"PLoS ONE and the Rise of the Open Access Mega Journal" by Peter Binfield

PLoS ONE and the rise of the Open Access Mega Journal Committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource Peter Binfield, Publisher PLoS, pbinfield@plos.org

Who are the Public Library of Science?
Eight years old and the largest not-for-profit Open Access publisher
The publisher of 7 Open Access journals including PLoS ONE
Staffed by professional publishers from the likes of Nature, BMJ, Springer etc
Based in San Francisco, and Cambridge UK
Self Sustaining since late 2010

Establish high quality journals
put PLoS and open access on the map
Build a more extensive OA publishing operation
an open access home for every paper
Make the literature more useful
to scientists and the public
accelerate science
The Public Library of Science – our publishing strategy

PLoS Biology October, 2003 PLoS Medicine October, 2004 PLoS Community Journals June-September, 2005 October, 2007 PLoS ONE December, 2006

Objective Editorial criteria
Scientifically rigorous
Ethical
Properly reported
Conclusions supported by the data
Editors and reviewers do not ask subjective questions such as:
How important is the work?
Which is the relevant audience?
Everything that deserves to be published, will be published
Therefore the journal is not artificially limited in size
Online tools are then used to evaluate, sort & filter the content after publication, not before
PLoS ONE’s Key Innovation – The editorial process

Scalability
each submission ‘pays for itself’
the journal itself benefits from ‘economies of scale’ (e.g. it only peer reviews papers once; it presents all content in a single online environment)
Inclusive scope
all of science and medicine
Encouraging discussion and debate
on PLoS ONE: Commenting, Rating and Annotation
elsewhere: Editorial Board discussion forum; EveryONE blog; Twitter; FriendFeed; Facebook
What else is different?

The ‘Open Access Mega Journal'
First, some statistics. There are:
Approx 10,000 publishers
Publishing approx 25,000 journals
Which publish approx 1.5 million articles per year (almost 1 million of which appear in PubMed)
In an industry which historically changes very slowly

The ‘Open Access Mega Journal'
can be defined as:
Very very large
Publishing thousands of articles per year
and benefiting from economies of scale
Open Access
Because no one will pay a subscription fee for a journal that large (and growing that fast)
and using an OA Business Model where each article pays for its own costs
(Preferably) without any ‘artificial’ constraints on its ability to grow
For example, a desire to only publish ‘high impact; papers

Publications by PLoS ONE per quarter since launch

Publications by PLoS ONE per quarter since launch Publications by PLoS ONE per quarter since launch

* Projections for 2011
By publication volume, PLoS ONE was the largest journal in the world in 2010, and will be the largest by a factor of 2-3 in 2011
PLoS ONE – statistics 0.52% 4,310 6,734 2009 0.7% 6,784 13,567 2010 ~1.5%* >12,000* >22,000* 2011 0.34% 2,723 4,401 2008 0.16% 1,231 2,497 2007 % of Annual PubMed Annual Publications Annual Submissions Year

“ Open Access Mega Journals” – One Name, Two Flavours
‘ Clones’ of PLoS ONE (not selective)
SAGE Open
BMJ Open
Scientific Reports (Nature)
AIP Advances (Am Inst Physics)
G3 (Genetics Soc of America)
Biology Open (Company of Biologists)
‘ Pseudo-Clones’ of PLoS ONE (probably selective)
Physical Review X (Am Physical Society)
Open Biology (Royal Society)
Cell Reports (Elsevier, Cell Press)

The Conclusions…
The ‘full’ PLoS ONE model is wildly successful
On current trends, PLoS ONE will be publishing 3% of the STM literature in 2012
Major publishers are rapidly launching PLoS ONE clones
Some others have held back from the full PLoS ONE model, but have still launched ‘OA MegaJournals’
For various reasons, it remains to be seen if this model will be as successful
Rumour has it that many others are in the works…

The Conclusions…
I believe we have entered the era of the OA mega journal
Such journals can choose to be selective, or not
From early trends, they will mostly form around large disciplines and attempt to ‘own’ entire fields of science
They will grow rapidly!
The opportunity to launch new OA mega journals is now
Some basic modeling predicts that in 2016, almost 50% of the STM literature could be published in approx 100 OA mega journals…

The Consequences…
Content will rapidly concentrate into a small number of very large titles
Filtering based solely on Journal name will disappear and will be replaced with new metrics
The content currently being published in the universe of 25,000 journals will presumably start to dry up
There are many open questions…

Peter Binfield Publisher, PLoS ONE and the Community Journals http://www.plos.org email: pbinfield@plos.org twitter: @p_binfield

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