PLOS One

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.

The review process starts with initial checks by the journal's staff and in-house editorial team to verify compliance with policy and ethical standards, competing interests, financial disclosure and data availability. Then, the academic editor, usually a member of PLOS One's editorial board who has relevant expertise, reviews the paper and decides whether an external peer review is needed for expert feedback. Based on the review and any feedback, the academic editor can accept, reject, or request a minor or major revision.

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. 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 50% 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, open access to PLOS One is financed by an article processing charge, typically paid by the author's institution or by the author. This model allows PLOS journals to make all articles available to the public for free immediately upon publication. As of April 2021, PLOS One charges a publication fee of $1,745 to publish an article. Depending on circumstances, it may waive or reduce the fee for authors who do not have sufficient funds.

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. The success of PLOS One has inspired a series of other open access journals, including some other mega journals having broad scope, low selectivity, and a pay-to-publish model using 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 2025 impact factor of 2.8.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and in major scientific databases, including:

• AGRICOLA
• BIOSIS Previews
• Chemical Abstracts Service
• Embase
• Food Science and Technology Abstracts
• MEDLINE/PubMed
• PsycINFO
• Scopus
• The Zoological Record
• Web of Science

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 rejection letter concerned Ingleby and Head's paper about differences in PhD-to-postdoc transition between male and female scientists. The reviewer argued that the authors should "find one or two male biologists to work with" to ensure the manuscript does not drift into "ideologically biased assumptions", comments which the authors found to be "unprofessional and inappropriate" and veering into sexism. Shortly afterward, the journal was reported to be PLOS One. By May 1, PLOS had 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 also issued an apology statement following the incident.

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); lit. 'that which creates or transforms') which means "nature" in the Chinese language. Despite the authors' protests, the article was retracted. 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 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. 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 then lack of a retraction of a 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 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". 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 a total of 67 post-publication reader comments and 129 responses on PLOS One site. 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.

Rapid-onset gender dysphoria controversy

On August 27, 2018, the editors of PLOS One initiated a reevaluation of an article they published two weeks earlier submitted by Brown University School of Public Health assistant professor Lisa Littman. The study described a phenomenon of social contagion, or "cluster outbreaks" in gender dysphoria among young people, which Littman called "rapid-onset gender dysphoria". Data was obtained from a survey placed on three websites for concerned parents of children with gender dysphoria, asking for responses from parents whose children had experienced "sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria beginning between the ages of 10 and 21". The study was criticized by transgender activists like Julia Serano and medical professionals like developmental and clinical psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, as being politicized and having self-selected samples, as well as lacking clinical data or responses from the adolescents themselves.

On March 19, 2019, PLOS One completed its review. PLOS One psychology academic editor Angelo Brandelli Costa acted as a reviewer criticizing the methods and conclusion of the study in a formal comment, saying, "The level of evidence produced by the Dr. Littman's study cannot generate a new diagnostic criterion relative to the time of presentation of the demands of medical and social gender affirmation." In a separate letter apologizing for the failure of peer review to address the issues with the article, PLOS One Editor-in-chief Joerg Heber said, "we have reached the conclusion that the study and resultant data reported in the article represent a valid contribution to the scientific literature. However, we have also determined that the study, including its goals, methodology, and conclusions, were not adequately framed in the published version, and that these needed to be corrected."

The paper was republished with updated Title, Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Discussion, and Conclusion sections, but the Results section was mostly unchanged. In her correction, Littman emphasized that the article was "a study of parental observations which serves to develop hypotheses", saying "Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is not a formal mental health diagnosis at this time. This report did not collect data from the adolescents and young adults (AYAs) or clinicians and therefore does not validate the phenomenon. Additional research that includes AYAs, along with consensus among experts in the field, will be needed to determine if what is described here as rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) will become a formal diagnosis."