Happy birthday PLoS ONE
Posted by mfenner, Thu Aug 02 10:05:00 UTC 2007
The journal PLos ONE turned one year old yesterday (although the first papers were published in December 2006). PLos One is an open access scientific journal that takes a different take on interestingness. Most journals will reject scientific papers even before peer review based on a perceived interestingness, that is the paper is not of general interest, doesn’t fit the scope of the journal or is not the first paper on the subject. PLos ONE is different because it judges a paper solely on the quality of the science:
All papers that make a valuable contribution to the scientific literature, that are replicable, that are clearly written, and whose conclusions are supported by the data deserve publication.
The interestingness or perceived impact of a paper is not judged by the editor handling the submission, but will be judged by open peer review after publication of the paper. The journal uses tools provided by the open source Topaz Project to let readers rate and comment on the published paper. This approach is of course commonplace for other online content, e.g. Digg, but had not been tried before for scientific publications. Nature Precedings has since taken the same approach of open peer review.
PLoS ONE is radically different from other scientific journals in that it doesn’t filter that much before publication. The acceptance rate of submitted papers will therefore be much higher, but the impact factor (i.e. average number of citations) much lower. As long as the perceived reputation of a journal – which closely correlates with the rejection rate and the impact factor – is the driving force in the decision of the author to submit to a particular journal, PLoS ONE will have a hard time attracting very good papers. But if an author is mainly judged by the number of citations for his papers, and some positive ratings and comments thrown in, PLoS ONE all of the sudden looks very attractive.
