Its been several years since I last submitted to PLOSONE . Since then we embarked on a Phase II grant working on tuberculosis and after much work by many labs at Rutgers and SRI we are now submitting the work today. So we decided to give PLOSONE a second chance. In the interim I have published in PLOS Computational Biology and PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
So one of the challenges of having a large collaboration is the number of co-authors, this one has 13. Using Editorial Manager just adding author details alone took nearly 1h. They do not make it easy to enter addresses for people from the same group either. Then there are the picky figure resolution and image file formats to deal with that create hours of work for the non graphic designers out there. After trying to get images of the right resolution and size etc. I have probably re-uploaded at least 10 times, waiting to read the figure quality report only to see the word fail. I have become far too familiar with a graphics program called GIMP and the removal of the “alpha channel”. Frankly I do not want to be spending my time working as a graphic artist just to publish in PLOS, I am beyond tired of their requirements. Compared to other journals like ACS, Springer, F1000Reports etc, submitting to PLOS ones are time consuming in my opinion. After spending 5.5hrs working to submit the manuscript, 4 figures and 5 supplemental files, I am wondering why anyone would want to do this again. Lets see how it does in review.
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Abhik says:
July 31, 2015 at 9:46 pm (UTC -5)
so what’s special about plos that you are this amount of hard work .
Kaveh Bazargan (@kaveh1000) says:
August 1, 2015 at 8:18 am (UTC -5)
I don’t think Plos are alone in this but they are just the biggest “target” as they publish so many papers. My biggest gripe with Plos (and many other publishers of course) is that it *seems* all graphics are converted to bitmap. I wrote about it here:
http://bazargan.org/a-look-at-the-new-journal-style-at-plos/