The downside to PLoS One forcing out almost 8000 articles this year will be that a lot of them won't have any legitimate peer review, despite shrill objections to my noting in even the nicest possible way that they can't be doing the same peer review as other PLoS groups, much less print magazines (though likely the same as many other pay-to-publish services, BMC, etc. included) ... they just can't.

But I am nice about it, because I like what they are trying to do and I get that they want to keep the doors open, and when you make money collecting publication fees you are going to publish a lot of stuff, at least enough to get the company in the black before taxpayer-funding runs out - this year PLoS One will publish more articles than anyone in the world.

But an anonymous blogger at Scienceblogs (I know, I know, whatever, but he has been around a while so presumably they know who he is - I am not Columbo) does not have to pull any punches, because they are The Borg of science blogging:

As you may recall, a mere week ago I was disturbed to have discovered the publication of a truly horrifically bad acupuncture study in PLoS ONE. It had all the hallmarks of quackademic medicine: an implausible hypothesis, trying to correlate mystical concepts of meridians and qi to anatomy and failing miserably, and dubious statistical modeling. That PLoS ONE actually published this tripe shows me that, for all its claims of being scientifically rigorous, PLoS ONE has a serious problem when it comes to so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (sCAM or, if you're a fan, CAM). In fact, PLoS ONE has as its tagline "accelerating the publication of peer-reviewed science." Sadly, the acupuncture study published there a month or two ago made me think that going a bit slower wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing.

He's pretty harsh but he is right in thinking that a lot of these studies are simply looked at by editing and not peer reviewed.   Unless Acupuncturists are doing the peer reviewing, which may be another issue.

But it isn't like PLoS One is trying to be PLoS Biology or Nature either so I don't get concerned the way he does.   And the cash it generates keeps PLoS Biology afloat.   I am more caveat emptor about it.  Appearing in a pay-to-publish journal does not confer scientific legitimacy any more than physicists appearing in arXiv do.   And every journal ends up with some rubbish.   And even Elvis had some bad albums.   So over time PLoS One will converge on a better solution but it will take time.  Like arXiv, the audience does a lot of the peer review after the fact and in this case, at least one of them has spoken ... in the legendary Scienceblogs style.