PLOS

PLOS (for Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit open access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license. It launched its first journal, PLOS Biology, in October 2003 and publishes seven journals, as of October 2015. The organization is based in San Francisco, California, and has a European editorial office in Cambridge, England. The publications are primarily funded by payments from the authors.

History

The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The petition called for all scientists to pledge that from September 2001 they would discontinue submission of papers to journals that did not make the full text of their papers available to all, free and unfettered, either immediately or after a delay of no more than 6 months. Although tens of thousands signed the petition, most did not act upon its terms; and in August 2001, Brown and Eisen announced they would start their own non-profit publishing operation. In December 2002, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded PLOS a $9 million grant, which it followed in May 2006 with a $1 million grant to help PLOS achieve financial sustainability and launch new free-access biomedical journals.

PLOS ONE

PLOS ONE (originally PLoS ONE) is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. Operating under a pay-to-publish model, PLOS ONE publishes approximately 70% of submitted manuscripts. All submissions go through a pre-publication review by a member of the board of academic editors, who can elect to seek an opinion from an external reviewer. According to the journal, papers are not to be excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field. Although submissions declined from 2013 to 2014, PLOS ONE remains the world’s largest journals by number of papers published (about 30,000 a year, or 85 papers per day) and has a 2014 journal impact factor of 3.234.

History

Development

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded PLOS a $9 million grant in December 2002 and $1 million grant in May 2006 for its financial sustainability and launch of new free-access biomedical journals. Later, PLOS ONE was launched in December 2006 as a beta version named PLoS ONE. It launched with Commenting and Note making functionality, and added the ability to rate articles in July 2007. In September 2007 the ability to leave "trackbacks" on articles was added. In August 2008 it moved from a weekly publication schedule to a daily one, publishing articles as soon as they became ready. In October 2008 PLoS ONE came out of "beta". Also in September 2009, as part of its Article-Level Metrics program, PLoS ONE made the full online usage data—e.g., HTML page views, PDF, XML downloads—for every published article publicly available. In mid-2012, as part of a rebranding of PLoS as PLOS, the journal changed its name to PLOS ONE.