I know that there are some open access journals in Agriculture and Food Sciences, however, surprisingly, with a simple search more than 30 journals appear. I choose  PLOS ONE as our group is planning to publish an analytical method paper in this peer-review open access scientific journal. This journal is an international community of researchers of multidisciplinary from Nobel laureates to early career scientists within science and medicine. It is currently the world’s largest journal in terms of number of paper published.

PLOS ONE is published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006 with an international Editorial Board. It is run under a pay-to-publish model (US $1495 per manuscript). All submissions go through a peer-review process, which focuses on technical rather than subjective concerns.

PLOS ONE publishes reports of original research for all disciplines of science and medicine, which facilitates new connections between research either within or between disciplines. In particular, scope of PLOS ONE includes:

– Systematic reviews

– Submission describing methods, software, databases, or other tools

– Qualitative research

– Studies reporting negative results

Here are criteria for publications:

1. The report reflects results of primary scientific research.
2. The study has not been published elsewhere.
3. Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are used with a high technical standard and are explained in enough details.
4. Conclusions are based on the data.
5. The study is presented in an intelligible way and is written in standard English.
6. The study meets all ethical standards for experimentation and research integrity.

PLOS has the Creative Common Attribution (CC BY) license, which is developed to ease open access, for all the published articles. It means that authors of all published articles agree that their publications are free immediately access and available for reuse without permission or fees as long as the authors and original sources are properly cited. Therefore, knowledge for PLOS can be shared and used without barrier for the needs of research.