From Open Access News: PLoS One is Making a Splash.
PLoS ONE has had more submissions (70) in its first three weeks than any other PLoS journal in the same period.
PS: Congrats to PLoS and congrats to authors for seeing the value here and supporting something new.
Heather’s Comment:
PLoS, the Public Library of Science, is an open access publisher competing for the top quality market. PLoS One, a new journal providing quality peer review for articles from any discipline, is receiving lots of submissions – already 70 since it was first announced 3 weeks ago. Why is this important for chemists without borders?. While this is good news for all researchers, PLoS One is particularly important for chemists, who currently have much fewer open access options than other disciplines. Physicists, for example, have been self-archiving virtually all their work, from the preprint stage, in arXiv for many years. In most other disciplines, the majority of journals allow authors to self-archive preprints and the author’s own peer-reviewed postprint. In some areas, such as medicine, the full open access publishing options are substantial and growing rapidly. Up to this point, however, chemists have been at a disadvantage, with fewer open access publishers and self-archiving options. With funders beginning to require open access, and greatly preferring immediate open access, chemists were at a disadvantage until PLoS One.
I wonder how many of those first 70 submissions were from chemists?
Although this is certainly a welcome addition to the Open Access world, keep in mind that there are currently some hefty author charges for PLoS One, which may be a significant barrier for CWB chemists. Some journals, like Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry are free for the author as well as the reader.
Heather – Sad to say less that 5 of our first 70 submissions could really be classified as chemistry, even were we to take a very catholic definition of the subject. That isn’t too much of a surprise as the Public Library of Science currently has very little reputation among chemists.
However I was very much hoping that with PLoS ONE we could provide a publishing venue that would appeal to chemist looking to diseminate their research Open Access. One thing that would greatly help this would be to have some chemistry researchers on the Editorial Board of PLoS ONE. Any volunteers?
Chris Surridge – Managing Editor, PLoS ONE.
p.s. Jean-Claude – I’m sorry if our publication fees look hefty. We are trying to keep them as low as possible. We also have a fee waiver policy for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to author payment information, and hence ability to pay will not influence publication decisions. These policies ensure that the fee is never a barrier to publication.
Many thank for your comments, Chris & Jean-Claude. I think that awareness of open access is not as widespread among chemists as with other researchers yet, but this will change!