NEWS
2010 - 11 - 24 Jacques Zimmer defends PLoS ONE magazine in “Science”
Dr. Jacques Zimmer, senior researcher at CRP-Santé, member of the Editorial Board of the PLoS ONE journal, has published a letter in the journal “Science” to defend the PLoS ONE magazine which was strongly attacked and criticized for its publication process.
This letter follows a long debate around the PLoS ONE publication policy. PLoS ONE is an online journal which provides free access to scientific information. Everybody has the opportunity to publish their comment as a post publication peer review within this scientific magazine. Editors can accept only articles that they have rigorously evaluated, most often together with external reviewers. Each editor is, of course, the expert in the field he evaluates. However PLOS ONE, founded in 2006, was mainly criticized for its new approach: some of the readers thought that the peer review process was not efficient and strict enough. But the magazine has a very rigorous process and even if critical voices said that this model would become a failure, PLoS ONE is a real success story. Today, the magazine can be proud of more than 17.000 submissions since 2006 and more than 10.000 articles were published. Thomson Scientific has also changed their mind about PLoS ONE and the first impact factor of the journal is 4.3.
As a member of PLoS ONE Board of Editors, Dr. Jacques Zimmer wrote a letter explaining PLoS ONE’s process, how relevant it is for scientific authors and publications and in which way PLoS ONE does not publish “bad Science”. The letter has been published in Science, on October 1st, 2010. This gives additional credit to this scientific journal which is still under development.
Dr. Jacques Zimmer is a researcher at the Laboratory of Immunogenetics and Allergology for seven years. He is an MD, PhD by training who currently focuses his activities exclusively on research. His fields of expertise are natural killer (NK) cells, an important component of the innate immune system.. He regularly reviews papers for scientific journals.