Article history: Received March 20, 2013 Received in Revised form September, 14, 2013 Accepted 18 September 2013 Available online 18 September 2013 The novel equivalent material concept, proposed originally by the author, was utilized together with the mean stress and the point stress failure concepts to predict the load-carrying capacity of O-notched ductile steel plates under pure tension. Unlike for V and U-notches, it was found that the point stress criterion combined with the equivalent material concept could estimate successfully the limited available experimental results reported in literature regarding four Onotched plates made of very ductile steel. By using the model, one may predict well the onset of tensile crack initiation in O-notched ductile components without requiring performing experiments or elastic-plastic analysis.