EEB in PLoS ONE

i-5327a74783e30bae20851ea227c8cac2-ONE publish_center.jpgThe word 'ONE' in PLoS ONE indicates that the journal publishes articles in all areas of science. This is not as easy as it sounds, of course. The majority of papers published so far have some kind of biomedical connection to them, which is not a surprise as the biomedical community was the first to embrace PLoS and as the other six PLoS journals are either specifically targeting this community (PLoS Medicine, Pathogens and Neglected Tropical Diseases) or are welcoming to such papers (PLoS Biology, Genetics and Computational Biology).

The support of patient advocate groups, PLoS openness and non-acceptance of advertising from the pharmacological industry, led to a wealth of articles describing clinical trials, leading to our first PLoS Hub - Clinical Trials where the community can post comments on these papers.

But we want PLoS ONE to go beyond and to, eventually, publish equally in all areas of science. We have to do it incrementally. We understand that it is not easy to be the pioneer, the ice-breaker, the first person in one's field to publish in PLoS ONE and subsequently get asked "you published WHERE?". Such people, we understand, have to be at a secure point in their careers, as well as strong proponents of Open Access. And such people are key to our success - they tell their colleagues about us and provide the seed - that first paper in the field that gives the others the opening to also submit their manuscripts to us. If you recognize yourself in this description, contact me ASAP!

Eventually, in a year or two, we may see a lot of physics, astronomy, math and chemistry published in ONE. Areas like geology, meteorology and archaeology may come before that. But the best way to expand is to work with what we have - ask people to publish papers that are somewhat related to papers we have already published. So, we may go from biomedical science through Computational Biology to Mathematics, or from biomedical science through Biophysics to Physics.

So, we took a look to see which areas of the Life Sciences have already gravitated to PLoS ONE and it was obvious that we have quickly (in only one year and 1600 papers) become quite a journal-of-choice for the EEB community - that is: Ecology-Evolution-Behavior.

We have already published 159 papers in the Ecology category (see this for a good recent one).

There are already 269 articles tagged as Evolutionary Biology and those include forays into anthropology, invertebrate and vertebrate paleontology and even philosophy of evolutionary biology (we are also capable of publishing taxonomical new-species-description monographs).

Finally, Behavioral Biology (which probably deserves its own category) can be found under the ecology and evolution tags, as well as among the 250 articles categorized as Neuroscience. Check out some cool papers on the behavior of fruitflies, honeybees, iguanas, birds, bats, pikas, chimps and humans, to point out just a few.

Those are large numbers! And we want more! Look around those categories - is there something that is somewhat similar to your own research? If so, why not publish with us?

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"Such people, we understand, have to be at a secure point in their careers".

That's unfortunately a rather important point. I was advised not to attempt the jump until PLOs-ONE IF be known and acceptable according to the submitted work. In some fields, this might prove a long walk. This is probably way more easy for math science where IF is not considered a criteria as to where publish his/her work...