Looking into the whole Plos One thing, I came across this on Wiki:
(I know Wiki is not the know all end all, but this, I believe, is accurate.)
"Publication concept
PLOS ONE is built on several conceptually different ideas compared to traditional peer-reviewed scientific publishing in that it does not use the perceived importance of a paper as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. The idea is that, instead,
PLOS ONE only verifies whether experiments and data analysis were conducted rigorously, and leaves it to the scientific community to ascertain importance, post publication, through debate and comment.
"
Also this:
"
PLOS ONE is financed by charging authors a
publication fee. The
"author-pays" model allows PLOS journals to provide all articles to everybody for free (i.e., open access) immediately after publication. As of July 2010,
PLOS ONE charged authors US$1,350
[20] to publish an article.....This model has drawn criticism, however. In 2011
Richard Poynder posited that journals such as PLoS ONE that charge authors for publication rather than charging users for access may produce a
conflict of interest that reduces peer review standards (accept more articles, earn more revenue)."
And this:
"Operating under a pay-to-publish model,
PLOS ONE publishes approximately 70% of submitted manuscripts."
So, getting this "study" published was just a matter of writing a check. I think I will ignore this breaking news.