It's not about having access to more articles, it's about the guarantee of peer-review of whatever you read on PLOS. On Arxiv you could be reading the ramblings of a random person on the internet with zero relevance to the real world.

> On Arxiv you could be reading the ramblings of a random person on the internet with zero relevance to the real world.

The current model for traditional publishing vets each paper that is published; arxive vets each author[1] once, and then their papers can be published.

So, sure, you could be reading the ramblings of a random person, but it is quite unlikely.

I think what is more valuable is looking at the citations to the work you are reading; unless you are reading something very very new, if it is valuable at all it would be cited.

[1] When I last looked at publishing (maybe a decade ago?), arxive was vetting authors, not individual papers.