Hybrid journals vital for extending author choice, research shows | Publishing Research Consortium

"Hybrid journals play an important role in extending author choice, a report by the Publishing Research Consortium, Research Consulting and Pleiade Management & Consultancy has shown.

The report, which aims to understand authors’ motivations when selecting to publish in Hybrid Open Access journals, found the most important factor for researchers when deciding where to publish was the scope and quality of a journal, with many researchers not factoring open access into their decision as they assumed an OA publishing option would be offered by default.

If no open access option was available, the report found, more than half of researchers who published in a Hybrid Gold OA Journal would have selected another journal, showing that without the hybrid option, author choice would be restricted.

Hybrid journals were also found to offer flexibility to researchers in cases where funding was limited. Without access to funding to cover article publication charges (APCs), many authors who had published via a Gold OA route in a hybrid journal said they would have chosen the subscription-only model in order to publish in their journal of choice. Meanwhile authors who had selected a pure gold journal because its scope best matched their article, sometimes encountered significant obstacles when they realised this entailed an APC payment...."