Correction to: The troubles of high-profile open access megajournals

Correction to: Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03144-6

In the original publication (Heneberg 2019), Fig. 5e does not properly label the values. Figure 5e (similarly to subfigures 5a, 5c and 5g, which were displayed correctly) contained data on citations from Nature, Science or PNAS to the megajournals, not vice versa. The revised version of Fig. 5e is given below.

Fig. 5

Analysis of citations to and from the top-tier journals from selected open access journals, including the megajournals occurring in the first post-publication year. a, c, e, g, i Citations from the top-tier journals (Nature, Science and PNAS) to the indicated open access journals occurring in the first post-publication year. b, d, f, h, j Citations to the top-tier journals (Nature, Science and PNAS) from the indicated open access journals occurring in the first post-publication year. The analyzed open access journals consisted of BMC journals (a, b), Hindawi journals (c, d), megajournals other than PLoS ONE (e–f), PLoS series journals other than PLoS ONE (g–h) and the three top-tier journals (i, j). Note that PLoS ONE was analyzed in detail in Figs. 3 and 4. The data are shown as the number of citations from an indicated journal in the first post-publication year (e.g., citations in 2017 to papers published in 2016) divided by the total number of papers published, multiplied by 100. High variability in case of early publication years of Hindawi journals is caused by low publication volumes of this publisher prior year 2005

In addition, one of the titles of megajournals sensu stricto according to Björk (2015), Biology Open (ISSN 2046-6390) was incidentally misidentified; instead, the data for the Open Biology (ISSN 2046-2441) were used. Therefore, the data that were obtained for this journal should not be counted in when the megajournals were analyzed. Due to the low number of citable items published by both these journals (only 96 citable items were published by Open Biology in 2018, and 205 citable items were published by Biology Open according to the Web of Knowledge), the analyses of the relatively large publication output of all megajournals combined were not affected.

The conclusions of the study are not affected by these corrections.