Wednesday, December 30, 2009

PLoS ONE Review of 2009

[By Peter Binfield, Managing Editor - PLoS ONE  |  originally posted at Everyone - PLoS ONE community blog]

'It was on Dec 20th, 2006 that PLoS ONE launched, and 2009 (only our third full year of publication) has been packed full of exciting developments.  To note our birthday, I took the opportunity to round up the major events of the past 12 months. There have been an awful lot of them and it is a tribute to our staff and academic editors that we were able to achieve all of the following while increasing our publication volume from 2,726 articles published in 2008 to 4,400 expected in 2009 (something which, we believe, now makes us the third largest journal in the world, by publication volume).

The start of the year saw us developing new functionality, with the launch of Collections on PLoS ONE. This began with the publication of the ''Stress-Induced Depression and Comorbidities'' Collection in January, followed by our second in February – the  PLoS ONE Paleontology Collection. We subsequently launched the Prokaryotic Genome Collection in June and the Structural Genomics Consortium Collection in October (a collection which provides 'enhanced versions' of papers, incorporating advanced 3D interactive simulation software – an excellent example of the creative re-use of Open Access content).

In March, we launched everyONE, our community blog site; we announced our ability to accept LaTeX submissions; and we upgraded our site with a redesigned 'tabbed' user interface to accommodate our newly launched Article-Level Metrics functionality (of which more later).

In April, we announced our ''Blog Post of the Month Competition'' (in collaboration with researchblogging.org) which has since gone on to award a winner every month.

In May, we redesigned our email Table of Contents alerts so that recipients now receive an email categorized by subject area, and this was also the month in which we publicly thanked the 9,000 peer reviewers who gave us their expert opinions during 2008.

Our 2009 media coverage will be reviewed by Bex in a different post, but in May we published a paper that sparked our largest media story of the year – the Darwinius masillae (or 'Ida') paper – "Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology". The coverage of this paper was overviewed in three separate blog posts.  

May also saw a major event in the development of PLoS's technology platform – with the migration of PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, we were finally able to have all seven of our titles on Topaz, which is now our shared online platform.

In July, we began a partnership with DeepDyve to improve our search capabilities and we also launched the "Worth a Thousand Words" blog series (featuring a selected image from each week's publications). July also saw PLoS publicly express our opinion that there is more value in measuring impact at the article level than at the journal level – something which coincided with the announcement that we would no longer be promoting Impact Factors on our sites.

In August, PLoS ONE was featured in the popular internet comic, "PhD Comics" as part of their "Nature vs Science" series, and in the same month PLoS launched an important experiment in rapid publication – PLoS Currents: Influenza, a collaboration between PLoS, Google Knol and the NCBI

In September, PLoS ONE was immensely proud to win the ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation, 2009 – this is a major industry award and a testament to the rapid pace of innovation that the journal has pioneered in the 3 years since launch.

September was also the month that saw our Article-Level Metrics program expand in a significant way, by displaying usage data on every article in the PLoS corpus. In December, we also added data from ResearchBlogging.org to the program.  We regard Article-Level Metrics as a significant new development in academic publishing and we  expect to significantly expand it in 2010. Several presentations were made through the year on the topic of Article-level Metrics, for example to NISO, to the ElPub Conference, and to UCSF/Berkeley and these are all archived with audio if you wanted to delve into the details.

In October, OASPA, the new association for Open Access Scholarly Publishers was launched and PLoS was proud to be a founding member. This coincided with Open Access Week, 2009. And in November, in response to many requests over the years, we launched our new PLoS store.

And finally, after a year of incredible developments, 2009 has culminated with what may yet turn out to be the most significant development of all – the request by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) for public comments on the issue of broadening public access to publicly funded research. You still have time to provide your feedback and there would be no better New Year resolution than to make your voice heard in this forum.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us in 2009, and over the last three years – in particular thank you to our (almost) 1,000 Academic Editors, all of our peer reviewers and of course, all of our authors. We look forward to publishing more great science in 2010'.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Happy third birth day, PLoS ONE!

This is the time all supporters of OA should celebrate - for the great, unparallel success that PLoS ONE has achieved in three years: more than 8000 articles, an extended editorial force of 1000 Academic Editors, innovative article-level metrics, thematic collections, etc. We would like to thank all the reviewers who volunteered to review manuscripts within a very short time window of 10 days! The editorial staff deserve a big thank you for the hard work and readiness to help and solve problems. We must also thank our authors who have shown faith in PLoS ONE and submitted their high quality work to this journal. I hope next year will be even better.

Friday, December 18, 2009

New addition to Article-Level Metrics - blog posts from ResearchBlogging.org

(By Liz Allen, Thu 2009-12-17 12:19 | in syndication with PLoS Blog)
 
Throughout the course of 2009, PLoS has been adding a range of Metrics to each and every article that it has published. In addition to the many metrics already displayed (article pageviews and downloads, citations, social bookmarks, notes, comments and ratings), we are pleased to now add data relating to the blog coverage of any article, as measured by ResearchBlogging.org. You can find out more about the Article Level Metrics program here.

Every interested author and user can now see how many times an article has been downloaded (split into HTML Pageviews, PDF and XML downloads and displayed in a month-by-month format); how often an article has been cited (as measured by PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef); how many times it has been 'socially bookmarked' (at CiteULike and Connotea); how many times users have Commented, or left Notes, or provided Ratings; and how many blog articles have been written about it (as measured by the blog aggragators Postgenomic, Blog Lines, Nature Blogs and, from today, ResearchBlogging.org).

We've created a 2.4 minute screen shot video (with audio commentary) that you can watch to familiarize yourself with the blog aggregation functionality from ResearchBlogging.org so you can see for yourself the benefits of this part of the Article-Level Metrics program. 

On launching this new functionality, Pete Binfield, Publisher of PLoS ONE and the Community Journals said:

"We're delighted to add data from ResearchBlogging.org to the Article Level Metrics program because the blogs that they index are mainly written by practicing scientists, who are well versed at providing readable summaries of the research that we publish".

Bloggers who regularly write about scientific research are able to register with ResearchBlogging.org and (provided they qualify) they are then entitled to indicate that their blog entries refer to peer reviewed scientific research by adding an icon to their posts. As a result, the ResarchBlogging.org service represents a high quality source of highly relevant articles, typically written by practicing scientists, on the topic of peer reviewed research. Since all PLoS content is peer reviewed and free to read, PLoS articles tend to be regularly covered by their bloggers. You can find the current list of qualified ResearchBlogging.org bloggers here.

Dave Munger, the co-founder of ResearchBlogging.org, said:

"We're pleased to be working with PLoS to assess the impact of its articles. PLoS journals do a great job publishing and making research accessible to everyone, and we think coverage in thoughtful blog posts is an important component of the impact of a peer-reviewed journal article". You can read more in this blog post.

PLoS ONE and ResearchBlogging.org also collaborate on a monthly "Blog Pick of the Month" competition that we feature on everyONE, the PLoS ONE community blog. Every month, Bora Zivkovic, the Online Discussion Expert for PLoS, chooses the best blog about a PLoS ONE article that has appeared in ResearchBlogging.org and we feature it on our blog. The winning blogger and all the authors of the original PLoS ONE research article all win t-shirts. To enter, you simply need to be a ResearchBlogging.org blogger and start writing about PLoS ONE articles.

We welcome feedback and questions on any aspect of this program to alm@plos.org.