Dear Chris

We were given information about PLOS One by Catriona MacCallum, and are considering submitting a paper to it. Our main concerns are:

a) Will papers accepted in PLOS One be considered as proper peer review papers? Firstly, is the short technical review sufficent to be considered "peer review"? And secondly, if the open access peer review is permanent, then do the papers become more like discussion papers rather than peer review papers?

b) Following publication in PLOS One, is it anticipated that a selection of well received papers would migrate to a higher impact journal, like PLOS Biology etc? Will PLOS One always be considered as a repository for papers which were not selected by Editors to be sent to referees for jornals like PLOS Biology etc? Or is it envisaged that PLOS one will eventually fully replace the subjective editorial selection process and the high impact PLOS journals? (The result being that high impact becomes self regulating through PLOS One...)

c) Will PLOS One be included in the ISI database as a peer review scientific journal? If it is not included, then other scientists will not be able to find the PLOS One papers and therefore it will have a lower impact.

With best regards

Mark Sutton and Trevor Blackall.