PLoS ONE

PLoS ONE is an open access, online scientific journal from the Public Library of Science (ISSN 1817-101X). It covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. Submissions go through pre-publication peer review but are not excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field. Unlike other PLoS journals, the PLoS ONE online platform has post-publication user discussion and rating features. PLoS One articles are indexed in PubMed, but to date they are not indexed by Web of Science or Scopus.

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History

PLoS ONE was launched at the end of 2006 as a beta version. As of November 2007, there were over 1000 articles available.

Publication concept

PLoS ONE is built on several conceptual differences compared to traditional peer-reviewed publishing so far.

• It does not restrict itself to a specific scientific area. This might facilitate publication of research on topics off or between common science categories, while at the same time making it more difficult to browse the contents.
• It does not use presumed importance of a paper as a criterion for rejection. Instead, PLoS ONE only verifies whether experiments were conducted properly and will publish any paper where this is the case. This will facilitate publication of topics not commonly assumed to be important, while it will make it more difficult to search for important papers on PLoS ONE. This might be alleviated by allowing the readers to rate and comment on papers after publication, thus highlighting the item. This policy is likely to produce a low impact factor of PLoS ONE once assigned.

"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." [1]

• Being an online-only publication allows PLoS ONE to publish more papers than a journal that prints a weekly or monthly issue. This again increased the ease of publishing while it makes screening papers on PLoS ONE more difficult due to sheer total number of publications.

Business model

As all journals of the Public Library of Science, PLoS ONE is financed by charging authors or funders a publication fee. As of March 2007, PLoS ONE charges scientists or their institutions $1,250 to publish an article. It will waive the fee for authors who do not have the funds. [2]

The pre-publication fees model allows PLoS ONE (and other PLoS journals) to provide all articles to everybody for free immediately after publication. This is done using the Creative Commons Attribution License, version 2.5.

See also

• Preprint