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An Open Letter to the Community from PLOS CEO, Alison Mudditt

Alison Mudditt Open Science Publishing Thought Leaders

As the new PLOS CEO, I’ve spent my first months assessing the organization and planning for a thriving future. We are in the midst of shaping our next innovative steps in pursuit of maximal openness and transparency in research communication, and assessing what changes we need to make as an organization. Some of these changes will likely go unnoticed outside of PLOS. Others may cause speculation. For clarity and transparency’s sake, I’ve chosen to write an open letter to the communities PLOS serves, so we can encourage open dialogue and so that you can share in our continuing evolution.

Since the very beginning PLOS has been a publisher, advocacy organization and innovator. Our roots in innovation run deep; from mobilizing scientists’ desire for free and Open Access to the literature and building PLOS ONE to the journal it is today, to pioneering Article-Level Metrics as an alternative to journal impact factors and launching our forward-thinking data policy to positively influence credit, recognition and reproducibility.

One of our top priorities this coming year is to improve the author experience since our authors are at the center of everything we do. Among their top concerns are ‘time to first decision’ and ‘time to publication’. We share their concerns and are committed to reducing this time as much as possible across all our journals. We are embarking on an ambitious plan to reinvigorate PLOS ONE’s editorial board, increase the efficiency of reviewer assignment, and develop and deploy new analytical capabilities to ensure no manuscript is unnecessarily stalled.

Part of this initiative will involve changes around the workflow system – Aperta™ – we set out to develop several years ago with the goal to streamline manuscript submission and handling. At the time we began, there was very little available that would create the end-to-end workflow we envisioned as the key to opening research on multiple fronts. But the development process has proved more challenging than expected and as a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to halt development of Aperta. This will enable us to more sharply focus on internal processes that can have more immediate benefit for the communities we serve and the authors who choose to publish with us. The progress made with Aperta will not be wasted effort: we are currently exploring how to best leverage its unique strengths and capabilities to support core PLOS priorities like preprints and innovation in peer review. This will be part of our planning for 2018.

Innovation is not unlike science itself; there are hurdles to success, determination is integral to advance in one’s work, and knowing when to set aside any particular project to move forward is key. What I, and hopefully others, appreciate is that PLOS continues to be an organization willing to take risks in order to best serve scientific communities across the full spectrum of topics and interests.

Moreover, it’s our goal to optimize the openness and integrity of the publication process by ensuring that research outcomes are discoverable, freely available and reusable and that science communication is constructive, transparent and verifiable. You will be hearing more from me on our core initiatives in early 2018.

PLOS is steadfast in our commitment to our mission and communities and I look forward to sharing our milestones with the scientific and publishing community in 2018 and beyond.

Sincerely,

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