Transforming scientific communication

A PLoS One senior editor explains how its innovative publication criteria are changing the way research is disseminated and evaluated.

By Karina Toledo, Caxambu

Agência FAPESP – Making the results of research accessible to more people in the least possible amount of time and allowing the scientific community to judge the relevance of the article after its publication. That sums up the innovative ideas that guided the creation of PLoS One, which has been transforming the scientific community around the globe since it was established in 2006.

Eric Martens, a senior editor at the periodical, made this evaluation in a conference presentation during the 29th Annual Meeting of the Federation of Experimental Biology Societies (FeSBE), held from August 21st to 24th in Caxambu, Minas Gerais.

According to Martens, in 2012, PLoS One published 24,000 articles, with a 70% acceptance rate. On average, it receives 200 submissions daily and publishes 140 articles daily.

“While many journals reject more than 90% of the articles submitted to them, to raise their impact factor, PLoS One has a unique philosophy: all consistent research that, from an ethical and scientific point of view, contributes in some manner to knowledge in a given area should be published and freely accessible. We have not rejected an article based on its presumed impact,” commented Martens.

As PLoS One aims to disseminate research in all fields of science and medicine, there is no risk that an article derived from an interdisciplinary study will be rejected because it does not fit the scope of a given area of study. Studies with negative results—or those that do not prove the initially proposed hypothesis—are also welcome.

“There are fields with few options for open access periodicals, such as paleontology. PLoS One is a good option in these cases,” said Martens.

Martens, however, stresses that there are criteria that must be met for an article to be accepted. Articles must be unpublished and must offer new knowledge in a given area. They must also include experiments, statistics and a high-level technical analysis. All data should be described in such detail that they can be reproduced by any interested party.

The conclusions should be presented in an adequate manner and be supported by data obtained through experiments and analyses. The article should be written in an intelligible manner in standard English. The study should comply with international ethical standards and maintain research integrity.

According to Martens, the basis for rejecting an article is generally related to fundamental problems with a study’s methodology or interpretation of the results. “Factors such as a poorly designed experiment, insufficient sample, lack of statistical relevance in the results or inappropriate analysis techniques” may lead an article to be rejected, he noted.

In addition to the journal’s team, academic editors, i.e., specialists from several areas who are regular contributors, participate in the review process. They decide whether there is a need for external revisers.

“In order to guarantee transparency in the process, the acceptance or rejection letter is always signed by the respective academic editor, and this information is also published. The external reviewers are also encouraged to sign the evaluation,” explained Martens.

The evaluation model based on the methodological soundness rather than impact of studies has proved to be very successful in his opinion. But, according to Martens, a series of crucial tools are necessary for the model to work. For example, the PLoS One website offers a commentary section, and a series of indicators shows how many times an article has been accessed and cited, with graphs that show the evolution over time.

Additionally, the article’s reach among the general public is measured by the number of times it has been shared on blogs and social networks.

“We believe that this individual metric model is a good alternative to the impact factor based on the journal. This is changing the way people think and evaluate scientific research,” he stated.

The problem with the impact factor, according to Martens, is that it is based on the average of the number of citations that articles in a journal receive in a given period, which masks the existing variations in each periodical.

“Nature, for example, has an impact factor over 30. But if you analyze the distribution of the journal’s citations, you will see that it is highly variable. There are articles that had a major impact and that are still being cited, such as the Human Genome Project. And there are others that have been cited only once or twice in their history,” he affirmed.

Model of success

In order for a periodical to be considered open access, it must meet two criteria: the content must be available for free on the Internet, without a need to register or obtain a subscription, and the readers must have copyright permission to republish or reuse the content as they would like. The only condition is that the authors and editors must be acknowledged.

In Martens’ assessment, this model has proved to be successful and is growing quickly, supported largely by institutions such as the European Commission, the UK Research Councils, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO).

“These bodies require that every study that they fund have open access. Some important universities have also adopted such policies to promote the practice, including Columbia, Duke, Princeton, Stanford and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he said.

Martens, however, recognizes that, currently, the cost of publishing for journals that use an open access model falls on the researcher. In the case of PLoS One, the researcher must pay about US$ 1,300 per article. In journals with a higher rejection rate, the publication cost is normally higher.

“We want to reach a point where the institutions that fund research understand that making the results of studies accessible is an essential part of the research process so that they cover these costs,” he noted.