An oligarchy of Mega-Journals is what PLoS One publisher Peter Binfield envisages for the not-too-distant future of scholarly publishing. In his recent presentation at the Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting, embedded below, he outlines the growth of PLoS One into a Mega-Journal and projects several of the ' PLoS One clones' which have recently been launched, to follow a similar growth curve.

Given the nothing short of spectacular growth of PLoS One, it is indeed reasonable to assume that the smaller journals in the approx. 25,000 journal ecosystem will be coming under serious threat of extinction fairly soon. Only time will tell, but it is fun to speculate about the potential consequences PLoS One growth and the launching of so many P1 clones will have for scholarly publishing. I would not be surprised if the smallest among the journals would already be feeling the pressure mounting as the stream of submissions is quickly drying up.

Speaking as an author, one of the allures of publishing in PLoS One is the potential to reach many readers. Another is the ease of publication: submit, do whatever the reviewers want and then publish. Why would I publish anywhere else? Well, I don't have tenure, so my resume needs to look good. Today, you can make your CV look good not only by how much and what you publish, but also by where you publish. So there are a few journal names which would make my CV look better than if it was all PLoS One on there - almost no matter what was actually published. Obviously, only few journals of the 25,000 will have such a good-looking name, yet most still will reject your paper if they find something about it they don't 'like'. Because PLoS One does not reject submitted manuscripts for subjective criteria such as 'impact' or 'general interest', the rational strategy for maximizing resume impact is to submit to the few 'good-looking' journals first and if they reject your manuscript, get it out in PLoS One. If everyone followed this strategy, thousands of journals would collapse very soon.

Pete suggests in his presentation that the P1 clones might focus on large disciplines such as 'genetics' or 'physics', etc. Now, given that humans don't always follow a rational strategy, what could be the reasons of large sections of the scientific community to publish in a journal with an equal or smaller readership but otherwise exactly identical to PLoS One, even right down to publishing costs (i.e., author charges)? I can think of many reasons individual authors might want to publish somewhere else, but these reasons wouldn't necessarily account for large swaths of scientists publishing in a brand new journal which is just a clone of what is already established.

However, the new competition should be an incentive for PLoS to lower PLoS One author charges below the competition. There are two reasons for this: for one, if you're cheaper than the competition, but provide the same services, you'll keep your competitive edge. Second, the PLoS One charges are so high, only because the other PLoS journals are not paying for themselves. In effect, every PLoS One author is also paying for the papers of, say, PLoS Biology (a very good-looking journal name) authors. So basically, whenever I publish in PLoS One (done that once, one is currently being written and one more is in the works), I'm paying - in part - for a 'good-looking' journal, but I don't get to put it on my CV. I can't see a good reason why I should do that.

A quick search for the financial reports of PLoS didn't turn up anything useful. But if I can find that data, I'd calculate by how much, on average, PLoS One is subsidizing the PLoS community journals. With the figure, I could calculate what the actual publication costs for PLoS One should be and ask PLoS One staff to reduce my fee to precisely that amount.

Eventually, IMHO, PLoS should just phase out the community journals altogether: what purpose do they serve now any more?