Large drop in submissions at world’s largest open-access journal

Science : The Public Library of Science (PLOS) publishes open-access journals that are freely available online and that charge authors to publish their articles. PLOS didn’t break even until it created PLOS ONE, a multidisciplinary journal that publishes any article which passes technical scrutiny. In 2010, PLOS ONE became the world’s largest open-access journal, with a total of 8600 research papers, and it continued to grow. However, after a December 2013 peak of 3039 new papers published, the journal’s monthly publication rate has fallen dramatically. In May 2014, it fell 25% from it’s peak to 2276. Phil Davis, an independent researcher who publicized the decrease, believes that it may have been partly caused by the June 2013 decline in PLOS ONE‘s impact factor , a measure of how widely a journal is cited. He also suggests two other factors that may have contributed: a decrease in federal research funding and the US government shutdown.