Dear Guillermo Federico Padilla-Gonzalez ,

To me PloS ONE is using an interesting conceptual idea of peer-reviewed scientific publishing by using not so much the perceived importance of a paper as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. Instead they verify whether experiments, data analysis and so on were conducted rigorously, and leaves it to the scientific community to determine the importance. Their success led obviously to competition and caused some decline in impact factor (still a reasonable 2.776). Examples of publishers following this example (with the same concept):

-Springer Nature came up with Scientific Reports (4.525)

-MDPI has their International Journal of Molecular Sciences (impact factor 4.183)

-PeerJ published the journal with the same name PeerJ (2.353)

-Elsevier now tries something similar for a number of years (but is it not too late?) with Heliyon (citescore 1.6 so impact factor will be round 1.6 as well)

So in retrospect a great initiative that done so much good for the open access movement.

Best regards.

Dear Guillermo Federico Padilla-Gonzalez ,

To me PloS ONE is using an interesting conceptual idea of peer-reviewed scientific publishing by using not so much the perceived importance of a paper as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. Instead they verify whether experiments, data analysis and so on were conducted rigorously, and leaves it to the scientific community to determine the importance. Their success led obviously to competition and caused some decline in impact factor (still a reasonable 2.776). Examples of publishers following this example (with the same concept):

-Springer Nature came up with Scientific Reports (4.525)

-MDPI has their International Journal of Molecular Sciences (impact factor 4.183)

-PeerJ published the journal with the same name PeerJ (2.353)

-Elsevier now tries something similar for a number of years (but is it not too late?) with Heliyon (citescore 1.6 so impact factor will be round 1.6 as well)

So in retrospect a great initiative that done so much good for the open access movement.

Best regards.

A good response from Rob. I've recently published with this group. They are as 'professional' as most other 'traditional' access journals that I have encountered. As to their sometimes 'predatory' status that is sometimes reported - I believe that the criticism is mainly directed at their buisiness model - and that could be said for many large publishing houses.

i agree with Dean Whitehead an

Good introduction has already been provided by Rob and Dean. This is in addition to their comments. PLOS One is a product of Public Library of Science (PLOS) that helped to popularize and bring forward a different publishing concept known as 'Mega Journals'. Although PLOS One could not be the very first journal that emerged with this idea, I am sure that the concept was pioneered by PLOS One. Usually, mega journals are open-access and multidisciplinary. They also follow the business model that charges a submission fee and/or an APC from authors. These journals concentrate more on the technical soundness of the research (methodology) than the significant of the study. This does not mean that they would publish any insignificant work if it is technically correct and if they are paid. As far as I am aware, PLOS One includes a rigorous peer-review process as followed by most of the good, genuine journals. This journal belongs to the first quartile (Q1) of SJR ranked journals and have a good IF too. Even if we do not need to completely rely on these numerical measures, journal's reputation is an evidence to mark it as one of the leading multidisciplinary OA journals that available today. No doubt, it has published a number of very good research. However, we can notice some performance drop of this journal after 2010 and the emerging of a number of competitive mega journals could be one of the reasons for this. Yes, the journal may be included in the Beall's list for sometime ago. As Dean says this could be due to its large scale business model. Perhaps, the characteristics of this business model fell into the criteria defined by Beall. However, in my view, predatory criterion and assessment process must be updated with time to decide one's true genuinity at present.

I am planning to put a paper in Plos ONE. I like the idea of OA journals because the days of journal subscriptions are dwindling and a new paradigm of publishing is being ushered in. With sci-hub and other means to access journal articles for free, circumventing the profit of subscription journals, it is good to embrace the new paradigm. Most importantly, if you support these journals with good quality papers you are effectively ensuring that the journal is reputable. If you want your choice-journal to be successful, you are also responsible for the journal's success and if scientists could all think like this, things would be very different.

PLOS ONE is one of the Open access mega journals. These include BMJ Open, PeerJ, SAGE Open, RSC, Medicine, Royal Society Open Science and several others. PLOS ONE is doing well and is maintaining its standards.

Unfortunately, we have not had a good experience with this journal.

We submitted a paper in November 2019 concerning the metamorphosis of Artificial Intelligence.

After about a month, "PLOS One" rejected the article.

The justification was concise (five standard sentences), and it contained only formal criteria. The report did not specify content-related information.

After our inquiry, we learned that the reviewer comes from a different field (astrobiology) and is currently working on her Ph.D. thesis.

Thereupon we explained that we disagree with the reviewer.

An editorial assistant recommended submitting a formal appeal, which we did.

We explained in complete detail why we disagree with the review.

PLOS One accepted the appeal in late January 2020. We were allowed to resubmit, which we did in mid-March 2020.

In May 2020, PLOS One rejected the resubmitted paper.

Once again, there were no comments regarding the content. Within the report, the reviewer answered three criteria with shortcuts (No Response, "No," and "Don't Know"). In the final justification, the anonymous reviewer argued we use "odd word choices."

This statement sounds very sad because we had hired and paid a US-based editing and scholarly service (eContent Pro International) to review the article in advance of submitting it to PLoS One.

In summary: One gatekeeper (junior student) and two "reviewers" (one senior student, one reviewer unknown) didn't try to understand what we were doing.

Plos One criticized only formal /language aspects.

The whole process took five months in total.

Articles in "PLOS One" may be high-profile, but the peer review is not in our experience.

For these reasons, I can only advise against submitting a paper to PLOS One.

PS: We had published articles in premier Journals (Scimago Q1) before (Wiley, Elsevier, IGI Global....), and each time, we experienced a professional and rigorous peer-review service...

I have read many articles in the field of plant biochemistry in Plos One that were of high quality. I have not published in this journal, yet, but as long as there is a rigourous review regarding the scientific soundness of a manuscript I do not see a problem in publishing in Plos One.

I recently published an article there. Having it accepted took several iterations and more lab work, as the original manuscript was only intended to be a report on method development. I have to admit that the quality of the paper benefited from the reviewer‘s insisting on rigorous adherence to the journal‘s standards. Requiring (or, depending on your point of view, allowing) the scientist to provide all underlying data is also a good thing in my humble opinion.