Thanks to the Open Access movement, PLoS ONE (PONE) shall be publishing its 2000th article in a few hours from now. This is perhaps becoming a special moment for all those linked to the success of this wonderful publishing project. I think the credit goes to its managers, an overwhelmingly efficient editorial board, thousands of qualified referees who respond to a fast peer-review process and a seamless electronic workflow.
Having said that, I feel it’s getting almost a norm to listen about PONE’s strides and therefore, I can’t say how festive this occasion is going to be! …happening and burgeoning, going from strength to strength in such a short period of not even 2 years, PONE is often making (and breaking) records.
This reminds me of a shouting blog post when PONE published its 500th paper in just 25 weeks of its launch. Soon after, the 1000th article was accepted on September 20, 2007. Although the corresponding blog post was not that shouting, it mentioned the article acceptance was chosen to match another special occasion - birthday of Chris Surridge, first Managing Editor of PONE. What a special birth day gift!
… it will be interesting to know whose birthday coincides with 2000th PONE article!
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Latest PLoS ONE evaluation at Faculty of 1000
On April 11, Frank de Gruijl from the Leiden University Medical Center/LUMC, Netherlands evaluated at the F1000Biology an article published in PLoSONE (The Vitamin D Receptor Is a Wnt Effector that Controls Hair Follicle Differentiation and Specifies Tumor Type in Adult Epidermis.Pálmer HG, Anjos-Afonso F, Carmeliet G, Takeda H, Watt FM. PLoS ONE 2008, 3(1):e1483). He rated this article with the F1000 factor of 6.00; this value denotes that the article is of major interest to community in the corresponding research area and that every researcher in the field must read it. Here are the evaluator's specific remarks:
"Both the WNT pathway and the vitamin D receptor (VDR) are known to be important to the development of hair follicles, but the latter can now also be considered a downstream transcription factor of WNT, next to its canonical transcription factor TCF/Lef. The branching point is beta-catenin, which can activate both transcription factors. Remarkably, some beta-catenin-responsive genes have VDR, but not TCF/Lef promoter sites. The ligand-activated VDR was shown to prevent follicular tumor formation by beta-catenin, most likely by restoring natural differentiation, and infiltrative human basal cell carcinomas were found to have low VDR expression next to a clear nuclear beta-catenin expression".
On an average about 5% of PLoSONE articles are evaluated on the Faculty of 1000 at a given time, which roughly means a fourth position in terms of number of evaluations, after Science (~17% of the published articles evaluated), Nature (~15% of the published articles evaluated) and PNAS(~15% of the published articles evaluated).
PS: F1000Biology is available to subscribers only. All major research institutions across the world already subscribe to the service. All contents at F1000 are usable through the creative commons attribution license unless otherwise stated.
"Both the WNT pathway and the vitamin D receptor (VDR) are known to be important to the development of hair follicles, but the latter can now also be considered a downstream transcription factor of WNT, next to its canonical transcription factor TCF/Lef. The branching point is beta-catenin, which can activate both transcription factors. Remarkably, some beta-catenin-responsive genes have VDR, but not TCF/Lef promoter sites. The ligand-activated VDR was shown to prevent follicular tumor formation by beta-catenin, most likely by restoring natural differentiation, and infiltrative human basal cell carcinomas were found to have low VDR expression next to a clear nuclear beta-catenin expression".
On an average about 5% of PLoSONE articles are evaluated on the Faculty of 1000 at a given time, which roughly means a fourth position in terms of number of evaluations, after Science (~17% of the published articles evaluated), Nature (~15% of the published articles evaluated) and PNAS(~15% of the published articles evaluated).
PS: F1000Biology is available to subscribers only. All major research institutions across the world already subscribe to the service. All contents at F1000 are usable through the creative commons attribution license unless otherwise stated.
Friday, April 11, 2008
PLoS ONE’s strides at the Faculty-of-1000-Biology
The emergence of Open Access Publishing has brought into practice the long envisioned model of post publication peer review. The success of such models is largely spearheaded by the new technologies based on Web 2.0. For example, the multidisciplinary journal, PLoS ONE, launched in late 2006 has been successfully strengthening the spirit and mission of Open Access while harnessing the power of web technology; at the same time its hosted on a powerful TOPAZ platform for community based review, evaluation and dialogue. It makes a terrific resource when an open access journal combines the power of rating and evaluation in real time.
Another revolution of our time is the authoritative, post-publication benchmarking and rating of most impacting articles through services such as the Faculty of 1000. Faculty of 1000 Biology is a web based, authoritative, next generation literature awareness tool. Run by the Medicine reports Limited (UK), it is a revolutionary online research service that comprehensively and systematically highlights and reviews path-breaking papers based on the recommendations of a faculty of well over 2300 selected leading researchers ("Faculty Members"). This service is run by scientists for scientists and provides ‘a rapidly updated consensus map of the important papers and trends across biology’. F1000Medicine is the sister concern of F1000Biology run by medical academics and clinicians and is rapidly gaining popularity among medical doctors and paramedics.
I consider myself fortunate to have published in Open Access journals in both PLoSONE and BMC and to be associated in editorial capacities with PLoS ONE, F1000Medicine, F1000Biology and the BMC led journals, Annals of Clinical Microbiol Antimicrobials, Infect Agents Cancer, Acta Vet Scand and Gut Pathogens (to be launched soon). I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying open access publishing and witnessing the success and impact of the revolutionary evaluating services.
Since a few weeks I have been associated with PLoS ONE in a more dedicated capacity of a Section Editor (Microbiology and Genomics) and therefore, got further opportunity to look into how this journal is going from strength to strength in such a short time of not even two years? Well that was evident from the number of articles published and their quality. However, I was keen in seeing this from the lenses of giants! I did some analyses involving tools at F1000Biology to know how inclined are the opinion leaders in biological sciences about PLoSONE articles given that the Faculty Members of F1000 have been traditionally ‘jumping’ to articles from a few top tier journals such as Nature or Cell. Good to say, the trend is reversing, although slow. Here is how - I was very much pleased to note PLoS ONE’s visible impact; 55 of the1241 articles (4.4%) published in PLoS ONE in 2007 have been evaluated and recommended by the experts at F1000Biology. What this means in terms of impact? As a comparison I modeled PLoS ONE statistics alongside one highly established journal, Nature (the only journal with which PLoS ONE can be compared due to its multidisciplinary nature). A total of 349 articles out of 2892 (12%) published by Nature in 2007 were evaluated at F1000Biology. Seemingly, the difference in terms of number of articles evaluated looks large. However, as I mentioned, if we consider the current visible bias of F1000 faculty towards Nature journals and the publishing criteria (at Nature) linked to space (huge rejection rates due to subjective criteria), PLoS ONE stands distinctly tall given the fact that it is just born. Performances of all other titles were nowhere near. Other 66 Open Access titles (all BMC series + Genome Biology put together) from Biomed Central (4740 articles in 2007) could yield only 47 evaluations at F1000Biology (0.9%) during 2007. Given that BMC titles are also freely available, it is intriguing to know what makes PLoSONE so successful at F1000? In my perception - it is the high quality of the articles plus the ease with which they can be judged on face - PLoSONE sandbox makes it extremely simple for the evaluators to quickly pick the articles based on notes, referee’s comments, ratings, reader responses and community feedback etc.
The future is even brighter – more and more F1000 members are inclined to using open access articles for their benchmarking. It makes life easy. I remember, I once had almost begged for a reprint from an author of a beautiful review article on genome duplications (many authors do not respond to reprint requests in a reasonable time frame). I wanted to have it evaluated at F1000Medicine and the closed access article was costing me USD 60.00 (in India, this equals to a monthly rent for a 2 bedroom house!!) – how shame!
Finally, I do not know how useful will be these initial statistics on F1000 ratings; but, I am sure this could mean a good indicator for the prospective authors at PLoSONE (especially in the absence of any bibliometric index such as Impact Factor) to foresee its reputation and peer-acceptance that the journal has earned in a short time.
Another revolution of our time is the authoritative, post-publication benchmarking and rating of most impacting articles through services such as the Faculty of 1000. Faculty of 1000 Biology is a web based, authoritative, next generation literature awareness tool. Run by the Medicine reports Limited (UK), it is a revolutionary online research service that comprehensively and systematically highlights and reviews path-breaking papers based on the recommendations of a faculty of well over 2300 selected leading researchers ("Faculty Members"). This service is run by scientists for scientists and provides ‘a rapidly updated consensus map of the important papers and trends across biology’. F1000Medicine is the sister concern of F1000Biology run by medical academics and clinicians and is rapidly gaining popularity among medical doctors and paramedics.
I consider myself fortunate to have published in Open Access journals in both PLoSONE and BMC and to be associated in editorial capacities with PLoS ONE, F1000Medicine, F1000Biology and the BMC led journals, Annals of Clinical Microbiol Antimicrobials, Infect Agents Cancer, Acta Vet Scand and Gut Pathogens (to be launched soon). I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying open access publishing and witnessing the success and impact of the revolutionary evaluating services.
Since a few weeks I have been associated with PLoS ONE in a more dedicated capacity of a Section Editor (Microbiology and Genomics) and therefore, got further opportunity to look into how this journal is going from strength to strength in such a short time of not even two years? Well that was evident from the number of articles published and their quality. However, I was keen in seeing this from the lenses of giants! I did some analyses involving tools at F1000Biology to know how inclined are the opinion leaders in biological sciences about PLoSONE articles given that the Faculty Members of F1000 have been traditionally ‘jumping’ to articles from a few top tier journals such as Nature or Cell. Good to say, the trend is reversing, although slow. Here is how - I was very much pleased to note PLoS ONE’s visible impact; 55 of the1241 articles (4.4%) published in PLoS ONE in 2007 have been evaluated and recommended by the experts at F1000Biology. What this means in terms of impact? As a comparison I modeled PLoS ONE statistics alongside one highly established journal, Nature (the only journal with which PLoS ONE can be compared due to its multidisciplinary nature). A total of 349 articles out of 2892 (12%) published by Nature in 2007 were evaluated at F1000Biology. Seemingly, the difference in terms of number of articles evaluated looks large. However, as I mentioned, if we consider the current visible bias of F1000 faculty towards Nature journals and the publishing criteria (at Nature) linked to space (huge rejection rates due to subjective criteria), PLoS ONE stands distinctly tall given the fact that it is just born. Performances of all other titles were nowhere near. Other 66 Open Access titles (all BMC series + Genome Biology put together) from Biomed Central (4740 articles in 2007) could yield only 47 evaluations at F1000Biology (0.9%) during 2007. Given that BMC titles are also freely available, it is intriguing to know what makes PLoSONE so successful at F1000? In my perception - it is the high quality of the articles plus the ease with which they can be judged on face - PLoSONE sandbox makes it extremely simple for the evaluators to quickly pick the articles based on notes, referee’s comments, ratings, reader responses and community feedback etc.
The future is even brighter – more and more F1000 members are inclined to using open access articles for their benchmarking. It makes life easy. I remember, I once had almost begged for a reprint from an author of a beautiful review article on genome duplications (many authors do not respond to reprint requests in a reasonable time frame). I wanted to have it evaluated at F1000Medicine and the closed access article was costing me USD 60.00 (in India, this equals to a monthly rent for a 2 bedroom house!!) – how shame!
Finally, I do not know how useful will be these initial statistics on F1000 ratings; but, I am sure this could mean a good indicator for the prospective authors at PLoSONE (especially in the absence of any bibliometric index such as Impact Factor) to foresee its reputation and peer-acceptance that the journal has earned in a short time.
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