Why I am not publishing in PLoS One, yet
PLoS One is a new peer-reviewed journal (2006) with many interesting features:
- The board includes many respected Computer Scientists: Ananth Grama, Johan Bollen, Josh C. Bongard, Robert P. Futrelle, etc.
- It is the largest Open Access journal in the world: 2,800 articles published in 2008.
- They accept LaTeX submissions.
- Readers can annotate, rate and comment on published papers.
- They have RSS feeds everywhere.
- The publication fees are fair.
- They have the coolest ad ever.
Unfortunately, for a Computer Scientist, it is not yet attractive:
- The Computer Science section is filled with biology and medicine papers making use of Information Technology. In other words, the PLoS One taxonomy confuses Information Technology and Computer Science! Thankfully, I could find one article in Natural Language Processing which might be the first and only Computer Science paper published in PLoS One. So there is hope.
- As a related point, PLoS One is not indexed at the usual places as a Computer Science journal (DBLP, ACM DL, and so on). Of course, no Computer Science indexing is possible until PLoS One correctly classifies the Computer Science articles.
If they could fix these problems, I would gladly submit some of my work to them. PLoS One could become a useful journal in Computer Science over time. What about prestige? PLoS One uses article-level metrics. Instead of trying to be a prestigious journal, PLoS One helps you measure the impact of your own papers.
Montreal, Canada 
Follow on
What I really like about PLOS, is the fact that comments can be attached to a published document. There is a lot of post-publication knowledge lost about papers. Many readers may have useful comments, but those will never be published. In PLOS One, reviews are somewhat done after publication and are public. The only limit right now, is that most scientists are still unlikely to write their comments there….
What would be great, is to complement it with citation track that could also cumulated comments from other sources (blog, paper citing it, etc..)
Comment by Francois Rivest — 2/9/2009 @ 7:41
Last time I checked PLoS, there wasn’t really a place for human factors papers yet, so I’m still waiting before I turn to them for publication.
Comment by Sylvie Noel — 2/9/2009 @ 9:50
@Rivest I think people have an incentive to comment publicly on papers within their field. That’s why people make an effort to ask questions during conferences (sometimes).
@Noel Yes, if they want our papers, they need to make an effort so that we feel welcome. Right now, it looks like a private club for biology and medicine. Which is fine, if that is their goal.
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 2/9/2009 @ 9:58
I always wondered about the word “science”? Does that mean only hard sciences? I’m in “social science”… is that science? Will PlOS eventually launch a journal of sociology, of education, of anthro?
If not – that’s fine… I’m just curious.
Comment by Stian Håklev — 2/9/2009 @ 11:35
@Stian someone should try submitting a social science paper to PLoS One just to see what happens.
Comment by Benjamin Geer — 3/9/2009 @ 11:42
I still wonder how can we know that a journal is prestigious?
Comment by iris — 3/9/2009 @ 16:45