Abbreviated title (ISO 4) PLOS ONE Language English Publication history 2006–present | Discipline Multidisciplinary Edited by Joerg Heber | |
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Publisher Public Library of Science | ||
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 the number of submissions decreased 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). Numbers decreased further to 22,000 published papers in 2016.
Contents
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 and turnaround
The number of papers published by PLOS ONE grew rapidly from inception to 2013 and has since declined somewhat. By 2010, it was estimated to have become the largest journal in the world, and in 2011, 1 in 60 articles indexed by PubMed were published by PLOS ONE.
At PLOS ONE, the median review time has grown from 37 days to 125 days over the first ten years of operation, according to Himmelstein's analysis, done for Nature. The median between acceptance and posting a paper on the site has decreased from 35 to 15 days over the same period. Both numbers for 2016 roughly correspond to the industry-wide averages for biology-related journals.
Management
The founding managing editor was Chris Surridge. He was succeeded by Peter Binfield in March 2008, who was publisher until May 2012. Damian Pattinson then held the chief editorial position until December 2015. Joerg Heber was confirmed as editor-in-chief from November 2016.
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. Registered readers can leave comments on articles on the website.
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 (i.e., open access) immediately after publication. As of October 2015, PLOS ONE charged authors US$1,495 to publish an article. Depending on circumstances, it may waive or reduce 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 (accept more articles, earn more revenue). 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 of other journals, having broad scope and low selectivity, now called megajournals, and a pay-to-publish model, usually published under Creative Commons licenses.
Reception
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 the journal would be included in the Journal Citation Reports, and the journal received an impact factor of 4.411 in 2010. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2015 impact factor of 3.057.
Abstracting and indexing
The articles are indexed in:
Sexist peer review
On April 29, 2015, Fiona Ingleby and Megan Head, postdoctoral fellows at the University of Sussex and Australian National University respectively, posted a rejection letter, which they said was sent to them by a peer reviewer for a journal they did not wish to name. The excerpt made negative comments about women's aptitude for science and advised Ingleby and Head to find male co-authors. Shortly afterward, the journal was reported to be PLOS ONE. By May 1, PLOS announced that it was severing ties with the reviewer responsible for the comments and asking the editor who relayed them to step down. PLOS ONE director Damian Pattinson also stated that the journal was considering moving away from the tradition of anonymous peer review.
CreatorGate
On March 3, 2016, the editors of PLOS ONE initiated a reevaluation of an article about the functioning of the human hand due to outrage among the journal's readership over a reference to "Creator" inside the paper. The authors, who received grants from the Chinese National Basic Research Program and National Natural Science Foundation of China for this work, responded by saying "Creator" is a poorly-translated idiom (造化(者), literally "(that which) creates or transforms") which means "nature" in the Chinese language. Despite the authors' protests, the article was retracted. "Creator" is found in the paper in three sentences:
A less sympathetic explanation for the use of "Creator" was suggested to The Chronicle of Higher Education by Chinese-language experts who noted that the academic editor listed on the paper, Renzhi Han, previously worked at the Chinese Evangelical Church in Iowa City.
Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post presented detailed analysis of the problem, which she named #CreatorGate, and concluded that the journal’s hasty retraction may have been an even bigger offense than the publication of the paper in the first place. To contrast PLOS ONE's handling of the problem, she used a 12-year history of retraction of the fraudulent paper on vaccine and autism by The Lancet and no retraction of debunked study on "arsenic life" by Science. Others added the history of the article in Nature on "water memory" that was not retracted either.
Jonathan Eisen, chair of advisory board of a sister journal PLOS Biology and an advocate for open-access, defended PLOS ONE for prompt response to social media, which in his words "most journals pretend doesn’t even exist". David Knutson issued a statement about the paper processing at PLOS ONE, which praised the importance of post-publication peer review and described their intention to offer open signed reviews in order to ensure accountability of the process. From March 2 to 9, the research article received total 67 post-publication reader comments and 129 responses on PLOS ONE site, the first one from cell biologist turned science journalist Leonid Schneider who cited a Wikipedia article rather than scientific literature as an authority. Signe Dean of SBS put #CreatorGate in perspective: it is not the most scandalous retraction in science, yet it shows how a social media outrage storm does expedite a retraction.
The dissemination activity on social media within one week of publicity was:
The article was viewed 169,926 times on PLOS site in the first ten days of March, compared to 555 views in January and 116 views in February.
On March 10, 2016, BioLogos, a website of a Christian advocacy group established by the 16th Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins after publication of his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, started Blog series Faith and Science Seeking Understanding to review the controversy raised by #CreatorGate. The series follows the accusations of anti-Christian/anti-”design” bias in the scientific world by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and David Klinghoffer of Evolution News and Views. BioLogos authors argue that avoiding mentions of God in scientific literature is not a censorship but a rule of a successful game akin to the rules of soccer or football.