Our communities keep us moving forward

At PLOS, every article is a collaboration. Our expert editorial boards and guest editors work in partnership with reviewers to provide accurate assessment and shape articles for publication. 

Without the support of these thousands of individual researchers PLOS would not be the home for rigorous, insightful research that it is. For all of the work they’ve contributed over the past year, we just want to say THANK YOU to our Editorial Boards, Guest Editors, and Reviewers. 

Collaboration leads to success

PLOS journals are driven by researchers for the benefit of the entire scientific community. With their support and feedback, we’ve been exploring how we can make the publishing process more transparent, fair, and efficient for all of the researchers who rely on us to share their work. We saw many of those goals come to life in 2019.

Published peer review history empowered authors and reviewers to opt-in and reveal the expert assessment that shapes each published article. Combined with ORCID, we also expanded opportunities for reviewer credit in order to increase recognition for this essential contribution to the research process. We also joined the Review Commons pilot along with 12 other journals and launched a preprint commenting trial to make early, public peer review feedback available during the assessment process. Both of these pilots we hope will make the review process clearer, faster, and more robust. 

Our volunteer Editorial Boards and Guest Editors worked together across geographies, timezones, and disciplines to launch 30+ Calls for Papers and of highly focused research. Across all of our journals, we press-released nearly 400 papers, helping ensure that authors reach the widest possible audience, and the communities where their work has the most impact.

More to come in 2020

We’re only a few months into the new year and we’ve already started off with the launch of Registered Reports on PLOS ONE which we hope will empower researchers to tell the story of their research in a way that more accurately reflects the process of scientific discovery.

Building off the progress we made in 2019, we’ll be carefully monitoring these new initiatives with more to report as the programs develop. And we’ll continue looking for new opportunities to break boundaries and change the publication landscape in the ways that matter most to our communities. 

Finally, we just want to take a moment to recognize how tremendous this set of accomplishments was for 2019–with equally ambitious plans for 2020. Nothing we’ve done would have been possible without so many researchers dedicating their time and expertise to PLOS and we want to say thank you for your continued support. We couldn’t do it without you!