PLOS
clock | January 13, 2009There are 17 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:
Mitochondrial Phylogeography Illuminates the Origin of the Extinct Caspian Tiger and Its Relationship to the Amur Tiger:
The Caspian tiger (Panthera tigris virgata) flourished in Central Asian riverine forest systems…
clock | January 13, 2009Evolution is the theme of the month for January at PLoS ONE, so we have picked , for your pleasure, some of our papers for the Top picks in Evolutionary Biology. In conjuction with this, I have also conducted an interview with our Evolution Section Editor Dr.Tom Tregenza.
Dr.Tom Tregenza studies sexual selection and sexual conflict in crickets, both in the lab and in the field, and we discuss some of his research in the interview. He is also involved in a collaborative study of the amazing mimic octopus - see the movie below - so I hope you go and check out the interview:
clock | January 6, 2009Just check out this list - PLoS ONE papers are apparently on everybody's 'Best of 2008' lists these days. Now, that is impact!
clock | December 20, 2008Happy Anniversary, PLoS ONE!
Today is PLoS ONE's second anniversary and we're celebrating by announcing that the winner of the second PLoS synchroblogging competition is SciCurious of the Neurotopia 2.0 blog.
"This fluent post captures the essence of the research and accurately communicates it in a style that resonates with both the scientific and lay community" - Liz Allen, PLoS.
Here is the winning entry, cross posted in its entirety:
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Einstein was smart, but Could He Play the Violin?
I already wrote one entry for PLoS ONE's second birthday, but I'm feeling sparky…
clock | December 19, 2008The deadline for the PLoS ONE Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition is now officially over. Here are all the posts written for the competition - 18 posts, written by 17 people, covering 22 PLoS ONE articles. Liz, Dave, Jason and I will be reading them today and will announce the winner as soon as we can:
Barn Owl of Guadalupe Storm-Petrel: DNA Repair During Spermatogenesis: Gimme a Break! about the article: Deletion of Genes Implicated in Protecting the Integrity of Male Germ Cells Has Differential Effects on the Incidence of DNA Breaks and Germ Cell Loss
Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket…
clock | December 18, 2008The entries for the PLoS ONE Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition have been coming in all day. Here are the posts I found so far. If you have posted and your post is not on this list, let me know by e-mail. I will keep updating this post and moving it to the top until the competition closes at dawn tomorrow:
Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science: Predatory slime mould freezes prey in large groups about the article: Exploitation of Other Social Amoebae by Dictyostelium caveatum
Scicurious of Neurotopia (version 2.0): Why Did the Dolphin Carry a Sponge? about the article: Why Do…
clock | December 18, 2008Listen here to the The December 16, 2008 David E. Barmes Global Health Lecture given by Dr.Harold Varmus:
Harold Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, is President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Dr. Varmus chairs the Scientific Board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health program and leads the Advisory Committee for the Global Health Division. He was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission on Macroeconomics…
clock | December 16, 2008Despite online debates - which one is better: Twitter or FriendFeed, sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek - the fact is that these are two different animals altogether. Asking one to make a choice between the two is like asking one to make a choice between e-mail and YouTube - those are two different services that do different things. Thus, they are to be used differently.
Twitter is a communications tool (or a 'human application'). You can broadcast (one-to-many), you can eavesdrop (many-to-one) or you can converse (one-to-one, either in public or through Direct Messages). But most…
clock | December 11, 2008Paper number 0000001 was published in PLoS ONE on December 20th 2006 - exactly two years ago. So, we will have various types of celebrations, of course. One of those, the one you can and should participate in, is the Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition.
So, how does it go? How can you participate?
First, spread the word about it to your own contacts and readers.
Second, if you are not already registered with ResearchBlogging.org, do so ASAP, or on December 17th at the latest (to give them enough time to approve you and to give yourself enough time to look around and familiarize…
clock | December 8, 2008If you don't follow the PLoS Blog (you don't? really?), you may have missed a series of posts we recently started, interviewing some of our authors and academic editors, who reveal the behind-the-scenes thoughts about the process. Check out interviews with Jeremy Farrar, Dario Ringach, Ivan Baxter, Niyaz Ahmed and Tian Kegong.
clock | November 11, 2008Here is a great example by Cameron Neylon:
It's a little embarrassing...
...but being straightforward is always the best approach. Since we published our paper in PLoS ONE a few months back I haven't been as happy as I was about the activity of our Sortase. What this means is that we are now using a higher concentration of the enzyme to do our ligation reactions. They seem to be working well and with high yields, but we need to put in more enzyme. If you don't understand that don't worry - just imagine you posted a carefully thought out recipe and then discovered you couldn't get that same…
awild | October 1, 2008This morning I had to deny a scientist permission to use my photos of her ants in a paper headed for PLoS Biology. I hate doing that. Especially when I took those photos in part to help her to promote her research.
The problem is that PLoS content is managed under a Creative Commons (=CC) licensing scheme. I don't do CC. Overall it's not a bad licensing scheme, but for one sticking point: CC allows users to re-distribute an image to external parties.
In an ideal world, non-profit users would faithfully tack on the CC license and the attribution to the photographer, as required by the…
clock | September 30, 2008As the month of September is coming to a close, and the topic of the month in PLoS ONE is bats, we decided to end the focus with a Journal Club.
Starting today, and lasting a week, there will be a Journal Club on this PLoS ONE article - Bats' Conquest of a Formidable Foraging Niche: The Myriads of Nocturnally Migrating Songbirds by Ana G. Popa-Lisseanu, Antonio Delgado-Huertas, Manuela G. Forero, Alicia Rodriguez, Raphael Arlettaz and Carlos Ibanez:
Along food chains, i.e., at different trophic levels, the most abundant taxa often represent exceptional food reservoirs, and are hence the main…
clock | September 10, 2008This month's Theme Of The Month in PLoS ONE are bats! Midway between the release of Batman II and Halloween, this sounds like an appropriate choice. Peter Binfield provides more information.
A number of our bat papers have received media and blog coverage (and not just by Anne-Marie!), but it is never too late. Bloggers tend to write about the newest papers, fresh off the presses. But nothing stops you from going back and covering one of the older papers if you find it interesting. Perhaps you were just not aware of it before.
Here are some of our bat papers to date, showcasing the…
clock | September 9, 2008PLoS ONE has already published a large number of papers in chronobiology. But we want more. Hey, I work there - I want to see more.
So, when I went to the SRBR meeting in May, I did whatever I could to explain how PLoS ONE works and why my colleagues in the field should consider publishing with PLoS.
One thing we neeeded to give potential authors confidence is to add more chronobiologists to our Editorial Board in order to ensure that their mansucripts will be handled (and thus reviewed) by the experts in the field.
So, I am very happy to announce that we have secured editorial services…
clock | August 29, 2008The cat is out of the bag! The version2.0 of ResearchBlogging.org is ready to go and you can test it out:
After a week of late nights and hard coding, our development team has released the beta version of the site to our entire userbase! You can visit the new site here:
http://72.32.57.144/index.php/
We are planning on launching the site at the researchblogging.org address over the weekend, but you can get a head start now setting up your account, customizing it the way you like, and trying out all our new features. (note: All passwords have been reset, so you'll need to use the "forgot…
clock | August 27, 2008Why is the letter P the most useful for alliterative titles?
But back to the substance. One thing that bugged me for a long time is that I often see on blogs or hear in person a sentiment that "there are no comments on PLoS ONE". Yet I spend quite some time every week opening and reading all the new comments so I KNOW they are there and that there is quite a bunch of them already. Why the difference in perception? Is it due to the predictable distribution (a few papers get lots of comments, most get one or none, just like blog posts)?
So, when we saw this nice analysis of commenting on…
clock | August 21, 2008This is big! A new agreement was signed between Max Planck Society and Public Library of Science in which the MPS will pay publication fees for its researchers. Mark Patterson explains:
The MPS is one of the world's leading research organizations whose researchers have an international reputation for scientific excellence. We are delighted to be collaborating with the MPS in this way so that more MPS researchers will be encouraged to publish their work in PLoS journals, and to promote open access to research literature more broadly. For papers accepted in PLoS journals after July 1st, 2008…
clock | August 19, 2008Last night I made another room in FriendFeed - PLoS ONE in the Media/Blogs. I made it primarily for my own use, linking to the media and blog coverage of PLoS ONE papers so I can have everything in one place.
But this should not stop you from using it, as well as from adding to it - if you read (or write yourself) a good article or blog post about one of the PLoS ONE papers, old or new, please place the link there and help me in my work. See the 'Green Sahara' example for the format I prefer (use the title and link of the paper, then add URLs of posts/articles in comments).