Nature: “PLoS Stays Afloat with Bulk Publishing”

A couple of the Protandim studies have been published by Public Library of Science (PLoS). Since we know that all journals are not created equal, it is worth looking into value of PLoS (we will look at other journals in future articles).

Nature provides us with an informative article about PLoS. In it, it explains:

"Public Library of Science (PLoS), the poster child of the open-access publishing movement, is following an haute couture model of science publishing — relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals."

"An analysis by Nature of the company's accounts shows that PLoS still relies heavily on charity funding, and falls far short of its stated goal of quickly breaking even through its business model of charging authors a fee to publish in its journals. In the past financial year, ending 30 September 2007, its $6.68-million spending outstripped its revenue of $2.86 million, according to the publicly available accounts."

It gets worse for PLoS (note the emphasis below is mine):

"But its financial future is looking brighter thanks to a cash cow in the form of PLoS One, an online database that PLoS launched in December 2006. PLoS One uses a system of 'light' peer-review to publish any article considered methodologically sound. In its first full year of operation in 2007, PLoS One published 1,230 articles, which would have generated an estimated $1.54 million in author fees, around half of PLoS's total income that year. By comparison, the 321 articles published in PLoS Biology in 2007 brought in less than half this amount."

Pubmed, as of this writing (June 27, 2011), lists two articles on Pubmed that were published on Plos One - which is not to be confused with the more reputable journals that make PLoS main journals:

• "Protandim, a fundamentally new antioxidant approach in chemoprevention using mouse two-stage skin carcinogenesis as a model." - Robbins D, Gu X, Shi R, Liu J, Wang F, Ponville J, McCord JM, Zhao Y.
• "The chemopreventive effects of Protandim: modulation of p53 mitochondrial translocation and apoptosis during skin carcinogenesis." - Liu J, Gu X, Robbins D, Li G, Shi R, McCord JM, Zhao Y.

(It should be noted that these articles are very similar in nature and share 6 of the same authors.)

Here are a couple of other prime quotes from the Nature article about PLoS One:

"PLoS One has published 1,158 papers since the beginning of this year, which is almost as many as it published during the whole of 2007. Another factor is that it costs authors only $1,250 to publish in PLoS One."

"'There's so much in PLoS One that it is difficult to judge the overall quality and, simply because of this volume, it's going to be considered a dumping ground, justified or not,' says John Hawley, executive director of the free-access Journal of Clinical Investigation. 'But nonetheless, it introduces a sub-standard journal to their mix.'"

A wise consumer should question the value of research that that was published in a repository "considered a dumping ground." Then again, since Paul Myhill, Inventor of Protandim, Admits Science is for Marketing it makes sense that they'd go with a cheap, easy path to publishing.

By the way, as of this writing (June 27, 2011), Nature has the highest Impact Factor, meaning that its own reputation as a journal is

Originally posted 2011-06-28 00:53:06.

This post involves:

Protandim Studies

... and focuses on:

PLoS, PLoS One