PLOS One

PLOS ONE  
Discipline Multidisciplinary
Language English
Edited by Joerg Heber
Publication details
Publication history
 2006–present
Publisher
Frequency Upon acceptance
Yes
License Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International
2.766
Standard abbreviations
PLoS One
Indexing
ISSN 1932-6203
LCCN 2006214532
OCLC no. 228234657
Links

PLOS One (stylized PLOS ONE, and formerly 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. The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 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. In January 2010, the journal was included in the Journal Citation Reports and received its first impact factor of 4.411. PLOS One papers are published under Creative Commons licenses.

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 and turnaround

YearPapers Published
20071,200[6]
20082,800[6]
20094,406[7]
20106,749[7]
201113,798[8]
201223,468[9]
201331,500[10]
201430,040[11]
201528,107[12]
2016 22,054[13]

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,[7] and in 2011, 1 in 60 articles indexed by PubMed were published by PLOS One.[14] By September 2017, PLOS One confirmed they had published over 200,000 articles.[15] By November 2017, the journal Scientific Reports overtook PLOS One in terms of output.[16][17]

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.[18][19]

Management

The founding managing editor was Chris Surridge.[20] He was succeeded by Peter Binfield in March 2008, who was publisher until May 2012.[21] Damian Pattinson then held the chief editorial position until December 2015.[22] Joerg Heber was confirmed as editor-in-chief from November 2016.[23]

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.[24]

According to Nature, the journal's aim is to "challenge academia's obsession with journal status and impact factors".[26] 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.[24]

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. In the first four years following launch, it made use of over 40,000 external peer reviewers.[27] The journal uses an international board of academic editors with over 6,000 academics handling submissions and publishes approximately 50 % of all submissions, after review by, on average, 2.9 experts.[28] Registered readers can leave comments on articles on the website.[26]

Business model

A welcome message from PLoS to Nature Publishing Group on the launch of Scientific Reports,[29] 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.[30]

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[31] to publish an article. Depending on circumstances, it may waive or reduce the fee for authors who do not have sufficient funds.[32] 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).[33] 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.[34] PLoS had been operating at a loss until 2009 but covered its operational costs for the first time in 2010,[35] largely due to the growth of PLOS One.

Influence

The "PLOS One model" has inspired a series of other journals,[36][37][38] 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.[39] 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,[40] and the journal received an impact factor of 4.411 in 2010. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2016 impact factor of 2.806.[41]

Abstracting and indexing

The articles are indexed in:[25]

Response to controversial publications

Alleged sexism in one peer review instance

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 immediately issued a statement following the incident, written by PLOS One director Damian Pattinson, saying,

"I want to sincerely apologize for the distress the report caused the authors, and to make clear that we completely oppose the sentiments it expressed,"

He also stated that the journal was considering moving away from the tradition of anonymous peer review.[42]

CreatorGate

On March 3, 2016, the editors of PLOS One initiated a reevaluation of an article about the functioning of the human hand[43] due to outrage among the journal's readership over a reference to "Creator" inside the paper.[44] 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")[45] which means "nature" in the Chinese language. Despite the authors' protests, the article was retracted.[46] "Creator" is found in the paper in three sentences:

  • "The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way".
  • "Hand coordination should indicate the mystery of the Creator's invention".
  • "In conclusion, our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years".

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.[47]

Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post presented a 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.[48] 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 the lack of a retraction of a debunked study on "arsenic life" by Science.[49][50] Others added the history of the article in Nature on "water memory" that was not retracted either.[51]

Jonathan Eisen, chair of the advisory board of a sister journal PLOS Biology and an advocate for open-access, commended PLOS One for their prompt response on social media, which in his words "most journals pretend doesn't even exist".[52] 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.[53] From March 2 to 9, the research article received total 67 post-publication reader comments and 129 responses on PLOS One site.[54] 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.[55]

The dissemination activity on social media within one week of publicity was:

  • 1,309 tweets which share the article on Twitter;
  • 7,432 posts, 1,516 shares and 4,570 Likes on Facebook.

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.[56]

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.[57] The series follows the accusations of anti-Christian/anti-intelligent design bias in the scientific world by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and David Klinghoffer of Evolution News and Views.[58][59] 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 basketball.[60][61]

References

  1. ↑ "Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation". Archived from the original on March 2, 2007. Retrieved December 17, 2002.
  2. ↑ "Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation". Archived from the original on 2007-02-25.
  3. ↑ Zivkovic, Bora. "Trackbacks are here!". Archived from the original on 2010-10-11. Retrieved 2015-03-15.
  4. ↑ PLOS ONE Milestones Archived 2012-01-06 at the Wayback Machine., a timeline on Dipity
  5. ↑ David Knutson (23 July 2012). "New PLOS look". PLOS BLOG. Public Library of Science. Archived from the original on 6 August 2012. Retrieved 6 August 2012.
  6. 1 2 Kaiser, Jocelyn (2014-06-04). "Output Drops at World's Largest Open Access Journal". Science Magazine. Retrieved 2015-10-26.
  7. 1 2 3 Morrison, Heather (5 January 2011). "PLoS ONE: now the world's largest journal?". Poetic Economics Blog. Retrieved 16 January 2011.
  8. ↑ Taylor, Mike. "It’s Not Academic: How Publishers Are Squelching Science Communication." Discover Magazine. February 21, 2012. Retrieved on March 3, 2012.
  9. ↑ Hoff, Krista (3 January 2013). "PLOS ONE Papers of 2012". everyONE Blog. Retrieved 21 May 2013.
  10. ↑ Kayla Graham (2014-01-06). "Thanking Our Peer Reviewers – EveryONEEveryONE". Blogs.plos.org. Retrieved 2015-05-17.
  11. ↑ "PLoS One Impact Factor|2016|2015|2014 - BioxBio". www.bioxbio.com. Retrieved 2016-10-17.
  12. ↑ Davis, Phil (2016-02-02). "As PLOS ONE Shrinks, 2015 Impact Factor Expected to Rise". The Scholarly Kitchen. Retrieved 2016-10-17.
  13. ↑ Davis, Phil (2017-01-05). "PLOS ONE Output Drops Again In 2016". The Scholarly Kitchen. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
  14. ↑ Konkeil, Stacey (20 December 2011). "PLOS ONE: Five Years, Many Milestones". everyONE Blog. Retrieved 24 December 2011.
  15. ↑ "A Publishing Milestone to Celebrate: 200,000 PLOS Research Articles and Counting | STM Publishing News". www.stm-publishing.com. Retrieved 2017-09-27.
  16. ↑ "Scientific Reports Overtakes PLOS ONE As Largest Megajournal - The Scholarly Kitchen". The Scholarly Kitchen. 2017-04-06. Retrieved 2017-11-27.
  17. ↑ "PLOS Reports $1.7M Loss In 2016 - The Scholarly Kitchen". The Scholarly Kitchen. 2017-11-27. Retrieved 2017-11-27.
  18. ↑ Kendall, Powell (11 February 2016). "Does it take too long to publish research?" (PDF). Nature. 530 (7589): 148–151. Bibcode:2016Natur.530..148P. doi:10.1038/530148a. PMID 26863966. Retrieved 2016-03-10.
  19. ↑ Himmelstein, Daniel (10 February 2016). "The history of publishing delays". Satoshi Village. Retrieved 2016-03-10.
  20. ↑ Poynder, Richard (15 June 2006). "Open Access: Stage Two". Open and Shut Blog. Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  21. ↑ Jerram, Peter (8 May 2012). "Publisher of PLOS ONE moves to new Open-Access initiative". The official PLOS Blog. Retrieved 22 June 2012.
  22. ↑ "Research Square hires Damian Pattinson, former Editorial Director of PLOS ONE | STM Publishing News". www.stm-publishing.com. Retrieved 2016-09-17.
  23. ↑ "PLOS appoints Dr. Joerg Heber Editor-in-Chief of PLOS ONE | The Official PLOS Blog". 2016-09-16. Retrieved 2016-09-17.
  24. 1 2 MacCallum, C. J. (2006). "ONE for All: The Next Step for PLOS". PLoS Biol. 4 (11): e401. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040401. PMC 1637059. PMID 17523266.
  25. 1 2 PLOS ONE Journal Information. Plosone.org (2012-09-04). Retrieved on 2013-06-20.
  26. 1 2 Giles, J. (2007). "Open-Access Journal Will Publish First, Judge Later". Nature. 445 (7123): 9. Bibcode:2007Natur.445....9G. doi:10.1038/445009a. PMID 17203032.
  27. ↑ "Thanking PLOS ONE Peer Reviewers". PLOS ONE. Dec 2010. Retrieved 16 January 2011.
  28. ↑ "PLOS ONE Editorial and Peer-Review Process". PLOS ONE. 2008. Retrieved 12 December 2013.
  29. ↑ Allen, Liz (January 19, 2011) "Welcome, Nature. Seriously", (WebCite)
  30. ↑ Welcome message from Apple to IBM ([ WebCite])
  31. ↑ "PLOS Publication Costs Update". PLOS ONE. Retrieved 3 July 2016.
  32. ↑ "Publication Fees". PLOS. Retrieved 1 January 2015.
  33. ↑ Poynder, Richard (7 March 2011). "PLOS ONE, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing". Open and Shut Blog. Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  34. ↑ Harnad, Stevan (June–July 2011). "No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed". D-Lib Magazine. doi:10.1045/july2010-harnad. Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  35. ↑ Peter Jerram (July 20, 2011). "2010 PLoS Progress Update". Archived from the original on January 16, 2012. Retrieved January 16, 2012.
  36. ↑ Sitek, Dagmar; Bertelmann, Roland (2014). "Open Access: A State of the Art". In Sönke Bartling; Sascha Friesike. Opening Science. Springer. p. 139. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_9. ISBN 978-3-319-00025-1.
  37. ↑ Rhodri Jackson and Martin Richardson, "Gold open access: the future of the academic journal?", Chapter 9 in Cope and Phillip (2014), pp. 223–248. The Future of the Academic Journal, 2nd ed., Chandos Publishing, Jul 1, 2014, 478 pages.
  38. ↑ Bo-Christer Björk and David Solomon, Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges Archived 2014-06-02 at the Wayback Machine., 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.
  39. ↑ "ALPSP Awards 2010–finalists announced". ALPSP. Archived from the original on 11 December 2011. Retrieved 9 September 2010.
  40. ↑ Patterson, Mark (5 January 2010). "PLOS ONE indexed by Web of Science". PLOS Blogs. Retrieved 9 September 2010.
  41. ↑ "JOURNALNAME". 2015 Journal Citation Reports. Web of Science (Science ed.). Clarivate Analytics. 2016.
  42. ↑ Bernstein, Rachel (2015-05-01). "PLOS ONE ousts reviewer, editor after sexist peer-review storm". Science Magazine. Retrieved 2015-10-27.
  43. ↑ Liu, Ming-Jin; Xiong, Cai-Hua; Xiong, Le; Huang, Xiao-Lin (January 5, 2016). "Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living". PLOS ONE. 11 (1): e0146193. Bibcode:2016PLoSO..1146193L. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146193. PMC 4701170. PMID 26730579. Retrieved 2016-03-09. (Retracted)
  44. ↑ Davis, Nicola (7 March 2016). "Hand of God? Scientific anatomy paper citing a 'creator' retracted after furore". The Guardian. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  45. ↑ Mair, Victor (4 March 2016). "The hand of god". Language Log. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  46. ↑ The PLOS ONE Staff (March 4, 2016). "Retraction: Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living". PLOS ONE. 11 (3): e0151685. Bibcode:2016PLoSO..1151685.. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0151685. PMC 4778690. PMID 26943177. Retrieved 2016-03-15.
  47. ↑ Basken, Paul (7 March 2016). "Paper Praising 'Creator' Puts Fear of God in Open-Access Giant". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  48. ↑ Kaplan, Sarah (8 March 2016). "#CreatorGate: How a study on hands sparked an uproar about science, God and ethics in publishing". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  49. ↑ Wakefield, AJ; Murch, SH; Anthony, A; Linnell, J; Casson, DM; Malik, M; Berelowitz, M; Dhillon, AP; Thomson, MA; Harvey, P; Valentine, A; Davies, SE; Walker-Smith, JA (1998). "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children". The Lancet. 351 (9103): 637–641. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(97)11096-0. PMID 9500320. Retrieved 2016-03-09. (Retracted)
  50. ↑ Wolfe-Simon, Felisa; Blum, Jodi Switzer; Kulp, Thomas R.; Gordon, Gwyneth W.; Hoeft, Shelley E.; Pett-Ridge, Jennifer; Stolz, John F.; Webb, Samuel M.; Weber, Peter K.; Davies, P. C. W.; Anbar, A. D.; Oremland, R. S. (2 December 2010). "A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus". Science. 332 (6034): 1163–1166. Bibcode:2011Sci...332.1163W. doi:10.1126/science.1197258. PMID 21127214. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  51. ↑ Cressey, Daniel (10 March 2016). "Paper that says human hand was 'designed by Creator' sparks concern. Apparently creationist research prompts soul searching over process of editing and peer review" (PDF). Nature. 531 (7593): 143. Bibcode:2016Natur.531..143C. doi:10.1038/531143f. Retrieved 2016-03-10.
  52. ↑ Kotack, Madison (3 March 2016). "A Science Journal Invokes 'the Creator,' and Science Pushes Back". Wired. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  53. ↑ Schneider, Leonid (4 March 2016). "Hand of God paper retracted: PLOS ONE "could not stand by the pre-publication assessment"". For Better Science. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  54. ↑ Liu, MJ; Xiong, CH; Xiong, L; Huang, XL (9 March 2016). "Reader Comments on Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living". PLOS ONE. 11 (1): e0146193. Bibcode:2016PLoSO..1146193L. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146193. PMC 4701170. PMID 26730579. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  55. ↑ Dean, Signe (7 March 2016). "Not just #creatorgate: Most scandalous retractions in science". SBS. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  56. ↑ Liu, MJ; Xiong, CH; Xiong, L; Huang, XL (10 March 2016). "Metrics of Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living". PLOS ONE. 11 (1): e0146193. Bibcode:2016PLoSO..1146193L. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146193. PMC 4701170. PMID 26730579. Retrieved 2016-03-10.
  57. ↑ "Faith and Science Seeking Understanding: Reviewing #Creatorgate - Blog Series". BioLogos. 10 March 2016. Retrieved 2016-03-12.
  58. ↑ Ham, Ken (6 March 2016). "Secularist Intolerance Against Scientific Paper That Briefly Mentions Creator". Answers in Genesis. Retrieved 2016-03-12.
  59. ↑ Klinghoffer, David (7 March 2016). "PLOS ONE "Creator" Scandal Enters Witch-hunt Territory". Evolution News and Views. Discovery Institute. Retrieved 2016-03-12.
  60. ↑ Applegate, Kathryn (10 March 2016). "Reviewing #Creatorgate: Why a scientist shouldn't use the word "Creator" in their articles". BioLogos. Retrieved 2016-03-12.
  61. ↑ Stump, Jim (10 March 2016). "Reviewing #Creatorgate: How Science is Like Soccer". BioLogos. Retrieved 2016-03-12.
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