PLOS ONE is an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Public Library of
Science since 2006.
It covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine.
All submissions go through an internal and external pre-publication peer review, but
are not excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field.
The PLOS ONE online platform employs a "publish first, judge later" methodology, with post-publication
user discussion and rating features.
History Development
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded PLoS a $9 million grant in December 2002 and
$1 million grant in May 2006 for its financial sustainability and launch of new free-access
biomedical journals.
Later, PLOS ONE was launched in December 2006 as a beta version named PLoS ONE.
It launched with Commenting and Note making functionality, and added the ability to rate
articles in July 2007.
In September 2007 the ability to leave "trackbacks" on articles was added.
In August 2008 it moved from a weekly publication schedule to a daily one, publishing articles
as soon as they became ready.
In October 2008 PLoS ONE came out of "beta".
Also in September 2009, as part of its Article-Level Metrics program, PLoS ONE made the full online
usage data—e.g., HTML page views, PDF, XML downloads—for every published article publicly
available.
In mid-2012, as part of a rebranding of PLoS as PLOS, the journal changed its name to PLOS
ONE.
Output In 2006 the journal published 138 articles;
in 2007, it published just over 1,200 articles; and in 2008, it published almost 2,800 articles,
making it the largest open access journal in the world.
In 2009, 4,406 articles were published, making PLOS ONE the third largest scientific journal
in the world and in 2010, 6,749 articles were published, making the journal the largest
in the world.
In 2011, the journal published 13,798 articles, meaning that approximately 1 in 60 of all
articles indexed by PubMed as being published in 2011 were published by PLOS ONE, In 2012
PLOS ONE published 23,468 papers.
In 2013, PLOS ONE published 31,500 papers.
Management The founding managing editor was Chris Surridge.
He was succeeded by Peter Binfield in March 2008, who was publisher until May 2012.
The current executive editor is Damian Pattinson.
Publication concept PLOS ONE is built on several conceptually
different ideas compared to traditional peer-reviewed scientific publishing in that it does not
use the perceived importance of a paper as a criterion for acceptance or rejection.
The idea is that, instead, PLOS ONE only verifies whether experiments and data analysis were
conducted rigorously, and leaves it to the scientific community to ascertain importance,
post publication, through debate and comment.
According to Nature, the journal's aim is to "challenge academia's obsession with journal
status and impact factors".
Being an online-only publication allows PLOS ONE to publish more papers than a print journal.
In an effort to facilitate publication of research on topics outside, or between, traditional
science categories, it does not restrict itself to a specific scientific area.
Papers published in PLOS ONE can be of any length, contain full color throughout, and
contain supplementary materials such as multimedia files.
Reuse of articles is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License, version 2.5.
In the first four years following launch, it made use of over 40,000 external peer reviewers.
The journal uses an international board of academic editors with over 6,000 academics
handling submissions and publishes approximately 70 % of all submissions, after review by,
on average, 2.9 experts.
Business model
As with all journals of the Public Library of Science, PLOS ONE is financed by charging
authors a publication fee.
The "author-pays" model allows PLOS journals to provide all articles to everybody for free
immediately after publication.
As of July 2010, PLOS ONE charged authors US$1,350 to publish an article.
It will waive the fee for authors who do not have sufficient funds.
This model has drawn criticism, however.
In 2011 Richard Poynder posited that journals such as PLoS ONE that charge authors for publication
rather than charging users for access may produce a conflict of interest that reduces
peer review standards.
Stevan Harnad instead argues for a "no fault" peer-review model, in which authors are charged
for each round of peer review, regardless of the outcome, rather than for publication.
PLoS had been operating at a loss until 2009 but covered its operational costs for the
first time in 2010, largely due to the growth of PLOS ONE.
Influence The "PLOS ONE model" has inspired a series
other journals, having broad scope, low selectivity,and a pay-to-publish model, usually published
under Creative Commons licenses.
Examples are Scientific Reports and Open Biology.
Community recognition and citation information In September 2009, PLOS ONE received the Publishing
Innovation Award of the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers.
The award is given in recognition of a "truly innovative approach to any aspect of publication
as adjudged from originality and innovative qualities, together with utility, benefit
to the community and long-term prospects".
In January 2010 it was announced that it was to be analyzed by Journal Citation Reports.
Its 2013 impact factor was 3.534.
Additionally, the Scopus Journal Analyzer reports a "trend line" value of 3.74 for PLOS
ONE for the year 2009.
Abstracting and indexing The articles are indexed in:
References
External links Official website
Lecture by Chris Surridge, Managing Director of PLOS ONE hosted on openwetware wiki, Oct
2006 News column on PLOS ONE by Derek Lowe on Corante.com,
Jan 2006 Technical background on how PLOS ONE platform
will be run