[Foundation-l] [libraries] SAGE Open

[Daniel Mietchen]

Hi Fred,

I didn't intend to say that these journals are "bad in some way",
though some details like the "non-commercial" clause at Scientific
Reports could well qualify for that label.

PLoS ONE addresses three major problems:
*Access to the research literature it publishes
*Scope limitations
*Impact guesstimation.

Ad 1: It is by far not unique in using a CC-BY license but it is now
the largest scientific journal on the planet (cf.
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/01/plos-one-now-worlds-largest-journal.html
).

Ad 2: In theory, it is open for submissions from any field of research
(in practice, it remains tilted towards the biomedical fields), a
scope it shares with only a few journals, and these are typically
either hybrid OA (PNAS) or not OA at all (like Nature, Science).

Ad 3: Contrary to some commenters, PLoS ONE does use classical
pre-publication peer review. What it leaves out of the procedure,
though, is the question of whether the research reported in a given
manuscript is important enough to merit publication in this journal.
This question is asked at most other journals, but the responses to it
perform very badly in predicting actual future impact of the paper.
PLoS ONE takes the approach that if the research is scientifically
sound and reported in sufficient level of detail, it is not going to
be rejected.

PLoS ONE clones are characterized by being open access journals
launched after PLoS ONE (indeed, within the last year), aiming for a
broad scope (which may simply be "all of genetics, as with G3), and
doing away with the future impact guesstimation aspect during peer
review. Some go even further - the initial article processing charge
at Scientific Reports, for instance, is identical (to the last digit)
to the one at PLoS ONE.

All of the three points outlined above, and certainly combinations
thereof, may justify the establishment of a new journal, but the main
driver behind the PLoS ONE clones may well be commercial, given that
the scalability of PLoS ONE has allowed PLoS to break even in 2010
(cf. http://river-valley.tv/open-access-publishers-breaking-even-and-growing-fast/
).

Another aspect that PLoS ONE is driving forward is what they call
"Article-level metrics" (cf.
http://friendfeed.com/article-level-metrics ) - i.e. quantitative
indicators of the actual impact of an article (rather than the
_Journal_ Impact Factor used by many as a proxy to _article_ quality),
as well as post-publication peer review (a lively example is at
http://www.plosone.org/article/comments/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013180
).

On a related note, the title of the article on Open Access to the
research literature is currently being discussed (again) at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Open_access_(publishing)#Title_of_the_article_on_Open_Access
, and I am working on a list of Open-Access-related topics (cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:GLAM/OA/Catalogue ) that would benefit
from some feedback.

Cheers,

Daniel


On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Please, let me forward this conversation also to our brand new libraries list.
>
> Aubrey
>
> 2011/8/19 Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>:
>>> SAGE Open is one of those "PLoS ONE clones". Others include
>>> BMJ Open: http://blogs.bmj.com/bmjopen/
>>> Scientific Reports: http://www.nature.com/srep
>>> AIP Advances: http://aipadvances.aip.org/
>>> G3: http://www.g3journal.org/
>>> New Journal of Physics: http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630
>>> Open Biology: http://royalsocietypublishing.org/site/openbiology/
>>>
>>> A related commentary:
>>> http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2011/03/29/might-copies-of-plos-one-change-journals-forever/
>>> .
>>>
>>> Daniel
>>
>> "PLoS ONE clones" seems to imply a problem. Are these journals bad in
>> some way?
>>
>> Fred
>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 9:47 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>> A breakthrough from an unexpected source:
>>>>
>>>> http://sgo.sagepub.com/
>>>>
>>>> Fred
>>>>
>>>>
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