PLOS ONE

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PLOS ONE  
PLOS ONE logo 2012.svg
Abbreviated title (ISO 4)
 PLOS ONE
Discipline Multidisciplinary
Language English
Edited by Damian Pattinson
Publication details
Publisher
Publication history
 2006–present
Frequency Upon acceptance
Yes
License Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International
3.234
Indexing
ISSN 1932-6203
LCCN 2006214532
OCLC no. 228234657
Links

PLOS ONE (originally PLoS ONE) is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. Operating under a pay-to-publish model, PLOS ONE publishes approximately 70% of submitted manuscripts. All submissions go through a pre-publication review by a member of the board of academic editors, who can elect to seek an opinion from an external reviewer. According to the journal, papers are not to be excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field. Although submissions declined from 2013 to 2014, PLOS ONE remains the world’s largest journal by number of papers published (about 30,000 a year, or 85 papers per day) and has a 2014 journal impact factor of 3.234.

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.[1][2] 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.[3] In August 2008 it moved from a weekly publication schedule to a daily one, publishing articles as soon as they became ready.[4] 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.[5]

Output

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.[6] In 2009, 4,406 articles were published, making PLOS ONE the third largest scientific journal in the world (by volume) and in 2010, 6,749 articles were published, making the journal the largest in the world (by volume).[7] In 2011, the journal published 13,798 articles,[8] meaning that approximately 1 in 60 of all articles indexed by PubMed as being published in 2011 were published by PLOS ONE,[9] In 2012, PLOS ONE published 23,468 papers.[10] In 2013, PLOS ONE published 31,500 papers.[11] 2014 saw the first year-over-year decline in published articles, to 30,040.

Management

The founding managing editor was Chris Surridge.[12] He was succeeded by Peter Binfield in March 2008, who was publisher until May 2012. The current executive editor is Damian Pattinson.[13]

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.[14]

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Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLOS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees. If published, papers will be made available for community-based open peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating.[15]

According to Nature, the journal's aim is to "challenge academia's obsession with journal status and impact factors".[16] 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.[14]

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.[17] 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.[18] Registered readers can leave comments on articles on the website.[16]

Business model

A welcome message from PLoS to Nature Publishing Group on the launch of Scientific Reports,[19] inspired by a similar message sent in 1981 by Apple to IBM upon the latter's entry into the personal computer market with its IBM Personal Computer.[20]

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 (i.e., open access) immediately after publication. As of July 2010, PLOS ONE charged authors US$1,350[21] to publish an article. Depending on circumstances, it may waive or reduce the fee for authors who do not have sufficient funds.[22] 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 (accept more articles, earn more revenue).[23] 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.[24] PLoS had been operating at a loss until 2009 but covered its operational costs for the first time in 2010,[25] largely due to the growth of PLOS ONE.

Influence

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Main article: Mega journal

The "PLOS ONE model" has inspired a series of other journals,[26][27][28] having broad scope and low selectivity, now called megajournals, and a pay-to-publish model, usually published under Creative Commons licenses.

Community recognition and citation information

In September 2009, PLOS ONE received the Publishing Innovation Award of the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers.[29] 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 PLOS ONE citations were to be analyzed by Journal Citation Reports,[30] and PLOS the journal received an impact factor of 4.411 in 2010. The impact factor has declined steadily each year since then, to 3.234 in 2014.[31] In 2015, PLOS ONE ranked 25 on Google Scholar for all journals in terms of citations.[32]

Abstracting and indexing

The articles are indexed in:[15]

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References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ PLOS ONE Milestones, a timeline on Dipity
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Taylor, Mike. "It’s Not Academic: How Publishers Are Squelching Science Communication." Discover Magazine. February 21, 2012. Retrieved on March 3, 2012.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 PLOS ONE Journal Information. Plosone.org (2012-09-04). Retrieved on 2013-06-20.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Allen, Liz (January 19, 2011) "Welcome, Nature. Seriously", (WebCite)
  20. ↑ Welcome message from Apple to IBM ([ WebCite])
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Rhodri Jackson and Martin Richardson, "Gold open access: the future of the academic journal?", Chapter 9 in Cope and Phillip (2014), p.223-248. The Future of the Academic Journal, 2nd ed., Chandos Publishing, Jul 1, 2014, 478 pages.
  28. ↑ Bo-Christer Björk and David Solomon, Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges, March 2014, 69 pages. Final Report to a consortium of research funders comprising Jisc, Research Libraries UK, Research Councils UK, the Wellcome Trust, the Austrian Science Fund, the Luxembourg National Research Fund, and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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