Pros
- The people at PLOS are bright, friendly, engaged and a pleasure to work with. - The company does genuinely care about its staff and they do make efforts to ensure that people are supported - work is flexible, good support during COVID, birthday and extra days off during winter holidays. Their heart is in the right place, at least. - Working for a not-for-profit means that not every activity needs to financially motivated, although the purse strings are still tight - After several years of haemorrhaging money we are now in the black, although sometimes this at the cost of well-being and performance - Compensation is good - There is not a culture of working very long hours like there is in other areas (e.g. consulting) - There are negatives of working at PLOS, but the positives absolutely outweigh the negatives. I love my job and working for PLOS - it's not perfect but I would recommend others work here. I am sure the problems at PLOS are prevalent in other organisations too.
Cons
- The tight purse strings are starting to harm morale and journal performance. We're launching several new titles which has put a real strain on the organisation. Rather than hire staff to help out with this, the approach has to been to overload already overloaded staff with yet more work. This has put personal pressure on those spread too thin, but has also started harm other journals as staff previously devoted to one title are neglecting their original titles and backlogs are forming. Whilst we have hired a fair few positions recently, these have often been in brand new roles at a high level. - Decreasing value placed on in-house expertise as more tasks are outsourced - people have started leaving for this reason.
