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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.

Wide dissemination. As an open access journal, articles in PLoS Medicine will always be freely available online, from our website and from PubMed Central, to anyone with internet access. This means that your work will have the broadest possible audience—the entire world. And recent studies have begun to suggest that open access articles get downloaded and cited more frequently.
Fast and professional peer review. PLoS Medicine is run by a team of experienced editors who have previously worked in medical publishing, including at major medical journals such as the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The professional editors work closely with academic editors and peer reviewers to provide authors with an efficient, fair, and constructive review process.
Pre-submission inquiries. We are happy to look at abstracts prior to submission and will let you know within 48 hours whether we will consider the full paper.
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, and can be expedited under special circumstances.
Your research, put in context. Each research article is accompanied by an Editors’ Summary written by PLoS Medicine's editors to be understandable by all medical professionals, whatever their specialty, and the general public.
Reader Responses. Peer review and publication is only the first step in the assessment process. Equally important is the correspondence that a paper generates. Our Reader Responses facility allows the scientific community to debate the importance of your findings and the response to be archived.
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.
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.
Your research has the chance to have a high impact. PLoS Medicine's 2006 impact factor, measured by Thomson Scientific, is 13.8. However, impact factors are only one measure of a journal's importance. 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 wider discussion of impact factors, see the June 2006 Editorial.
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.