The vision behind the creation of PLOS Hubs is to show how open-access literature can be reused and reorganized, filtered, and assessed to enable the exchange of research, opinion, and data between community members.

The first site was PLOS Hubs: Clinical Trials, which is limited to PLOS content. In Fall 2010, this Hub was joined by the PLOS Hubs: Biodiversity, which extends beyond PLOS into other open-access content from PubMed Central, and demonstrates some of the data integration that is a key motivation for this project.

Since a Hub is itself not a journal–because it aggregates existing content published in other journals–authors who wish to have their work included in the Hub can publish in any open-access journal, such as a PLOS journal.