Scientific Reports is an open access scientific journal under the Nature Publishing Group. It started in 2011 and they publish articles related to natural and clinical sciences. The 2015 journal metrics for the 2-year impact factor is 5.228. The goal of this journal is to have articles readily accessible to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. Their goal is to publish articles quickly to ensure current, up-to-date research, with articles published on a daily basis and a review process that takes roughly 45 days. Their decision to be open access is listed in the following benefits:

Increased citation and usage

Greater public engagement

Faster impact

Broader collaboration

Increased interdisciplinary interaction

It has recently been reported that Scientific Reports is now the largest scholarly journal in the world. Previously, PLoS ONE held this title, but have hit a peak in the number of articles they published in 2013. Scientific Reports published 6,214 articles in the first quarter of 2017 compared to PLoS ONE’s 5,541. However, this doesn’t come without its own troubles. In 2016, Scientific Reports published a paper on a compound that induces death in human liver cancer cells by a group from the University of Malaya. Readers were quick to point out shoddy chemistry methods, duplicated images in their figures, copy and pasted cells from different figures. It was also pointed out that images in this article were used in other articles published by the same group but to represent a different cell line. The article was soon retracted, but this cannot be seen on the webpage for the article, unless one reads the comment section. This issue brought into question the legitimacy of the review process of the journal and open access journals in general. When a journal is on a mission to get as many articles out as possible, how can they assure quality of the work being published?