PLOS
clock | September 28, 2007Lots of new stuff on PLoS today. So, let's go over it one by one.
First, today is the inaugural day of the Clinical Trials Hub, central place for all the papers reporting on clinical trials and discussions of them, hosted on TOPAZ platform (just like PLoS ONE) so users can comment, rate and annotate all the papers (and links from blog posts will show up as trackbacks). Emma Veitch has all the details.
Second, the Trackbacks are now working for some, but not all blogging platforms, as long as the correct URL of the article is used. Links from Drupal blogs form automatically. For…
clock | September 21, 2007Yesterday, PLoS ONE moved to the newest version of the TOPAZ platform. Rich Cave explains all the improvements that this move entails, including the citation download for articles, but one new feature that should really be exciting to bloggers are Trackbacks.
From now on, if you link to a PLoS ONE article in your post, that article will display a link back to your blog post (go to an article and look at the right side-bar, nested between the Discussions and Ratings). Thus, in addition to the conversation already going on in the commentary attached to the article itself, the readers will be…
clock | September 14, 2007As always on Fridays, there are new papers published in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Computational Biology. I like to take my own picks, and today I pick this pre-publication (there is a provisional PDF online) in my own field:
Meta-analysis of Drosophila Circadian Microarray Studies Identifies a Novel Set of Rhythmically Expressed Genes:
Five independent groups have reported microarray studies that identify dozens of rhythmically expressed genes in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Limited overlap among the lists of discovered genes makes it difficult to determine which, if…
clock | September 11, 2007Holy Cow! Every Tuesday night I like to link to 5-6 of the brand new papers on PLoS ONE that I find personally most intriguing. But today, it is so difficult to choose - I want to highlight something like 20 out of today's 39. So, here are a few and you definitely go and see the whole list for yourself (and you know the drill, as I parrot it every week: read, rate, comment):
Impedance-Matching Hearing in Paleozoic Reptiles: Evidence of Advanced Sensory Perception at an Early Stage of Amniote Evolution
Insights into the onset of evolutionary novelties are key to the understanding of amniote…
clock | September 10, 2007In PLoS Biology:
High-Resolution Genome-Wide Dissection of the Two Rules of Speciation in Drosophila:
The evolution of reproductive isolation is a fundamental step in the origin of species. One kind of reproductive isolation, the sterility and inviability of species hybrids, is characterized by two of the strongest rules in evolutionary biology. The first is Haldane's rule: for species crosses in which just one hybrid sex is sterile or inviable, it tends to be the sex defined by having a pair of dissimilar sex chromosomes (e.g., the "XY" of males in humans). The second rule is the large X…
clock | September 5, 2007Check out this screenshot of the front page of PLoS ONE:
See the banner on the top right? Looks familiar?
There are several rotating ads, so you may have to click around several papers until you get to see it yourself (and while looking around, of course you are allowed to read papers, rate them., etc....)
clock | August 30, 2007The next journal to be launched by the Public Library of Science is PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
To whet your appetite, two papers were published in advance, both on the cause of River Blindness and the evolution of resistance to the anti-parasitic ivermectin: a research paper Genetic Selection of Low Fertile Onchocerca volvulus by Ivermectin Treatment and a commentary Ivermectin Resistance in Onchocerca volvulus - Toward a Genetic Basis.
Shabnam Sigman gives more details about the launch on the PLoS Blog. You can get more information about the new journal here.
clock | August 22, 2007Intrigued, but unsure about the whole thing? Would like to add comments, but don't really understand what is acceptable? Read this.
clock | August 22, 2007Do you remember all the buzz about the paper on the not random but not deterministic either behavior in fruitflies? By our blogfriend Bjoern Brembs?
Well, you can now watch the behavior of the insect in the movie associated with the paper. The video is up on SciVee of course - see it here.
And if there is a text box on top of it that bothers you, you can easily toggle it off - see the menu on the left, find Selection and click on the selection you are watching - textbox is gone. Click again, box is back. Also there on the left are Options, one of which includes "disable selection box",…
clock | August 20, 2007Video is taking over science communication. And why not? Now that paper is outdated, the limitations of that ancient technology should not apply to scientific publishing any more. Just because paper cannot support movies does not mean that modern scientific papers should shy away from using them.
Last week saw the launch of SciVee, essentially an aggregator of science movies. Now, you may ask - why do we need yet another one of those sites? There are several out there already. Journal of Visualized Experiments is a real journal - the videos are submitted and reviewed first and, if…
clock | August 16, 2007As could have been expected, I am now officially the blogmeister of the PLoS blog. I have just posted my first introductory post there. It is a Drupal blog. The above and below the fold parts are separate (you see one or the other, not both at the same time) so this will take some getting used to. There will be, in the coming weeks and months, changes to the blog and I want your input. Post your suggestions in the comments over there. The comments are moderated for now due to excessive influx of spam, so be patient when you post comments there - I will approve them as fast as I can.
clock | August 9, 2007As I predicted, bloggers have waited a day or two before they wrote much of substance abour Scifoo. First, you don't want to miss out on any cool conversations by blogging instead. Second, the experience is so intense, one needs to cool down, process and digest everything. Before I write my own thoughts, here are some links to places where you can see what others are doing:
The campers are joining the Science Foo Camp Facebook group (honor system - only campers are supposed to join, but it is open) and exchanging links, pictures and information.
There is an official aggregator where you can…
clock | August 8, 2007I am not sure if blogging about it is enough - in this case a very strong Resume may be more important - but if you think you have sufficient experience and expertise to be a Managing Editor of a major biology journal, PLoS Biology (and are not too intimidated to be stepping into Hemai's shoes), check the job ad and apply:
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) seeks an experienced editor and manager to lead its flagship life science journal - PLoS Biology. Since its launch in 2003, PLoS Biology has rapidly become established as both a high impact journal and a leader in the open-access…
clock | August 8, 2007As far as I know, there are two papers on PLoS ONE so far that, as Supporting Information, have KML files readable by Google Earth: Naturalised Vitis Rootstocks in Europe and Consequences to Native Wild Grapevine and this week's Regional Decline of Coral Cover in the Indo-Pacific: Timing, Extent, and Subregional Comparisons. Just scroll down to the Supporting Information of those papers, click on "Map S1" and, if you have Google Earth you can explore the map of the area of study.
If you are publishing a paper in an online, open access journal, think outside the box - there are things you can…
clock | August 3, 2007Home pages of PLoS Biology, Medicine, Computational Biology, Genetics and Pathogens have a new look today. Richard Cave explains the design changes. Go take a look.
clock | August 3, 2007A month has passed.
It was a steep learning curve, but I think I have climbed high enough on it to be confident that I'll be fine on my own back in Chapel Hill. Being a part of the PLoS team is such an exhillarating experience - there is so much energy and optimism around the office, everybody from CEO to the newest intern living, breathing and dreaming Open Access 24/7.
Not to bore you about the job any more - you will be hearing about PLoS over and over again here - let me, for now, just show you some pictures (under the fold) from the farewell party last night at Jupiter in downtown…
clock | August 1, 2007On this day one year ago, PLoS ONE opened its doors to manuscript submissions. Chris Surridge, the Managing Editor, wrote a blog post recounting the past year:
The initial success of PLoS ONE is something unprecedented in scientific publishing. It has been achieved because of the commitment and faith of hundreds of people: PLoS staff, editorial and advisory board members, reviewers, authors and particularly readers. And yet this is only a very small step towards an open, interactive and efficient literature that will accelerate scientific progress. Over the coming months, we will take…
clock | July 19, 2007This picture, from this article, must have been taken some time last week, just a couple of days after Jimmy Wales came to talk to us here at PLoS. That is when he placed the PLoS sticker on his laptop:
clock | July 18, 2007There are 21 new papers on PLoS ONE published this week. Here are some titles that got my personal attention:
Climate Change, Genetics or Human Choice: Why Were the Shells of Mankind's Earliest Ornament Larger in the Pleistocene Than in the Holocene? by Peter R. Teske, Isabelle Papadopoulos, Christopher D. McQuaid, Brent K. Newman and Nigel P. Barker:
The southern African tick shell, Nassarius kraussianus, is the earliest ornament known to be used by humans, dating back ~75,000 years. This study investigates why beads made from these shells in more recent times are smaller. It is likely due…
clock | July 18, 2007Curtis, one of the founders of JeffsBench wrote a very interesting article comparing JeffsBench to PLoS ONE in their roles in fostering online scientific discussions. Register, look around and comment....