As An Open-access Megajournal Cedes Some Ground, a Movement Gathers Steam
The world’s largest scientific journal, the open-access giant PLOS ONE, is feeling some pullback. Last year the free site published 10 percent fewer papers than it did two years ago. Its impact factor — a measure that uses citations to track its influence — has been on a five-year slide. Rather than signaling a failure of the open-access movement, however, the declines are looking like the byproduct of a broader victory in a hard-fought campaign. More and more, major publishers are creating their own open-access journals, with articles freely available to anyone. And in many other cases they’re offering hybrid models that let authors pay for open access. An increasingly common version of author-paid open access is the "megajournal," copying the PLOS ONE innovation of publishing a large volume of papers online across various disciplines.