Below I outline why I stepped out of my role as associate Editor at Plos One and why we will no longer submit papers from my lab to Plos One:
Earlier this year we submitted and eventually had accepted a methods paper on measuring personality in rodents. Following final acceptance we reviewed the ‘proofs’ and approved them. Technically, these are not proofs but a word document that will be used to generate the official PDF. At Plos One an author does not get a chance to actually check the final PDF.
Once the paper appeared online we found a completely random phrase pasted in the beginning of the second paragraph! This is what it looks like: “Studies of personality in wild populations usually require that wild animals are live –more transparent and concisend reorganizing and simplifying the discussion of is version evenmotrapped” the part in bold has been pasted in the middle of a sentence. How could this happen? Well it happens because nobody reads the PDF proofs! The authors are not allowed and clearly nobody at Plos reads them.
We contacted Plos asking them to remove the random phrase. Rather than a quick response with apologies… we were told that it was our fault so they would fix it but as a correction. We reply saying “No that is clearly not our fault, the typesetter clearly added it as there is no trace of it in the word file we reviewed”. Many emails followed and it turns out that someone (either the typesetters at Plos or ourselves – although, again, there was no trace of this phrase anywhere in our original documents) had inadvertently inserted some hidden text in the file. Hidden text goes undetected unless you select the “Hidden text” option in the display tab of Word Options to make it visible. When they sent us the word ‘proof’ the hidden text was not visible, but when they convert it to the PDF proof it automatically appears.
Eventually they agreed to fix it because this was clearly their fault, however they still published a correction to our paper with the old and new version. Why would one want to do so? No idea. It only confuses the reader, it hijacks citations and it makes us look sloppy, as if we were the ones who created this mess! Here are the take-home messages:
Earlier this year we submitted and eventually had accepted a methods paper on measuring personality in rodents. Following final acceptance we reviewed the ‘proofs’ and approved them. Technically, these are not proofs but a word document that will be used to generate the official PDF. At Plos One an author does not get a chance to actually check the final PDF.
Once the paper appeared online we found a completely random phrase pasted in the beginning of the second paragraph! This is what it looks like: “Studies of personality in wild populations usually require that wild animals are live –more transparent and concisend reorganizing and simplifying the discussion of is version evenmotrapped” the part in bold has been pasted in the middle of a sentence. How could this happen? Well it happens because nobody reads the PDF proofs! The authors are not allowed and clearly nobody at Plos reads them.
We contacted Plos asking them to remove the random phrase. Rather than a quick response with apologies… we were told that it was our fault so they would fix it but as a correction. We reply saying “No that is clearly not our fault, the typesetter clearly added it as there is no trace of it in the word file we reviewed”. Many emails followed and it turns out that someone (either the typesetters at Plos or ourselves – although, again, there was no trace of this phrase anywhere in our original documents) had inadvertently inserted some hidden text in the file. Hidden text goes undetected unless you select the “Hidden text” option in the display tab of Word Options to make it visible. When they sent us the word ‘proof’ the hidden text was not visible, but when they convert it to the PDF proof it automatically appears.
Eventually they agreed to fix it because this was clearly their fault, however they still published a correction to our paper with the old and new version. Why would one want to do so? No idea. It only confuses the reader, it hijacks citations and it makes us look sloppy, as if we were the ones who created this mess! Here are the take-home messages:
- Despite paying a hefty $1500+ in authors fees… no human being checks the proofs, so wtf*** are we paying for since all the work by the editor and reviewers is free? As a ‘customer’ I feel this is appalling! For $1500+ I do expect someone to check the proofs or at least I want to have the possibility of checking them myself.
- We have just demonstrated that if one wants to add some text to a paper and have it undetected, all you need to do is insert it as hidden text and then deselect this box in Word. Could this explain the famous ‘hand of God’ case at Plos? Does this mean any author can modify the paper post-acceptance without anyone realizing? YES!