Hi Fred, I didn't intend to say that these journals are "bad in some way", though some details like the "non-commercial" clause at Scientific Reports could well qualify for that label. PLoS ONE addresses three major problems: *Access to the research literature it publishes *Scope limitations *Impact guesstimation. Ad 1: It is by far not unique in using a CC-BY license but it is now the largest scientific journal on the planet (cf. http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/01/plos-one-now-worlds-largest-jou… ). Ad 2: In theory, it is open for submissions from any field of research (in practice, it remains tilted towards the biomedical fields), a scope it shares with only a few journals, and these are typically either hybrid OA (PNAS) or not OA at all (like Nature, Science). Ad 3: Contrary to some commenters, PLoS ONE does use classical pre-publication peer review. What it leaves out of the procedure, though, is the question of whether the research reported in a given manuscript is important enough to merit publication in this journal. This question is asked at most other journals, but the responses to it perform very badly in predicting actual future impact of the paper. PLoS ONE takes the approach that if the research is scientifically sound and reported in sufficient level of detail, it is not going to be rejected. PLoS ONE clones are characterized by being open access journals launched after PLoS ONE (indeed, within the last year), aiming for a broad scope (which may simply be "all of genetics, as with G3), and doing away with the future impact guesstimation aspect during peer review. Some go even further - the initial article processing charge at Scientific Reports, for instance, is identical (to the last digit) to the one at PLoS ONE. All of the three points outlined above, and certainly combinations thereof, may justify the establishment of a new journal, but the main driver behind the PLoS ONE clones may well be commercial, given that the scalability of PLoS ONE has allowed PLoS to break even in 2010 (cf. http://river-valley.tv/open-access-publishers-breaking-even-and-growing-fas… ). Another aspect that PLoS ONE is driving forward is what they call "Article-level metrics" (cf. http://friendfeed.com/article-level-metrics ) - i.e. quantitative indicators of the actual impact of an article (rather than the _Journal_ Impact Factor used by many as a proxy to _article_ quality), as well as post-publication peer review (a lively example is at http://www.plosone.org/article/comments/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone… ). On a related note, the title of the article on Open Access to the research literature is currently being discussed (again) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Open_access_(publishing)#Title_of_the_art… , and I am working on a list of Open-Access-related topics (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:GLAM/OA/Catalogue ) that would benefit from some feedback. Cheers, Daniel On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com> wrote: