Nature Publisher Launches PLoS ONE Competitor

linhares writes "Nature's Publishing Group is launching a new journal, Scientific Reports, announced earlier this month. The press release makes it clear that it is molded after PLoS ONE: 'Scientific Reports will publish original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences. It will not set a threshold of perceived importance for the papers that it publishes; rather, Scientific Reports will publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original. To enable the community to evaluate the importance of papers post-peer review, the Scientific Reports website will include most-downloaded, most-emailed, and most-blogged lists. All research papers will benefit from rapid peer review and publication, and will be deposited in PubMed Central.' Perhaps readers may find it ironic that PLoS ONE, first dismissed by Nature as an 'online database' 'relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals' seems to be setting the standards for 'a new era in publishing.'"

Re:Wait and See

[linhares]

Another problem that lots of people have brought up is the CC non commercial license that Nature is using. This could hamper the Open Access movement (and an author's ultimate impact). Some people go as far as to claim that non-commercial licenses aren't Open Access at all [okfn.org] and can indeed hinder progress down the line. At any rate, ONE has at least three years until Nature gets its report card (=impact factor). PLoS ONE is already the largest journal in the world (by volume), and if it can maintain quality, the Public Lib of Science should be safely sustainable in the long run. But make no mistake, Nature is coming here with guns blazing [sspnet.org].

Re:No mention of arxiv.org yet?

[Z8]

YourI take your point that arXiv.org is not peer reviewed and the PLoS journal are. However, arXiv.org is definitely "open access". Besides obviously meeting the definition [wikipedia.org], even their web page [arxiv.org] advertises it as open access. Also, not all journals are peer-reviewed.

Maybe you are arguing that "open access journal" means something different than "open access"+"journal", but who is muddying the waters at that point? It's easier just to say that arXiv.org is not peer-reviewed while some other open access sites are.

PRISM may be wrong that open access = no peer review, but it's also a mistake to assume open access = peer review. Open access and peer review are just two different things.