Open-access mega-journals and the future of scholarly communication

开放获取的“超级期刊”是一种新兴的出版趋势，它有可能重塑研究人员分享他们的发现的方式，重塑学术出版市场，并从根本上改变学术的性质和范围。该项目将调查大型期刊在学术界内外的影响。大型期刊只在网上出版（它们没有纸质版），并在开放的网络上提供文章（而不仅仅是订阅者）。通常，他们通过收取出版前的文章处理费（而不是出版后的订阅费）来支持这一点。越来越多的开放获取（OA）期刊都具有这些特点。大型期刊的与众不同之处在于它们对范围和质量的创新方法。它们的范围空前广泛：《公共科学图书馆·综合》和《自然科学报告》这两大大型期刊发表的文章涵盖了整个科学和医学领域。他们的质量方法是基于对“技术可靠性”的评估，忽略了诸如“重要性”和“兴趣”等传统价值标准。至关重要的是，这些问题在发表后通过复杂的机器生成的文章使用和引用指标来解决。因此，大型期刊通过创建大量开放的多学科研究内容数据库，完全扭转了过去40年来学术出版日益专业化的趋势。大型期刊现在开始产生真正的影响。《公共科学图书馆·综合》创刊于2006年，是同类期刊中的第一本，现在是世界上最大的学术期刊，2013年发表了3.15万篇文章。继其成功之后，包括《自然》（Nature）在内的其他老牌出版商也推出了新图书。新的出版商也在进入这个市场，他们受到大型规模经济潜力的鼓舞，并认识到大型期刊在挑战传统出版的专业期刊的市场主导地位方面具有颠覆性的潜力。了解大型期刊是如何发展的以及它们的主要特征是这个项目的关键目标。大型期刊对学术本身的潜在影响也很重要，这将是本项目特别关注的焦点。大型期刊表面上弱化了“看门人”的作用，比如学术编辑、编辑委员会成员和同行评议人，他们传统上对一篇论文的学科“重要性”和社区“兴趣”做出判断。这可能会对学科身份和联系产生影响。大型期刊似乎有潜力增强学术出版物跨越边界的能力——学科边界，以及学术界和社会其他部分之间的边界。因此，大型期刊促进跨学科工作的程度以及它们鼓励使用学术内容的方式是重要的研究领域。该项目的另一个问题是，它们在多大程度上促进了指标驱动的研究评估而不是同行评估的增长趋势，以及这与研究资金和管理之间的关系。这个项目将研究这些和相关的问题，特别是问，“学术研究界内外的大型期刊的出现有什么意义？”使用多种研究方法，它将收集定量和定性数据来回答这个问题。这项研究将包括对大型期刊特征的定量研究（例如，使用文献计量学方法）、与出版业主要利益相关者的访谈、涉及代表不同学科和专业社区的学者和研究管理人员的焦点小组和访谈，以及对研究人员的国际调查。收集所有这些证据将使研究小组能够得出研究人员、出版商、研究经理和政策制定者感兴趣的结论。

Open-access 'mega-journals' are an emerging publishing trend which has the potential to reshape the way researchers share their findings, remoulding the academic publishing market and radically changing the nature and reach of scholarship. This project will investigate the influence of mega-journals in the academic community and beyond.Mega-journals publish only online (they have no paper equivalent), and make their articles available on the open web (rather than just to subscribers). Typically, they support this by charging pre-publication article-processing charges (rather than post-publication subscriptions). These features are true of a growing group of open-access (OA) journals. What distinguishes mega-journals is their innovative approach to scope and quality. Their scope is unprecedentedly wide: PLOS ONE and Nature Scientific Reports, two major mega-journals, publish articles across the entire fields of science and medicine. Their approach to quality is based on an assessment of 'technical soundness', ignoring traditionally-valued criteria such as 'importance' and 'interest'. Crucially, these are addressed after publication through sophisticated machine-generated metrics on article use and citation. Thus mega-journals completely reverse the trend of increasing specialisation in scholarly publishing over the last 40 years by creating massive openly-available databases of multi-disciplinary research content. Mega-journals are now beginning to make a real impact. PLOS ONE, founded in 2006, was the first journal of its type and is now the world's largest academic journal, publishing 31,500 articles in 2013. Following its success, other established publishers, including Nature, have launched titles. New publishers are also entering the market, encouraged by the potential for major economies of scale and recognising the disruptive potential of mega-journals in challenging the market dominance of conventionally-published specialised journals. Understanding how mega-journals are developing and their main characteristics are key aims of this project.The potential influence of mega-journals on scholarship itself is also significant and will be a particular focus for this project. Mega-journals ostensibly deemphasise the role of 'gatekeepers' such as academic editors, editorial board members and peer reviewers who traditionally make judgements about a paper's disciplinary 'importance' and community 'interest'. This perhaps has implications for disciplinary identities and connections. Mega-journals seem to have the potential to enhance the ability of scholarly publications to move across boundaries - disciplinary boundaries and also those between academia and the rest of society. The extent to which mega-journals promote interdisciplinary working and the ways in which they can encourage use of scholarly content beyond academia are therefore important areas of enquiry. Another question for the project is the extent to which they contribute to an increasing trend of metrics-driven assessment of research rather than peer assessment, and the relationship this has on research funding and management.This project will examine these and related issues asking in particular, 'What is the significance of the emergence of mega-journals both within and beyond the academic research community?' Using a variety of research methods, it will assemble both quantitative and qualitative data to answer this question. The research will include quantitative studies of the characteristics of mega-journals (for example, using bibliometric methods), interviews with major stakeholders in the publishing industry, focus groups and interviews involving scholars and research managers representing different disciplinary and professional communities, and an international survey of researchers. Assembling all of this evidence will allow the research team to draw conclusions of interest to researchers, publishers, research managers and policymakers.