PLOS

Take a look at this picture: It shows the top five journals ordered by the numbers of papers that Mendeley users decided are worth keeping for future reference. The discussion of the meaning of these numbers is here. I sure like that #5 there....
Yesss!!! I know lots of people, especially in math, physics, engineering and computational biology have been yearning for this for a while. And, starting today, you can submit manuscripts to PLoS ONE in LaTeX. Read the formatting instructions carefully, then submit. The first article submitted in LaTeX was the High-Resolution Map of Science one last week, featured today in New York Times.
Last week, I conducted an e-mail interview with one of the PLoS ONE most frequent authors, Professor Seyed Ehtesham Hasnain . The interview is now live on the PLoS Blog
Under the fold: */ The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c Harold Varmus Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin Political HumorJoke of the Day
So says Jonathan. Will watch.
You may be aware that PLoS ONE has started making Collections of papers in various areas of research. The older PLoS journals have been making collections for a long time. PLoS ONE is just starting. Last month we put together the first such collection - Stress-Induced Depression and Comorbidities: From Bench to Bedside. Today, we are happy to unveil our second collection - the PLoS ONE Paleontology Collection! It is important to keep in mind that there are two types of collections: the first type is a one-off, closed collection, often associated with a conference, where we ask for or are…
Thursday, February 19 ScienceBlogger Bora Zivkovic from A Blog Around the Clock gave a presentation on open science as part of a panel discussion at Columbia University in New York City. The event, titled "Open Science: Good for Research, Good for Researchers?" was organized by the Scholarly Communication Program and also featured presentations by Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel University, and Barry Canton of Gingko BioWorks and OpenWetWare. For those who have read Bora's many posts here on ScienceBlogs promoting the open science movement, it was obvious before he even uttered a word that…
Mrs.Coturnix and I arrived nicely in NYC last night and had a nice dinner at Heartland Brewery. This morning, we had breakfast at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where I ordered my pastry using a Serbian name for the cake, and the Albanian woman working in the Hungarian shop understood what I wanted! I forgot to bring my camera with me today, and Mrs.Coturnix did not bring her cable, so the pictures of the pastries will have to wait our return home. Then, Mrs.Coturnix went for a long walk (it was nice in the morning, got cold in the afternoon), ending up in the Met. I joined my co-panelists Jean-…
Last week a did an interview with Dr.Adam Ratner and it is now posted on the PLoS Blog. Go check it out.
You may remember some time ago, we gave out the data to a few people in the community to take a look at the commenting function on PLoS ONE. Now, Euan Adie, using crowdsourcing (a big Thank You to 818 people who helped with this project) came up with the most detailed analysis to date. Well worth your time to take a look.
I will be on a panel, Open Science: Good For Research, Good For Researchers? next week, February 19th (3:00 to 5:00 pm EST at Columbia University, Morningside Campus, Shapiro CEPSR Building, Davis Auditorium). I am sure my hosts will organize something for us that day before and/or after the event, but Mrs.Coturnix and I will be there a couple of days longer. So, I think we should have a meetup - for Overlords, SciBlings, Nature Networkers, independent bloggers, readers and fans ;-) Is Friday evening a good time for this? Or is Saturday better? Let me know. You can follow the panel on…
What do this cartoon and the latest edition of PLoS One have in common? Well, reading Bora's blog this week I saw an article entitled, Risks for Central Nervous System Diseases among Mobile Phone Subscribers: A Danish Retrospective Cohort Study and my ears perked up. We have been mocking the idea that cell phones cause everything from brain cancer to colony collapse disorder and it's always fun to see what cell phones are being blamed for based on weak associations and correlations. In this article the authors identified more than four hundred thousand cell phone subscribers and linked…
When I was a little kid, almost nothing was known about evolution of whales. They were huge, they were marine and they were mammals, but their evolutionary ancestry was open to speculation. Some (like Darwin himself) hypothesized that the terrestrial ancestor of whales looked like a bear. Others favored the idea of a hippo-like or even a pig-like ancestor. Over the decades, two things happened. First, the revolution in molecular biology and computing power allowed scientists to compare many genes of many mammals and thus infer genealogical relationships between whales and other groups of…
There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites. The Big One today, I'll cover in a separate post a little later, but here I also want to point out a paper by my good friends Elsa Youngsteadt and Coby Schal, back from my NCSU days (Dr.Youngsteadt now works for…
So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Microblogging the ISMB: A New Approach to Conference Reporting: The International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) has become an important communication hub for bioinformaticians, and the core element of the Conference--presentations of peer-reviewed papers--is…
There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Rhythmicity in Mice Selected for Extremes in Stress Reactivity: Behavioural, Endocrine and Sleep Changes Resembling Endophenotypes of Major Depression: Dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis,…
There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week (wow! two circadian papers, plus dinosaurs and honeybees and heterochrony! - what a week!) - you go and look for your own favourites: Evidence of Combat in Triceratops: The horns and frill of Triceratops and other ceratopsids (horned dinosaurs) are…
There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Mineral Preservatives in the Wood of Stradivari and Guarneri: Following the futile efforts of generations to reach the high standard of excellence achieved by the luthiers in Cremona, Italy, by variations of design…
There are 15 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Preparing the Perfect Cuttlefish Meal: Complex Prey Handling by Dolphins: Dolphins are well known for their complex social and foraging behaviours. Direct underwater observations of wild dolphin feeding behaviour…
Just because I was busy with the conference does not meen that PLoS stopped the virtual presses to accommodate me! Of course, there are a bunch of cool new papers in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE that have been published last week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Action Potential Initiation in the Hodgkin-Huxley Model: In 1952, Hodgkin and Huxley described the underlying mechanism for the…