Placing PLoS ONE in the appropriate evaluative context | DrugMonkey

"As you know, I have a morbid fascination with PLoS ONE and what it means for science, careers in science and the practices within my subfields of interest. There are two complaints that I see as supposed objective reasons for old school folks' easy complaining bout how it is not a real journal. First, that they simply publish 'too many papers'. It was 23,468 in 2012... My subfield journals of interest maybe publish something between about 12 and 20 original reports per issue. One or two issues per month. So anything from about 144 to 480 articles per year. A lot lower than PLoS ONE, eh? But look, I follow at least 10 journals that are sort of normal, run of the mill, society level journals in which stuff that I read, cite and publish myself might appear. So right there we're up to something on the order of 3,000 article per year.  PLoS ONE, as you know, covers just about all aspects of science! So multiply my subfield by all the other subfields (I can get to 20 easy without even leaving 'biomedical' as the supergroup) with their respective journals and.... all of a sudden the PLoS ONE output doesn't look so large..."