Everyone Loves a List, Right?

This is a republished post in an effort to share PLOS posts relevant to early career researchers, especially news on peer review, preprints and open access. Read the original post and more on The Official PLOS Blog.

Bidding farewell to the decade afforded us a wonderfully surprising trip down memory lane. Researching our milestones, top blogs and best tweets, showed us just how far we’ve come since we launched our first journal, PLOS Biology, in 2003.

It certainly seems like OA publishing has always been an option for authors, but did you know it has only been ten years since PLOS first became fully sustainable through APCs? And we were one of the first to prove the viability of this model. Moreover, we also had to demonstrate that innovation, experimentation, quality, excellence and fairness could live together hand-in-hand as part of that model.

We do not operate in a vacuum. We had a lot of help from some notable early adopters as well as those initial reviewers and academic editors that are the heart of any publishing operation. And our success could not have occurred without all of our authors, who trusted their research with a publisher that simply wanted to do things a bit different. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now sit back and toggle through time as we celebrate 10 years of history, but with an eye on a bright future.

2010:  The PLOS suite of Article-Level Metrics is available for each and every published article.

• Top Tweet: (an interview with a PLOSBlogs blogger): 

2011: Curated PLOS Collections on focused themes ease discovery and provide opportunity for breadth of coverage from PLOS journals, blogs and external sources all in one place.

• Top Tweet: Why full OA matters

2012: The Global Participation Initiative was launched, which aims to tackle barriers to publication based on cost, specifically addressing the lack of funding for publication faced by authors in many countries.

• Top Tweet: Harvard, we have a problem 

2013: The Accelerating Science Awards Program (ASAP) co-sponsored by PLOS, honors pioneers using Open Access research to benefit society. The program attracts 200 nominations from 30 countries.

• Top Tweet: Science shouldn’t be a luxury

2014: The PLOS Data Policy ensures a research article’s underlying data is available to the science community, promoting new discovery, replication and validation (arguably bringing the open data conversation into the mainstream).

• Top Tweet: The Top 11 ways to tell a journal is fake)

2015: PLOS Communities grow to include Paleontology and Ecology with active social media and live blogging at scientific conferences, expanding the impact and contributions of authors and early career researchers.

• Top Tweet: Introduction of the SciComm blog 

2016: 1.) More granular credit for authors with standardized CRedIT roles. 2.) Early sharing of work with preprints and direct transfer to PLOS from bioRxiv. 3.) Implementation of ORCID iDs for authors helps ensure work is properly attributed—Learn more.

• Top Tweet: Between science’s secretive, elitist past and Open, accessible future 

2017: 1.) Journal and Collections publishing platform AmbraTM licensed open source. 2.)  PLOS Channels with external editors provide opportunity for discovery, exploration and contextual insights.

• Top Tweet: Net Neutrality matters to science 

2018: PLOS Collaborates with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to enable preprint posting on bioRxiv.

• Top Tweet: #Preprints have come to @PLOS! 

2019: Published Peer Review history launches.

• Top Tweet: We’re pushing the boundaries of Open and launching published peer review history 

Top 10 PLOS blogs by page views (note: these blogs are relatively recent and their ‘page views’ totals may be due to the fact that we have a lot more followers now):

1.     PLOS Journals Now Open for Published Peer Review
2.     Making a home for the physical sciences and engineering at PLOS ONE
3.     Streamlined Formatting PLOS Articles
4.     PLOS Appoints Dr. Joerg Heber EIC of PLOS ONE
5.     Transparency, Credit, and Peer Review
6.     Author credit: PLOS and CRediT Update
7.     CEO Letter to the Community
8.     Power to the Preprint
9.     You’ve completed your review, now get credit with ORCID
10.     PLOS, Cold Spring Harbor Preprint Agreement