PLOS ONE APC and Open Access: The World's Largest Journal at One of the Lowest Prices

PLOS is a nonprofit organization, and the standard PLOS ONE APC still sits below most Nature Portfolio and Cell Press open-access venues. This is one of the journal metrics where PLOS ONE's megajournal model benefits authors on tighter budgets.

One feature that sets PLOS apart: the APC is locked at the submission date rate, not the acceptance date. If PLOS raises the price after you submit, you still pay the rate that was in effect when your manuscript entered the system. This protects authors from mid-review price increases, something most publishers don't offer.

For context, $2,477 is roughly 34% of what Nature Communications charges ($7,350) and 45% of what Science Advances charges ($5,450). The savings are still substantial. A lab publishing 5 papers per year saves $24,365 by choosing PLOS ONE over Nature Communications. That's a postdoc's salary in some countries.

PLOS ONE was the original megajournal, launched in 2006 by the Public Library of Science. It pioneered the concept of peer review based solely on scientific soundness rather than perceived novelty or impact. If the methods are sound and the conclusions are supported by the data, PLOS ONE will publish it.

This editorial philosophy changed academic publishing permanently. Scientific Reports (Springer Nature), PeerJ, Frontiers journals, and others all followed the model PLOS ONE created. The megajournal category now accounts for hundreds of thousands of articles per year across publishers.

PLOS ONE's JIF sits at 2.9 (2024). That number has declined from its peak of 4.4 in 2012, which reflects both the journal's enormous volume and the field's general shift in how impact factors are distributed. For researchers in fields where journal brand matters less than accessibility and speed, the IF number is secondary to the practical advantages.

The journal is indexed in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and every other major database. Articles receive DOIs, appear in Google Scholar, and are treated identically to articles in any other peer-reviewed journal for tenure, grants, and citations.

PLOS offers institutional agreements, including a Flat Fee agreement that covers PLOS ONE. Under a Flat Fee agreement, the institution pays an annual flat fee based on historical publication activity, and its authors can publish in the covered PLOS journals (PLOS ONE among them) at no cost to the authors.

PLOS works with libraries and consortia on institutional agreements and lists participating institutions on its institutional partners page. If your university recently signed an agreement, you may have zero-cost PLOS ONE access without knowing it. Check your library's open access partnerships page.

For institutions without Flat Fee agreements, many maintain OA funds that cover APCs at PLOS ONE's level. A $2,477 charge falls within the limits of most university OA funds, which typically cap at $2,500-$5,000.

PLOS has one of the most generous waiver programs in academic publishing:

Full waivers: Publication in any PLOS journal is free for authors based at institutions in a Research4Life Group A country who have no external funding for their research study. Authors at institutions in Research4Life Group B countries with no external funding pay a reduced fee of $940 at PLOS ONE. Authors must indicate they require Research4Life fee assistance at the time of manuscript submission.

Fee assistance: The PLOS Publication Fee Assistance (PFA) program is for authors unable to pay all or part of their publication fees who can demonstrate financial need. PLOS considers applications on a case-by-case basis, and authors should exhaust alternative funding sources before applying. A decision is usually sent within 10 business days.

Process: Assistance must be formally applied for at submission, using the form in the submission system. Requests made during the review process or after acceptance will not be considered, and authors cannot apply by email or through direct request to journal editors. Editors and reviewers never see whether you requested assistance or what you're paying.

No impact on review: PLOS explicitly states that fee assistance requests don't affect editorial decisions. The manuscript review process is completely separated from the payment process.

The organization's mission is open access to scientific knowledge, and their waiver program reflects that.

PLOS ONE publishes articles under a CC BY license (articles by US Government employees use a CC0 license). This is non-negotiable. You can't choose CC BY-NC or any other variant.

CC BY is the most permissive Creative Commons license. It allows anyone to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to, and reuse the work for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as they provide proper attribution.

For funder compliance, this is perfect. Every major funder mandate that specifies a license requires CC BY. PLOS ONE meets this automatically without any action from the author.

Some researchers are uncomfortable with the commercial reuse provision. It's worth understanding what this means in practice: pharmaceutical companies or textbook publishers could reuse your figures or data without asking permission. For most researchers, this isn't an issue. The work gets more exposure, and you get cited. But if commercial reuse is a genuine concern for your specific research, PLOS ONE may not be the right fit.

PLOS says all of its journals comply with major funder requirements for open access sharing. Check your own funder's current policy before you submit.

PLOS says authors don't need to worry about their article's eligibility under major funder requirements. There's no license to select, no embargo to manage, no workaround needed. Submit, get accepted, the compliance happens automatically.

PLOS also handles PMC deposit automatically. Your article appears in PubMed Central without any action on your part.

PLOS ONE is transparent about its fee structure. PLOS lists $2,477 as the fee for a standard article, payable upon acceptance. However:

• Data deposition: PLOS ONE has strict data availability requirements. All data underlying your findings must be publicly available. This usually means depositing in a public repository (Dryad, Figshare, institutional repositories). Most are free for standard datasets, but very large files (genomics, imaging) may incur storage fees.

• Formatting: PLOS ONE offers format-free initial submission and waives formatting requirements until a provisional Editorial Accept decision. This saves time compared to journals with strict formatting requirements. After a provisional accept, the journal runs final checks on formatting and technical requirements, so budget time to fix any it flags.

• Revision timeline: Check your decision letter for the revision requirements, and if you need more time to prepare your revision, email plosone@plos.org to request an extension.

• Preprints: PLOS says posting a manuscript on a preprint server does not impact consideration of the manuscript at any PLOS journal. If you posted to bioRxiv or medRxiv before submission, that's fine.

PLOS ONE reviews manuscripts for technical soundness only. Reviewers aren't asked to evaluate novelty or significance, just whether the study is methodologically sound and the conclusions are supported by the evidence.

This editorial philosophy means:

• Faster decisions: PLOS's 2025 metrics list a median time to first decision of 32 days.

• Acceptance rate: PLOS's 2025 metrics list an acceptance rate of 26%.

• Less subjectivity: Rejection is based on methodological flaws, not an editor's opinion about whether the finding is "interesting enough."

For researchers who have been through multiple rounds of rejection at selective journals, PLOS ONE offers a reliable path to publication for sound work that doesn't need a prestige stamp.

PLOS ONE makes sense in several specific scenarios:

1. Budget is tight: At $2,477, it's a reasonably priced reputable option. If your grant is running low or you don't have dedicated publication funds, PLOS ONE keeps costs manageable.

1. Speed matters: PLOS's 2025 metrics list a 32-day median time to first decision and a 209-day median time to publication.

1. Funder compliance is non-negotiable: Universal compliance with every major mandate. Zero risk of a compliance problem.

1. Your institution has a Flat Fee agreement: If so, and you are an eligible author, it costs you nothing.

1. Technical soundness, not JIF, is what you need: For datasets, methods papers, replication studies, or negative results that deserve the scientific record.

PLOS ONE isn't the right choice if journal prestige is the primary criterion for your career stage. For tenure cases at research-intensive universities or competitive grant applications, higher-IF journals like PNAS or Nature Communications carry more weight. But for the vast majority of scientific publications, PLOS ONE provides a solid, well-indexed, universally compliant home at a price that doesn't drain your research budget.

Before submitting anywhere, it's worth making sure your methodology and presentation are clean. Even at PLOS ONE, technical flaws in your manuscript lead to rejection. PLOS ONE submission readiness check to catch issues before reviewers do.

For manuscripts targeting PLOS ONE, the most consistent mistake is authors submitting a paper written for Nature or PNAS without updating the framing. PLOS ONE reviews for technical soundness, not novelty or impact. A manuscript with a lengthy introduction justifying why this result matters globally, careful positioning of prior work, and a discussion inflating the claim is not wrong at PLOS ONE, it just signals that the author's mental model is still the selective journal.

Reviewers at PLOS ONE expect a more neutral, methods-forward presentation: here is the question, here is the method, here are the results, here are the limitations. The significance case does not need to be made for editorial purposes.

The second pattern: authors who do not know that PLOS ONE has strict data availability requirements before they hit the payment stage. Every dataset underlying the findings must be publicly deposited. Discovering a data deposition obligation after acceptance, when the lab's proprietary data is involved, can delay or complicate publication significantly. Check the data availability policy before submitting.