PLOS One

PLOS One (stylized PLOS ONE, and formerly PLoS ONE) is a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. 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.

Submissions are subject to an article processing charge and, according to the journal, papers are not to be excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field. 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. In January 2010, the journal was included in the Journal Citation Reports and received its first impact factor of 4.4. Its 2024 impact factor is 2.6. PLOS One papers are published under Creative Commons licenses.

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, the journal moved from a weekly to a daily publication schedule, publishing articles as soon as they became ready. PLOS One came out of "beta" in October 2008.

In September 2009, as part of its article-level metrics program, PLOS One made its full online usage data, including HTML page views and PDF or XML download statistics, publicly available for every published article. In mid-2012, as part of a rebranding of PLoS as PLOS, the journal changed its name to PLOS One.

The number of papers published by PLOS One grew rapidly from inception to 2013 and has since declined somewhat. By 2010, it was estimated to have become the largest journal in the world, and in 2011, 1 in 60 articles indexed by PubMed were published by PLOS One. By September 2017, PLOS One confirmed they had published over 200,000 articles. By November 2017, the journal Scientific Reports overtook PLOS One in terms of output.

At PLOS One, the median review time has grown from 37 days to 125 days over the first ten years of operation, according to Himmelstein's analysis, done for Nature. The median between acceptance and posting a paper on the site has decreased from 35 to 15 days over the same period. Both numbers for 2016 roughly correspond to the industry-wide averages for biology-related journals. The acceptance rate decreased from around 50% to 31% between January 2021 and June 2023.

The founding managing editor was Chris Surridge. He was succeeded by Peter Binfield in March 2008, who was publisher until May 2012. Damian Pattinson then held the chief editorial position until December 2015. Joerg Heber was as editor-in-chief from November 2016 before Emily Chenette took over in that position in March 2021.

PLOS One is built on several conceptually different ideas compared to traditional peer-reviewed scientific publishing in that it does not use the perceived importance of a paper as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. The idea is that, instead, PLOS One only verifies whether experiments and data analysis were conducted rigorously, and leaves it to the scientific community to ascertain importance, post publication, through debate and comment.