Update. In response to this problem (previous post, this thread), some publishers are desk-rejecting papers based on open health datasets. The problem is not the quality of the data, but the absence of additional work to validate findings.

Two reports:

1. "Journals and publishers crack down on research from open health data sets," Science, Oct 8, 2025.
https://www.science.org/content/article/journals-and-publishers-crack-down-research-open-health-data-sets

2. "AI: Journals are automatically rejecting public health dataset papers to combat paper mills," BMJ, Oct 15, 2025.
https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2170
(#paywalled)

#AI #Data #Frontiers #Medicine #PaperMills #PLOS #OpenData

Oh and #PLOS has a #TeXLaTeX template, which is a hard requirement for me. Journals not accepting LaTeX in physics fields is just silly. #PLOS's template is a bit funny though. No provided class, and you're supposed to submit it self-contained by manually pasting-in the auto-generated bibliography and included files, etc and weirdly excluding figures. I wrote a tool that does this automatically:

https://pypi.org/project/latex-flatten/

It seems the academic world thus seems (?) to see #PLOS papers as "lesser quality", because also negative or non-results are allowed.

I never was into any of these reading or citing metrics, #OpenAccess is my top priority. I am funded by public money, so I'd find it unaccptable if my publications were paywalled. None of them have many reads or citations, though... Too niche a subject I guess. 🤷

So I think we should publish good stuff to journals like #PLOS and boost their reputation. 🚀

The current academic publishing system is a terrible mess of quasi-monopolys, ridiculious publishing costs, #PhD's suffering from #publishOrPerish pressure, godawful paywalls, unpaid reviewers, authors waiving rights on their own work, and more...

#PLOS being a nonprofit brings some fresh air into this: They have no interest in accepting only sensational results - just good old peer review.