PLOS

---

title: "PLOS" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["plos", "publishing-companies-established-in-2003", "2003-establishments-in-california", "internet-properties-established-in-2003", "organizations-based-in-san-francisco", "science-and-technology-in-the-san-francisco-bay-area", "open-access-publishers", "non-profit-academic-publishers", "articles-containing-video-clips"] description: "Nonprofit open-access publisher" topic_path: "society/education" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Nonprofit open-access publisher ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox publisher"]

Field	Value
name	Public Library of Science
image	Logo Plos.svg
caption	PLOS logo since March 2020
founded
(public operations)
founder
country	United States
headquarters	Levi's Plaza, San Francisco, California
keypeople	Alison Mudditt (CEO)
publications	Academic journals
topics	Science
url
::

| name = Public Library of Science | image = Logo Plos.svg | caption = PLOS logo since March 2020 | parent = | status = | traded_as = | predecessor = | founded = (public operations) | founder = | successor = | country = United States | headquarters = Levi's Plaza, San Francisco, California | distribution = | keypeople = Alison Mudditt (CEO) | publications = Academic journals | topics = Science | genre = | imprints = | revenue = | numemployees = | url =

PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launched its first journal, PLOS Biology, in October 2003.

As of 2024, PLOS publishes 14 academic journals, including 7 journals indexed within the Science Citation Index Expanded, and consequently 7 journals ranked with an impact factor.

PLOS journals are included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). PLOS is also a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), a participating publisher and supporter of the Initiative for Open Citations, and a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

History

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Open_Access_PLoS.svg" caption="The Open Access logo"] ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Mechanism-for-Multiple-Ligand-Recognition-by-the-Human-Transferrin-Receptor-pbio.0000051.sv001.ogv" caption="doi-access = free }}"] ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Thank_you_for_practicing_Open_Science_-_Igsi8c4BjI8.webm" caption="PLOS created this fictional thank you note from the future to contemporary researchers for sharing their research openly"] ::

The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The petition called for all scientists to pledge that, from September 2001, they would discontinue submission of articles to journals that did not make the full text of their articles available to all, free and unfettered, either immediately or after a delay of no more than six months. Although tens of thousands signed the petition, most did not act upon its terms; and in August 2001, Brown and Eisen announced that they would start their own nonprofit publishing operation. In December 2002, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded PLOS a $9 million grant, which it followed in May 2006 with a $1 million grant to help PLOS achieve financial sustainability and launch new free-access biomedical journals.

The PLOS organizers turned their attention to starting their own journal along the lines of the UK-based BioMed Central, which has been publishing open-access scientific articles in the biological sciences in journals such as Genome Biology since 2000. The PLOS journals are what is described as "open-access content"; all content is published under the Creative Commons "attribution" license. The project states (quoting the Budapest Open Access Initiative) that: "The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

As a publishing company, the Public Library of Science officially launched its operation on 13 October 2003, with the publication of a print and online scientific journal entitled PLOS Biology, and has since launched 11 more journals. One, PLOS Clinical Trials, has since been merged into PLOS ONE. Following the merger, the company started the PLOS Hub for Clinical Trials to collect journal articles published in any PLOS journal that related to clinical trials; the hub was discontinued in July 2013.

PLOS became a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact in 2023, and has taken steps to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These include the introduction of five new open-access journals in 2021 to publish research relevant to the SDGs: PLOS Climate, PLOS Water, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, PLOS Digital Health, and PLOS Global Public Health.

In 2011, the Public Library of Science became an official financial supporting organization of Healthcare Information For All by 2015, a global initiative that advocates unrestricted access to medical knowledge, sponsoring the first HIFA2015 Webinar in 2012.

In 2012, the organization quit using the stylization "PLoS" to identify itself and began using only "PLOS".

In 2016, PLOS confirmed that its chief executive officer, Elizabeth Marincola, would be leaving for personal and professional reasons at the end of that year. In May 2017, PLOS announced that their new CEO would be Alison Mudditt with effect from June.

In 2021, PLOS announced a policy that required changes in reporting for researchers working in other countries as an attempt to address neo-colonial parachute research practices.

Financial model

To fund the journals, PLOS charges an article processing charge (APC) to be paid by the author or the author's employer or funder. In the United States, institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have pledged that recipients of their grants will be allocated funds to cover such author charges. The Global Participation Initiative (GPI) was instituted in 2012, by which authors in "group-one countries" are not charged a fee and those in "group-two countries" are given a fee reduction. (In all cases, decisions to publish are based solely on editorial criteria.)

PLOS was launched with grants totaling US$13 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation.{{Cite journal | author = Declan Butler | title = Open-access journal hits rocky times | journal = Nature | volume = 441 | page = 914 | date = June 2006 | doi = 10.1038/441914a | pmid = 16791161 | issue = 7096 | bibcode = 2006Natur.441..914B | author-link = Declan Butler | doi-access = free

Publications

::data[format=table]

Title	Inception	ISSN
PLOS Biology	2003-10-01
PLOS Medicine	2004-10-01
PLOS Computational Biology	2005-05-01
PLOS Genetics	2005-06-01
PLOS Pathogens	2005-09-01
PLOS Clinical Trials
(later merged into PLOS ONE)	2006-04-01
PLOS ONE	2006-12-01
PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases	2007-10-01
PLOS Hub for Clinical Trials	2007-09-01	—
PLOS Currents	2009-08-01
PLOS Climate	2021
PLOS Digital Health	2021
PLOS Global Public Health	2021
PLOS Sustainability and Transformation	2021
PLOS Water	2021
PLOS Ageing and Health	title=PLOS launches two journals to address critical real-world challenges	url=https://theplosblog.plos.org/2025/11/plos-launches-two-journals-to-address-critical-real-world-challenges/
PLOS Ecosystems	November 2025	—
::

Other partners

In April 2017, PLOS was one of the founding partners in the Initiative for Open Citations.

Headquarters

PLOS has its main headquarters in Suite 225 in the Koshland East Building in Levi's Plaza in San Francisco. Previously, the company had been located at 185 Berry Street. In June 2010, PLOS announced that it was moving to a new location in order to accommodate its rapid growth. The move to the Koshland East Building went into effect on 21 June 2010.

Footnotes

References

• Adam, David. "Scientists Take on the Publishers in an Experiment to Make Research Free to All" The Guardian, 6 October 2003.
• Albanese, Andrew. "Open Access Gains with PLoS Launch: Scientists Call for Cell Press Boycott; Harvard Balks on Big Deal." Library Journal, 15 November 2003, 18–19.
• Butler, Declan. "Public Library Set to Turn Publisher as Boycott Looms." Nature, 2 August 2001, 469.
• Case, Mary. "The Public Library of Science." ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 215 (2001): 4. https://web.archive.org/web/20151110091642/http://www.arl.org/newsltr/215/plos.html
• Doyle, Helen. "Public Library of Science (PLoS): Committed to Making the World's Scientific and Medical Literature A Public Resource." ASIDIC Newsletter, no. 87 (2004): 9–10. https://nfais.memberclicks.net/assets/ASIDIC/Newsletters/s04_newsletter.pdf
• Eisen, Michael. "Publish and Be Praised." The Guardian, 9 October 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/oct/09/research.highereducation
• Foster, Andrea L. "Scientists Plan 2 Online Journals to Make Articles Available Free." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 January 2003, A29.
• Kleiner, Kurt. "Free Online Journal Gives Sneak Preview." New Scientist, 19 August 2003, 18. https://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994071
• Malakoff, David. "Opening the Books on Open Access." Science Magazine, 24 October 2003, 550–554.

• Mantell, Katie. "Open-Access Journal Seeks to Cut Costs for Researchers." SciDev.Net, 15 January 2004. http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=readNews&itemid=1194&language=1

• Mellman, Ira. "Setting Logical Priorities: A Boycott Is Not the Best Route to Free Exchange of Scientific Information." Nature, 26 April 2001, 1026.
• Olsen, Florence. "Scholars Urge Boycott of Journals That Won't Join Free Archives." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 April 2001, A43.
• Peek, Robin. "Can Science and Nature Be Trumped?" Information Today 20, no. 2 (2003): 19, 50–51.
• ———. "The Future of the Public Library of Science." Information Today 19, no. 2 (2002): 28.
• ———. "The Scholarly Publisher as Midwife." Information Today 18, no. 7 (2001): 32.
• Pickering, Bobby. "Medical Journals to Get Open Access Rival." Information World Review, 21 May 2004. http://www.iwr.co.uk/iwreview/1155321
• Public Library of Science. "Open Letter to Scientific Publishers." (2001). http://www.plos.org/about/letter.html
• Reich, Margaret. "Peace, Love, and PLoS." The Physiologist 2003; 46(4): 137, 139–141. https://web.archive.org/web/20041223045509/http://www.the-aps.org/news/PloS.pdf
• Suber, Peter. "The Launch of PLoS Biology." SPARC Open Access Newsletter, no. 67 (2003). http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-03.htm#launch
• Velterop, Jan. "Vendor View." Information World Review, 1 December 2001. http://www.iwr.co.uk/iwreview/1150688
• Wadman, Meredith. "Publishers Challenged over Access to Papers." Nature, 29 March 2001, 502.

References

1. "Choose Your Journal".
2. (2003). "Mechanism for Multiple Ligand Recognition by the Human Transferrin Receptor". PLOS Biology.
3. "History". PLOS.
4. (2014). "Professor Michael Eisen: A Pioneer of Open Access Science". The Tower.
5. (2001). "Public library of science shifts gears: As scientific publishing boycott deadline approached, advocates of free scientific publishing announce that they will create their own online, free-access archive". EMBO Reports.
6. (17 December 2002). "Public Library of Science to launch new free-access biomedical journals with $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation".
7. "Submit".
8. (21 April 2023). "Building a more sustainable future through Open Access research".
9. "SDG Publishers Compact Members".
10. "SDG Publishers Compact".
11. (27 April 2021). "To boldly grow: five new journals shaped by Open Science".
12. "How organisations support HIFA2015".
13. "HIFA2015 Webinars".
14. Knutson, David. (23 July 2012). "New PLOS look". Public Library of Science.
15. "PLOS on Twitter". Twitter.
16. (19 May 2017). "PLOS Appoints Alison Mudditt Chief Executive Officer {{!}} STM Publishing News".
17. (2021-09-27). "Announcing a new PLOS policy on inclusion in global research".
18. (2011-07-20). "2010 PLOS Progress Update | The Official PLOS Blog". Blogs.plos.org.
19. Sugita, Shigeki. (2014). "How far has open access progressed?". SPARC Japan.
20. (2013-09-19). "2012-2013 Progress Update". PLOS.
21. "2022 Financial Overview".
22. (13 November 2025). "PLOS launches two journals to address critical real-world challenges".
23. (6 April 2017). "Press". Initiative for Open Citations.
24. "Contact". PLoS.
25. (2008-03-10). "Contact". PLoS.
26. Allen, Liz. (2010-06-16). "PLoS San Francisco office is moving | The Official PLOS Blog". PLOS.

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::