Why Publish in PLoS Medicine?

Choosing where to send a paper is always a difficult decision. Here are ten ways in which you will benefit by publishing your paper in PLoS Medicine rather than another top-tier journal.

1. Wide dissemination. PLoS Medicine is the leading open-access medical journal, providing an innovative and influential venue for research and comment on the major challenges to human health worldwide. As an open access journal, articles in PLoS Medicine will always be freely available online, from our Web site and from PubMed Central, to anyone with internet access. This means that your work will have the broadest possible audience. And recent studies have begun to suggest that open access articles get downloaded and cited more frequently.
2. Fast and professional peer review. PLoS Medicine is run by a team of experienced professional editors. The professional editors work closely with academic editors and peer reviewers to provide authors with an efficient, fair, and constructive review process.
3. Time-saving presubmission inquiries. It is essential that authors provide a presubmission inquiry, consisting of a referenced abstract and a cover letter, prior to full submission. This allows us to let you know within 48 hours whether the paper is within our scope and whether we will consider the full paper. Read more about the scope of the journal.
4. Rapid publication. Because we are primarily an online journal, once a paper is accepted we do not have to wait for space to become available in the print journal before the paper is published. The time between acceptance and online publication is normally around 6 weeks.
5. Your research, put in context. Each research article is accompanied by an Editors’ Summary written to be understandable by all medical professionals, whatever their specialty, and the general public.
6. Author-friendly editing. Unlike other leading publications, we will not totally rewrite your paper to conform to house style. We will, of course, help authors whose first language is not English. In addition, we will not ask you to shorten your paper unnecessarily, although we do require papers to be written concisely.
7. No need to order reprints. Our open access license means that anyone can reprint and distribute our content, so long as they credit the author and cite the original source. Commercial publishing companies make huge profits reprinting your work—now you have an alternative.
8. Your research has the chance to have a high impact. There are a number of ways of measuring a journal's impact, including the influence it has on health policy, how widely read its papers are, and how frequently the papers are cited by other researchers. For a more information on impact factors see this blog and for wider discussion of impact see the June 2006 Editorial.
9. Publicity. We send out weekly press releases on papers published by PLoS Medicine to ensure that papers have the greatest chance of being covered accurately by the media.
10. Notes, Comments, and Ratings. PLoS Medicine provides a number of 'Web 2.0' tools to facilitate community evaluation and discourse around published articles. See our guidelines explaining how you can add notes, comments, and ratings to any PLoS Medicine article.