Mega journal

The term mega journal, also written as megajournal or mega-journal, refers to an open-access scholarly journal that is peer reviewed and intended to be far bigger in size than a conventional journal, admitting submissions with only minimal selectivity. It publishes any manuscript that presents scientifically trustworthy empirical results, without asking about the potential scientific contribution before publication.¹ The model was created in 2006 when the open-access publisher Public Library of Science launched PLOS ONE, and it has since been adopted by many other publishers, most prominently with Scientific Reports, launched by Nature in 2011.²

Definition and criteria

The information systems scholar Bo-Christer Björk of the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, who has produced the main longitudinal studies of the model, defines a megajournal by five primary criteria: a big publishing volume or the aim of one, peer review by scientific soundness only, a broad subject area, full open access, and funding by authors paying publishing fees.³ Secondary criteria include rapid publication, a moderate author fee, and a high-prestige publisher; a suggested benchmark for a moderate article processing charge is $1,500 or less, and rapid publication is suggested as less than six months from submission.⁷ A later review of the literature converges on four major characteristics: large-scale publishing compared with most conventional journals, broad scope, soundness-based peer review, and an open-access economic model based on article processing charges.⁴

Not every journal called a megajournal satisfies every criterion. Björk's own 2018 analysis found that not all megajournals are actually big, and bibliometric work on eleven open-access megajournals concluded that there is no such thing as a "typical" megajournal, with journals varying in subject scope and several publishing disproportionately in particular sub-disciplines.^{4 • 7} The term is also applied more loosely to "PLOS ONE-like" journals beyond Björk's strict definition.⁵

Growth of the model

PLOS ONE demonstrated the viability of the model and sparked a succession of imitators, and its success led most science, technology, and medicine publishers into the megajournal market.⁴ By 2016 megajournals were publishing around 50,000 articles per year.¹ The biggest growth rates between 2010 and 2016 were by far those of megajournals, although after a period of very rapid growth from 2010 to 2013 the increase in overall article volumes slowed.⁴ PLOS ONE's own output peaked in 2013 and decreased gradually over the following years.⁸ Scientific Reports, by contrast, grew rapidly after 2014 and became the biggest journal in the category.³

The scale of the phenomenon in biomedicine has continued to expand beyond the classic megajournals. In 2015, 11 Scopus-indexed journals published more than 2,000 biomedical full papers each and accounted for 6 percent of that year's literature; in 2022 there were 55 such journals, publishing more than 300,000 articles, almost a quarter of the biomedical literature that year.⁶

Soundness-only peer review

The most distinctive and most controversial feature of the model is its approach to quality control. Traditional peer review involves two key judgments: whether a paper's claims are sufficiently well substantiated, and whether it is interesting enough to be worth publishing. Megajournals keep the first judgment and drop the second, evaluating only the technical or scientific soundness of an article and leaving judgments of novelty, importance, and interest to the community after publication, supported by tools such as article-level metrics.^{2 • 9}

Advocates argue that selective publishing is partly an artifact of print-era page constraints that online journals do not face, and that soundness-only review avoids the subjectivity of reviewers judging novelty or potential importance. It also improves efficiency by eliminating the submission-rejection spiral in which articles pass through several journals before finding a home, and it creates a publishing venue for work that traditional journals undervalue, such as null and negative results and replication studies.^{2 • 10} A related practice is the cascading of reviews from highly selective sister journals down to a publisher's megajournal; Solomon's 2014 survey of authors in four megajournals found resubmission rates of between 32 and 62 percent depending on the journal, and BMJ Open authors in particular reported being encouraged by editors at the highly selective BMJ journals to submit there after rejection.^{11 • 12}

Critics have labeled the approach "light peer review" and raised several objections. Some researchers, particularly in fields such as history and education, view the model with suspicion, arguing that if everything sound is published, readers will struggle to identify highly significant papers and that filtering for significance is a crucial part of the publication process. Others worry that limiting editorial intervention removes the formative feedback that reviewers provide. However, several authors who had published in megajournals reported that the peer review reports they received were often indistinguishable in scope from those of more traditional journals.¹³

Citation impact and quality

Björk and Paul Catani compared citation distributions for megajournal articles with those of traditionally reviewed journals in a 2016 pilot study. The study's results indicated that highly selective journals, which accept very few submissions, contain many fewer uncited or barely cited papers, yet the tail of articles receiving two or fewer citations was in fact larger among a sample of selective traditional journals than among megajournals. Their tentative conclusion was that the peer review system does not appear to lead to differences in eventual citation distributions between megajournals and average traditional journals, and that megajournals had a similar impact factor range to average traditional journals.^{1 • 5} The comparison journals were information science titles, which may have different citation characteristics from bioscience disciplines, so the conclusion carries that qualification.⁵

Despite the doubts that persist over the model, author satisfaction with publishing in megajournals was found to be very high.⁴ Disciplinary uptake is uneven: PLOS ONE published disproportionately in the biosciences, with 95 percent of its 2015 articles in that area, whereas Scientific Reports has a more even distribution of subjects.¹⁴

Integrity concerns

Rapid growth has brought research integrity problems. Special issue manipulation, retraction rates, and paper-mill articles in numerous megajournals threaten the integrity of the medical literature, and journals failing to meet research integrity requirements have been delisted from the Web of Science Core Collection, including the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and the Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results.¹⁵ Megajournals have also been reported to have a higher publishing error rate, and the financial incentives of open-access publishers to publish widely have raised concerns about quality and the possibility of predatory publishing.¹⁶ The open-access business model has led the librarian Jeffrey Beall, who cataloged predatory journals, to review five predatory mega journals.¹⁷

References

1. Björk, B.-C., and Catani, P. (2016). Peer review in megajournals compared with traditional scholarly journals: Does it make a difference? Learned Publishing 29(1), 9–12.
2. Spezi, V., Wakeling, S., Pinfield, S., et al. (2018). "Let the community decide"? The vision and reality of soundness-only peer review in open-access mega-journals. Journal of Documentation.
3. Björk, B.-C. (2018). Evolution of the scholarly mega-journal, 2006–2017. PeerJ.
4. Herman, E., Akeroyd, J., Bequet, G., Nicholas, D., and Watkinson, A. (2020). The changed – and changing – landscape of serials publishing. Learned Publishing 33(3), 213–229.
5. Spezi, V., Wakeling, S., Pinfield, S., Creaser, C., Fry, J., and Willett, P. (2017). Open-access mega-journals: The future of scholarly communication or academic dumping ground? A review. Journal of Documentation 73(2), 263–283.
6. Wu, et al. (2023). The Rapid Growth of Mega-Journals: Threats and Opportunities. JAMA.
7. Wakeling, S., Willett, P., Creaser, C., Fry, J., Pinfield, S., and Spezi, V. (2016). Open-Access Mega-Journals: A Bibliometric Profile. PLOS ONE.
8. Twenty years of PLOS One. PLOS ONE (2025).
9. Greiffenhagen, C. (2024). Judging Importance before Checking Correctness: Quick Opinions in Mathematical Peer Review. Social Studies of Science.
10. Siler, L. (2020). The diverse niches of megajournals: Specialism within generalism. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
11. Björk, B.-C. (2015). Have the "mega-journals" reached the limits to growth? PeerJ.
12. Spezi, V., et al. (2017). Open-access mega-journals (full text). White Rose Research Online.
13. Wakeling, S., Spezi, V., Fry, J., Creaser, C., Pinfield, S., and Willett, P. (2019). Academic communities: The role of journals and open-access mega-journals in scholarly communication. Journal of Documentation 75(1), 120–139.
14. Wakeling, S., et al. (2019). Motivations, understandings, and experiences of open-access mega-journal authors: Results of a large-scale survey. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
15. Wu, et al. (2023). Threats and Opportunities Associated With Rapid Growth of Mega-Journals. JAMA.
16. Evaluation and Comparison of the Academic Quality of Open-Access Mega Journals and Authoritative Journals: Disruptive Innovation Evaluation. Journal of Medical Internet Research (2025).
17. Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science, Vol. 24, no. 2, August 2019, 115–131.

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Broadcasting and journalism › Periodicals and publishing › Publishing and publishing houses › Scholarly publishing and journals infrastructure › Journal publishers and journal reference lists › Open access journal publishers and OA publishing programs

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 17, 2026; Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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