PLOS ONE has always had high ethics standards for the research that we publish. Our publication criteria require that “research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity”, which are described in more detail in our publication policies. Moreover, compliance with PLOS policies is checked at multiple points by journal staff. This important work helps ensure that articles published by PLOS ONE meet all applicable national and international regulations, and adhere to high standards for research and publication ethics.

The competitive nature of academic publishing, tenure, and hiring decisions can incentivize researchers to take shortcuts, compromising on ethics to boost or accelerate their publication records. In some cases, this might mean conducting research before all requisite approvals have been obtained. In others, it might mean purchasing authorship or article content, or compromising the integrity of the peer review process. These unethical practices can pollute the literature with problematic articles that are harmful to the broader community, including people endeavoring to replicate fraudulent research and those directly impacted by the published findings.

PLOS and other publishers have recently seen a rise in large-scale cases involving manipulation of the publication process, and we are working to increase the stringency of our processes to keep problematic articles out of the literature. As part of this work, we are introducing a change to the PLOS ONE Human Subjects Research Policy to require that authors of manuscripts reporting research involving human participants provide original ethics approval documentation at the time of submission. This also applies to studies that use human participants’ data or primary tissue samples, except for studies that are exempt from ethics approval requirements per institutional and/or national requirements.

Up to this point, PLOS ONE policy has required that submissions of studies involving human participants include an Ethics Statement reporting information about the study’s ethics approval and informed consent procedures. On occasion, journal staff have requested ethics approval documents for studies where there were concerns about adherence to the policy.

Several observations support further strengthening our Human Subjects Research Policy. Recently, the PLOS Publication Ethics team has handled higher volumes of cases where ethics documents received during their investigations raised concerns about whether ethics standards were upheld during the research process, whether measures were in place to protect participants in the research, or whether the reported findings were reliable. 

In light of these concerns, PLOS ONE ran a trial in 2022 wherein cohorts of authors were asked to supply ethics approval documents before peer review. Compliance was high, but what journal staff found was deeply troubling: in one cohort, nearly two-thirds of submissions did not meet PLOS ONE’s human subjects research requirements and were therefore rejected. Importantly, journal staff would not have detected the issues had they not requested the ethics documentation.

Given these observations, we are updating the Human Subjects Research Policy for PLOS ONE, PLOS Climate, PLOS Global Public Health and PLOS Water (effective 1 March 2023) and we are considering similar updates for other PLOS journals. Under the new policy, original ethics approval documentation will be required at the time of submission. These documents will be evaluated by journal staff before peer review, but will not be published. If there are any concerns about the ethics approval documents, if they are not provided, or if they indicate the study did not comply with our policies, the manuscript will be rejected without external review. Per our longstanding policy, we will continue to request ethics documents for manuscripts submitted before this date if deemed necessary by journal staff or editorial board members.

We recognize that this policy alone will not identify all potentially fraudulent or unethical research. Nevertheless, it is an important advance in our efforts to safeguard the integrity of human subjects research publications, uphold our ethics policies, and ensure that the community can continue to trust, reuse, and build upon the work that we publish.

Renee Hoch, Managing Editor, PLOS Publication Ethics Team

Emily Chenette, Editor in Chief, PLOS ONE

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PLOS ONE is a large journal. A very, very, very large journal. We receive around 100 submissions each day, and publish more than a thousand papers a month across 200+ disciplines. This work is supported by a board of nearly 10,000 Academic Editors and tens of thousands of peer reviewers. They work alongside the journal’s editorial staff to ensure that everything we publish meets our publication criteria, and that we publish all rigorous research and research methodology that contribute to academic knowledge.

But PLOS ONE’s large size leads to a specific set of challenges. Chief among these is how we adapt to address changes in submission volume. During the past two years, we’ve been fortunate to receive a sustained high volume of submissions from researchers who wanted to publish with us. However, this influx of submissions has outstripped the capacity of our board – many of whom are undoubtedly exhausted from two years of pandemic-related stress – and has led to lengthening timeframes for review and publication.

I want to openly acknowledge that these longer timeframes do not reflect the standard of service that we aim to provide researchers. We exist solely to serve the needs of the research community, and know how important timing can be to our community. To all authors who have been disappointed in their experience with PLOS ONE: I’m sorry. We can, and we will, do better.

We are addressing this in four ways:

Editorial Board Audit

PLOS’ Editorial Board Services team has conducted an audit of the editorial board and has been recruiting new Academic Editors in subject areas that have been particularly impacted by high submission volumes. We’ve recently recruited more than 600 new Academic Editors, and plan to recruit several hundred more by the end of the year. This recruitment drive will not only help us close gaps in board coverage, but will also ensure that the Academic Editors on our board receive a sustainable number of submissions to handle. 

Workflow Review

We are reviewing our workflows to ensure that they are as efficient as possible. Saving a couple of minutes of handling time per manuscript might not seem like a major achievement in isolation, but given the journal’s size this rapidly multiplies into significant time savings, which benefits authors and Academic Editors. 

Improving Contributor Correspondence

We are also reviewing our contributor correspondence infrastructure to ensure that author queries are received by appropriate journal staff who can provide the most helpful responses, faster. 

Better Matching of New Submissions

Finally, we’re trialing an improved algorithm that matches new submissions to potential Academic Editors to ensure that all papers submitted to the journal are picked up by an Academic Editor as soon as possible. Better matching also allows the journal staff who manage this process to focus on supporting our Academic Editors in other ways – for example, helping resolve questions about the review process, or ensuring that new Academic Editors have all of the tools and training that they need to review a manuscript. This in turn helps ensure that authors, reviewers and Academic Editors all receive excellent service from PLOS ONE. 

With these changes in place, authors should soon start noticing an improvement in review and publication times. 

It has been immensely gratifying to see so many papers submitted to PLOS ONE by authors who value Open Science. We will continue improving our processes to ensure that we provide the rapid, robust review and publication of all rigorous research and research methods that PLOS ONE has become renowned for. I look forward to sharing news of our progress with our community. 

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Dear PLOS ONE community,

What a joy it is to write this letter – to have the opportunity to reflect on the strengths of PLOS ONE and consider how we can best meet your needs in the years ahead. I’m writing to you to share what you can expect from me as Editor-in-Chief of PLOS ONE, and to call for your feedback and your perspective on what we’ve gotten right, and where we can improve.

I am a molecular biologist by training. I received my PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004, and studied gene expression signatures in lung cancer cells while a postdoc at Duke University. As a brand-new postdoc I had the experience that I am sure will be familiar to many of you of writing grants to secure funding for my research – and I realised, during this process, that what I really loved about scientific research was not the process of making the discoveries myself, but reading papers and considering how pieces of research fit together to advance discoveries. So, in 2007, I left the lab to begin working in science publishing. I joined PLOS ONE in 2018 after positions at the FEBS Journal and Nature Cell Biology. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to work closely with our former Editor-in-Chief Joerg Heber, who brought such meaningful and important changes to the journal to support scientific communication and our academic community.

I am excited to continue this work to serve the PLOS ONE community. From our board of nearly 10,000 Academic Editors to the authors, reviewers and readers who support the journal, we are embedded in a community of scientists and researchers who want to transform scholarly communication. I am committed to listening to our community to understand how we can best meet your needs and working with you to change science communication for the better – and always with the principles of openness, transparency, rigor and reproducibility in mind.

PLOS ONE has always supported these principles: we strongly believe that open science is trusted science. Under Joerg’s leadership, our commitment became increasingly tangible as we worked closely with our community to develop policies and practices that support Open Science throughout the lifecycle of a research project (Figure 1). In 2018, we developed links with bioRxiv to support authors who wished to post a preprint of their manuscript at the time of submission to PLOS ONE. Although our publication times are fairly speedy, this step helps ensure that all research is publicly available as soon as possible and helps authors receive credit for and feedback on their work. Importantly, preprints also offer a way to begin addressing some of the current limitations with the peer-review process, including issues around transparency, recognition and trust.

In 2019, we released Peer Review History to allow authors to opt in to making the reviewers’ reports and decision letters part of the publication record. Reviewers can also opt in to signing their reviews to receive credit for their work and bring additional recognition to this essential job. We’ve also recently launched Study Protocols, which complement our existing Registered Report framework in supporting authors to receive early feedback on their study design. Lab Protocols, another new article type, were developed in partnership with protocols.io, and represent a sleek and efficient way to peer-review and share research methods while allowing those who developed a specific technique to receive credit for their important contributions.

I am proud of what the journal has accomplished in recent years towards the goal of transforming scholarly communication. From supporting preprints and other Open Science initiatives to enabling authors to publish (and receive credit for) the continuum of research, we are leading a transformation in research communication. But there is more to do. 

What matters to me most is that you feel that your work has a home in PLOS ONE. Addressing this means building deeper links with our communities – listening to and learning from you, and understanding how we can support you in publishing your research, whether as protocols, preprints or papers. The steps that we take towards greater transparency, openness and trust in research will be with our community as partners. 

I will also continue to create opportunities for reviewers and editors to receive credit for their work, and investigate new avenues for author feedback. For example, we’ve recently developed links with the Peer Community In communities, have explored hosting preprint journal clubs and have developed a pilot project to integrate comments on preprints into the “traditional” review process. We will keep experimenting, keep tweaking and keep refining as we assess ways to make the review process more meaningful and impactful for all involved. 

Finally, I will ensure that we deliver on our commitment to supporting research into areas around inequities and inequalities, while seeking to identify and minimise potential sources of bias in our manuscript-handling practices. Some of this work has already begun, and I look forward to sharing our progress with you. 

I want you to know how important your feedback is to me and to the journal, and I welcome all comments and suggestions on what we’re doing right and where we can improve. You can find me on Twitter at @emilychenette, or reach me via email at echenette@plos.org.

Thank you so much for your support of PLOS ONE and Open Science. I look forward to working with you all to continue PLOS’ mission of transforming research communication.

Emily

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Historically, PLOS ONE is best known in the life sciences and biomedical fields. However, as a multidisciplinary journal, we have always welcomed research from all subject areas, including the natural and medical sciences, engineering, mathematics, and social sciences and related humanities.  

Two years ago we formed a set of dedicated editorial teams in different subject areas across the PLOS ONE scope, with the aim of facilitating stronger interactions with our authors and our editorial board, as well as improving how we handle individual manuscripts. In this blog post, I’d like to outline how the team that I’m part of, Physical Sciences and Engineering, has been working to engage with researchers across physical sciences communities and to advance the PLOS mission by helping scientists and engineers to publish exciting research that is open, transparent and reproducible. 

Crossing disciplinary boundaries

In the last year alone we have published exciting papers in core physical sciences fields from climate change and natural language processing to fluid dynamics and statistics. What makes a multidisciplinary journal special, though, is the opportunity to provide a home for research which does not naturally sit in one traditional discipline or which forms previously unexplored connections between subject areas. 

Two recent papers we have published in recent months nicely highlight this interdisciplinary focus. 

First, a study authored by Braun and colleagues brought together chemists and archaeologists interested in the prospect of using isotopic ratios to provenance iron objects. The authors carried out a series of smelting experiments on Levantine iron ore samples, then used mass spectrometry to show that the ratio of osmium isotopes was preserved from ore to metal. This observation is notable because it means the Os isotopic ratio can be used to identify the source of iron in objects found in the Levant region, since ore from different sites has a characteristic isotopic ratio, and therefore as a promising tool for understanding the economic, social and geo-political aspects of iron production in the ancient world.

A study authored by Lawley and colleagues from the mathematics and biology departments at Duke University used a mathematical model of oxygen uptake in insects to gain insight into the role of spiracles, small openings in the tracheal wall. It was previously known that spiracles alternate between closed, open and ‘fluttering’ states, the latter when they open and close rapidly, but the benefits of fluttering remain unclear. By defining a diffusion differential equation model, the authors found that a rapid fluttering state allows for comparable oxygen uptake to the open state but with much less water loss. This result suggests that insects can achieve both high oxygen intake and low water loss by keeping the spiracles closed most of the time and fluttering while open.  

We have also recently launched a call for papers programme in order to build dedicated collections of research on different themes from across the physical sciences and engineering. Collections we have published so far have covered topics as diverse as Machine Learning in Healthcare, Open Biomaterials Research, Open Quantum Computing and Simulation, Science of Stories and Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Disease Dynamics, providing an opportunity for readers and prospective authors to see the broad range of interdisciplinary research we publish at PLOS ONE. Right now we have an open call on Cities as Complex Systems, encompassing complex systems and networks research applied to questions in urban science.

Getting to know you

Our team has enjoyed meeting researchers from across the globe at conferences, workshops and other events. In 2019 we attended meetings on ubiquitous computing and wearables, quantitative biology, geology and geochemistry, robotics, complex networks and materials science, learning about what matters to researchers when it comes to sharing their science with other researchers and the broader public. One highlight for us was NetSci 2019, where our Associate Editor Deanne Dunbar participated in a spirited ‘Meet the Editor’ panel discussion on the current challenges and future directions of publishing in the (relatively) nascent subject of network science. Our Associate Editor Hanna Landenmark also had the chance to connect with early career researchers at the organic bioelectronics meeting Orbitaly2019, where she ran a workshop on authorship and reviewing. 

Conversations we have had at meetings have also led to us significantly expanding our editorial board, with more than 800 scientists from physical sciences fields becoming PLOS ONE Academic Editors since 2018! This depth and breadth of expertise means we ensure that our editorial and review process is fast and thorough, led by experts in the scientific community.

Supporting reproducible research

Reproducibility is a key pillar of open science and the PLOS ONE mission. For all research we emphasise the importance of reproducibility by making it one of our core publication criteria, and via our open data policy. Within individual subject areas in the physical sciences, however, we often hear demand from researchers for additional guidance or editorial policies so that reported research can better meet community standards. Working with our academic editors we have recently developed new policies to support the reproducibility of studies reporting data from NMR spectroscopy and crystallography experiments, with plans to develop specific author guidelines in other areas in 2020. 

Get in touch!

We have a number of other exciting projects planned for 2020 at PLOS ONE and we are always keen to hear from you! We regularly highlight new physical sciences and engineering papers every fortnight on the PLOS ONE homepage, on this blog and via our Twitter account @PLOSONE. You can also get in touch with us via the form below to share your ideas on how to make publishing physical sciences research easier and accessible to all!

Featured image: Jill Hemman, CC-BY 2.0, Flickr

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0000-0002-6370-4254  A few months ago, PLOS ONE published a study of parental reports on gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults, which was the subject of strong criticism and debate shortly after publication (see example

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0000-0002-6370-4254At PLOS we are thrilled to be a signatory of Commitment Statement towards Enabling FAIR data in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences. This cross-publisher disciplinary effort is very much in line with PLOS’ existing