PLOS
clock | August 18, 2009Two recent events put in stark relief the differences between the old way of doing things and the new way of doing things. What am I talking about? The changing world of science publishing, of course.
Let me introduce the two examples first, and make some of my comments at the end.
Example 1. Publishing a Comment about a journal article
My SciBling Steinn brought to our collective attention a horrific case of a scientist who spent a year fighting against the editors of a journal, trying to have a Comment published about a paper that was, in his view, erroneous (for the sake of the argument it…
clock | August 15, 2009A run-down of good recent stuff, highly recommended for your weekend reading and bookmarking:
PLoS One: Interview with Peter Binfield:
...In my view PLoS ONE is the most dynamic, innovative and exciting journal in the world, and I am proud to work on it.
In many ways PLoS ONE operates like any other journal however it diverges in several important respects. The founding principle of PLoS ONE was that there are certain aspects of publishing which are best conducted pre-publication and certain aspects which are best conducted post-publication. The advent of online publishing has allowed us to…
clock | August 4, 2009Ginny Barbour, Part 5: Open Access, Achievements and Looking Forward from PLoS on Vimeo.
clock | August 3, 2009Ginny Barbour, Part 4: PLoS Medicine's Fifth Anniversary and Future Plans from PLoS on Vimeo.
clock | August 2, 2009Ginny Barbour, Part 3: PLoS Medicine Open Access to Health Information from PLoS on Vimeo.
clock | August 1, 2009It is time to announce the July winner. To see who won this time, you'll have to go here.
clock | July 27, 2009Open Access and the divide between 'mainstream' and 'peripheral' science (also available here and here) by Jean-Claude Guédon is a Must Read of the day. Anyone have his contact info so I can see if he would come to ScienceOnline'10?
There is a whole bunch of articles about science publication metrics in the latest ESEP THEME SECTION - The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance. Well worth studying. On article-level metrics, there are some interesting reactions in the blogosphere, by Deepak Singh, Bjoern Brembs, Duncan Hull, Bill Hooker and Abhishek Tiwari…
clock | July 22, 2009Everyone and their grandmother knows that Impact Factor is a crude, unreliable and just wrong metric to use in evaluating individuals for career-making (or career-breaking) purposes. Yet, so many institutions (or rather, their bureaucrats - scientists would abandon it if their bosses would) cling to IF anyway. Probably because nobody has pushed for a good alternative yet. In the world of science publishing, when something needs to be done, usually people look at us (that is: PLoS) to make the first move. The beauty of being a path-blazer!
So, in today's post 'PLoS Journals - measuring impact…
clock | July 22, 2009It was hectic during the travels, but I managed to interview Peter Sommer, PLoS ONE Section Editor for Virology anyway - in the age of the Internet, one can be connected everywhere. We posted the interview on everyONE blog yesterday.
clock | July 10, 2009As you know, I gave two lectures here in Belgrade. The first one, at the University Library on Monday, and the second one at the Oncology Institute of the School of Medicine at the University of Belgrade. As the two audiences were different (mainly librarians/infoscientists at the first, mainly professors/students of medicine at the second) I geared the two talks differently.
You can listen to the audio of the entire thing (the second talk) here, see some pictures (from both talks) here and read (in Serbian) a blog post here, written by incredible Ana Ivkovic who organized my entire Belgrade…
clock | July 5, 2009As I was traveling, I only briefly mentioned the brand new and exciting paleontology paper in PLoS ONE - New Mid-Cretaceous (Latest Albian) Dinosaurs from Winton, Queensland, Australia that was published on Thursday. Bex has written an introduction and will post a Media/Blog coverage (of which there was a lot!) summary probably tomorrow.
The fossils were discovered, cleaned and analyzed by the Australian Age Of Dinosaurs non-profit organization, with a help of thousands of volunteers - the 'citizen scientists'. You can learn more from their press release.
The importance of the publication of…
clock | July 2, 2009I am running to the Lindau Harbor for the last day's trip and will be offline for the next 12 or so hours. So I don't have time for a long post right now about this cool new dinosaur paper we just published in PLoS ONE.
So please check it out - see what it is all about and read the paper itself.
clock | June 27, 2009A couple of months ago, my SciBling David Dobbs and I recorded about an hour of discussion for Bloggingheads.tv. We talked mainly about science journalism, but also about journalism in general, about the future of the book, etc.
Unfortunately, Dave's half of the file got broken beyond repair, so the show never aired. I kept my half of the file and did not really know what to do with it. So, recently I downloaded Audacity and tried my hand at editing the audio part of the file, trying to cut out the silences (during which Dave was talking) and dialogues that would be intelligible without Dave'…
clock | June 25, 2009If you are in any way following the developments in the world of science publishing, you have probably heard about the new effort by PLoS to establish article-level metrics for scientific papers (instead of the dreadful and erronoeus Impact Factor).
Today, Peter Binfield, the Managing Editor of PLoS ONE, published a paper entitled "PLoS ONE: Background, Future Development, and Article-Level Metrics" that covers all of that in great detail. The paper is, of course, Open Access, so you can download the PDF for free here and the related PowerPoint slideshow here.
Peter says:
The paper goes into…
clock | June 18, 2009What does it mean - a Journal Club? Read here and, if you want to do one, contact me.
clock | June 4, 2009You may have noticed a couple of days ago that Caryn Shechtman posted an interview with me on the New York blog on Nature Network. Then, Caryn and Erin and I thought it might be a good idea to have the entire interview reposted here, for those who missed it. So, proceed under the fold:
1. What is your professional background?
Even as a little kid I always loved animals and thought that whatever I do when I grow up would have something to do with animals: perhaps work at a zoo or in a circus!. When I was in 6th grade or so, I read the entire series of books by James Herriot and decided to…