New Term: MOAMJ = Multidisciplinary Open Access Mega Journal

IEEE has just announced that it will be starting a new gold open-access mega-journal to be called IEEE Access.  In launching the journal, the publisher has also coined a new term for the journal’s genre: Multidisciplinary Open Access Mega Journal (MOAMJ).

The editor of the journal is Dr. Michael Pecht of the University of Maryland. He’s currently assembling an editorial board and establishing the journal’s publishing policies.

IEEE Access appears to be following the “light review” standard established by PLOS ONE. Their website says:

But, unlike IEEE’s traditional Transactions or Journals, reviewers are asked to assess the technical correctness of a paper and its potential interest to readers, but not its fundamental novelty or potential impact. Readers will evaluate the work through their comments and usage metrics, updated frequently, will be displayed with the abstract of each paper published.

The term “Multidisciplinary Open Access Mega Journal” may be a little imprecise in this case, for the journal says,

To be accepted for publication in IEEE Access^TM, articles must satisfy the following criteria: The article presents the results of original engineering research, development, or design work […]  [emphasis added]

So it is really “multidisciplinary” only in terms of the disciplines represented by IEEE. You cannot, for example, submit a paper on 17th-century British poetry and expect it to get published here, despite the use of the term “multidisciplinary.”

Note that this journal is not on my list of predatory journals. I hope that IEEE Access’ editorial standards are higher than in other IEEE publications. I have observed instances of plagiarism in their publications, and I find it annoying that the publisher often does not add sufficient metadata to its PDFs, meaning that after you print out one of their articles, you have no idea what journal or transaction it came from when it was published, and the like.

Finally, regarding the article processing fee for this new journal, I found this:

That is not cheap.

Hat tip: Felipe G. Nievinski

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 5th, 2013 at 2:00 PM and is filed under article processing charges, Scholarly Open-Access Publishers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.