, 2 min read
Why I am not publishing in PLoS One, yet
PLoS One is a new peer-reviewed journal (2006) with many interesting features:
- The board includes many respected Computer Scientists: Ananth Grama, Johan Bollen, Josh C. Bongard, Robert P. Futrelle, etc.
- It is the largest Open Access journal in the world: 2,800 articles published in 2008.
- They accept LaTeX submissions.
- Readers can annotate, rate and comment on published papers.
- They have RSS feeds everywhere.
- The publication fees are fair.
- They have the coolest ad ever.
Unfortunately, for a Computer Scientist, it is not yet attractive:
- The Computer Science section is filled with biology and medicine papers making use of Information Technology. In other words, the PLoS One taxonomy confuses Information Technology and Computer Science! Thankfully, I could find one article in Natural Language Processing which might be the first and only Computer Science paper published in PLoS One. So there is hope.
- As a related point, PLoS One is not indexed at the usual places as a Computer Science journal (DBLP, ACM DL, and so on). Of course, no Computer Science indexing is possible until PLoS One correctly classifies the Computer Science articles.
If they could fix these problems, I would gladly submit some of my work to them. PLoS One could become a useful journal in Computer Science over time. What about prestige? PLoS One uses article-level metrics. Instead of trying to be a prestigious journal, PLoS One helps you measure the impact of your own papers.
Update: PLoS Computational Biology is now indexed by DBLP.