As an Open-Access Megajournal Cedes Some Ground, a Movement Gathers Steam - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"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.

In short, PLOS ONE — now consistently publishing around 30,000 articles a year — has attracted much more company in its mission to build huge stocks of freely available scientific research. "Since PLOS ONE’s tremendous success, everyone and their grandmother has created a megajournal," said David J. Solomon, an emeritus professor of medicine at Michigan State University who studies open-access economics....

Officials with the library say the end of PLOS ONE’s rapid growth is not indicative of an underlying problem. Instead, it is due largely to the increased competition in open-access publishing and the finite supply of scientist-authors, especially at a time of tighter research budgets, said Elizabeth Marincola, chief executive officer of PLOS...."