Wakeling_et_al-2019-Journal_of_the_Association_for_Information_Science_and_Technology.pdf (1.17 MB)
Motivations, understandings, and experiences of open-access mega-journal authors: results of a large-scale survey
journal contribution
posted on 2019-06-27, 15:11 authored by Simon Wakeling, Claire Creaser, Stephen Pinfield, Jenny FryJenny Fry, Valerie Spezi, Peter Willett, Monica ParamitaOpen-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.
Funding
Arts and Humanities Research Council. Grant Number: AH/M010643/1
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Journal of the Association for Information Science and TechnologyCitation
WAKELING, W. ... et al., 2019. Motivations, understandings, and experiences of open-access mega-journal authors: results of a large-scale survey. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 70 (7), pp. 754-768.Publisher
© 2019 The Authors. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of ASIS&TVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-09-25Publication date
2019Notes
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.ISSN
2330-1635eISSN
2330-1643Publisher version
Language
- en