Scholarly Publishing: PLOS CEO Discusses the Future in Open Letter to the Community

From the Text of an Open Letter by Public Library of Science (PLOS) CEO, Alison Muddit:

As the new PLOS CEO, I’ve spent my first months assessing the organization and planning for a thriving future. We are in the midst of shaping our next innovative steps in pursuit of maximal openness and transparency in research communication, and assessing what changes we need to make as an organization. Some of these changes will likely go unnoticed outside of PLOS. Others may cause speculation. For clarity and transparency’s sake, I’ve chosen to write an open letter to the communities PLOS serves, so we can encourage open dialogue and so that you can share in our continuing evolution.
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One of our top priorities this coming year is to improve the author experience since our authors are at the center of everything we do.
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…We are embarking on an ambitious plan to reinvigorate PLOS ONE’s editorial board…
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Part of this initiative will involve changes around the workflow system – Aperta – we set out to develop several years ago with the goal to streamline manuscript submission and handling. At the time we began, there was very little available that would create the end-to-end workflow we envisioned as the key to opening research on multiple fronts. But the development process has proved more challenging than expected and as a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to halt development of Aperta.

Read the Complete Letter (555 words)

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