Something for everyONE
Welcome to the first post of everyONE, the PLoS ONE community blog. Here are the answers to a few questions that are probably crossing your mind as you look at this site for the first time.
Why a blog and why now? As of March 2009, PLoS ONE, the peer-reviewed open-access journal for all scientific and medical research, has published over 5,000 articles, representing the work of over 30,000 authors and co-authors, and receives over 160,000 unique visitors per month. That’s a good sized online community and we thought it was about time that you had a blog to call your own. This blog is for authors who have published with us and for users who haven’t and it contains something for everyone.
Why did you call the blog everyONE? For three main reasons that encapsulate the mission of the journal:
Firstly, because PLoS ONE is for every rigorous research article that passes our peer-review process.
Secondly, because PLoS ONE is a forum for research in every scientific discipline (with a current emphasis on life and health sciences because of PLoS’s history).
Thirdly, because PLoS ONE is a source of information for every inquisitive reader with an interest in high-quality scientific research.
Why the buzz about PLoS ONE? It’s probably because we’re a little different. PLoS ONE is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for all science and medicine, which has the core scholarly journal publishing values at its heart but reflects improvements offered by the internet publishing age.
What does the blog cover?
The best blog from Researchblogging.org – our monthly choice of a post that originated from a PLoS ONE article. A prize goes to the author of the blog (and the author/s of the original PLoS ONE paper) that gets picked by Bora Zivkovic our online discussion expert. Kicks off 4.1.2009.
Details about new developments, such as our Collections. Be the first to learn about new additions to our growing portfolio.
Commenting – send us your questions, comments and concerns. You’ll need to join WordPress to do this but that takes just seconds. When you are almost finished entering your data, simply check the box to create a new user name (don’t create a blog, unless you really want to!). Once you’ve joined and are logged in, just click on “comments” at the bottom of any page or post and have your say. Your item will come to us for approval prior to being posted together with our answer (when one is required).
Events – discover how you can become a “Roving Ambassador” for PLoS ONE when you attend a conference.
Interviews – This blog is all about you and we’ll use it to share your scientific and publishing experiences.
Journal clubs – get your lab involved or read the latest debate
Media Coverage – PLoS ONE articles are in the media on a daily basis. Find out about that coverage, and how we achieve it.
Public Access – if public money pays for research, it should be freely available to all. Find out which funders support public access to research.
Publication fees – information on our fees and the PLoS business model.
Polls – share your opinions on a variety of scientific and publishing topics.
Resources – spread the word using downloads; we’re a non-profit so we need to keep our costs down and have our supporters help us out.
Service – our service levels, our values and what it is really like to publish with us if you haven’t already done so.
Feedback – Every journal has its good days and its not so good ones and we’ll use this site to keep you informed about what gives (from technology upgrades, to staff changes etc).
We’re excited to bring you a treasury of good and interesting science on a daily basis. We welcome your submissions (you can submit here) and we hope that this blog site will be a useful addition to the PLoS ONE mix.
