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

开放获取的“大型期刊”是一种新兴的出版趋势，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。这个项目将调查大型期刊在学术界和其他领域的影响力。大型期刊只在网上发表（它们没有纸质版），并在开放的网络上发表文章（而不仅仅是订阅者）。通常，他们通过收取发布前的项目处理费用（而不是发布后订阅）来支持这一点。这些特征在越来越多的开放获取（OA）期刊中是真实的。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。它们的范围是前所未有的广泛：PLOS ONE和Nature Scientific Reports，两个主要的大型期刊，发表的文章涉及整个科学和医学领域。他们的质量方法是基于对“技术健全性”的评估，忽视了传统价值标准，如“重要性”和“兴趣”。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得到解决。因此，大型期刊完全扭转了过去40年来学术出版日益专业化的趋势，创建了大量开放的多学科研究内容数据库。大型期刊现在开始产生真实的影响。PLOS ONE成立于2006年，是第一份此类期刊，现在是世界上最大的学术期刊，2013年发表了31，500篇文章。在其成功之后，包括《自然》在内的其他知名出版商也推出了自己的作品。新的出版商也在进入市场，受到规模经济潜力的鼓舞，并认识到大型期刊在挑战传统出版专业期刊市场主导地位方面的破坏性潜力。了解大型期刊的发展及其主要特征是本项目的主要目标。大型期刊对学术本身的潜在影响也很重要，将是本项目的重点。大型期刊表面上不重视学术编辑、编委会成员和同行评审员等“看门人”的作用，这些人传统上对论文的学科“重要性”和社区“利益”做出判断。这可能对学科身份和联系有影响。大型期刊似乎有潜力提高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门之间的边界。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界以外的学术内容的方式是重要的调查领域。该项目的另一个问题是，它们在多大程度上促进了越来越多的以指标为导向的研究评估，而不是同行评估，以及这对研究资金和管理的关系。该项目将研究这些问题和相关问题，特别是问，“在学术研究界内外，大型期刊的出现有什么意义？它将使用各种研究方法，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的特点进行定量研究（例如，使用文献计量方法），与出版业主要利益攸关方进行访谈，与代表不同学科和专业界的学者和研究管理人员进行焦点小组和访谈，以及对研究人员进行国际调查。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.