What is a Megajournal?

WHAT IS A MEGAJOURNAL?: This short video by John Bond of Riverwinds Consulting talks about Megajournals in publishing.

JOHN'S NEW BOOK is “Scholarly Publishing: A Primer”
Buy it at Amazon:

CONNECT

TRANSCRIPTS
Hi there. I am John Bond from Riverwinds Consulting and this is Publishing Defined.

Today I am going to talk about megajournals. A megajournal is a peer-reviewed scholarly open access journal. It is usually more expansive in scope than a traditional journal.

The characteristics of megajournals are usually considered to be: online only, open access (and therefore funded via an APC or Article Processing Charge), broad in scope, willing to consider most articles on their technical merit, and usually a rapid turnaround time to publication.

The first megajournal in many people’s minds was PLOS ONE, or the Public Library of Science. Other certainly preceded PLOS ONE, such as The Scientific World Journal and some Biomed Central publications. Many other megajournals have followed such as Scientific Reports, Nature Communications, BMJ Open, and many others. The topic of a megajournal can be as broad as science, or medicine, or the like and is very rarely as focused as subscription journals are.

PLOS ONE has recently been overtaken by Scientific Reports as the largest megajournal. Mega, is applied more to the size of the journal’s subject than the volume of paper’s published, which vary widely from PLOS’s huge output to much more modest ones from second tier journals like Heliyon or others.

The phrase megajournal for some has been, incorrectly, associated with predatory publishing.

The megajournal format has been the focus of other criticisms as well.

At the end of the day, the question many have had in scholarly publishing is what some megajournals have added to the intellectual discussions in their chosen field? Have they added more to the conversation or are they simply a venue for an author to publish, and a source of revenue for the publishers?

Well that’s it. I am a publishing consultant and work with associations, publishers, and individuals on a host of content related challenges. Reach out to me with your questions.

Hit the Like button below if you enjoyed this video. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel or click on the playlist to see more of my videos.

And make comments below. Thank so much and take care.