The Evolving Scope of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases

PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases is an open-access community journal that serves the needs of a small but active and robust community of neglected tropical disease (NTD) scientists, clinicians, and public health and policy experts. As stewards of that community, our editorial staff has very much molded the journal according to what we have learned from you in terms of mission, priorities, and scope. In the eighteen months since the launch of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, some of our most interesting editorial discussions and queries from authors are in regards to the journal’s scope, particularly the specific conditions defined as NTDs (http://www. plosntds.org/static/scope.action). What has emerged from these discussions is a journal focused on a fairly specific group of important infections endemic in developing countries with seven common features [1,2]: (1) the NTDs occur in the setting of poverty where they are the most prevalent infections afflicting ‘‘the bottom billion,’’ i.e., people living on less than US$1 per day [3]; (2) they are chronic conditions— people can harbor their NTDs for years or decades; (3) they generally disable, rather than kill; (4) they are frequently disfiguring and stigmatizing [4]; (5) they are not typically emerging in character; instead, the NTDs have plagued humankind for centuries and many are described in ancient texts [5]; (6) they are not just diseases of poverty, but they also promote poverty because of their effects on child development, cognition, and education, adult agricultural worker productivity, and pregnancy outcome [3]; and (7) the NTDs are a critical component of the ‘‘other diseases’’ mentioned in the sixth Millennium Development Goal (‘‘Combat HIV/ AIDS, malaria, and other diseases’’) [1,2,6].