Happy Birthday, PLoS ONE!

On this day one year ago, PLoS ONE opened its doors to manuscript submissions. Chris Surridge, the Managing Editor, wrote a blog post recounting the past year:

The initial success of PLoS ONE is something unprecedented in scientific publishing. It has been achieved because of the commitment and faith of hundreds of people: PLoS staff, editorial and advisory board members, reviewers, authors and particularly readers. And yet this is only a very small step towards an open, interactive and efficient literature that will accelerate scientific progress. Over the coming months, we will take further steps with additional functionality on the site, new publishing ventures launching and established ones taking more advantage of the opportunities afforded by the TOPAZ platform on which PLoS ONE is presented.

The inside scoop: everyone here is really excited.

The manuscripts keep coming in, despite this being the middle of the summer when scientists are supposed to be out sailing, not writing papers. ONE is getting about 60 manuscripts per week and publishing about 30 per week. There are 697 papers already published, and many are in the pipeline. The traffic to the site is rapidly growing, although the online traffic is supposed to go down during the summer (I know my blog is down to about 60% of normal traffic right now).

While initially almost all the papers were biomedical, there are more and more papers in other areas of science, from ecology and behavioral biology to psychology and archaeology. Are you a bold pioneer, willing to be the one to break the ice and show the rest of the colleagues in YOUR field how good it is to publish with PLoS ONE? If yes, we love you - please submit a manuscript and help ONE become even more broad in its scope.

I just did some quick stats and, although this has started only three weeks ago, by last Sunday there were already 109 ratings on 78 papers! Keep them coming!

And, thanks to other bloggers who have already noted the anniverary on their sites:

PLoS ONE turns 1
PLoS ONE is (the) One
PLoS ONE is 1
PLoS ONE is one

Finally, let's go back to Chris for the birthday present wishes:

So, if it is a birthday, what about presents?

Well, PLoS ONE would like three things none of which are particularly expensive and which all of the readers of this blog can give us: three resolutions.

Whenever you write about a published paper, be it in a journal or on a blog, always provide a link to the freely available version of the paper if one exists.

Whenever you read a paper in PLoS ONE, always rate it before leaving.

And most importantly....

Whenever you write a scientific paper, always, always, always publish it Open Access.