A ray of sunshine in the open-access future

"These several days of listening to presentations and talking with publishers, academics, and librarians [at the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) Conference and the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) Symposium] have left me, I have to say, more optimistic about the potential future of open-access publishing than I’ve been in many years, maybe ever....For a long time, I’ve assumed that a transition to a sizable role for OA publishing will require existing publishers to switch their existing journals to an OA publication-fee revenue model in order to cover enough of the scholarly fields, because the founding of enough new journals, whether by existing publishers are new ones, is a long and unlikely process, and won’t be able to address the brand development problem for even longer. But recent developments may indicate a breakthrough from a surprising direction....Publishers have not failed to notice the dramatic success of PLoS ONE, and they are jumping on the bandwagon. SAGE announced SAGE Open,...Nature Publishing Group is rolling out Scientific Reports....and there’s BMJ Open..., AIP Advances..., Genetics Society of America‘s G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics....It seems extraordinarily likely that other major publishers will move in this direction as well. (You heard it here first.) The mega-journal trend means that strong traditional publishers with name recognition are entering open-access publishing in a big way. They’ll be hard pressed to trot out their hackneyed canards (vanity press, disenfranchisement). And these journals will provide coverage of a huge swathe of academic fields. Between SAGE Open, PLoS ONE, and Scientific Reports, essentially all of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences are covered. In addition, the breadth of these journals means that they will be competing for the same pool of articles. Authors will have a choice between submitting papers in genetics, say, to PLoS One or G3, in physics to AIP Advances or Scientific Reports, and so forth. Publishers will have to compete in order to attract authors, either on price or publisher services or both...."