My experience with PLOS ONE revealed a deeply flawed, mechanical, and highly inefficient editorial process entirely unsuited for time-sensitive social science research. Despite my manuscript on political discourse analysis being marked as "Under Review" for over three months, the journal office ultimately admitted that not a single reviewer invitation had been accepted and that the Academic Editor now needed to be replaced entirely. Furthermore, when I proactively suggested independent, world-class experts to help resolve their bottleneck, my assistance was summarily dismissed with generic, automated templates, while the staff offered nothing but evasive, boilerplate responses until I was forced to issue a hard deadline. This total lack of transparency, monitoring, and genuine editorial oversight makes PLOS ONE a highly risky and unreliable venue for researchers managing strict academic promotion timelines.
