The Ride of Your Life: ONE to the Power of 10 | EveryONE

"PLOS ONE is turning 10 today. Back in 2005 when conversations about PLOS ONE really got going, the publishing landscape looked very different from what it does now.  Open Access (OA) publications were a tiny fraction of publication output, the only quantitative metric available to assess a newly published piece of scientific work was the impact factor and the editorial process was still largely reliant on a subjective evaluation of whether the scope or ‘interest level’ of a manuscript matched the requirements of the specific journal or editor in place at that time.

By the end of 2005, PLOS had launched PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine and the first Community Journals to demonstrate that Open Access was compatible with the most selective traditional journals and to dispel the myth that OA journals weren’t peer reviewed. It worked, and the PLOS brand was born.

But the founders’ aspiration was ultimately about changing the very notion of ‘quality’ in science."