1. Committed to making the world’s
scientific and medical literature
a public resource
PLoS ONE and the rise of the
Open Access Mega Journal
Peter Binfield, Publisher PLoS, pbinfield@plos.org
www.plos.org

2. Who are the Public Library of
Science?
• Eight years old and the largest not-for-
profit Open Access publisher
• The publisher of 7 Open Access journals
including PLoS ONE
• Staffed by professional publishers from
the likes of Nature, BMJ, Springer etc
• Based in San Francisco, and Cambridge
UK
• Self Sustaining since late 2010
www.plos.org

3. The Public Library of Science
– our publishing strategy
• Establish high quality journals
– put PLoS and open access on the map
• Build a more extensive OA publishing
operation
– an open access home for every paper
• Make the literature more useful
– to scientists and the public
– accelerate science
www.plos.org

4. PLoS Biology
October, 2003
PLoS Medicine
October, 2004
PLoS Community Journals
June-September, 2005 October, 2007
PLoS ONE
December,
2006
www.plos.org

5. PLoS ONE’s Key Innovation –
The editorial process
• Objective Editorial criteria
– Scientifically rigorous
– Ethical
– Properly reported
– Conclusions supported by the data
• Editors and reviewers do not ask subjective
questions such as:
– How important is the work?
– Which is the relevant audience?
• Everything that deserves to be published, will
be published
– Therefore the journal is not artificially limited in size
• Online tools are then used to evaluate, sort &
filter the content after publication, not before
www.plos.org

7. www.plos.org

8. What else is different?
• Scalability
– each submission ‘pays for itself’
– the journal itself benefits from ‘economies of scale’
(e.g. it only peer reviews papers once; it presents
all content in a single online environment)
• Inclusive scope
– all of science and medicine
• Encouraging discussion and debate
– on PLoS ONE: Commenting, Rating and Annotation
– elsewhere: Editorial Board discussion forum;
EveryONE blog; Twitter; FriendFeed; Facebook
www.plos.org

9. The ‘Open Access Mega Journal'
First, some statistics. There are:
• Approx 10,000 publishers
• Publishing approx 25,000 journals
• Which publish approx 1.5 million
articles per year (almost 1 million of
which appear in PubMed)
• In an industry which historically
changes very slowly
www.plos.org

10. The ‘Open Access Mega Journal'
can be defined as:
1. Very very large
– Publishing thousands of articles per year
– and benefiting from economies of scale
1. Open Access
– Because no one will pay a subscription fee for a
journal that large (and growing that fast)
– and using an OA Business Model where each
article pays for its own costs
1. (Preferably) without any ‘artificial’
constraints on its ability to grow
– For example, a desire to only publish ‘high impact;
www.plos.org
papers

11. Publications by PLoS ONE per quarter
since launch

12. 3500
Publications by PLoS ONE per
3000 quarter since launch
Publications by PLoS ONE per quarter
since launch
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www.plos.org
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13. 3500
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14. PLoS ONE – statistics
Year Annual Annual % of Annual
Submissions Publications PubMed
2007 2,497 1,231 0.16%
2008 4,401 2,723 0.34%
2009 6,734 4,310 0.52%
2010 13,567 6,784 0.7%
2011 >22,000* >12,000* ~1.5%*
*Projections for 2011
• By publication volume, PLoS ONE was the largest journal in
the world in 2010, and will be the largest by a factor of 2-3
in 2011
www.plos.org

15. “Open Access Mega Journals”
– One Name, Two Flavours
• ‘Clones’ of PLoS ONE (not selective)
– SAGE Open
– BMJ Open
– Scientific Reports (Nature)
– AIP Advances (Am Inst Physics)
– G3 (Genetics Soc of America)
– Biology Open (Company of Biologists)
• ‘Pseudo-Clones’ of PLoS ONE (probably selective)
– Physical Review X (Am Physical Society)
– Open Biology (Royal Society)
– Cell Reports (Elsevier, Cell Press)
www.plos.org

16. The Conclusions…
• The ‘full’ PLoS ONE model is wildly
successful
– On current trends, PLoS ONE will be publishing
3% of the STM literature in 2012
• Major publishers are rapidly launching PLoS
ONE clones
• Some others have held back from the full
PLoS ONE model, but have still launched ‘OA
MegaJournals’
– For various reasons, it remains to be seen if this
model will be as successful
• Rumour has it that many others are in the
works…
www.plos.org

17. The Conclusions…
• I believe we have entered the era of the OA
mega journal
– Such journals can choose to be selective, or not
– From early trends, they will mostly form around
large disciplines and attempt to ‘own’ entire fields
of science
– They will grow rapidly!
• The opportunity to launch new OA mega
journals is now
– Some basic modeling predicts that in 2016,
almost 50% of the STM literature could be
published in approx 100 OA mega journals…
www.plos.org

18. The Consequences…
• Content will rapidly concentrate into a small
number of very large titles
• Filtering based solely on Journal name will
disappear and will be replaced with new
metrics
• The content currently being published in the
universe of 25,000 journals will presumably
start to dry up
• There are many open questions…
www.plos.org

19. Peter Binfield
Publisher, PLoS ONE and the
Community Journals
http://www.plos.org
email: pbinfield@plos.org
twitter: @p_binfield
www.plos.org