at PLOS ONE

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2019.100974

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Motivations, understandings, and experiences of open‐access mega‐journal authors: Results of a large‐scale survey

Authors : Simon Wakeling, Claire Creaser, Stephen Pinfield, Jenny Fry, Valérie Spezi, Peter Willett, Monica Paramita

Open‐access mega‐journals (OAMJs) are characterized by their large scale, wide scope, open‐access (OA) business model, and “soundness‐only” peer review. The last of these controversially discounts the novelty, significance, and relevance of submitted articles and assesses only their “soundness.”

This article reports the results of an international survey of authors (n = 11,883), comparing the responses of OAMJ authors with those of other OA and subscription journals, and drawing comparisons between different OAMJs. Strikingly, OAMJ authors showed a low understanding of soundness‐only peer review: two‐thirds believed OAMJs took into account novelty, significance, and relevance, although there were marked geographical variations.

Author satisfaction with OAMJs, however, was high, with more than 80% of OAMJ authors saying they would publish again in the same journal, although there were variations by title, and levels were slightly lower than subscription journals (over 90%).

Their reasons for choosing to publish in OAMJs included a wide variety of factors, not significantly different from reasons given by authors of other journals, with the most important including the quality of the journal and quality of peer review.

About half of OAMJ articles had been submitted elsewhere before submission to the OAMJ with some evidence of a “cascade” of articles between journals from the same publisher.

URL : Motivations, understandings, and experiences of open‐access mega‐journal authors: Results of a large‐scale survey

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24154

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The diverse niches of megajournals: Specialism within generalism

Authors: Kyle Siler, Vincent Larivière, Cassidy R. Sugimoto

Over the past decade, megajournals have expanded in popularity and established a legitimate niche in academic publishing. Leveraging advantages of digital publishing, megajournals are characterized by large publication volume, broad interdisciplinary scope, and peer‐review filters that select primarily for scientific soundness as opposed to novelty or originality.

These publishing innovations are complementary and competitive vis‐à‐vis traditional journals. We analyze how megajournals (PLOS One, Scientific Reports) are represented in different fields relative to prominent generalist journals (Nature, PNAS, Science) and “quasi‐megajournals” (Nature Communications, PeerJ).

Our results show that both megajournals and prominent traditional journals have distinctive niches, despite the similar interdisciplinary scopes of such journals.

These niches—defined by publishing volume and disciplinary diversity—are dynamic and varied over the relatively brief histories of the analyzed megajournals. Although the life sciences are the predominant contributor to megajournals, there is variation in the disciplinary composition of different megajournals.

The growth trajectories and disciplinary composition of generalist journals—including megajournals—reflect changing knowledge dissemination and reward structures in science.

URL : The diverse niches of megajournals: Specialism within generalism

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24299

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Acceptance rates of scholarly peer-reviewed journals: A literature survey

Author : Bo-Christer Bjórk

The acceptance rate of scholarly journals is an important selection criterion for authors choosing where to submit their manuscripts. Unfortunately, information about the acceptance (or rejection rates) of individual journals is seldom available.

This article surveys available systematic information and studies of acceptance rates. The overall global average is around 35-40%. There are significant differences between fields of science, with biomedicine having higher acceptance rates compared to for instance the social sciences.

Open access journals usually have higher acceptance rates than subscription journals, and this is particularly true for so-called OA mega-journals, which have peer review criteria focusing on sound science only.

URL : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2019.jul.07

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The relationship between usage and citations in an open access mega journal

Authors : Barbara McGillivray, Mathias Astell

How does usage of an article relate to the number of citations it accrues? Does the timeframe in which an article is used (and how much that article is used) have an effect on when and how much that article is cited?

What role does an article’s subject area play in the relationship between usage and citations? This paper aims to answer these questions through an observational study of usage and citation data collected about a multidisciplinary, open access mega journal, Scientific Reports.

We find that while the direct correlation between usage and citations is only moderate at best, the relationship between how early and how much an article is used and how early it is cited is much clearer. What is more, we find that when an article is cited earlier it is also cited more often, leading to the assertion that if an article is more highly accessed early on, it is more likely to be cited earlier and more often.

As Scientific Reports is a multidisciplinary journal covering all natural and clinical sciences, this study was also able to look at the differences across subject areas and found some interesting variations when comparing the major subject areas covered by the journal (i.e. biological, Earth, physical and health sciences).

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01333