PLOS
clock | May 13, 2008Peter Binfield, the new Managing Editor of PLoS ONE, did some analysis of the content of the journal so far, and realized that the single most frequent Category our authors use is 'Cell Signaling'. And, as he writes in his blog post, those are some impressive papers....and we want more of them!
clock | May 7, 2008Considering this I am kinda baffled by this. There is tons of microbial metagenomics and genomics in PLoS journals.
clock | April 10, 2008Tomorrow at noon, tune into NPR's Science Friday, as you do every week anyway, I know, and you do not need to be told by me, but this time, make sure you hear Harold Varmus being interviewed about the implementation of the new NIH law and the editorial he wrote in PLoS Biology.
If I remember correctly, NPR Science Friday posts podcasts of the shows a few hours after they air live, so if you miss the show in real time you can come back to it and hear it later.
clock | April 8, 2008As many of you may be aware, yesterday was the first day of the implementation of the new NIH law which requires all articles describing research funded by NIH to be deposited into PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. Folks at SPARC have put together a list of resources one can consult when looking for answers about the implementation of the access policy.
Bloggers on Nature Network as well as here on Scienceblogs.com will write posts about the NIH bill and its implementation throughout the week (the 'OA week'), informing their readers about the implementation, the next steps to be…
clock | April 4, 2008There is a change in the command center of PLoS ONE this month. The transition will be seamless. The new editor, Peter Binfield has joined us a couple of weeks ago and has assumed the Big Kahuna position on the 1st of April. The outgoing editor, Chris Surridge will remain in advisory role for the remainder of the month. I am excited to see them both next week in Cambridge, so we can start plotting the strategy to take over the world together (over a Guinness or two, I hope). And, perhaps important to those who complain that ONE is too biologically oriented, Peter is a physicist, so you…
clock | March 18, 2008The IT/Web team has been hard at work to make TOPAZ, the platform for 5 out of 7 PLoS journals work smoothly again.
clock | March 18, 2008For becoming the 1000th member of the PLoS Facebook group. I think some swag will be going her way... ;-)
clock | March 17, 2008There is an ongoing Journal Club on the PLoS ONE article A Three-Stage Colonization Model for the Peopling of the Americas. You'll see that the first comments there have been posted by people you know - bloggers like Martin Rundkvist and Greg Laden and Kambiz Kamrani. Now it's your turn to add your thoughts. Or, if this is not a topic you are interested in, it is never too late to add your commentary to one of the previous Journal Clubs or to just any PLoS ONE article you are interested in.
ddobbs | February 27, 2008A jazz player's brain: Brain activation while improvising. Blue areas are deactivated comparable to normal, orange and read are ramped up. From PLOS One.
An intriguing finding: While improvising, jazz players seem to turn OFF the part of the brain that (to quote a new study just published in PLOS One) "typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance." They're in what athletes call the zone, where they navigate the oncoming musical terrain by a sort of flexible trained instinct, like boulder-hopping downhill: Think about it and you stumble. Lovely…
clock | February 27, 2008It was a heroic (and sometimes nerve-wrecking) couple of months for the IT/Web team at PLoS, but the fruits of their labor will shortly be visible to all. PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens will soon migrate onto the TOPAZ platform. You are familiar with TOPAZ already as PLoS ONE, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and the PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials are already on this platform. The remaining two journals, the two biggies (PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine) will migrate later this year as well.
Mark Patterson explains in detail what this will mean for you: authors…
ddobbs | February 26, 2008[This is a revised, expanded version of the original heads-up I put up last night.]
A large new meta-analysis of SSRI antidepressant trials concludes that the drugs have essentially no therapeutic effect at all. The study, in PLOS Medicine today, comes on the heels of another study published a few weeks ago (I blogged on it here) showing that SSRIs have little therapeutic effect if you include the (unflattering) clinical trials the industry had previously hidden.
The PLOS study is a meta-analysis of 47 clinical trials that account for almost all full data on clinical trials of SSRIs such as…
ddobbs | February 25, 2008I've not had time to thoroughly read this yet. But on the heels of another study published a few weeks ago (I blogged on it here) showing that SSRIs have little therapeutic effect if you include the (unflattering) clinical trials the industry had previously hidden, PLOS Medicine now publishes a larger study -- a meta-analysis of all available data on clinical trials of SSRIs -- that shows that "compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression" --…
clock | February 25, 2008This is an exciting day at PLoS and, after having to keep my mouth shut for a couple of months about it, I am really happy to be free to announce to the world that my friend and excellent science blogger Jonathan Eisen is now officially the Academic Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Biology.
The editors have written an article that explains his role and how and why it was Jonathan who was chosen. In a separate article, Jonathan gives us a touching and thrilling story of his conversion to Open Access and his vision for the future of PLoS Biology.
You should go and congratulate him in the comments…
clock | February 21, 2008Are you confused with the new NIH Policy and unsure as to what you need to do? If so, Association of Research Libraries has assembled a very useful website that explains the process step by step. But the easiest thing to do is to publish with a journal that does the depositing for you free of charge and here is the list of such journals. Of course, PLoS automatically does that for you as well.
clock | February 20, 2008The word 'ONE' in PLoS ONE indicates that the journal publishes articles in all areas of science. This is not as easy as it sounds, of course. The majority of papers published so far have some kind of biomedical connection to them, which is not a surprise as the biomedical community was the first to embrace PLoS and as the other six PLoS journals are either specifically targeting this community (PLoS Medicine, Pathogens and Neglected Tropical Diseases) or are welcoming to such papers (PLoS Biology, Genetics and Computational Biology).
The support of patient advocate groups, PLoS openness and…
clock | February 20, 2008Brendan Bohannan, Richard W. Castenholz, Jessica Green and their students and postdcos at the Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Oregon are currently doing a Journal Club on the PLoS ONE article The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition: Metagenomic Characterization of Viruses within Aquatic Microbial Samples, which is part of the PLoS Global Ocean Sampling Collection. Please join in the discussion.
clock | January 22, 2008Last week, we made a little upgrade to the PLoS Blog.
If you look at any individual post you will see that we added the "e-mail this page" and "Printer-friendly version" buttons on the bottom of each post.
We have also started allowing trackbacks on our posts. Just like comments, trackbacks will be moderated due to large amounts of spam that are still attacking our system. We check the approval cue for comments and trackbacks on the blog regularly, so yours will show up after a short lag (and if it does not, give me a heads-up by e-mail).
Now look at the right side-bar, where we have made…
clock | January 21, 2008A paper published back in September - Chimpanzees Share Forbidden Fruit by Hockings et al. is getting renewed attention these days.
Rebecca Walton has compiled links to the recent media and blog coverage of the paper (including those by my SciBlings Afarensis, Greg Laden and Brian Switek), the peer-reviewer's comments have been added to the paper, and The Animal Cognition Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany has posted a series of comment as part of a Journal Club on this paper.
Now, all you need to do is join in the conversation - log…
clock | January 9, 2008Members of the Rodriguez lab and the Otero lab, both of Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante (CSIC-Universidad Miguel Hernandez. Spain) have just posted their first Journal Club commentary on the PLoS ONE article High-Pass Filtering of Input Signals by the Ih Current in a Non-Spiking Neuron, the Retinal Rod Bipolar Cell.
Check their discussion and join in - respond to their comments or post your own discussions, annotations and ratings and keep the conversation going!
Also, it is never too late to add your thoughts to the previous Journal Clubs.
clock | January 8, 2008PLoS ONE is the first and (so far) the most successful scientific journal specifically geared to meet the brave new world of the future. After starting it and bringing it up from birth to where it is now one year later, Chris Surridge has decided to move on.
Do you think you have the skill and experience to pick up where he leaves off? Do you want to be at the cutting edge of scientific publishing? If so, take a look at the new job ad for the Managing Editor of PLoS ONE:
The overall responsibility of this position, which will be located in the San Francisco office, is to lead the…