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I am really interested to see how PLoS One, the multi-trick, lowborn pony in the open-access PLoS stable, turns out.

PLoS One was launched two years ago by the Public Library of Science, an organization that promotes open access science publishing. (Open access means the articles are totally free and accessible online, to any old person who wants to read them and may have paid tax dollars to fund them.) PLoS also publishes PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, two highly esteemed journals that rival the best long-established, limited access journals, and four other well regarded subject-specific publications. There are a couple things that make PLoS One different. It only publishes online, it publishes weekly, and it publishes on any topic in science or medicine—this makes it very high volume. It also permits blog-style reviews, comments, ratings and trackbacks. But most importantly, it doesn’t reject papers for lack of significance. Papers are reviewed for integrity, but not for “impact.” The articles of a diligent but uninspired graduate student who unwisely chose to study a boring and essentially irrelevant corner of science might find a home here, for example.

The PLoS One format has received a certain level of criticism, or at least lack of respect. A recent news article in Nature, already roundly criticized itself, tossed around terms like “dumping ground” and “substandard.” Concern stems from the fact that PLoS One is perceived as employing some sort of peer-review lite system for accepting papers. Firstly, editors may perform reviews themselves and decline to send it out to additional referees. But this may not be that different from journals which solicit papers, or journals that accept communicated work, and maybe that system is a little bit broken anyway. Secondly, there is the whole “no paper too small” policy at PLoS One. As the Nature article sniffs, “But referees only check for serious methodological flaws, and not the importance of the result.” Perhaps I am biased—perhaps my work is generally free of serious methodological flaws—but my experience revealed the PLoS One editorial process to be the most rigorous of the three journals to which I sent my first paper.

It was disappointing to get rejected twice before publishing in PLoS One. But the real frustration was that of the five reviews from the first two journals, three of the referees did not understand the work. (One was downright insulting.) The two reviews from PLoS One, however, were thorough, detailed and clearly by researchers who understood the work. A reflection of an editorial process of high integrity, certainly, and not an unusual one.

PLoS One is just getting started. Where will it go? Will its success continue to subsidize the elite PLoS journals? Is it a problem if it becomes the final resting place for papers rejected elsewhere? There are more datasets and manuscripts, work that would improve the world were it to be published, than there are spaces in conventional journals. By providing a forum for that work, PLoS One is doing something very new and exciting. And if the online interactive tools PLoS One provides are employed, its articles will be dynamically peer-reviewed and rated, its novel format will demonstrate ground-breaking importance, and the journal will prove extraordinarily useful. Or not; the comments and ratings for most PLoS One papers are empty. Lots of people, like the ones at my departmental journal club, don’t know about PLoS One yet. What will happen to that line on my CV, five years from now (when, I’m hoping, it will matter)? I’m proud that my first paper is “cheap publishing of lower quality“—it has a scrappy kind of feel to it, but also kind of cutting edge.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Science research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.