Extended definition
A megajournal is a large-scale, broad-scope, open-access journal whose peer review assesses only the technical and methodological soundness of a manuscript, leaving judgments of novelty, importance, and relevance to the community after publication. PLOS ONE pioneered the model in 2006, and other publishers soon followed; Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports, launched in 2011, became the largest title of its kind in the following decade. Björk (2018) documented the format’s evolution from 2006 to 2017 and showed that what sets a megajournal apart from other open-access journals is precisely this review centered on scientific trustworthiness (“soundness”) rather than selection by perceived merit. Free of the space quotas imposed by print, a megajournal publishes thousands of articles a year, funded by article-processing charges (APCs) paid by authors. Spezi and colleagues (2017) produced the first comprehensive review of the phenomenon, organized around four defining traits: scale, breadth of scope, review policy, and economic model.
When it applies
The megajournal is the right outlet when work is technically sound but does not fit the novelty-based selectivity of traditional journals. It applies to negative results, replication studies, data-set reports, and incremental findings that have value as a record but would be rejected by venues that filter on expected impact. It works when speed matters: the review cycle tends to be shorter, because the reviewer evaluates method and not relevance. It also suits authors who prioritize immediate open access and broad discovery, since the wide scope and indexing secure interdisciplinary visibility. In high-output fields such as biomedicine and the life sciences, the model absorbs volumes that selective journals cannot accommodate.
When it does not apply
The megajournal does not substitute for the selective journal where a field judges careers by venue prestige: publishing in one does not, by itself, signal the importance of a finding, and committees that conflate place of publication with quality penalize the author. The “soundness-only” promise is also messier in practice than in theory. Wakeling and colleagues (2019), surveying nearly twelve thousand authors, found that two-thirds believed the megajournal assessed novelty and relevance, a sign that the model is poorly understood and not consistently applied by reviewers. It does not hold as a bet on perpetual growth: Björk (2015) showed that the largest titles hit their volume ceiling around 2013 and 2014, and the format lost momentum as new open-access journals competed for the same submissions. And it does not apply when the APC outweighs the visibility it buys.
Applications by field
- Biomedicine and life sciences: the highest density of submissions; they hold the bulk of megajournal volume and receive cascading transfers from the same publisher’s selective journals.
- Physical sciences and chemistry: Scientific Reports grew mainly here, absorbing sound findings without a demand for impact.
- Social sciences and humanities: more cautious uptake; titles such as SAGE Open extended the model, but a culture of judging by venue prestige limits adoption.
- Engineering and computing: drawn by speed and open access, with the APC often covered by project funding.
Common pitfalls
The first pitfall is reading broad scope and high volume as a sign of low quality: a megajournal is not, by definition, a dump, even though the “academic dumping ground” label persists in the debate. The second is assuming that “soundness-only” means lax review; the assessment of method can be as demanding as the traditional one, it simply does not judge relevance. The third is ignoring the cascade effect: some articles arrive by transfer from the same publisher’s selective journals, which distorts the perception of selectivity. The fourth is treating all megajournals as equivalent, when correction rates, retraction rates, and APCs vary widely across titles. The fifth is choosing the manuscript’s destination by the megajournal’s impact factor, an uninformative metric for a venue that publishes tens of thousands of articles across heterogeneous fields.