Is PLOS ONE a Good Journal? Predatory or Legitimate?

PLOS ONE publishes around 20,000-25,000 papers per year. Its impact factor is 2.6. It accepts papers based on scientific soundness rather than perceived significance. When people hear these facts together, some of them call it predatory.

They're wrong. And understanding why they're wrong matters for making smart journal decisions.

What PLOS ONE Actually Is

PLOS ONE is published by the Public Library of Science, a non-profit organization founded in 2001 by scientists including Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Michael Levitt. It launched in 2006 as the world's first large-scale open-access, soundness-only peer-reviewed journal.

It's indexed in PubMed. It's on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) whitelist. It's not on Beall's list or any credible predatory journal database. It has been around for nearly 20 years. These are not the characteristics of a predatory journal.

The reason it gets called predatory is that its volume and its soundness-only model superficially resemble the patterns of journals that do prey on researchers. High volume, APC-funded, accepts a lot of papers - that's also the description of dozens of actual scam operations.

But the mechanism is completely different.

The Soundness-Only Model: What It Really Means

This is the part most people misunderstand.

PLOS ONE's peer review model instructs reviewers to assess: Are the methods valid? Are the conclusions supported by the data? Is the statistical analysis appropriate? Are the claims properly scoped?

Reviewers are explicitly told NOT to reject papers because they believe the findings aren't important or novel enough. That judgment is left out of the peer review process by design.

This is a deliberate philosophical position. The argument is that significance is often misjudged at the time of publication and that the scientific community, over time, is a better judge of what matters than individual peer reviewers. Negative results and replications, which significance-based journals routinely reject, can be critically important and deserve a home.

This model is not a low standard. It's a different standard. A PLOS ONE paper still goes through real peer review by researchers in the relevant field. Methods that don't hold up get rejected. Claims that exceed the data get sent back. It just doesn't filter on "will anyone care about this."

Why Negative Results Belong in PLOS ONE

The publication bias problem in science is real and documented. Journals that require significance systematically suppress null results, which skews the literature toward inflated effect sizes and unreproducible findings.

PLOS ONE is one of the few major journals where a well-designed study with null results can get published on its merits. If you ran a well-powered, properly controlled experiment and found no effect, that's scientifically valuable information. PLOS ONE will consider it. Most other journals won't.

The Impact Factor: 2.6 in Context

The PLOS ONE impact factor is 2.6, and it's been declining. The peak was around 4.4 in 2010.

Here's why the IF is low, and why that's partly a structural feature rather than a mark of quality:

Volume effect: With 20,000+ papers per year, citations are divided across an enormous denominator. Even if each paper gets cited a reasonable number of times, the average is pulled down by the sheer scale.

Cross-disciplinary scope: PLOS ONE publishes across all fields of science. A chemistry paper and a neuroscience paper and an ecology paper all go into the same journal. The citation pools for different fields don't mix well, which suppresses the IF relative to field-specific journals.

Soundness vs. significance: Not filtering for significance means some papers get cited many times and others get cited rarely. That variance drags the mean down.

What does 2.6 mean in practice? For most field-specific comparisons, it places PLOS ONE below respected specialist journals. A Nature Neuroscience paper and a PLOS ONE paper are not equivalent, and no one is claiming they are.

But that's not the comparison that matters when you're deciding whether to submit.

When PLOS ONE Is the Right Choice

PLOS ONE makes sense in several real situations:

Your paper is sound but doesn't have a "wow" finding. If your work is methodologically rigorous, answers a clear question, and reaches valid conclusions, it deserves to be in the literature. PLOS ONE is built for this case.

You have negative or null results. PLOS ONE is one of the best homes for well-designed null results. The scientific record needs them.

You've been rejected from multiple higher-impact journals for significance reasons, not scientific ones. If reviewers are saying "interesting but not significant enough," PLOS ONE removes that barrier.

You need fee waiver access. PLOS ONE offers full APCs waivers for authors from low-income countries (as defined by the World Bank) and partial waivers for others. The process is straightforward and not contingent on acceptance.

You want fast, predictable review. PLOS ONE's acceptance rate is around 40% and first decisions come within a few weeks. If you need to publish and the timeline matters, PLOS ONE is reliable.

When PLOS ONE Is NOT the Right Choice

Be honest with yourself about when PLOS ONE isn't serving your interests:

You need a high IF for career or grant reasons. At some institutions and for some funding bodies, impact factor thresholds matter. If yours is one of them, PLOS ONE's 2.6 won't clear the bar.

Your field has strong specialist journals. If you work in a field where the community reads and respects specific journals, publishing in PLOS ONE might mean your paper gets less attention from the people who need to see it.

Your paper has a genuinely important finding. If your work would clear the bar at Nature Communications, PNAS, or a high-impact specialist journal, submit there first. Use PLOS ONE as a home for what doesn't fit elsewhere, not as the default destination for your best work.

The APC: $1,895 and the Waiver System

The APC is $1,895, which is significantly lower than most open-access journals at comparable or higher impact factors. Science Advances costs $5,000. Nature Communications costs €5,390. By comparison, PLOS ONE is affordable.

And for authors who genuinely can't pay, PLOS offers a no-questions-asked waiver process for low-income countries and a partial waiver for authors elsewhere. PLOS doesn't accept or reject papers based on the ability to pay - the waiver decision is made separately from the editorial decision.

This makes PLOS ONE genuinely accessible in a way that most open-access journals are not.

The "Predatory" Confusion, Explained

Let's be specific about where the predatory confusion comes from and why it's wrong.

Predatory journals: High-volume, APC-funded operations that accept nearly everything without real peer review. They exist to extract fees from researchers. Quality control is minimal or fake.

PLOS ONE: High-volume, APC-funded journal that accepts approximately 40% of submissions after genuine peer review. The editorial process is real. Methods are checked. Conclusions are evaluated. It's just not filtering on significance.

The surface features (high volume, APC, high acceptance rate) overlap. The mechanism is entirely different. A predatory journal charges you money and publishes without checking your methods. PLOS ONE charges you money and actually reviews your methods, then publishes if they hold up.

The test: Would a paper with fabricated data get through PLOS ONE peer review? No - peer review would catch the methodological problems. Would it get through a predatory journal? Probably yes. That's the difference. PLOS ONE also requires signed reviewer identities in many cases, adding another layer of accountability that genuine predatory operations skip entirely.

PLOS ONE's Place in the Ecosystem

The scientific publishing ecosystem needs PLOS ONE and journals like it. The significance bias in high-impact journals is real and causes harm to the scientific record. Negative results, replications, and technically sound but "boring" findings all deserve publication.

PLOS ONE fills that role better than any other high-volume journal. It has genuine quality control, real indexing, no paywall, and affordable APCs with waivers available.

Don't treat it as a backup for your best work. Do treat it as the right venue for sound science that doesn't fit significance-driven journals.

Data Availability and Reproducibility Requirements

PLOS ONE has one of the strongest data availability policies in publishing. Authors are required to make all data underlying the paper's figures and conclusions available without restriction. This means:

• Raw data must be deposited in a public repository (Dryad, Zenodo, Figshare, or field-specific repositories) or provided as supporting information
• The Data Availability Statement is mandatory and must include specific accession numbers or repository links: vague statements like "data available on request" are no longer accepted
• Code used in analyses must be shared under an open license where possible

For researchers who work with sensitive human data (clinical records, identifiable patient information), PLOS ONE has processes for restricted-access data with appropriate justification.

This policy is part of PLOS ONE's broader commitment to reproducibility. The soundness-only review model works better when the data is genuinely available for others to re-analyze and build on. It's one of the genuine advantages of the journal: papers published there are more reproducible than the average because of these requirements, not despite them.

Sources

• Public Library of Science: plos.org/plos-one
• Directory of Open Access Journals: doaj.org
• PLOS Article Processing Charge and waiver policy: plos.org/publish/fees
• Clarivate Journal Citation Reports 2025
• Dwan K et al. (2008). Systematic review of the empirical evidence of study publication bias. PLOS ONE 3(8): e3081.
• PLOS ONE impact factor history
• PLOS ONE acceptance rate
• PLOS ONE submission guide
• Full PLOS ONE journal profile

The Bottom Line

PLOS ONE is a good journal for sound science that doesn't need to make an outsized novelty claim. If your paper's methods are rigorous and the question is well-defined, PLOS ONE is an efficient route to open-access publication. The bar is real but navigable.

See also

• PLOS ONE Impact Factor 2026: 2.6
• PLOS ONE Review Time
• Scientific Reports vs PLOS ONE