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Safari joe blessing1/1/2024 ![]() ![]() For PLoS ONE, being a “bulk publishing” journal serves a clear purpose and one that should not be scorned. In order to make their parent organization money, therefore, they need to rely heavily on automation and minimal intervention from the publisher. PLoS ONE is able to do this because of low selectivity - rejecting only 3 out of every 10 manuscripts. ![]() In financial terms, the purpose of PLoS ONE is to subsidize the cost of publication for their two flagship journals, PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, two highly-selective, high-cost journals that would be unable to continue in their current state without financial subvention. While a subscription-access publisher may dream of being overwhelmed by manuscript submissions, this blessing may come as a curse for a publisher that has banked on making money from not spending a lot of time and resources rejecting manuscripts. Authors initially skeptical that a journal working on the principle of light peer-review may now consider PLoS ONE a destination for future manuscripts. More importantly, authors who published early with PLoS ONE did so for reasons other than an impact factor.įor many authors, a journal’s impact factor strongly determines where to submit one’s manuscript. After three hard years, scientists have recognized that PLoS ONE is a source of quality articles that are worth both their attention and citations. Normally, publishers would view a high initial impact factor as a blessing. Is a High Impact Factor a Blessing or a Curse? And authors with access to publication funds through their institution have passed through the most finest filter of them all - the peer-review that rewarded them with employment at an elite institution in the first place.Įither way, being willing and able to pay $1,350 to pay to publish an article is a signal that there is something unique about PLoS ONE authors, and it shouldn’t be so surprising that articles written by the 70% who were able to pass through the publication review gate are performing so well. (I’ll address APC waivers later in this post).Īuthors with research funds have already gone through a form of peer-review by their granting agency, which has selected their proposal above all others because it has merit and stands a chance of producing interesting results. Authors with access to funds (either through their own research grants or through their institution’s open access publishing funds) represent a characteristically different group of authors than the rest of the author population. And while their article processing charges (APCs) are not as high as competing commercial publishers’, they still exert a barrier to authors. We need to remember that it costs $1,350 to publish an article in PLoS ONE. So how can a journal that allows 7 out of 10 manuscripts through their gate achieve such a stellar rating? We must accept that this is a valid and correct measure of the citation impact of PLoS ONE articles. Self-cites represent just 8% of the citations used to calculate their impact factor, and removing these self-cites drops their score to just 4.00. Or were they the sounds of competing publishers banging their heads against their office walls in utter amazement? For there seems something very strange about a journal that accepts nearly 70% of all submissions yet achieves such a score, especially with its first assessment.įor anyone considering that PLoS ONE engaged in editorial shenanigans to boost self-citations, there is no evidence of such. ![]() Within minutes after the impact factors for 2009 being released, one could almost hear the sounds of champagne corks popping in San Francisco. This puts the open access journal in the top 25th percentile of ISI’s “Biology” category, a group of journals that sports a median impact factor of just 1.370. Last week PLoS ONE received its first impact factor - a stunning 4.351. ![]()
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