The blogosphere (Scholarly Kitchen, Science in the Open, Book of Trogool, and The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics) has been lit up by the recent announcement of Nature’s newest journal venture. Scientific Reports will be a fully Open Access journal and compete directly with PLoS One for authors.
Both of these journals will publish any STM (sci/tech/med) article that meets their peer review standards, without looking at the potential importance of the article. This means that when a top tier journal declines to publish your manuscript, you have two more options to go to. PLoS One is possibly the largest STM journal because of their acceptance guidelines.
This is a Very Big Thing in the publishing world, because PLoS and Nature Publishing Group are big publishers. Could smaller journals lose authors to PLoS One and Scientific Reports? Could enough authors move that smaller STM journals will disappear? A rock has been dropped in the water. Will it create ripples or waves?