Open-access megajournals reduce the peer-review burden | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

"Despite the flagrant trolling of its title, Nature‘s recent opinion-piece Open access is tiring out peer reviewers is mostly pretty good. But the implication that the rise of open-access journals has increased the aggregate burden of peer-review is flatly wrong, so I felt obliged to leave a comment explaining why. Here is that comment, promoted to a post of its own (with minor edits for clarity ... 'It’s an open secret that nearly every paper eventually gets published somewhere. Under the old regime, the usual approach is to 'work down the ladder', submitting the same paper repeatedly to progressively less prestigious journals until it reached one that was prepared to publish work of the supplied level of sexiness. As a result, many papers go through four, five or more rounds of peer-review before finally finding a home. Instead, such papers when submitted to a review-for-soundness-only venue such as PLOS ONErequire only a single round of review. (Assuming of course that they are indeed methodologically sound!) ...'"