Concern over tacit conflicts of interest in PLoS ONE peer reviews

After a 10 min inspection there were over a dozen such articles, in the area I was interested in, including editors editing for colleagues from the same academic department! I'd encourage every one too look at their area of interest and see how deep this problem with PLOS is. Its tax payers money that funds this journal through publication fees, and its about scientific integrity. Regarding Dr Calbet's claims, he worked with the co-authors for many years in Copenhagen (Pillegaard et al) and was con-currently publishing with them in PLOS and other journals. Shocking stuff. Jamie Timmons

The problem of abuse that Jamie Timmons flags is a problem that all journals battle with, not just PLoS One. All reputable journals have policies in place to ensure that handling Editors and potential peer reviewers declare any conflicts of interest before embarking on peer review. However, the whole system of peer review is reliant on trust; from trusting that authors are real, to trusting that data is not fabricated, to trusting that reviewers and Editors declare their conflicts of interest... PLoS One is also not unique in publishing the name of the handling Editor, on the peer-reviewed published article. E.g. the Frontiers journals do this. And one would have thought this goes some way to ensuring the system is more transparent, by allowing the reader to identify and consider any potential bias. Another approach to counter this problem is using a system of fully open peer review. BioMed Central operates open peer review on the medical titles in the BMC series (and has done for the past 10 years), and more recently biology titles too, for example, Biology Direct and GigaScience. This ‘openness’ is on two levels. The first is that authors will naturally see the reviewers' names; the second is that if the article is published, the reading public will also see who reviewed the article and how the authors responded. It makes the process transparent, makes the reviewers more accountable and gives credit. We’ve also found the quality of reviewer reports is higher under a system of open peer review. Biology Direct goes further and allows authors to select suitable reviewers from the journal's Editorial Board, in a fully open and transparent way making peer review truly collaborative. In this scenario, you could indeed have a close colleague openly handle a friends manuscript, but be empowered to choose the hottest critics to review the work openly without fear of accusations of bias. So yes, a potential conflict of interest does not necessarily mean wrong-doing. F1000R value openness in their post-publication peer review approach too. Elizabeth Moylan, Biology Editor, BioMed Central

A distinguishing feature of PLOS ONE is that the main criterion for acceptance of publication is whether the conclusions of a paper are supported by the data presented, the data themselves obtained by appropriate methodology and subjected to a clear (rational?) analysis. There are no requirements on significance, priority etc. (except, of course, a requirement that the same data do not appear elsewhere or if repetitions are present that they make sense). Combining the above with openness, which I see is not being disputed here, generates a reasonably good platform for scientific publication, which may be one reason for the Journal's relative success. The examples above simply prove how openness can be used to show potential connections. Whether there is anything inherently problematic about such connections can be left to the judgment of readers (again examples above). The quality of the peer review process, in the form it takes within PLOS ONE, will depend on the individual players. I recall the times when members of the USA National Academy of Sciences could publish their research in PNAS and the mixed reaction of getting a paper published in that prestigious venue that ensued as a result. I think as a community we face a difficult problem. On the one hand everyone benefits if the published literature is of high quality - having numerous studies whose conclusions cannot be substantiated by the experiments performed generates a headache to the student. On the other hand everyone suffers if high quality science remains untold because of too much restriction. At the top of the problem is the strong cultural acceptance of the "publish or perish" rule. I would be interested to know about alternative ways of assessment for individual researchers, where the huge heterogeneity of character can be better accommodated. We are bleeding talent away by only selecting the strong and fast.

Re Fanis's last comment, Kent Anderson of the Scholarly Kitchen wrote a piece earlier this week about Plos One and the publish or perish culture, which people might want to look at: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/01/29/can-mega-journals-maintain-boundaries-when-they-and-their-customers-both-embrace-publish-or-perish/