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The purpose of this paper is to look at two particular aspects of open access megajournals, a new type of scholarly journals. Such journals only review for scientific soundness and leave the judgment of scientific impact to the readers. The two leading journals currently each publish more than 20,000 articles per year. The publishing speed of such journals and acceptance rates of such journals are the topics of the study.

Submission, acceptance and publication dates for a sample of articles in 12 megajournals were manually extracted from the articles. Information about acceptance rates was obtained using web searches of journal home pages, editorials, blogs, etc.

The time from submission to publication varies a lot, with engineering megajournals publishing much more rapidly. But on average it takes almost half a year to get published, particularly in the high-volume biomedical journals. As some of the journals have grown in publication volume, the average review time has increased by almost two months. Acceptance rates have slightly decreased over the past five years, and are now in the range of 50–55 percent.

This is the first empirical study of how long it takes to get published in megajournals and it highlights a clear increase of around two months in publishing. Currently, the review process in the biomedical megajournals takes as long as in regular more selective journals in the same fields. Possible explanations could be increasing difficulties in finding willing and motivated reviewers and in a higher share of submissions from developing countries.

Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication landscape. OAMJs, such as PLOS ONE, are large scale, broad scope journals that operate an open access business model (normally based on article-processing charges), and which employ a novel form of peer review, focussing on scientific “soundness” and eschewing judgement of novelty or importance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses relating to OAMJs, and their place within scholarly publishing, and considers attitudes towards mega-journals within the academic community.

This paper presents a review of the literature of OAMJs structured around four defining characteristics: scale, disciplinary scope, peer review policy, and economic model. The existing scholarly literature was augmented by searches of more informal outputs, such as blogs and e-mail discussion lists, to capture the debate in its entirety.

While the academic literature relating specifically to OAMJs is relatively sparse, discussion in other fora is detailed and animated, with debates ranging from the sustainability and ethics of the mega-journal model, to the impact of soundness-only peer review on article quality and discoverability, and the potential for OAMJs to represent a paradigm-shifting development in scholarly publishing.

This paper represents the first comprehensive review of the mega-journal phenomenon, drawing not only on the published academic literature, but also grey, professional and informal sources. The paper advances a number of ways in which the role of OAMJs in the scholarly communication environment can be conceptualised.

This paper aims to review the current LIS literature for document supply, resource sharing and other issues such as open access that have an impact on the service.

The approach is based on the scanning of about 150 journals, reports, websites and blogs.

Important changes are taking place at the British Library. The new (4th) edition of the STM report is well worth reading. Much again, on open access, particularly the high costs of Gold. Elsevier comes in for some more bad press.

The only regular literature review that focuses on interlending, document supply and related issues.

While open access (OA) offers an alternative to the unsustainable pricing of serials and supports a core value of ensuring openness to knowledge, the perceived value of the impact of OA journals is still lacking consensus among stakeholders. This study is based on the analysis of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) research publication data within four broad disciplines – health science, life science, physical science and social science – and the purpose of this paper is to understand the perspectives and preferences of academic researchers around OA. The findings are useful to libraries in shaping their strategies for meeting the rising challenges of scholarly publishing.

Article publication data from HKU have been collected and analyzed with the purpose of exploring general OA trends and understanding authors’ incentives for publishing in OA journals.

The explosion in the number of OA journals in recent years has not only impacted on how libraries manage contents and budgets, but also on academic researchers’ choice of journals for submitting their articles for publication. This study conducted at the HKU indicated that academic researchers have a gradual tendency to shift toward publishing their work in OA journals, and interestingly, the shifts are to some extent discipline specific.

The OA marketplace is currently undergoing a state of flux. The OA model of funding through article publication charges, process of peer review and reputation in the marketplace are under rapid development.

As OA journals take up a sizeable market share of the scholarly journal publishing market, libraries need to stay abreast of developments in the OA sector in order to respond to researcher needs. Understanding the thinking behind researcher’s decisions in choosing venue for submission of publications helps to advance research support services which the library offers.

The change in researcher behavior prompted by the gravitation toward sharing of research contents in scholarly communication networks and broader choice of OA journals have resulted in a positive growth of OA articles publishing at the HKU.

This study is based on actual HKU publication data in the past ten years, and it is useful for understanding HKU researchers’ attitudes toward OA publications and in particular the longitudinal trends in shifting toward OA publishing within the context of the university’s open policy and within the global OA landscape.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the theory and practice of peer review in open-access mega-journals (OAMJs). OAMJs typically operate a “soundness-only” review policy aiming to evaluate only the rigour of an article, not the novelty or significance of the research or its relevance to a particular community, with these elements being left for “the community to decide” post-publication.

The paper reports the results of interviews with 31 senior publishers and editors representing 16 different organisations, including 10 that publish an OAMJ. Thematic analysis was carried out on the data and an analytical model developed to explicate their significance.

Findings suggest that in reality criteria beyond technical or scientific soundness can and do influence editorial decisions. Deviations from the original OAMJ model are both publisher supported (in the form of requirements for an article to be “worthy” of publication) and practice driven (in the form of some reviewers and editors applying traditional peer review criteria to OAMJ submissions). Also publishers believe post-publication evaluation of novelty, significance and relevance remains problematic.

The study is based on unprecedented access to senior publishers and editors, allowing insight into their strategic and operational priorities. The paper is the first to report in-depth qualitative data relating specifically to soundness-only peer review for OAMJs, shedding new light on the OAMJ phenomenon and helping inform discussion on its future role in scholarly communication. The paper proposes a new model for understanding the OAMJ approach to quality assurance, and how it is different from traditional peer review.

This paper aims to give an overview of OpenCon 2014, organized by the Right to Research Coalition, SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and an organizing committee of students and early career researchers from around the world that took place between the 14th and 17th of November 2014 in Washington DC.

A narrative approach was used to describe events.

OpenCon 2014 is an exciting new conference that targets early career librarians and researchers who are involved with and/or interested in aspects of the open-access movement. It is attempting to galvanize the upcoming generation of scholars to demand more of traditional publishing models by bringing together a selective group that spans diverse interests and experience levels.

This report outlines the author's takeaways and opinions concerning the events of the conference, as well as identifies some of the themes and issues that were relevant to librarians in research institutions.

It's hard to envision a system more global and more integrated than research. Many stakeholders affect and are affected by changes in the research ecosystem; the ecosystem differs in significant ways across the globe and between researchers, institutions and fields of study; and there are many questions that exclusive action can't address. There are also broad ecosystem-level questions that need answering. For these reasons alone, global approaches to reform are needed.

The first step in this exploration isn't to start looking for “solutions”, but to develop a better understanding of how our needs and interests overlap. By identifying the broad contours of common ground in this conversation, we can build the guardrails and mileposts for our collaborative efforts and then allow the finer-grained details of community-developed plans more flexibility and guidance to evolve over time.

What are these overlapping interests? First, the people in this community share a common motive – idealism – to make research better able to serve the public good. We also share a common desire to unleash the power of open to improve research and accelerate discovery; we are all willing to fix issues now instead of waiting for market forces or government intervention to do this for us; and we want to ensure that everyone everywhere has equitable access to knowledge.

There is also very broad agreement in this community about which specific problems in scholarly communication need to be fixed and why, and well as many overlapping beliefs in this community. OSI participants have concluded that four such beliefs best define our common ground: (1) research and society will benefit from open done right; (2) successful solutions will require broad collaboration; (3) connected issues need to be addressed, and (4) open isn't a single outcome, but a spectrum.

OSI has been observing and debating the activity in scholarly communication since late 2014 with regard to understanding possible global approaches and solutions for improving the future of open research. While the COVID-19 pandemic has made the importance of open science abundantly clear, the struggle to achieve this goal (not just for science but for all research) has been mired in a lack of clarity and urgency for over 20 years now, mostly stalling on the tension between wanting more openness but lacking realistic solutions for making this happen on a large scale with so many different stakeholders, needs and perspectives involved.

Underlying this tension is a fundamental difference in philosophy: whether the entire scholarly communication marketplace, driven by the needs and desires of researchers, should determine what kind of open it wants and needs; or whether this marketplace should be compelled to adopt open reform measures developed primarily by the scholarly communication system's main billpayers-funders and libraries. There is no widespread difference of opinion in the community whether open is worth pursuing. The debate is mostly over what specific open solutions are best, and at what pace open reforms should occur.

OSI has proposed a plan of action for working together to rebuild the future of scholarly communication on strong, common ground foundation. This plan – which we're referring to as Plan A – calls for joint action on studies, scholarly communication infrastructure improvement, and open outreach/education. Plan A also calls for working together with UNESCO to develop a unified global roadmap for the future of open, and for striving to ensure the community's work in this space is researcher-focused, collaborative, connected (addressing connected issues like peer review), diverse and flexible (no one-size-fits-all solutions), and beneficial to research. UNESCO's goal is to finish its roadmap proposal by early 2022.

For a full discussion of OSI's common ground recommendations, please see the Plan A website at http://plan-a.world.