PLoS Biology | www.plosbiology.org 1875 Editorial

the increasing pressure of submissions, limited page budgets, and the existing reward system by which the value of a paper is placed not on its content but on the venue in which it is published has led most journals to reject a substantial fraction of papers before peer review. The reasons given for rejection are various: the editors may claim that the paper is beyond the scope of a journal, too specialized, of insuffi cient general interest, or lacking a suffi ciently novel advance—even too complicated. The basis for such decisions is inevitably subjective. The higher-profi le science journals are consequently often accused of “lottery reviewing, ” a charge now aimed increasingly at the more specialist literature as well. Even after review, papers that are technically sound are often rejected on the basis of lack of novelty or advance. Only recently, I heard of a paper that had been “scooped ” by a publication in Nature (but it could equally well have been Science). The authors submitted the paper to at least three journals (and received seven reviews in total) before their work was accepted. Yet none of the reviewers took issue with the scientifi c quality of the paper; indeed, some suggested that it was stronger than the fi rst publication. It was rejected because no high-profi le journal can afford to be caught publishing the “also-ran, ” despite the strong argument that the second paper, replicating and even going somewhat further than the work of the fi rst, is at least as valuable to the scientifi c record. Such stories are all too common. But in just a few weeks, the Public Library of Science will launch a new “journal,” PLoS ON