What are megajournals?
"Megajournals" are relatively new in the scholarly publishing world. These open access journals publish articles in a wide range of subjects. PLOS One, which publishes thousands of articles per month, was the trailblazer of this development. Like traditional journals, articles submitted to these journals go through rigorous peer review.
The primary difference in the review process is the objective editorial criteria used for acceptance or rejection of a potential article. Reviewers ensure that the research is scientifically sound and ethical, but do not weigh the importance or relevance of the work. This allows a much higher acceptance rate. It also allows the acceptance of some types of articles that are normally rejected, most notably negative results, replication studies and protocols.
For more information on megajournals, read Open Access MegaJournals - Have They Changed Everything? by Peter Binfield, the co-founder of PeerJ and previously the publisher of PLOS One.
- Scholarly Publishing: Open Access Megajournals, George Washington University
Below are a few popular megajournals.
Nature Communications "is an open access, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing high-quality research in all areas of the biological, health, physical, chemical, Earth, social, mathematical, applied, and engineering sciences. Papers published by the journal aim to represent important advances of significance to specialists within each field."
Scientific Reports "is an open access journal publishing original research from across all areas of the natural sciences, psychology, medicine and engineering."
PLOS ONE "accepts research in over two hundred subject areas across science, engineering, medicine, and the related social sciences and humanities. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, replication studies, negative and null results are all in scope." The journal also publishes reports and protocols.
Heliyon "is an all-science, open access journal that is part of the Cell Press family. Any paper reporting scientifically accurate and valuable research, which adheres to accepted ethical and scientific publishing standards, will be considered for publication. As such, the journal also publishes manuscripts reporting negative/null results, incremental advances, and replication studies."
