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 4.411. According to Journal Citation Reports, PLOS ONE's 2022 impact factor is 3.7. 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.