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This paper looks at disciplinary differences in the production, relevance, and use of three predominant genres of informal scholarly communication on the internet: academic mailing lists; scholarly homepages, and scholar-produced decentralized digital resources. The aim is to contribute to the development of a theoretical framework for understanding and explaining disciplinary differences in the shaping of networked resources. We apply Whitley's theory of the intellectual and social organization of academic fields to explain variation in forms and types of digital resources across fields. The paper extends Whitley's theory by applying his key domain analytic concepts 'task uncertainty' and 'mutual dependence' to explain scholarly communication practices in the digital realm. The empirical data spans seven intellectual fields across the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The analysis shows that, while there are similarities in the scholarly production of information genres on the internet, Whitley's theory helps in identifying and understanding the diversity and heterogeneity of electronic communication fora across fields.Earlier attempts to identify critical dimensions for explaining the shaping and appropriation of networked resources include Covi's and Kling's [12] 'principle of proficiency,' Covi's [13] 'material mastery,' and the socio-technical interaction network (STIN) model developed by Kling, McKim, and King [14]. Covi's 'material mastery' and Covi's and Kling's 'principle of proficiency' concepts link a field's communication patterns and its most esteemed forms of publication with the use of electronic resources, and the types of resources used. These concepts were coined to challenge the notion that if systems are easy to use and scholars have general basic searching skills, they will use the systems designed to assist them. Covi [13, p. 294] found that use is more related to disciplinary search strategies and disciplinary materials selection criteria as shaped by the nature of the disciplinary fields, e.g. their degree of integration, their social structures, origins and developments, scope of knowledge produced, and funding patterns.

In this paper we present the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of eleven open-access mega-journals (OAMJs). OAMJs are a relatively recent phenomenon, and have been characterised as having four key characteristics: large size; broad disciplinary scope; a Gold-OA business model; and a peer-review policy that seeks to determine only the scientific soundness of the research rather than evaluate the novelty or significance of the work. Our investigation focuses on four key modes of analysis: journal outputs (the number of articles published and changes in output over time); OAMJ author characteristics (nationalities and institutional affiliations); subject areas (the disciplinary scope of OAMJs, and variations in sub-disciplinary output); and citation profiles (the citation distributions of each OAMJ, and the impact of citing journals). We found that while the total output of the eleven mega-journals grew by 14.9% between 2014 and 2015, this growth is largely attributable to the increased output of Scientific Reports and Medicine. We also found substantial variation in the geographical distribution of authors. Several journals have a relatively high proportion of Chinese authors, and we suggest this may be linked to these journals’ high Journal Impact Factors (JIFs). The mega-journals were also found to vary in subject scope, with several journals publishing disproportionately high numbers of articles in certain sub-disciplines. Our citation analsysis offers support for Björk & Catani’s suggestion that OAMJs’s citation distributions can be similar to those of traditional journals, while noting considerable variation in citation rates across the eleven titles. We conclude that while the OAMJ term is useful as a means of grouping journals which share a set of key characteristics, there is no such thing as a “typical” mega-journal, and we suggest several areas for additional research that might help us better understand the current and future role of OAMJs in scholarly communication.

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