I know, someone have asked this question for natural sciences (https://www.researchgate.net/post/PLOS_ONE_PeerJ_or_conventional_journals_for_publication-suggestions_for_early_career_professionals).
However, I would like to hear from fellow social science scholars (especially in the field of Economics and Business). Since PLOS ONE opened a whole category for related social sciences (most notably Economics and Psychology), should we consider publishing our papers in such Journal?
I would like to add that their Impact Factor are significantly higher than most journal in Finance.
PLOS One is currently ISI indexed but the number of published items is huge (e.g. more than 13000 in 2011); there is no guarantee that they will keep such an impact factor or that they will keep their place in the database (some journals get excluded every year, and according to the link http://www.chem-station.com/en/?p=364 their acceptance rate is 70%: too high for an ISI journal).
It is true that 70% acceptance rate is quite high, however this does not mean that they do not screen their submission well. What interest me is their commitment to publish even negative result. It is possible that other journal earn their low acceptance rate by (consciously or subconsciously) screening submission with negative results. Thus, there may be biases in scientific publications, both in natural and social sciences. I find this (if true) to be scientifically unacceptable.
However, PLOS ONE have been the domain for natural science and this reflects in the titles they carry. So far, there are no counterpart of PLOS ONE for social science. Only recently do PLOS ONE opens several social science category. Thus, I am concerned that my paper (if published there) would have low readership among my peer in social science.
The 70% acceptance rate can be a misleading indicator of low quality because the open access charge of $1,300 if the manuscript is published discourages the large number of marginal papers that get submitted to conventional journals. Also, the commitment of many in the scientific community who were interested in the open access concept (anyone who has been frustrated by the gatekeepers who do their best to extinguish innovative ideas entering the scholarly debate) ensured that a large number of high quality manuscripts were submitted initially. But since a tenure committee is probably more in league with the gatekeepers than in innovative ideas (that might discredit their own work) PLOS ONE is definitely a bad idea if you want the publication to count in a promotion package.
If instead the concern is whether the article will be read there is little to worry about. PLOS ONE provides a lot of options for starting a conversation about your paper. The comments section provided for each paper allow this public conversation to evolve and inform future work. And anyone in the world with internet access can read your article. Especially if your paper is iconoclastic you should publish there--it won't have a chance in hell in a conventional journal.
An update on my recent PLOS ONE experience. We wrote a paper on the effect of walking or biking to work on body mass index and first targeted both conventional economics and public health journals. The public health journals rejected it because they thought the endogeneity argument was too convoluted and the economics journals rejected it because they liked the endogenous selection argument better than our findings that did not provide support for their preferred argument. PLOS ONE published the manuscript 4 months after the first submission, the article is already in the top 1% of all articles tracked by Altmetric a month after its release, has been written up in Atlantic's CityLab online magazine and will also be referenced in an upcoming Wall Street Journal article on active commuting. I am so glad the public health and economics journals rejected it--no way it would have had this impact if published there.
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