Why I published in PLoS ONE. And why I probably won’t again for awhile. | Early Career Ecologists
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-03-23
Summary:
"One morning as I was working on revisions for a paper I had submitted to PLoS ONE, this popped up on my Twitter feed, 'I've now heard from several tenured or near-tenure profs that publishing in @plosone was career suicide. Thanks a lot Open Access' ... and I immediately felt defeated. Had I chosen poorly when deciding to submit to PLoS ONE? Or, are those people that view PLoS ONE as 'career suicide' just old-school professors who, for some weird reason, think papers don’t get reviewed at PLoS ONE? And, does that even matter, since I’ll need those same old-school professors to want to hire me in a couple years? Needless to say, my motivation for finishing the revisions waned. Fortunately there seem to be others out there that I deeply respect, like Ethan White (who, full disclosure, was the academic editor for my paper at PLoS), that are moving through the academic ranks and have a different view. These people value science for science, and not where it happens to be published ... So, given these contrasting views and the potential risk of publishing in PLoS ONE, why did I do it? The answer is actually relatively simple. I thought it would be the best venue for my paper. The best place to get it read by the people I wanted to read it. I’ll talk about that more in a moment, but first let me go through the paper’s submission history for a little background as to what led me to PLoS ONE. And while I’m at it, I want to (again!) dispel the amazingly apocryphal notion that papers are either not peer-reviewed at PLoS, or not peer-reviewed rigorously (see here for brief discussion) ... The coda to all this is a reality check. I will probably not publish in PLoS ONE again for quite some time. There is still too much negative bias against the journal and against people that have 'too many' PLoS ONE papers on their CV. My next couple papers are lined up for more traditional venues like The American Naturalist and Ecological Applications. Plus, for better or worse, I’m going to be honest, I still have a (some people would call shameful) desire to see my name on a Science or Nature paper. Perhaps this is for my own ego or maybe it is just the way most of us have been academically 'raised.' Regardless, even though I personally like PLoS ONE and read a lot of ecology papers they publish, you won’t being seeing my name in there again any time soon. I’m just not brave enough."