Open Access Mega-Journals: the Future of Scholarly Communication or Academic Dumping Ground? A Review

Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication landscape. OAMJs, such as PLOS ONE, are large scale, broad scope journals that operate an open access business model, and which employ a novel form of peer review, focusing on scientific soundness and rejecting judgement of novelty or importance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses relating to OAMJs, and their place within scholarly publishing, and to consider attitudes towards mega-journals within the academic community.