Open-access mega-journal PLOS ONE continues to shrink

"The open-access mega-journal’s output, measured by how many articles it publishes a year, last year fell to 22,054 -- its lowest since 2012 and down about 30 percent since its peak in 2013. Last year brought the most precipitous drop yet. PLOS ONE published 6,052 fewer articles in 2016 than it did the year before -- a drop of about 22 percent.

The decline was first reported by Phil Davis, a consultant who specializes in scholarly publishing, in a blog post this morning.

Joerg Heber, who became PLOS ONE’s new editor in chief in September, addressed the decline in a blog post last month. Reflecting on the journal’s first 10 years, he noted that many other publishers are now using similar models for their own publications.

As a result, 'the submissions to PLOS ONE have decreased, posing the question of our continuing unique value in this market,' Heber, former executive editor of the open-access journal Nature Communications, wrote. 'There will be challenges, but irrespective of our size, PLOS ONE will always play an important role towards PLOS’s broader goal as a nonprofit organization to support and advocate open science.'

Compared to most journals, PLOS ONE is still massive. As recently as 2010, the journal published fewer than 10,000 articles. But because of the journal’s outsize impact on the financial health of its nonprofit publisher, PLOS (short for Public Library of Science), a continued drop could one day become a problem."