Elsevier, a Dutch firm that is the world's biggest journal publisher, had a margin last year of 38% on revenues of £2.1 billion $3.2 billionn).
I'll tell you who: Pete Binfield, who was the editor-in-chief of PLOS ONE as it became the world's biggest journal.
Damian Pattinson, the editorial director of PLoS One, the latter group's biggest journal, calls Rubriq's service "useful", though he admits that details of how it will work have yet to be sorted out.The customers of a Finnish firm, Peerage of Science, are not authors, but journals themselves; 23 have signed up so far.
All are modeled on PLoS ONE, the publisher's biggest journal (and main revenue generator).
This has lead not only to the advent of open access publishers, such as BioMed Central, and online repository-type journals such as the PLoS ONE (part of the Public Library of Science and the biggest journal in the world, with 23,468 papers published in 2012), but also to the flourishing of "open access" practices.
But the big journals' reputations are only partly warranted.
But science isn't always about the big questions, or the big answers, big papers, big journals, big machines or big names.
Mr. Zivkovic, the ScienceOnline co-founder and a blog editor for Scientific American, which is owned by Nature, was somewhat sympathetic to the big journals' plight.
"These aren't the kinds of breakthroughs that get you publications in big journals, but without them you simply do not have a useable test," she says.
Just as a bad film can boost its audience with a famous actor, so can a scientifically weak study from a bigwig attract attention from big journals.
