Back in 2000, PLOS (or the Public Library of Science, as it was then known) was just the beginnings of an idea in the minds of co-founders Harold Varmus, Patrick O. Brown, and Michael Eisen. Nearly 25 years later, its goals remain unchanged: to break boundaries, empower researchers, redefine quality, and (back in 2003, when its first journal, PLOS Biology launched, most controversially), to open science. Importantly, PLOS has always viewed its success in achieving these goals in terms of adoption by the wider community. You may or may not agree about whether they have successfully advanced all of these goals, but we must surely all agree that they have definitely broken some boundaries in the cause of opening science.

Open access (OA) may be mainstream now but, 20-odd years ago, it was seen as a huge threat by most publishers, and PLOS, as one of the first fully OA publishers, was a major disruptor. The original spark for PLOS’s founding was Brown, Eisen, and Varmus’s open letter calling for researchers to pledge that, from September 2001, they would “publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.” The letter was signed by 34,000 scientists, and PLOS was subsequently launched as a not-for-profit publisher in order to prove that OA was viable. Its first two journals (PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine) showed that publishing could be both highly selective AND open access. As a result of PLOS’s success, and after a fair amount of prodding by funders, other publishers also came on board; at the time of writing, DOAJ lists 10.5M OA journal articles, published by nearly 21k journals. We’ve certainly come a long way!

But what of PLOS itself in the intervening years? Has it continued to break boundaries and open science? And has it done so while empowering researchers and redefining quality? In this post, I’m going to take a quick look back at PLOS’s evolution before looking ahead to what I think, if successful, could be one of their most impactful and boundary-breaking initiatives to date — their recently announced project to explore the needs of the research ecosystem and to design a fundamental change in how research results are published. This post is based on a recent conversation and follow-up emails about this project with PLOS CEO (and fellow Scholarly Kitchen Chef) Alison Mudditt, and its Chief Scientific Officer, Veronique Kiermer, .

First, a bit of context. There’s a brief history of PLOS on their website, but I want to take a look at it through the lens of PLOS’s recent strategic planning cycles. Over the course of its first decade or so, PLOS disrupted the publishing ecosystem in several ways. In addition to launching its first journals, it also started PLOS ONE (the first megajournal, intended by the founders to help redefine scientific publishing by focusing on rigorous research rather than perceived impact) and introduced an open data policy to open up research beyond the article. However, by the time Alison arrived in 2017, PLOS was facing some fundamental challenges: declining revenues and the threat of a first-ever deficit; declining submissions to PLOS ONE, and an increasing perception that its content was low quality; a loss of market share by the (then) seven PLOS  journals; and a range of organizational “debts” incurred during the previous period of rapid growth. To quote Alison: “In many ways, our revenue and output growth had outpaced the development of our capabilities and operations.”

The first strategic planning cycle under Alison’s leadership (2018-2020), therefore, focused on stabilization and seeding innovation, through a combination of improving operations (in order to achieve financial sustainability) and developing an innovation pipeline (to identify PLOS’s next “big thing”). Building on that, in the following cycle (2021-2024), PLOS sought to lay the foundations for breaking some more boundaries by reestablishing itself as a thought leader and influencer, in particular, by challenging orthodoxy, harnessing underappreciated trends, and addressing unarticulated needs.

Which brings us to the current planning cycle (2024-2027), which was the main focus of my conversations with Alison and Veronique. WIth this new project, PLOS has set itself the ambitious goal of seeding transformational (my highlight) change in scholarly publishing: overcoming two of the big barriers that currently exclude many researchers from participating in Open Science — the lack of recognition for Open Science contributions, and the lack of affordability — by thinking beyond the article and beyond the Article Processing Charge (APC).

The first phase of this project will focus on research and design — with extensive community input — and is expected to take 18 months; based on the findings from this phase, they will then move on to develop and test a prototype product. The research and design phase comprises three elements:

1. Design of a knowledge stack, in which all important contributions to Open Science can be discovered, the researchers involved recognized, and their contributions evaluated (for example, by their funders or institutions)
2. Financial modeling — developing an alternative, non-APC based business model for the knowledge stack
3. Community building through broad and deep community consultation, supported by a clear communications plan

As someone with a passion for improving recognition and reward for all forms of research contributions, when I learned of this project I immediately wanted to know more. My personal interest stems from my time at ORCID, whose vision is “a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions…”. Research is about so much more than publishing an article in a journal, and yet that’s what so many — if not most — researchers are incentivized to do. One of the reasons often given for this is the challenge of accessing reliable data about other outputs and contributions. But enabling recognition for all forms of contribution (i.e., not just journal articles) and all types of contributor (i.e., not just academic researchers) is one of the key use cases for ORCID and other persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as digital object identifiers (DOIs). ORCID records, for example, can contain information about many different forms of research contribution — from data sets to artistic performances, and from peer review to volunteer work — most of which can be or have been assigned their own PIDs. Tools (such as the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), now a NISO standard), as well as initiatives like the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) are other great examples of community efforts to effect change in how we recognize and reward different forms of research contribution. But progress has been painfully slow — mostly (in my view) because the culture change needed to move away from the current  system of recognition is huge, and it will require collective action by all sectors of the community. And, despite CRediT, DORA, PIDs, and other cross-community efforts, there’s still a tendency (on all our parts) to pass the buck (change will only happen if [funders/ institutions/ publishers/ researchers] lead the charge). But if no one takes the initiative, nothing will ever change.

So I find it inspiring that PLOS is willing to put a significant amount of time and effort into trying to break down this barrier — supported, for the first 18 months of research and design, by generous funding of $1m from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation and $1.5m from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

However, as mentioned, I do also have some concerns. This is a big project on a tight deadline and, even with a generous budget, there is a lot of work to be done. PLOS is staffing up to execute this work: a mix of contractors and dedicated PLOS staff will be working concurrently on the three strands of the first phase of the project for the next 18 months. But, while there won’t be any actual technical development during this phase, it will still be a major undertaking to onboard that many new people, make sure that time really is freed up to enable relevant staff to work on the project, and bring team members along who are less or not involved (and who may worry that this is going to add more to their own workloads). Alison and Veronique’s aim is, therefore, to keep the project connected with, but separate from, PLOS’s day-to-day work. They recognize the need to bring people with them internally, but without disrupting their workloads, and they hope that the PLOS executive team’s leadership, alongside plenty of internal consultation, will do the trick.

Another area of concern I raised with Alison and Veronique relates specifically to the community-building strand of the project. Having done a lot of this sort of work myself, I know that it’s both important and challenging. PLOS plans to engage with “researchers, funders, research institutions, libraries, and the digital infrastructure to design solutions based on the knowledge stack, that will work across disciplines, regional, and economic contexts.” That’s quite a tall order and, when I asked, Alison and Veronique clarified that, in fact, this project will not, for example, encompass all disciplines — they don’t have the expertise (or, in my view, the time!). Encouragingly, they are committed to reaching beyond the usual suspects virtually, by building a large user panel comprising hundreds of volunteers, who will be asked to help with user experience (UX) testing, research, and more. They also plan to convene a number of regional in-person meetings that will, by necessity, be restricted to small numbers of participants. However, they will be quite diverse in terms of geography, economics, and organization type, and PLOS plans to then validate the in-person discussions through follow-up work with larger groups. Per Alison and Veronique, PLOS is not currently planning to proactively engage with other publishers; instead, based on their theory of change, they want to move fast to try to understand PLOS’s own circumstances and motivations, and to design a solution that works for them. However, they will be transparent about what PLOS is doing and how it works; and any new development will be open source, so that other publishers can adopt or adapt it going forward.

My last big question for Alison and Veronique was how confident they are that this project will be successful — and what will that success look like? For the initial planning phase, their goal is to “be confident that we can build something that addresses the problems we set out to tackle,” and the anticipated outputs are: a proposed solution design for the knowledge stack grounded in user experience; an economic analysis and business model for the knowledge stack; a communications program, including a public report; and a small group of engaged stakeholders who have committed to participating in the next phase of the project. After that, they expect to spend several years building a prototype “something” that enables their authors to showcase, connect, and be recognized for a wider variety of contributions, supported by a financial model that will enable them to pay for this product or service equitably. That seems like a pretty good goal to me, and they are (reasonably!) confident that it’s one PLOS can achieve. It would certainly set us on the way to transforming how we value (and evaluate) research contributions, and would also be very much in keeping with PLOS’s own goal of breaking barriers in the cause of opening science. So I will be watching their progress with interest and very much hope they’re successful — given their track record of driving change in scholarly publishing, I’m cautiously optimistic!