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PLOS Extends a Profound Thank You

To all our Reviewers, Guest Editors and Editorial Board members, thank you! 2018 marks the fourth year that we formally and publicly acknowledge our community of reviewers and editors for sustaining public access to rigorous peer-reviewed research, enhancing our journals’ abilities to communicate the work of researchers and communities, and inspiring the work of our staff.

A Passion to Go Beyond

Our contributor community selflessly guides papers through the editorial process and provides feedback to authors. Many also actively stand up for Open Access, open data and Open Science as they attend conferences, debate with colleagues or share research via social media, email or even, yes, conversation! Our reviewers and editors devote time and energy to PLOS Collections, Special Issues, PLOS Channels, Editorials, Perspectives, blog posts, interviews, career advice, educational material and more to enrich the primary literature, provide context and engage the public. These endeavours help make PLOS a unique place to publish and for that we are greatly appreciative.

Those who volunteer their services to PLOS, and the greater scientific community, are more than just dedicated scientists: they share an entrepreneurial spirit as we advance scholarly communication with requirements for ORCID iDs for corresponding authors, implementation of CRediT for author contributions, community engagement for improved evaluation, integration of preprint Editors and experimentation with software development. Throughout all of these innovations, some successful (108,000 ORCID entries in our system uniquely identify authors to ensure complete and accurate recognition of work, regardless of changes to name or institution) and others less so, PLOS continues to be, in the words of our CEO, an organization “willing to take risks in order to best serve scientific communities.” We have tremendous appreciation for Reviewers, Guest Editors and Editorial Board Members who are confident to travel the road with us toward a world of readily discoverable, freely available, thoroughly reliable and fully reusable research outcomes.

An Impressive Community Workload

Continuing our quest for transparency in the publishing process, we include the number of newly submitted and published research articles brought to the public in 2017 in each of the seven journals’ thank you articles. We released this information for the first time last year and will continue to do so as it provides additional insight and appreciation for the workload of our reviewers and editors. That workload in 2017 supported publication of more than 23,000 research articles.

Our global network of more than 74,000 reviewers and 7,200 editors ensures that Research Articles, Perspectives, Editorials and more achieve the highest quality possible. The more than 15 million article views per month (on average) this past year hints at the enthusiasm that PLOS reviewers and editors share, for science and scientists. Enthusiasm is not enough, however. This geographically diverse contributor community also shares a commitment to responsible and fair examination of the science, ethics, reporting guidelines, data availability and journal publication criteria associated with each submission.

Efforts to Ease Process and Enrich Training

We’ve listened to our reviewer and editor communities who want more training, especially Early Career Researchers. In response we developed the PLOS Reviewer Center, to provide detailed, journal-agnostic peer review guidance from experienced researchers, staff editors, Editorial Board members, and other reviewers. The Reviewer Center is still under development, so we encourage you to take a look around and let us know what you find useful or missing via the feedback form.

Through the PLOS Reviewer Center anyone can:

  • Learn the basics of peer review and get helpful tips for handling reviewer tasks, from accepting a review invitation to completing a review
  • Access video, templates, checklists and other customized tools for reviewers
  • View recent articles and commentary about trends and studies on peer reviewers, the peer review process, and other related topics

In addition to the Reviewer Center, we’ve made more comprehensive our guidelines for Reviewers and Editors, provided editors more journal transfer options to accelerate publication of peer-reviewed manuscripts, made reviews public to increase transparency of the review process and experimented with signing reviews. A detailed overview of the Editorial and Peer Review Process is available on all journal sites.

For the Record

A published and citable journal article thank you provides reviewers and editors recognition and an academic citation for their inspired service to colleagues, institutions, funders and the public. Each reviewer’s and editor’s name is listed in the Supporting Information of each journal’s published article; links to these articles are below.

We’re in the midst of expanding the size and scope of the PLOS ONE Editorial Board to achieve stronger subject area coverage across all relevant disciplines. If you’d like to learn more, please email us at edboardmgmt@plos.org.

Once again, thank you!

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