Comment
When bigger is better
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Correspondence: Gregory A Petsko petsko@brandeis.edu
BMC Biology 2010, 8:43 doi:10.1186/1741-7007-8-43
Bigger Can Be Better, But ...
Robert Woodman
(2010-05-27 10:36) Quanta BioDesign, Ltd. 
I despair of keeping up with all the journals that are available to me today. I most
certainly agree with Gregory Petsko that the proliferation of specialty journals is
not a good thing. I sometimes see this proliferation as a pestilence. I welcome
the fusion of BMC Biology and the Journal of Biology, and I hope that the resulting
journal will retain high quality while publishing more, and more varied, papers.
My concern, though, is that bigger journals will tend to shut out tiny sub-fields.
Given that publication is a prerequisite for tenure in academia, the consolidation
of publication venues could hurt young professionals trying to obtain tenure by denying
them the ability to publish somewhere. Large, general journals could stifle the expansion and development of tightly focused
sub-fields (and sub-sub-fields) unless the staff at the large, general journal diligently
seeks to expand (and then maintain) its coverage of all fields and sub-fields, not just a chosen few.
Competing interests
None
Competition between publishers results in more journals
Quentin Vicens (2010-05-27 14:14) Aarhus University
I agree that fewer and more general journals is a better way to go, and that a good strategy to achieve that aim is to fuse together existing journals. To the list of factors that lead to journal proliferation mentioned in the article, one could add the competition between publishers for authors. I find the recent launching of Nature Communications to be an example of such practice, as it constitutes a copy of recent and innovative journals such as BMC Research Notes and PLoS ONE. In that case however, the main difference is that access to Nature Communications will not be free, perhaps a major motivation for launching it. Now we can only imagine librarians getting more grey hair out of trying to find funds to afford yet another journal subscription...
Competing interests
None declared
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