10 years of Malaria Journal: how did Open Access change publication patterns?

"A PubMed search for publications on 'malaria' in 2009, shows 2,839 papers, but as bibliometric tools are imperfect, 9% of these had only a trivial malaria content and were excluded from further analysis; the same correction factor was arbitrarily applied to publications on malaria between 2002 and 2009, as shown on Figure 1. Accordingly, a total of 2,584 papers had been published in English in 2009, in 528 journals (390 of which are impact factor-rated)(see Additional file 1 for the list of journals analysed). The extreme variety of journals publishing papers on malaria is an indication of how wide a field 'malaria' actually covers. While the majority of journals published only one or two papers on malaria that year, the bulk of papers (885, 34.2%) was found in a group of 13 journals, each with more than 25 papers that year. An analysis of seven of these journals over a period of 8 years shows that Malaria Journal and PLos One now publish 12.1% and 3.7% of all papers, respectively, while the other journals had kept more or less the same volume of publications over the period (i.e. a relative decrease of their share in the total volume of malaria publications, which had increased from 1,566 to 2,584 papers per year over the period). By comparison, in 2002, publication of malaria papers was spread more widely than in 2009, with 30 journals sharing about 25% of the bulk of the publication volume...."