Publishing Patterns of Top Molecular and Cellular Biologists in Subscription Model versus Open Access Journals, 2011–2013

The corresponding authors of the fifty most-cited molecular and cellular biology papers of 2011 in eight journals were identified. The journals studied included three prominent subscription model (SM) journals (Cell, Science, and Nature), three leading Open Access (OA) journals (PLOS ONE, PLOS Biology, BMC Biology), and two newer OA titles with connections to established SM publishers (Cell Reports [Cell Press] and Scientific Reports [Nature Publications Group]. Author affiliations were determined. Citations to their 400 papers were tallied up through April 2014. The 4,046 other papers they also authored from 2011–2013 were characterized as to the publishers of the journals within which they appeared and the ranking of those journals by Impact Factor (IF) within their subject categories as found in Journal Citation Reports. Cell, Science, and Nature authors were significantly more likely to be affiliated with elite institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom, were much more heavily cited, published many more papers, and did so in higher-ranking journals, very often in titles published by the Nature Publications Group, Cell Press, or the AAAS. They were significantly less likely to publish in the OA journals studied. Conversely, authors with PLOS ONE and BMC Biology citation successes were much more likely to appear repeatedly in OA titles from the Public Library of Science or BioMedCentral and had a lower rate of publishing in the SM titles analyzed. Authors in the remaining titles exhibited intermediate propensities.