Salinas and Munch’s article about the submission process in the field of ecology has direct repercussions on the open access movement. By using mathematical modeling to represent the submission process of over 3.2 million articles, they demonstrated how PLoS ONE was the best journal when attempting to minimize the number of resubmission while maximizing the number of citations (Salinas & Munch 2015). The rise of open access journals has been met with a certain amount of reluctance and skepticism by some in academia, including ecology scholars. For example, many open access journals are thought of as less prestigious, garnering fewer submissions by ecologists. However, comparing PLoS to the most prestigious ecology journals such as Ecology Letters and Ecology Monograms shows that they garner a similar number of citations, while PLoS requires fewer resubmissions prior to acceptance on average (Salinas & Munch 2015).
The editors of Ecology Letters were fairly critical of the analysis done in the PLoS ONE article. Two editors of Ecology Letters felt the article was only good for inexperienced scientists and overly simplistic. Scientists in ecology found the review extremely helpful, while scientists in other fields wanted a review done specific to their own fields (Woolson 2015). It seems like the scientists clearly see the value of publications examining the submission process within their fields, but many editors of print publications are not liking the results. A possible explanation for the lower number of resubmissions necessary for an online journal is the abandonment of the issue format. While print journals must stick to a specific format, open-access journals publish quality articles as they come in. This prevents constant formatting and cutting processes, easing the strain on the authors and editors.
The ideal result for an author is to garner the largest number of citations possible while minimizing the number of revisions. Salinas and Munch suggest that the best way to accomplish this is to move towards open-access, online only journals. This is supported by a more recent article analyzing the number of page views garnered by open-access articles compared to those behind a subscription firewall (Wang et al 2015). Whether publishers accept the changing reality of academia, scientists will certainly act in their own best interest. There will likely be resistance from top-tier journals and more established members in the field of ecology. However, the benefit to authors trying to get published is large enough to become a driving force towards open-access. Over time, this will lead to the establishment of more prestigious open-access journals and greater readership of scientific articles.

References

Salinas, S. & Munch, S. B. (2015). Where should I send it? Optimizing the submission decision
process. PLoS ONE. 10.1371/journal.pone.0115451
Wang, F. Liu, C., Mao, W., & Fang, Z. (2015). The open access advantage considering citation,
article usage and social media attention. 10.1007/s11192-015-1547-0
Woolston, C. (2015). Mathematical model helps scientists decide where to submit their papers.
Nature 518, 9. 10.1038/518009f