Nature Communications vs PLOS ONE: Which Should You Submit To?

Nature Communications asks: "Is this an important advance that scientists beyond the immediate subfield would want to read?" Reviewers evaluate both rigor AND significance. A technically perfect paper with a boring result gets rejected.

PLOS ONE asks: "Are the methods appropriate, the statistics correct, and the conclusions supported by the data?" Reviewers evaluate rigor only. A technically perfect paper with a boring result gets accepted. That's the explicit editorial policy, and it's the reason PLOS ONE exists.

This distinction matters because many researchers treat PLOS ONE as a "lesser" Nature Communications. It isn't. It's a journal with a fundamentally different purpose: preserving technically sound science in the published record, regardless of whether anyone finds the result exciting.

• The paper has genuine cross-field significance. Researchers in adjacent fields would stop to read the abstract.
• Career impact matters. A Nature Communications paper carries real weight on CVs, in grant applications, and at hiring committees.
• Your institution covers the $7,350 APC. Without institutional coverage, the cost is hard to justify for many labs.
• You want the Nature brand. In many fields (especially biology), "Nature Communications" on a publication list signals a quality threshold that PLOS ONE doesn't.
• The paper was rejected from Nature and you want to cascade. The transfer carries reviewer reports and saves time.

• Your research is methodologically rigorous but not a significance breakthrough. PLOS ONE was designed for exactly this.
• You have null results, negative findings, or a replication study. PLOS ONE is one of the few venues that genuinely welcomes these. The scientific record needs them.
• Cost matters. $2,477 vs $7,350, for labs publishing 5 OA papers a year, that's $24,365 saved.
• You need higher acceptance certainty. At ~31% acceptance, PLOS ONE is roughly 4x more likely to accept your paper than Nature Communications (~8%). If your methods are solid, the odds are meaningfully in your favor.
• Your funder requires OA and you don't have APC budget for Nature Communications.
• Your data is ready for public sharing. PLOS ONE's strict data availability requirements are actually an advantage, they signal transparency and reproducibility.

A common and legitimate approach: submit to Nature Communications first. If rejected, the feedback usually tells you whether the problem was significance (paper is sound but not impactful enough) or methodology (paper has real issues).

• Rejected for significance: Submit to PLOS ONE. Your paper is exactly what PLOS ONE publishes, sound science that doesn't need a significance argument.
• Rejected for methodology: Fix the problems first. PLOS ONE will catch the same methodological issues because its review is focused entirely on soundness.

Budget the cascade carefully: 4-8 weeks at Nature Communications before a desk rejection, then another 6 months at PLOS ONE. Total: 8-9 months from initial submission to PLOS ONE publication. If your timeline is tight, going directly to PLOS ONE is faster.

For a productive lab, the difference funds a research assistant or reagents for a year. Check institutional agreements before assuming you pay full price for either journal.

Nature Communications carries significantly more career weight. A single Nature Communications first-author paper can move a postdoc from the "interesting" pile to the "serious" pile at faculty searches. PLOS ONE doesn't have that effect.

But PLOS ONE has its own career value: building a publication record, establishing a body of work, and ensuring your data is in the public record. Early-career researchers sometimes get paralyzed chasing high-IF journals. Two PLOS ONE papers plus one Nature Communications paper is a stronger record than zero publications after 18 months of rejections from top journals.

Nature Communications uses full-time professional editors who manage review across broad disciplinary clusters. Reviewers are typically 2-3 experts who evaluate both scientific rigor and the significance of the advance. SciRev data shows review quality at 3.5/5 and overall handling satisfaction at 3.0/5, decent but not exceptional. The 8-day desk decision is a real advantage: you find out quickly whether the paper has a chance.

PLOS ONE uses over 6,000 volunteer Academic Editors (working faculty) who handle papers in their area of expertise. Reviewers evaluate soundness only. The review culture tends to be constructive, reviewers aren't asked to judge whether the result is exciting, so the feedback focuses on "is the science correct?" rather than "is this impactful enough?" The 17-day desk decision is slower, and the 188-day total timeline (6.3 months) can be frustrating for a journal with no significance hurdle.

One practical difference: Nature Communications reviewers sometimes request additional experiments to strengthen the significance argument. PLOS ONE reviewers almost never request new experiments for significance, they only ask for methodological clarifications or statistical corrections.