Progress Updates

2010 Progress Update

Welcome to the 2010 PLoS Progress Update, aimed at keeping our authors, reviewers, editors, and supporters fully apprised of developments at PLoS over our most recent year.

Download the 2010 PLoS Progress Update – low-resolution (1.3MB) or high-resolution (8.97MB) – or scroll down to read it on this page.

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For a fuller historical picture of how far we have come, read the Progress Updates from 2008 and 2009 and see our tax returns (Form 990) from 2008, 2009, and 2010.

1. Message from the Founders

It’s been another exciting year for PLoS, focused on establishing more open, efficient, and effective ways to accelerate progress in science and medicine and leading a transformation in research communication.

PLoS reached a truly significant milestone in 2010 when, seven years after entering the publishing business, our annual operating revenues exceeded expenses for the first time. Although we are delighted that PLoS and others have now shown that Open Access (OA) is a viable and sustainable business model, we have a long way to go before universal access is achieved for all.

The significant progress that we’ve made toward this goal could not have been achieved without the leadership of our co-founder Harold Varmus, who announced during the year that he was stepping aside as Chairman of the Board of Directors to focus on his new role as Director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI). After a thorough leadership search, we were delighted to welcome Gary Ward as our new Chairman. His insights into PLoS’s vision, his engaging and collaborative style, and his commitment to OA will make him a highly effective leader at this critical juncture in PLoS’s history.

As ever, we are indebted to our remarkable staff, our far-sighted supporters, and our authors, reviewers, editors, and advisors for another exceptional year. We would be nowhere without you.

Patrick O. Brown & Michael B. Eisen

2. Publishing Initiatives

During the year, PLoS launched or continued several publishing initiatives aimed at broadly rethinking and reinventing research communication.

Expansion of PLoS Currents

We expanded PLoS Currents, a series of experimental websites for the rapid communication of research results and ideas, and launched new sections on Huntington Disease (produced with support from CHDI Foundation, Inc. – watch a video about this website), Evidence on Genomic Tests (in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and phylogenetic studies called the Tree of Life. As we learn from these sections of PLoS Currents, we aim to greatly extend the utility of this new communication tool.

Launch of PLoS Hubs: Biodiversity

In the Fall of 2010, PLoS launched a prototype version of PLoS Hubs: Biodiversity to show how OA literature can be reused and reorganized, filtered, and assessed after publication. This prototype aggregates relevant articles from a variety of OA journals, including the PLoS journals and many others archived at PubMed Central, and demonstrates some of the data integration that is a key motivation for this project. We have very ambitious objectives for PLoS Hubs, which begin to illustrate the real power and potential of open content.

Launch of PLoS Blogs

Also in the Fall, PLoS launched PLoS Blogs, a network for discussing science and medicine in public. This platform covers topics in research, culture, and publishing. PLoS Blogs is different from other blogging networks because it includes an equal mix of science journalists and scientists. We were excited to welcome our new bloggers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum, to the network, and we have witnessed tremendous use of the outstanding content that is being shared in this new forum. This network also includes the PLoS journal blogs, everyONE and Speaking of Medicine, and the official PLoS blog.

3. Influential Research

PLoS Journals remain at the core of everything we do. During 2010, they continued to hit the headlines by publishing outstanding research along with provocative opinion and commentary.

PLoS Biology

Research highlights from PLoS Biology in 2010 included a study that found that most men in Europe descend from the first farmers who migrated from the Near East 10,000 years ago. This paper received widespread news coverage and fueled animated discussions in the science blogosphere. Another high-profile study showed how the remains of a nearly complete snake, found preserved in the nest of a sauropod dinosaur in western India, provided a rare glimpse of an unusual feeding behavior in ancient snakes. Meanwhile, research by Robert Pringle and colleagues helped termites get better press, showing that their mounds not only greatly enhance plant and animal activity at a local level, but their uniform spatial patterning also enhances the overall productivity of the entire landscape. The paper, accompanied by an explanatory primer, was featured in the Harvard Gazette, USA Today, The Telegraph, Discovery News, and BBC Mundo (Spain).

PLoS Biology also launched an Education series in October with an Editorial by Liza Gross and Cheryl Kerfeld, and an article by Chaitan Khosla and colleagues, In Living Color: Bacterial Pigments as an Untapped Resource in the Classroom and Beyond. The Education series features noteworthy, innovative open-education programs created to enhance the understanding of biology.

PLoS Medicine

In 2010 PLoS Medicine continued its mission to raise standards in medical publishing with further guidelines on the reporting of papers, such as an article providing specific guidance for developers of health research reporting guidelines, and by highlighting unacceptable practices in publishing, an example being the first academic analysis of the papers released in 2009 that documented ghostwriting practices by Wyeth. It continued to publish articles on the diseases and risk factors that cause the highest burden of disease; for example a four-part series, Water and Sanitation, launched at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; a series on Sub-Saharan Africa’s Mothers, Newborns, and Children published to coincide with the Pacific Health Summit; and several papers on the tobacco industry including one on how the tobacco industry has attempted to subvert European Union Policy.

PLoS Medicine also continued to publish high-profile debates on important topics in global health, such as the call by eight global health agencies to strengthen sources of health data and the capacity for analysis, synthesis, validation, and use of these data, and series on global health diplomacy and estimates of global health data.

Finally, together with PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE, the journal implemented a policy to no longer consider papers for which support in whole or in part for the study or the researchers comes from a tobacco company.

The Community Journals

The first three Community Journals (PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens) celebrated their 5^th birthday in 2010 (during OA week). These well-established journals are outstanding examples of how OA journals can be run and financially sustained with a publication fee model. A brief selection of the research published in each title is as follows:

PLoS Computational Biology—Modeling the interior of bacterial cells at a near atomic level of detail. Having selected the prokaryote Escherichia coli as a test system, researchers assembled an atomically detailed model of its cytoplasmic environment that includes 50 of the most abundant types of macromolecules at experimentally measured concentrations, which offers a vivid illustration of molecular behavior inside biological cells.

PLoS Genetics—Characterization of twenty sequenced human genomes. Researchers presented the analysis of twenty human genomes to evaluate the prospects for identifying rare functional variants that contribute to a phenotype of interest. They provided a proof of concept for the identification of rare variants by confirming that the cause of hemophilia A is easily recognizable in this dataset.

PLoS Pathogens—A tropical fungus takes root in the Pacific Northwest. Scientists described an outbreak of cryptococcosis among people, livestock, and wild animals from Vancouver Island to Oregon, identifying a virulent new strain of Cryptococcus gattii unique to the United States. Thanks in part to extensive press coverage, from venues as disparate as NPR and WebMD, the article was viewed 16,000 times its first week.

PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases—Mapping the global threat of vivax malaria. As part of the Malaria Atlas Project, researchers combined geographic, climatic, epidemiologic, genetic, and population data to create a comprehensive map of the worldwide human risk of Plasmodium vivax, a form of malaria less benign than previously believed. An estimated 2.85 billion people on five continents face potential exposure.

PLoS ONE

PLoS ONE published almost 6,800 articles in 2010, and among the extraordinary range of science that this represented, more than 300 research articles were covered by international media and bloggers. One of these high-profile articles included a clinical trial that found vitamin B could slow cognitive impairment in the elderly. In another, researchers used social networks to detect contagious outbreaks. The discovery of ancient Chalcolithic footwear in a cave located in Southern Armenia also received widespread media attention and was covered by The New York Times, Scientific American, and Vanity Fair.

2010 was also a year of Collections. In August, we launched the PLoS ONE: Marine Biodiversity and Biogeography – Regional Comparisons of Global Issues Collection. It was created in collaboration with the Census of Marine Life and was our biggest and most publicized Collection of 2010. The articles provided new species inventories, identified biogeographic regions, and collectively established a baseline for further global assessments. The collection received worldwide media attention and was featured in the BBC, National Geographic, and CNN. Additionally, one of our other collections, the Biodiversity of Saba Bank, was credited with having motivated the Netherlands Antilles to pass a National Decree designating the Saba Bank a marine protected area.

4. A Growing Organization

With the continued growth at PLoS, in terms of both submissions/publications and the complexity of the projects we are running and launching, comes the challenge of how to maintain the resources and infrastructure that we need to keep moving forward. 2010 was a busy year for us in this regard.

Growth of PLoS - Submissions and Publications

Two Office Moves

In June and October 2010, we moved both our San Francisco and Cambridge, U.K. offices because we had simply outgrown our existing locations. With careful planning from the IT and Administration teams on both sides of the Atlantic, these logistical projects ran remarkably smoothly with minimal downtime for our staff and authors, so we wish to extend a huge thank-you to everyone involved.

Editorial Manager®

The increase in submission volumes across all titles, and particularly PLoS ONE, meant that we needed a new manuscript submission and peer review system to scale up for our future. As we tune Editorial Manager (EM) to our specific needs, authors, reviewers, and editors should all benefit from an improved experience with our publications. As with any change in infrastructure, the move to EM has not been without challenges, and we are particularly grateful to authors, reviewers, and editors for helping us to negotiate this transition.

Increased Discoverability

More PLoS articles in the world means that our audience needs new ways to discover our content, which is another good reason why we improved our search functionality. Members of the development community also used our content to help us go mobile. They created our first ever iPhone application, which we launched for PLoS Medicine, and an iPad application for all of our journals – third party developments which were only possible because of the OA copyright license that we use on all our content.

5. The Evolving Open Access landscape

2010 was a big year for OA across the board. The three biggest OA publishers (BioMed Central, PLoS, and Hindawi) all achieved substantial growth. One of the other exciting developments was the announcement, from several publishers, of journals that operate along very similar lines to PLoS ONE, and therefore have the potential to grow quickly and accelerate the pace of change toward more comprehensive OA.

In the United States, on July 29, 2010, then-staff member Catherine Nancarrow testified before the 111th Congress Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy on the issue of broadening public access to federally funded research. Additionally, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which promises to strengthen the National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy and extend it across the federal government, was reintroduced into the House, and the Administration issued a call for comments from the community on how best to make this happen.

PLoS also joined the Open Access Implementation Group, which aims to accelerate the transition toward OA specifically within the U.K., where OA policy has been particularly progressive.

The largest and most successful International Open Access Week to date also took place in 2010, with just under 900 participants in 94 countries. PLoS co-founder, Nobel prize-winning scientist and director of the U.S. NCI, Dr. Harold Varmus participated in the official OA Week kick-off event by stating, with respect to where OA publishing has reached and what’s now possible: “All of these adventures are tremendously exciting because they markedly enrich the experience of being a scientist, of reading the work of others, and of exchanging views with others in the scientific community.”

6. The First PLoS Forum

In March 2010, PLoS held the first PLoS Forum in San Francisco, California. Over 70 invited thought leaders, such as research funders, policy makers, OA content users, researchers, etc., came together to brainstorm about the future of scientific communication. The lively and creative discussions will help to inform PLoS’s longer-term ambitions for transforming the ways we present and use new research findings.

7. Customer Service

Author Satisfaction Survey

In 2010, we conducted our second comprehensive survey of authors – those whose work was either published or rejected in 2009. In general, the results reinforced our 2009 findings. Levels of satisfaction remained high amongst PLoS authors, but respondents also identified several areas where processes could be improved, notably our journal management system, which was one of the motivations for our move to Editorial Manager®. As we did last year, we have provided a short summary of the findings in a SlideShare presentation, along with an audio commentary.

Likelihood to Resubmit to PLoS Journals

8. Financial Summary

PLoS reached an important milestone in 2010, operating in the black for the first time. Key contributors
were strong growth in PLoS ONE, continued performance of our Community Journals, and improvements in our underlying cost structure. This was accomplished without raising publishing fees for any of our journals.

Total revenues for the period grew to a little over $15.0MM—a 60% increase over 2009 levels—fueled
mainly by strong growth in publishing volumes. Operating revenues were $13.0MM, a 46% increase over 2009; and operating expenses were $12.2MM, a 25% increase over 2009. Public support for the
year was about $2MM. A full disclosure of our 2010 Form 990 Tax Return can be found here.

Income Statement and Balance Sheet_resized

9. 2011 and Beyond

We’re currently working on a number of technology projects that will improve the utility and stability of all our sites and open up our code and content to the world so that others can build and improve on initiatives we started, such as Article-Level Metrics and Search. We’re expanding our new initiatives, such as PLoS Currents, Hubs, and Blogs.
We also continue to evaluate our infrastructure and operations to make sure that we have everything we need to take us through the next phase of growth and organizational development. We expect that we’ll be making a number of changes during the course of the year as we seek to improve the range and level of services we offer.
It’s clear to us and many others that scholarly communication is undergoing a fundamental transition as the methods adapt more fully to online media. PLoS is committed to playing a leading role in this transition by simplifying, speeding up, and improving research communication. We have many experiments running in various areas:

Improving re-use of content – PLoS Hubs
Measuring impact at the article (not the journal) level – article-level metrics on all journal content
Encouraging more rapid and open sharing of new findings – PLoS Currents
Separating technical assessment of research from judgments about potential impact – PLoS ONE
Exploring post-publication discussion and assessment – commenting on all journal content
Raising standards through improved reporting standards – initiatives in all PLoS journals
Bridging the gap between research reporting and the broader public – PLoS Blogs

As publishers with strong community supporters and collaborators, we are well positioned to consider the evolution of the research article as we envision a world beyond the PDF where better organization of content, improved integration of data and multimedia content into articles, and more online discussions and openness are the norm.

10. Major Support in 2010

11. Board of Directors, Management

(current as of July 2011)

Board of Directors

Gary E. Ward – Chairman of the Board
Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Co-Director of the Vermont Center for Immunology and Infectious Disease, University of Vermont

Patrick O. Brown – PLoS Co-founder
Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University School of Medicine
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Michael B. Eisen – PLoS Co-founder
Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley

James D. A. Boyle
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law

David Liddle
Partner, US Venture Partners

Elizabeth Marincola
President, Society for Science and the Public
Publisher, Science News

Richard Smith
Director, UnitedHealth Chronic Disease Initiative
Visiting Professor, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Former Chief Executive & Editor of BMJ

Rosalind L. Smyth
Brough Professor of Paediatric Medicine and Head of the Division of Child Health at University of Liverpool

Marty Tenenbaum
Chairman and Founder of CommerceNet

Beth Weil
Head of the Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library, University of California, Berkeley

PLoS Senior Staff

Peter Jerram, Chief Executive Officer

Steve Borostyan, Chief Operating Officer/Chief Financial Officer

Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing

Richard Cave, Director of Information Technology

Katie Sharabati, Director of Human Resources

Susan Au, Director of Finance, Accounting, and Business Intelligence

Liz Allen, Director of Marketing and Business Development

Tracy Pelon, Director of Production

Theo Bloom, Chief Editor, PLoS Biology

Virginia Barbour, Chief Editor, PLoS Medicine

Peter Binfield, Publisher, PLoS ONE and PLoS Community Journals

For a full list of PLoS staff, visit the PLoS Staff page

Editorial Boards

PLoS Biology – Jonathan A. Eisen, Academic Editor-In-Chief (view Editorial Board)

PLoS Medicine
(view Editorial Board)

PLoS Computational Biology – Philip E. Bourne, Editor-in-Chief (view Editorial Board)

PLoS Genetics – Gregory S. Barsh, Editor-in-Chief
(view Editorial Board)

PLoS Pathogens – Kasturi Haldar, Editor-in-Chief
(view Editorial Board)

PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases – Peter Hotez and Serap Aksoy, Editors-in-Chief (view Editorial Board)

PLoS ONE (view Editorial Board)

Leading a transformation in research communication