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Motivations, understandings, and experiences of open-access mega-journal authors: results of a large-scale survey

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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 Paramita
Open-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 Technology

Citation

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&T

Version

  • 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

2018-09-25

Publication date

2019

Notes

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

2330-1635

eISSN

2330-1643

Language

  • en