The megajournal PLOS ONE will be correcting about 1,000 papers over the next few months, Retraction Watch has learned, and will add an author proof step – a first for the journal.
The corrections are for “errors in author names, affiliations, titles and references; to make minor updates to the acknowledgements, funding statements, and data availability statements, among other minor issues,” PLOS ONE head of communications David Knutson told us. He continued:
This batch of corrections does not reflect a recent change in the journal’s quality control standards or processes. Rather, we are clearing a backlog that accumulated during a 2-year period when minor corrections were deprioritized and resources were diverted to other areas. PLOS ONE is in the process of implementing an author proof step so that in the future such errors can be identified and addressed prior to publication.
Longtime Retraction Watch readers may recall that in 2016, a researcher noted PLOS ONE’s correction rate was much higher than that at other journals. He and others chalked that up to the lack of an author proof stage, which is common at other journals. Knutson explained why the journal was reversing the policy:
We are moving toward adding this service to authors because the correction request volumes in recent years have tipped the balance to where we have decided to prioritize the resources and time needed for this step in order to preempt minor corrections and ensure readers get correct information at the time of publication. For a megajournal like PLOS ONE, this is not a trivial decision given the publication volume, resources required to support this service, and the impacts of this extra step on time-to-publication which is a priority for the journal.
PLOS ONE distinguishes “standard corrections” from “publication ethics corrections” such as this one that led to a retraction, Knutson said:
The standard corrections typically address reporting or typesetting errors such as typographical errors, broken links (e.g. to datasets with public repositories), or missing funding information. These are the types of corrections represented in the forthcoming large volume batches.
By contrast, publication ethics corrections (such as the one you referenced) address concerns raised about published articles, e.g. involving policy compliance, integrity, or scientific validity issues, which require a different editorial process and for which we may issue corrections, expressions of concern, or retractions depending on the nature, severity, and impact of the issues and the extent to which they can be addressed.
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The “authors’ contributions” section in PlosOne articles often need double check in the proof step. During the peer-review the contributions may change and require adjustment.
Most importantly, due to the single blind peer-review of PlosOne, the identity of the reviewers and the handling editor are revealed to the authors after acceptance. The proof step is the only chance that the authors declare possible conflict of interests, if any.
This is nonsense. Authors at PLOS must declare any conflicts at manuscript submission. In their single-blind review model, these declarations are part of the manuscript review. PLOS publishes the anonymous peer reviews alongside the article, unless the authors opt out. They never publish or reveal reviewer names.
They actually do reveal the reviewer’s name, upon the reviewer’s consent.
It would be better if they would implement a real post acceptance editing from the editorial office, like ACS journal do. You get proofs with full editing of the text, including correction of typos.
PLOS does nothing (or was doing nothing when I last published there…), they rather send you 25 emails to ask you to change X to x… Wondering where all the money goes given the fact that authors have to do basically all the work…
I’m also curious about where the money is allocated in the scientific publishing industry. What service did the authors get for the $1000+ publication fee they pay? The contents are generated by the authors themselves, and the journal editors don’t do much (if any) actual editing. The reviewers are doing volunteer work. Subscribers are opting out of print version, reducing the publishers’ cost on making physical copies of the journals. So, what are the costs of running a journal?
I’m told that on a volunteer basis (which it largely is, in any case) the costs are $5/paper, and that with paid staff manaing it, it is about $100/paper.
I’m not active in this area, but others are, and it’s clearly an area for exploration, with various models possible.
https://openjournalsystems.com
There are two functions: publication and long-term archiving. They may wind up separated.
Also, the authors can actually publish the paper to a preprint site. The journal can restrict itself to handling peer review and providing a list of links to the final versions of accepted papers. This model has also been implemented.
Publishing used to require heavy machinery and a great deal of labor. The cost savings from technology have gone directly into profits.
… and fat profits for publishers are encouraging them to accept manuscript, even if peer reviewers are against it due to low quality and other legitimate reasons
shortly after reviewing a manuscript and submitting my review reprt as Reject, I found that it was published in the same journal, likely even before all reviewers finish the job and submit their report
when they don’t pay anything for the peer-review work, it’s worthless work for publishers/journals, can be easily neglected to reach 3,000 USD or CHF sooner than later
I am running a (non-profit) journal, and our costs are nowhere near as low as what you quote. It very much depends on what quality compromises you are willing to make (we do language editing in addition to copy editing because most of our authors are non-native, and that does not come cheap at all), but at the very least you need to rent an article management system, subscribe to Portico for last-resort archiving, etc… I don’t know exactly how low one can get with all-volonteer manpower (we have some salaried staff) and really bare-bone quality but it’s not going to be 5$/paper. I’d guess that the people who wave those numbers around have not actually run a journal, or not long enough to see the costs.
I have not managed a journal. But as you’re probably aware, there’s a lot of experimentation going on.-What’s your current per-article figure, the way you’ve chosen to structure it? (Setting aside any salary for the managing editor or editorial board, if any are paid, but including secretarial costs.)
When I worked as an editor we did not use any “article management system,” since the job of the editor was primarily to manage the articles, and even on a volunteer basis it was not that onerous. These days I just referee, but I see that many fine journals continue to communicate directly by email.
Copy-editing is becoming infrequent or rudimentary, and language editing was never common.
Archiving is not relevant to the discussion at all.
Costs of running journals are not very transparent, but there’s a lot of services that take real money. This 2021 article published at F1000 has a nice list of the services, which they tally up to <$1000 USD/arttcle, far less than the going rates of $2500-4000+ charged by publishers. (Hard to know how realistic their calcs are without being in the industry.) “Current market rates for scholarly publishing services”
https://doi.org/10.12688%2Ff1000research.27468.2
Indeed. ” In fact, one may even ask which of the services we list as part of the scholarly publishing standard are actually necessary. … Journals such as the Journal of Machine Learning Research, Discrete Analysis or the Journal of Open Source Software publish their articles with internal costs below US$10″
Thanks for that.
In the blog I wrote about this in 2016, which Retraction Watch picked up at the time, I wrote:
The APC is now a whopping $2290, so I’m not impressed by the corporate speak about this not being trivial given the resources needed yadda yadda. It would be better if PLOS ONE roundly admitted they’ve ripped off a generation of authors by publishing their work in the most shoddy ways possible and slapping corrections on it without abandan.
I see low costs like these regularly with computer science journals. The reason is often that the editors can engineer whatever publishing software they need themselves, so the software costs are hidden by skilled editor volunteerism. Most publishers have to pay for journal management software, which you absolutely need once a journal reaches a certain scale. The alternative is a lot of manual processes, which is even more expensive.
Further, for APC journals, only authors of ACCEPTED papers have to pay. But rejected articles come with staff and software costs too, so the accepted articles are also paying to service rejected papers
Plos One is sketchy. Their handling “editors” are turning over at an odd rate, and much of the editorial process is handled by an administrative staff that does not really understand science. For example, if you want to convey a message to the editor, you have to go through a PLOS administrator/gatekeeper, who will often block you from directly corresponding with the editor. On two occasions I received a ‘revise and resubmit’ and both times I was told the editor managing my manuscript was no longer available and that I needed to wait for a new one to be appointed. The staff often send out your revision to a completely different set of reviewers, which is not unheard of, but you end up with an entirely different set of critiques that you have to then address. The staff will also send your manuscript back to you for reasons that are silly (e.g., not knowing what secondary data analysis is, and demanding to know details relevant for primary data collection).