As one of our commenters recently asked, what would have happened “if a big commercial publisher had pioneered the high-volume, low-bar, author-pays mega-journal”?  If PLoS ONE was instead Big Company ONE, would it have succeeded and been as adored as it is now by OA advocates, or would it have been seen as a “cynical exploitation of the publish-or-perish climate in academia?” Would publishing traditionalists see it as an exciting new market to serve rather than the end of quality?
From The Scholarly Kitchen.
A deeply good point, and one worth contemplating.
I tend to think that if it were Big Company One, that it would neither have been received very well, nor worked as well as it has.
PLOS is a brand built on abundance, not scarcity, with a good association with impact thanks to its loss leader print journals. PLOS One is a natural product for that kind of brand, not to mention a natural one for its audience (the transitions I talked about last week are at best unevenly distributed - there’s a lot of religious fervor left out there). It also had the benefit of good timing and great technical implementation, and good staff. All of those things go into making a new venture a success.
Don’t forget that YouTube worked not just because of the team and founders, but the timing. Flash hit maturity. Broadband penetration went mainstream. Video got inserted into everything that had a camera. Imagine being the last video sharing platform to die before that trio of confluences lined up, and watching YouTube skyrocket to the heavens from the ground. Depressing.
But if your brand is built on exclusivity and scarcity, it’s going to be much harder to execute the PLoS One model. You won’t have the faithful lined up, because they’re burned by years of being attacked by you (thus the perception of cynicism is probable). And you won’t have a team that understands abundance, that designs for it. And you’ll likely have a management structure that will be looking at it with skepticism, not with hope.