plos.org
PLOS
Who runs PLOS, what it tracks and what it costs, and the 20 closest open-access academic publishing alternatives.
- Who’s behind it
- Not stated
- Online since
- Unknown
- Trackers
- Prices
- No pricing page
- Last price change
- –
- Closest alternative
- PeerJ
Measured from PLOS’s own pages, the Internet Archive and public records. Hover a dotted value for its source and date.
Visit PLOS01 · Who’s behind it
Who runs PLOS
PLOS plos.org
Discover how we are transforming scholarly publishing with a mission-driven commitment to open science, research integrity, and innovation that benefits researchers, institutions, and society worldwide.
Wikidata: nonprofit open-access publisher
- Company
- No imprint we could read
- Online since
- Not in the Internet Archive
- Audience
- In English
02 · Privacy
What PLOS tracks
What the homepage loads before you accept or decline cookies. A cookie banner should hold most of it back until you agree, and a tag manager can load more that we don’t see.
trackers that follow visitors
10 of the 13 alternatives below have fewer, 0 have more.
Privacy-friendly alternatives →- Cookie banner
- None found
- US company
- 3 tools
Advertising and retargeting
Lets ad networks recognise visitors on other sites and show them ads.
Marketing and email tracking
Links visits to email campaigns and customer profiles.
Third-party embeds
Videos, maps or fonts from other companies, which receive the visitor’s IP address.
03 · Alternatives
Alternatives to PLOS
Thumbs up if it’s a real alternative to PLOS, thumbs down if it isn’t.
- 01
PeerJ - Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journals, Trusted by Researchers
Trusted by researchers, committed to open. PeerJ delivers open-access publishing with transparent peer review across two STM and computer science journals.
Very close - 02
publisher of open-access scientific journals
Very close - 03
Frontiers | Publisher of peer-reviewed articles in open access journals
Open access publisher of peer-reviewed scientific articles across the entire spectrum of academia. Research network for academics to stay up-to-date with the latest scientific publications, events, blogs and news.
Very close - 04
peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal
Very close - 05
Egyptian scientific publisher
Very close - 06 SciELO scielo.org
bibliographic database of open access journals
Very close - 07
scientific journal
Very close - 08
academic journal of the National Academy of Sciences
Very close - 09
AAAS Home | American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
international non-profit organization promoting science
Very close - 10
OSF
tools that make open science practice easier
Very close - 11
KFF - The independent source for health policy research, polling, and news.
KFF is the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. Our mission is to serve as a nonpartisan source of information for policymakers, the media, the health policy community, and the public.
Very close - 12
Crossref
Crossref is open infrastructure linking the world's research. 26,500 members, 171 countries, 2.1 billion monthly API queries.
Very close - 13
WWF - Find your local WWF office
WWF is building a future in which humans live in harmony with nature. Use our hub page to find your local WWF office.
Very close - 14
TYPO3 Project and Governance — Democratic Open Source - TYPO3 Project
The TYPO3 project is a volunteer community backed by a not-for-profit member association, and a fully-owned service company.
Very close - 15
Client Challenge
global publishing company
Very close - 16
MedlinePlus - Health Information from the National Library of Medicine
Find information on health conditions, wellness issues, and more in easy-to-read language on MedlinePlus, the up-to-date, trusted health information site from the NIH and the National Library of Medicine.
Very close - 17
MariaDB Foundation - MariaDB.org
database management system, relational, open source, community developed fork of MySQL
Very close - 18
DataCite – Connecting Research, Advancing Knowledge - DataCite
international not-for-profit organization which aims to improve data citation
Very close - 19
SINTEF - Applied research, technology and innovation
SINTEF is one of Europe's largest independent research organisations. Every year we carry out several thousand projects for customers large and small.
Very close - 20
aggregator of scientific data on biodiversity; data portal
Very close
Closest first, by how much each site’s offer resembles PLOS’s. Trackers are counted the same way as above. Highlighted technologies are ones PLOS uses too. Votes and comments come from visitors and don’t change the order.
04 · History
What changed
Price and policy history →No changes yet. Each new crawl is compared with the last one, and what PLOS adds, drops or rewrites shows up here.
05 · Details
How we measure
Alternatives are matched by what sites actually offer, from their homepages, Wikidata and a summary by Claude, in any language. Trackers and the rest of the stack come from the homepage’s code and DNS records.
The full technology stack, the competitor map and search numbers · 15 technologies
- Neighbours
- k = 20
- Sites searched
- 9,192
- Vector
- 384-d
- Query
- 39 ms
Competitor map
Each alternative by how close its vector is to PLOS’s (x) and how much traffic it gets, how much of the stack it shares, or where it sits in the embedding space itself (y). Hover for the numbers, click to jump to it in the list.
similarity × popularity
Built with
- CMS
- WordPress meta generator: WordPress 7.1.4
- JavaScript frameworks
- React page source: data-reactroot
- JavaScript libraries
- jQuery asset https://plos.org/wp-content/themes/plos/resources/lib/scripts/jquery-3.5.1.min.js?ver=3.5…
- Fonts
- Google Fonts asset https://fonts.googleapis.com/
- Advertising
- X (Twitter) Pixel page source: static.ads-twitter.com/uwt.js
- Marketing automation
- HubSpot page source: js.hs-scripts.com
- CDN
- Cloudflare header cf-ray: a562fedfab10af33-HAM
- Hosting
- Kinsta header x-kinsta-cache: HIT
- Languages & backends
- PHP implied by WordPress (meta generator: WordPress 7.1.4)
- Email hosting
- Microsoft 365 MX plos-org.mail.protection.outlook.com
- Email delivery
- SendGrid TXT v=spf1 mx a ip4:136.147.136.128 ip4:184.23.159.2 ip4:216.74.38.68 ip4…
- DNS hosting
- Cloudflare DNS NS chad.ns.cloudflare.com
- SaaS tools (verified in DNS)
- Apple Business TXT apple-domain-verification=rD6IKpFy01dItKGF
- Atlassian TXT atlassian-domain-verification=KBcW5CfwNLAM/0qR7EQaMQ6EpgX44xvccXJeJ0O…
- Google Search Console TXT google-site-verification=g9PQGJfRFNffB4MEiJ_b7sA_J94yIXtFsQa0aHT3u5A
What competitors use
Across the 20 closest sites.
- Google Search Console 17/20
- Microsoft 365 14/20
- Google Workspace · not on plos.org 8/20
- Cloudflare 7/20
- Cloudflare DNS 7/20
- Meta Business Suite · not on plos.org 6/20
- PHP 6/20
- Google Tag Manager · not on plos.org 5/20
- Atlassian 5/20
- jQuery 5/20
- HubSpot 4/20
- Salesforce · not on plos.org 4/20
- Amazon Route 53 · not on plos.org 4/20
- nginx · not on plos.org 4/20
- WordPress 4/20
- GlobalSign · not on plos.org 3/20