The surfeit of chimp articles at PLoS ONE

Please don’t laugh if I say the word ‘chimp’ is getting more and more auspicious and luckier for PLoS ONE.

Yesterday, two cool articles published in PLoS ONE turned out to be quite hot in the media and blogosphere this morning. The loud story discussed everywhere (such as Female chimps keep quiet while mating at Times Online; Chimp’s Sex Calls May Reflect Calculation at New York Times; Squeaky chimp sex, or not at Science News; Why chimps scream during sex - it's a bit complicated ...at San Francisco Chronicle, and so on) highlighted why female chimps keep quite during the sexual engagement. You may like to comment on the paper and rate it right here.

Another important study on how young chimps die due to social networking, spread over 20 years of observations, analyzed links between behavioral patterns, social networking, mortality cycles and synchronization of breeding in a chimpanzee colony in Ivory Coast. Nature carried a breaking news article on its website (here) highlighting significance and impact of this study and included comments from the authors. While the story is at the moment actively being discussed at Nature, several other news channels started discussing the article – Play can be fatal for young chimps at The Cheers, Estonia; Infant play drives chimpanzee respiratory disease cycles at Eureka! Science News, Canada; Chimpanzees' Terrible Twos at Science Now; Play can be fatal for young chimps at Thaindian.com; etc. Being an Academic Editor on this important paper it is indeed quite pleasing for me although I was reluctant initially to handle this nice article as an Editor because I am not a primatologist. However, upon close reading also in consultation with my fellow Editor, Sarah Brosnan, I found the study quite near to my interest in infectious diseases and during the process the manuscript sort of ‘resurrected’ the Veterinarian inside me! We found the authors very cooperative and prompt to the editorial queries and revised the manuscript in a highly professional style. Timeliness is really very important in science publishing and we, as always, ensured that the revisions are completed expeditiously so the story catches its full worth at just a right time point. This indeed involves a greater co-ordination and involvement on the part of editors, reviewers and the authors – a working principle at PLoS ONE.

Another chimp tale - Sarah previously studied the circumstances under which chimpanzees exchange a lower-value food item (like an apple slice) for one valued more highly (like a grape). The article was extensively covered by the media and was discussed in blogosphere. You can, as always, join in the discussion by posting your comments onto the online version of Brosnan’s paper. Another paper on Chimps’ diet by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology was picked up by Newsweek and Wired, as well as The Daily Mirror and was discussed in several blogs.

Back in the month of September a remarkable article (Chimpanzees Share Forbidden Fruit), by Kimberley Hockings and colleagues, also from Max Plank, discussed that male chimpanzees steal desirable fruits, like papayas, to engage their female counterparts, who trade sexual favours in return for a share of the spoils. This was again a big media event.

All content published at PLoS ONE, from chimps to birds to corals to genomes and metagenomes is freely available online and articles can be commented upon, rated and discussed to enjoy the full power of Web 2.0 technology that the PLoS ONE is currently harnessing. There is certainly quite diverse food for thought here and you can always join in the discussion yourself by creating an account on the journal site and posting your comments for others to read. Also, you may like to rate the articles. Ratings are the quickest and easiest way for users to indicate which articles are of potential impact for the readers and the scientific community.

Soothing rains, soothing papers

My month long summer holidays just ended with the first rains after a very hot season (42 ℃) here in Hyderabad. Within the last 2 days the rejoice of Monsoon intensified also with the recent PLoS ONE evaluations at the F1000 Biology!! It appears that the Faculty Members of F1000 are now regularly picking up papers from PLoS series. Whereas this article Adaptation and mal-adaptation to ambient hypoxia; Andean, Ethiopian and Himalayan patterns. Xing G, Qualls C, .., Verma A, Appenzeller O, PLoS ONE 2008 3(6):e2342- [abstract on PubMed] [related articles] [free full text], by Xing and colleagues was rated as exceptional, the other two papers 1) Imaging cyclic AMP changes in pancreatic islets of transgenic reporter mice. Kim JW, Roberts CD, .., Roper SD, Chaudhari N, PLoS ONE 2008 3(5):e2127- [abstract on PubMed] [related articles] [free full text] and 2) East learns from West: Asiatic honeybees can understand dance language of European honeybees. Su S, Cai F, .., Tautz J, Chen S, PLoS ONE 2008 3(6):e2365- [abstract on PubMed] [related articles] [free full text] were tagged significant and with novel findings.

Roughly about 4-5% of PLoSONE articles are evaluated on the Faculty of 1000 at a given time, which coincides to 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). For a broad based and high volume journal such as PLoS ONE, the F1000 evaluations constitute important quality indexes for individual articles especially when a much controversial bibliometric index such as 'impact factor' is becoming increasingly redundant.

Another soothing observation was that the Viking DNA paper from Jørgen Dissing’s group, Evidence of Authentic DNA from Danish Viking Age Skeletons Untouched by Humans for 1,000 Years, which I handled recently was very well taken by the popular and science press. The paper was Slashdotted and subsequently received several thousand hits within the space of a couple of days as also reported in PLoS Blog by Rebecca Walton. Some of the coverage of this article is listed below:
Live Science – DNA Retrieved from 1000-year-old Vikings; Wired – Researchers Recover Thousand-Year-Old Viking DNA; People's Daily, China Impossible! Scientists retrieve ancient Viking DNA; Zee News (India) DNA from 1000 yr old skeletons!; Malaysia Sun Viking DNA retrieved from 1000-year-old skeletons; Newsweek – Bring Back the Vikings: Ancient DNA; Discover Magazine – Hide the Women and Children! Researchers Dig up Viking DNA Scientist Live, UK – Authentic Viking DNA; Huffington Post – Viking DNA Recovered From Ten 1,000-Year-Old Skeletons: Report; Anthropology.net – Recovering 1,000 Year Old Viking mtDNA; Science a Gogo Viking DNA Retrieved etc.

The ‘Omic’ revolution, Science 2.0 and PLoS ONE: Are they synonymous?

With the new developments in sequencing technology, more and more species and varieties of organisms are being sequenced more faster than never before, possibly within weeks now. Revolutionary new algorithms for genome analyses have enabled fast and reliable predictions as regards to evolution, physiology, lifestyles and fitness of the sequenced organisms. The scientific journals showcasing such studies have a greater role as regards to access and ease of access to the data and information.

As the new community genomics era dawns ahead, the Open Access journal PLoS ONE has suddenly become a preferred home for genomic and metagenomic studies. This can be gauged from the fact that a whopping 25% of its 2000 papers published until April 2008 was flagged under Genetics and Genomics. Out of this about 50 of the landmark papers addressed the whole genome inferred biology of multiple species of organisms. The most important have been for instance the genome sequences of grape-wine, the Group A Streptococci, Actinobacillus spp., Yersinia spp., Deinococcus geothermalis, Francisella tularensis, Shewanella piezotolerans, Acinetobacters, Leptospira biflexa, Arcobacter butzleri, Bacillus pumilus, Fusobacterium nucleatum, Staphylococcus aureus, Burkholderia mallei and so on.

In addition, six largescale metagenomic studies have been published there in the last few months and it continues to attract submissions in this area and the newly emerging field of ‘Microbiomics’. The Mediterranean metagenomics, coral reef microbial metagenomics and the ocean viral metagenomics projects published at PLoS ONE have been widely discussed both in media and the blogosphere.

No wonder this is truly the magic of web 2.0 based science communication that has transformed PLoS ONE to be the most cutting edge platform for the dissemination of the message of ‘omic’ sciences. So good, the journal is now TOPAZ enabled for community based review, rating and dialogue. It makes a terrific resource when genome data access is enabled through such channels with functionality for community engagement through forums such as Journal Clubs (JC) on PLoS ONE articles. Such JCs involve groups of scientists who volunteer to discuss PLoS ONE articles and to post their discussions as a series of comments, annotations, and ratings eventually triggering discussions within a broader scientific community.

Competing interest: I serve as Section Editor for PLoS ONE.