Why ONE Is More Than 5

"PLoS ONE is five years old this month. Though still young in age, the journal has grown up remarkably rapidly, to the extent that it is now the largest peer-reviewed journal in the world. In the past five years, it has both garnered huge respect and support from authors, readers, and editors, and drawn the criticism and ire of many commercial publishers and establishment figures still fighting to maintain the science publishing status quo. Their fight now appears to be in vain, however: this past year a series of journals emerged that are very similar in scope to PLoS ONE.... PLoS ONE clearly fills an unmet need in the world of scientific publishing, or publishers and scholarly societies wouldn't want to copy it....The success of PLoS ONE has surprised even us. The journal is now publishing about 70 papers a day (i.e., currently around 4,000 papers every quarter), and this figure continues to grow....If the trend continues, it will publish 14,500 articles in 2011: approximately 1 in 60 of all the papers indexed by PubMed in that calendar year will have been published in PLoS ONE. It has even attracted a new term —“megajournal”— to characterize it and the other journals of its ilk...."