Dear Catriona MacCallum:
I read your article “Why ONE Is More Than 5” with interest. I would like to make one correction.

While I am very flattered you mentioned TheScientificWorldJournal (TSWJ), I was disappointed to learn it was in the context of “… this past year [2011] a series of journals emerged that are very similar in scope to PLoS ONE (Table 1).”

There is no reason you would have known this, but I first heard of PLoS One at the first European Conference of Scientific Publishing (ECSP) organized in May 2006 by and at the University of Lund. Mark Peterson spoke about PloS and mentioned PloS One. He didn’t mention the notion of mapping articles to all relevant subject matters as PLoS One now does. I did speak about TSWJ, a core aspect of which is its mapping of articles to ‘domains’. The original TSWJ Domains are more ingenious than PLoS One’s rather traditional subjects, but the principle is the same. In fact, I have been informed many times over the years that PLoS One had copied TSWJ.

TSWJ was launched in 2000 with Volume 1 coming out in 2001. Therefore, I feel it does your readers an injustice to history to imply that PLoS One was copied by TSWJ and other publications, the launch dates of which I have not checked.

Congratulations on the success of PLoS One.

Sincerely,

Graham V Lees PhD
Founding Editor TheScientificWorld
Corpus Alienum Oy
Säflaksintie 70
02400 Kirkkonummi
Finland
gvlees@thescientificworld.com