Why ONE Is More Than 5

PLoS ONE is five years old this month. Though still young in age, the journal has grown up remarkably rapidly, to the extent that it is now the largest peer-reviewed journal in the world. In the past five years, it has both garnered huge respect and support from authors, readers, and editors, and drawn the criticism and ire of many commercial publishers and establishment figures still fighting to maintain the science publishing status quo. Their fight now appears to be in vain, however: this past year a series of journals emerged that are very similar in scope to PLoS ONE (Table 1), suggesting that the landscape of scholarly publishing has irreversibly shifted. PLoS ONE clearly fills an unmet need in the world of scientific publishing, or publishers and scholarly societies wouldn't want to copy it. Table 1 A sample of recently launched journals similar in scope to PLoS ONE. The success of PLoS ONE has surprised even us. The journal is now publishing about 70 papers a day (i.e., currently around 4,000 papers every quarter), and this figure continues to grow (Figure 1). If the trend continues, it will publish 14,500 articles in 2011: approximately 1 in 60 of all the papers indexed by PubMed in that calendar year will have been published in PLoS ONE. It has even attracted a new term—“megajournal”—to characterize it and the other journals of its ilk [1]. Figure 1 Publication growth of PLoS ONE. We believe its success relies on two features: trust and innovation. By demonstrating that open access (OA) is compatible with high quality and rigorous science, PLoS Biology, then PLoS Medicine and the PLoS “Community Journals” (PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases) built a “PLoS brand,” making PLoS a trusted source of excellent science that authors and readers respect. As a result, PLoS could introduce a single key innovation beyond that of OA—one that represented a fundamental change to the traditional editorial model (and which has garnered awards from the Association of Learned and Professional Publishers [2] and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition [3]). All articles in PLoS ONE are peer reviewed, but editors and reviewers are explicitly asked not to assess the “broad interest” or importance of a paper, a criterion that provides the rationale for other journals to reject articles. Instead, any article can be published if it is technically sound, ethically and appropriately reported, and its conclusions are supported by the data. Thus, PLoS ONE publications include negative results, methods papers, and studies that replicate (but do not duplicate) others, as well as articles that potentially represent a major advance for the field. And because PLoS ONE covers all of science (albeit with a current focus on the life and medical sciences), and because the publication fee ensures that each article covers its own editorial and production costs, there is no limit to PLoS ONE's potential size beyond that of science itself [4].