Mariska on Editorial Board PLOS ONE

I am delighted to soon join the Board of PLOS ONE. By joining PLOS ONE as an Academic Editor, I will be supporting the PLOS mission of freely disseminating rigorous scientific research to the public, worldwide.

PLOS ONE launched at the end of December 2006 as an efficient and economical venue for disseminating research in all areas of science and medicine. Today it is the largest journal in the world, publishing well over 2000 articles per month. The underlying philosophy is that all research, if well-performed and well-reported, has something of value to offer the scientific community, and accordingly, PLOS ONE’s editorial criteria focuses on the technical quality of the work rather than subjective judgments such as perceived novelty, limited relevance to a specialist field or negative results. I am personally very much appealed to that approach. I believe that if the scientific question is valid, interesting and logical given the existing literature, if the scientific method is sound and if the article written in a comprehensible way, then the work should get published, no matter the p-values!  The outcome of an experiment or research study should not influences the decision whether to publish it. This practice that many other journals unfortunately still hold, causes a publication bias in the literature. In fact, statistically significant results have been shown to be three times more likely to be published than papers with null results (Dickersin et al., 1987).

As an Editorial Board members at PLOS ONE I will be given a high degree of editorial autonomy over the papers that I handle, and am responsible for deciding whether a manuscript adheres to the journal’s criteria for publication. The appointment to the PLOS ONE Editorial Board is for three years, subject to review on an annual basis.