PLOS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. PLOS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. It provides:
PLOS ONE is published by PLOS, a nonprofit organization.
PLOS ONE is run as a partnership between its in-house PLOS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards, ensuring fast, fair, and professional peer review. To contact the Editorial Director, Damian Pattinson, or any of the Publications Assistants (who can be found at our contacts page), please e-mail plosone [at] plos.org. To access EveryONE, the PLOS ONE community blog, please visit http://everyone.plos.org
PLOS ONE features reports of original research from all disciplines within science and medicine. By not excluding papers on the basis of subject area, PLOS ONE facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers whether within or between disciplines.
Too often a journal's decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership — both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLOS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them).
PLOS applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all works we publish. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLOS journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.
To provide open access, PLOS journals use a business model in which our expenses—including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving—are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. The fees vary by journal.
PLOS is committed to the widest possible global participation in open access publishing. To determine the appropriate fee, we use a country-based pricing model, which is based on the country that provides 50% or more of the primary funding for the research that is being submitted. Research articles funded by Upper Middle and High Income Countries incur our standard publication fees. Corresponding authors who are affiliated with one of our Institutional Members are eligible for a discount on this fee. Such authors will be informed of the discount applicable after submission of their manuscript.
Fees for Low and Lower Middle Income Countries are calculated according to the PLOS Global Participation Initiative pricing program for manuscripts submitted after 9am Pacific Time on September 4, 2012 (this program is not retroactive).
Our fee waiver policy, whereby PLOS offers to waive or further reduce the payment required of authors who cannot pay the full amount charged for publication, remains in effect. Editors and reviewers have no access to whether authors are able to pay; decisions to publish are only based on editorial criteria.
At PLOS, we believe that articles in all journals should be assessed on their own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which they were published. PLOS journals have therefore initiated a program to provide a growing set of measures and indicators of impact at the article level that will include citation metrics, usage statistics, blogosphere coverage, social bookmarks, community rating and expert assessment. The long-term vision is to bring the views and activities of entire communities to bear, using the wealth of opportunities offered online, to provide new, meaningful and efficient mechanisms for research assessment. For more information on article-level metrics see the PLOS blog.
Each submission to PLOS ONE passes through a rigorous quality control and peer-review evaluation process before receiving a decision. Beginning in 2008, we are providing the following summary data regarding our process. This information will be updated quarterly with the latest data:
*Data refer to the 1,837 manuscripts that received a decision in the period 7/1/10 - 9/30/10.
**Data refer to the 2,216 manuscripts submitted in the period 1/1/10 - 3/31/10 and their status as of 10/5/10. We quote data from an earlier time period as some submissions spend time passing through revisions and re-evaluations before ultimately being accepted or rejected. Therefore, if we quoted data for submissions in the most recent quarter, it would not give a complete picture for those papers still being evaluated.
Please see our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for detailed information on common editorial inquiries.
PLOS ONE is indexed in PubMed, MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), EMBASE, AGRICOLA, PsycINFO, Zoological Records, FSTA (Food Science and Technology Abstracts), GeoRef, and RefAware, as well as being searchable via the Web of Knowledge. In addition, PLOS ONE is formally archived via PubMed Central and LOCKSS.
PLOS is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. For more information about PLOS, visit www.plos.org.