Let’s count the similarities to PLOS ONE, shall we?
- Supported by article fees. To their credit, however, there will be no fees for the first year. Honestly, I might submit an article while it’s free, but probably not after that. Why pay a fee more than ten times the cost of PeerJ?
- Does not review for “impact.”
- Article level metrics.
Innovations? Maybe that there is an option for open peer review. But it’s not clear what that will look like, so it’s hard to tell.
Like Science Advances, Royal Society Open Science will also “accept articles referred from other Royal Society journals.” Nice, but you do not need a new journal specifically to do that. As I noted before, it’s not clear what advantage having an article “referred” to this journal has versus taking my article to another non-Royal Society journal. Plus, why not accept articles referred from a lot of other journals besides Royal Society journals?
I just don’t see the point of this journal. I just don’t get what this journal is supposed to do for me that a ream of existing journals don’t already for me.
Unless you read very carefully, this news article from Science makes it seem like this is the Society’s first foray into open access publishing, but it is not. They already have Open Biology, running since 2011. It is still free to publish in Open Biology, even after more than two full years of publication. This might suggest that this “selective” new journal is not attracting the number of articles that it would like to.
I also note that, unlike Science, Royal Society journals have had the option of authors paying a (hefty) fee to make article open access for a while now.
I’m also puzzled by Steve Harnad’s pokes against the “gold” model of open access. We are just nowhere near enough institutions creating repositories for authors to self-archive to do the job. Maybe it will evolve towards that, but I don’t think that model is ready yet.
Perhaps the take home message from these new open access journals is this:
The creation of PLOS ONE was a landmark in the history of early twenty-first scientific publishing. Look at how many publishers have taken the PLOS ONE model, and run with it, and added no real innovations. Love it or hate it, you cannot ignore PLOS ONE. It changed the landscape of scientific publishing – and I would say for the better – more than anything else I can think of since the millenium.
Related posts
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External links
World’s first scientific publisher launches new open access journal
Royal Society Joins Open-Access Bandwagon
2 comments:
"Let’s count the similarities to PLOS ONE, shall we?"
You missed one: no length limits. That's particularly important for this publisher, as their journals Proceedings A and Proceedings B usually limit papers for only four pages.
"I just don’t see the point of this journal. I just don’t get what this journal is supposed to do for me that a ream of existing journals don’t already for me."
Looks simple to me: it's the Royal Society's (very welcome) move to stay relevant and competitive in the PLOS ONE/PeerJ/Frontiers era. I'm very much in favour of that, especially when it's a group as Establishment as the Royal Society affirming the PLOS ONE model.
"The creation of PLOS ONE was a landmark in the history of early twenty-first scientific publishing. [...] It changed the landscape of scientific publishing [...] more than anything else I can think of since the millenium."
No argument there!
"I just don’t see the point of this journal. I just don’t get what this journal is supposed to do for me that a ream of existing journals don’t already for me."
It provides options (although 1000 pounds is to much in my opinion). The idea behind the impact-is-not-a-criterion-for-publishing only works if the editor handling your paper bothers to follow this criterion or how he/she interprets impact.
I had a paper rejected from PLoS ONE based on, in my opinion, impact. I appealed and lost, after what I saw as a perfunctory (though slow) review review. http://proteinsandwavefunctions.blogspot.dk/2013/06/plos-one-rejects-we-appeal-and-loose.html
Luckily, PeerJ had just appeared (and the paper was bio-related). So I sent it there and it was accepted with no problem.
I have come to view mega-journals as X journals bundled into one, where X = number of editors. Yes, there is a common editorial policy, but it is open to interpretation and editors can basically do what they want.
I have published 12 papers in PLoS ONE and PeerJ and overall I have been very happy with my editors (2 of them deserve medals!), but it's good have options when you get a bad one.
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