PLOS

Scholarly communication is changing rapidly. Large scale integrity threats like paper mills and misuse of AI threaten the integrity of the scholarly record. We, as publishers, must meet these challenges head on.  We work proactively to detect and address emerging issues. Our journal policies and processes ensure that the research we publish adheres to the highest standards of integrity and publication ethics, and we will continue to review and evolve these workflows as AI tools and behaviors change.  Our dedicated Publication Ethics team also regularly contributes to the development of industry-leading policies and working groups including COPE guidance, United2Act, STM Integrity Hub project, the National Information Standards Organization CREC Working Group and the International Research Integrity Reference Group. We exist to serve the research community, and that means publishing research you can trust. Learn more about our commitment: https://plos.io/4iqEfqd #CatalystForBetter

🤝 We’re excited to announce a new collaboration between the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) and PLOS Water: a collection of papers focusing on policy-relevant, science-based solutions. This collaborative series entitled “A New Era for Water: Policy-Relevant Research for Solutions” will showcase articles exploring the science, governance, and solutions needed to address problems and enable a resilient future in the era of Global Water Bankruptcy.    Read the announcement and learn more about this upcoming collection on the PLOS Latitude blog: https://plos.io/4A0nMAs

We are ending this #OpenAccessWeek with some inspiration. Practicing open science leads to economic benefits. Open access lowers the barrier to access and collaboration, helping science progress faster, globally. But we can take those benefits one step further by sharing more elements of research that enable reuse. Research outputs like data and code make it easier for others to verify, reproduce or build upon existing work. When we also have infrastructure that facilitates reuse, we see greater research efficiency. The report offers practical ways we can lower the cost of knowledge for all, by sharing more components of research like data and code, investing in infrastructure that enables reuse, and realigning our incentive system to recognize more research contributions, not just research articles. 🔗 Read the full report here: https://plos.io/4jzTIGZ

What does it mean to be a non-profit? When we consider the cost of knowledge theme for this #OpenAccessWeek, it's worth asking where funding goes and who benefits.  We are a non-profit organization which means we exist to serve the research community, not shareholders. We undertake activities that catalyze broader change in scholarly communication and change publishing for the better.  Our publication fees and institutional agreements support the cost of maintaining our journals and enabling our mission. This allows us to invest in people, tools, and processes that enhance the author's experience and help us maintain a leading voice in matters of publication ethics and research integrity. It also makes it possible for us to provide tools and services that facilitate open science practice and to act as an advocate in the broader community. We also provide an annual financial overview and price transparency reporting. We believe in a future that is open to all, for all. https://plos.io/4sfi3nC

We're delighted at PLOS to be sponsoring the UNC Water and Health Conference this year, through their new Emerging Voices initiative! It's critical for the conference to hear directly from those who are experiencing some of the most acute challenges across water, sanitation, hygiene and health. We're looking forward to meeting many of the recipients next week in Chapel Hill, and hearing from this next generation of global changemakers in water and health. #WaterAndHealth #WASH #EmergingVoices #GlobalHealth

At the heart of this year’s #OpenAccessWeek theme is equity. In our last post we talked about our institutional agreements and the solutions we have designed to help share the costs of publishing more equitably. We also believe this challenge needs to be addressed systemically throughout the scholarly ecosystem.   Since 2023, we have been part of a multistakeholder working group to identify business models that enable equitable participation in knowledge-sharing. Together with cOAlition S and Jisc, we released a framework to help librarians, consortia, and funders identify equitable business models.  The How Equitable Is It? tool gives stakeholders a way to navigate equity indicators such as reuse rights, fee transparency, and enablement of open science practices like data and code sharing. These factors all help determine who can publish under certain models and how that research will be made accessible to the broader public for learning and reuse. 🔗 Explore the tool here: https://plos.io/4i1pD0o

Reflecting on #OpenAccessWeek's theme, how can costs be shared amongst the many stakeholders who produce and benefit from scientific knowledge? All publishing services have a cost. Even in a digital era, we need to invest in the platforms, tools and people that facilitate the peer review and editorial process, foster community engagement, and safeguard the scholarly record from integrity threats.  We believe in a multi-model ecosystem that supports researchers who want to make their work open, in ways that make sense for different regional, cultural and disciplinary contexts. This is the approach we have taken to provide APC-alternatives for our own portfolio of journals.  We designed our Global Equity model to provide more regionally equitable opportunities for institutions around the world to participate in open access agreements and remove financial barriers for their authors to publish in our journals.   Our Community Action Publishing model was developed to solve a different challenge: to sustainably manage the cost of selective publishing. Through this non-APC model, journal costs are distributed more equitably amongst the stakeholders who publish in those journals.  Learn more about our models on our website: https://plos.io/4BckPxU

PLOS Water Co-Editor-in-Chief, Sera Young, and Executive Editor, Guillaume Wright, will be attending the upcoming The Water Institute at UNC Gillings Water & Health Conference in North Carolina from 26-30 October where we are proud sponsors of this year's event 💧 We are pleased to once again partner with The Water Institute at UNC to publish a special collection of articles in PLOS Water, PLOS Global Public Health, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, and PLOS Sustainability and Transformation from the conference. If you are visiting, stop by Stand 3 to learn more. If you are interested in submitting your work to the next UNC Conference, find out more: https://plos.io/4yb2kIj

It is #OpenAccessWeek and this year’s theme is “The cost of knowledge.” We have always believed knowledge should be accessible to everyone without barriers. That is why PLOS was founded. PLOS is proud to have been part of the movement to #OpenAccess, but is it time to move beyond the article? Find out more in our Redefining Publishing report: https://plos.io/4yWfWYd