PLOS ONE Journal Information

PLOS ONE is run as a partnership between its in-house PLOS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards, ensuring fast, fair, and professional peer review. To contact the Executive Editor, Damian Pattinson, or any of the Publications Assistants (who can be found at our contacts page), please e-mail plosone [at] plos.org. To access everyONE, the PLOS ONE community blog, please visit http://everyone.plos.org

Scope

PLOS ONE features reports of original research from all disciplines within science and medicine. By not excluding papers on the basis of subject area, PLOS ONE facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers whether within or between disciplines.

Rigorous Peer-Review

Too often a journal's decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership — both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLOS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them).

Open Access

PLOS applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all works we publish. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLOS journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.

Publication Charges

To provide open access, PLOS journals use a business model in which our expenses—including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving—are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. For PLOS ONE the publication fee is US$1350. Authors who are affiliated with one of our Institutional Members are eligible for a discount on this fee.

We offer a complete or partial fee waiver for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to payment information, and hence inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper.

Measures of Impact

At PLOS, we believe that articles in all journals should be assessed on their own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which they were published. PLOS journals have therefore initiated a program to provide a growing set of measures and indicators of impact at the article level that will include citation metrics, usage statistics, blogosphere coverage, social bookmarks, community rating and expert assessment. The long-term vision is to bring the views and activities of entire communities to bear, using the wealth of opportunities offered online, to provide new, meaningful and efficient mechanisms for research assessment. For more information on article-level metrics see the PLOS blog.

Editorial and Peer-Review Process

Each submission to PLOS ONE passes through a rigorous quality control and peer-review evaluation process before receiving a decision. Beginning in 2008, we are providing the following summary data regarding our process. This information will be updated quarterly with the latest data:

• The PLOS ONE criteria for publication are as follows (more detailed information is provided here):
  • The study presents the results of primary scientific research.
  • Results reported have not been published elsewhere.
  • Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.
  • Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.
  • The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.
  • The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.
  • The article adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.
• Each submission is subjected to an in-house quality control check, which deals with issues such as competing interests; ethical requirements for studies involving human participants or animals; financial disclosures; full compliance with data deposition standards, etc. Submissions may be returned to authors for queries, and will not be seen by our Editorial Board or Peer Reviewers until they pass this quality control check.
• We use an international Editorial Board of over 3,000 academic experts, and a list of their areas of expertise is available at: http://www.plosone.org/static/edboard.action. Once each manuscript has passed quality control, it is assigned to a member of the Editorial Board, who takes responsibility as the Academic Editor for the submission. The Academic Editor is responsible for conducting the peer-review process and for making a decision to accept, invite revision of, or reject the article. Further details of the editorial process are described here.
• Our instructions for Peer Reviewers are to be found here. Currently, of the articles that are ultimately accepted for publication, 95.8%*were sent for review by external experts. Around 4.2%* of articles are peer reviewed by the Academic Editors themselves (often in consultation with other members of the Editorial Board) when they are sufficiently expert in the field to determine whether the paper meets the PLOS ONE criteria.
• On average, ALL accepted articles have been reviewed by 2.9* experts (one Academic Editor and 1.9* external Peer Reviewers).
• Authors can recommend specific Academic Editors, but PLOS ONE is not obliged to use that suggestion, and the identity of the Academic Editor is not revealed until a decision is rendered. The Academic Editor is also publicly identified on all published articles. If Peer Reviewers are willing, then they are also identified to the author at the time of decision.
• On average, PLOS ONE publishes 69%** of all submissions.
• Rejected papers are given the opportunity for a formal appeal.

Indexing and Archiving

PLOS ONE is indexed in PubMed, MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), EMBASE, AGRICOLA, PsycINFO, Zoological Records, FSTA (Food Science and Technology Abstracts), GeoRef, and RefAware, as well as being searchable via the Web of Knowledge. In addition, PLOS ONE is formally archived via PubMed Central and LOCKSS.

About PLOS

PLOS is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. For more information about PLOS, visit www.plos.org.