Authors James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis have received an award from the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) for their much talked about paper, “Social Network Sensors for Early Detection of Contagious Outbreaks“, published in PLoS ONE in September 2010 (read our interview with the authors here.) The Society named the article the “Best Environmental Epidemiology Paper” of 2010.

On behalf of PLoS ONE, we extend our congratulations to Fowler and Christakis!

Today it was announced that PLoS ONE has been named a SPARC Innovator by the Association of Research Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. We are very proud to have received this significant honor from a leading resource in Open Access (OA) advocacy.

In particular, SPARC’s recognition of PLoS ONE (which you can read in full on the SPARC website) highlights our contributions to changing the way science is communicated (namely, post-publication peer review and alt-metrics) and our success in proving that Open Access publishing is a viable and successful business model.

“PLoS ONE is a game-changer. It breaks through the preconception that authors—and readers—require a journal to determine the significance of scientific research, and demonstrates that the community is ready and willing to take on that role,” says Heather Joseph, SPARC’s Executive Director.

In welcoming this award, we also want to highlight the fact that our tremendous success has been possible thanks to the dedication of our staff, authors, editors, reviewers and everyone in the PLoS ONE ecosystem. This award and others is for them.

This announcement has been cross-posted from the Official PLoS Blog.

The author of the review, Betty Ladner, Associate University Librarian at UNC Charlotte, described PLoS ONE as having a “thorough peer-review process and excellent board”.

In the review, Ladner describes the merits of our cutting-edge user functionality, including our article level metrics. She also makes mention of this blog site, our ALPSP Award for Innovation, and our engagement with various social media tools. She praises our user interface saying that the “tabbed interface is attractive, easy to navigate, and content-rich” and calls out our search functionality as being “excellent” with “standard features such as single search box as well as advanced searching capability”.

PLoS ONE values the support of the librarian community and is delighted to receive such a positive review from this trusted journal.

Best Bone Structure

2009 was a big year for paleontology research in PLoS ONE and our Paleontology Collection now contains over 40 papers. Scott Hocknull’s discovery of three new dinosaurs in Australia appeared in ABC Science’s review of 2009 and National Geographic’s top 10 (most viewed) dinosaur and fossil finds; this National Geographic list also included PLoS ONE research published by Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin that suggests three dinosaurs thought to be separate species may actually be from the same species. The report of two 47.5-million-year old whale fossils discovered in Pakistan, one of which was a pregnant female, was featured in the “Life” category of Science News’s top stories of the year and was one of four PLoS ONE studies to make Not Exactly Rocket Science’s review of 2009. Unsurprisingly, the fossil that appeared in most lists was Darwinius masillae, aka Ida. As well as some of the stories mentioned above, Ida was discussed in the annual round-ups of New Scientist, LiveScience, the BBC News, among others.

The W.C. Fields Award for Best Study Involving Animals

W.C. Fields is credited with the line, “never work with children or animals.” Well, he should be glad he wasn’t a scientist! A number of interesting and intriguing animal studies appeared in the 2009 round-ups, covering categories from “cleverest” and “biggest” to “best candidate for a 2010 Ignoble.”

Sakamoto and colleagues studied black-browed albatrosses by affixing a small camera to them and watched the birds interacting with a killer whale; this study was highlighted in the BBC’s list of “clever nature” in 2009. Another clever creature was the crow in Alex Kacelnik’s study, which found the birds could use up to three tools sequentially – a study which appeared in the Science News “life” round-up.

If asked the question, “does my web look big in this?” by a spider from the new species Nephila komaci, the answer is definitely yes.  Kuntner and Coddington reported that the new spider is one of the largest known orb-weaving spiders and the study made National Geographic’s top 10 new species of 2009. The chimpanzees that exchanged sex for food on a long-term basis were included in ABC Science’s list of the year, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the study reporting fellatio in bats was named as one of the weirdest science stories of the year by Cosmic Log, Conservation Maven and New Scientist.

The Human Condition: Best Study about People

Of course, we don’t just like to read about animals in the news; we want to know more about ourselves—people. A study published last January reporting the potential use of the video game Tetris to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder, made Not Exactly Rocket Science’s Review of 2009, as well as the New York Times’s Year in Ideas and the top 10 psychology studies at True/Slant. What may have been one of the scariest studies of the year (Indicution of Empathy by the Smell of Anxiety by Prehn-Kristensen and colleagues) appeared in Discover Magazine’s top 100 science stories of 2009, a list that they are continuing to expand through the end of the month. People also turned out to be one of the most surprising creatures to glow, according to this review in Scientific American. In the “best use of science to solve a historical mystery” category, one of the candidates must surely be the paper that revealed that inbreeding may have been responsible for the decline of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain; this was another study included in the Not Exactly Rocket Science round-up.

Most Innovative

As many of you will know, PLoS ONE won the ALPSP’s award for Publishing Innovation of 2009 and we were very proud to be recognised for our constant efforts to innovate and to change the face of scientific publishing. In 2009, we launched our new programme of article-level metrics, which was nominated as one of the open science breakthroughs of 2009 on the World Association of Young Scientists blog. According to The Scientist, meanwhile, Mark Welch’s study, reporting a new recipe for protein expression, is one of the top 10 innovations of 2009.

It goes without saying, that 2009 was a great and superlative-filled year for PLoS ONE and we wish all of our readers, authors, editors and reviewers a very happy New Year!

We are extremely proud to say that PLoS ONE was presented with the 2009 award for Publishing Innovation. We blogged the award ceremony last week, but we now have the official Press Release and announcement from ALPSP.

In the Press Release, PLoS ONE was recognized as follows:

The winner was PLoS ONE from the Public Library of Science. This combines the traditional values of the journal with innovative online features to create an inclusive and efficient publication channel. It is bold and successful and shaping the future of publishing.

This award is made annually,

in recognition of a truly innovative approach to any aspect of publication. Applications are judged on their originality and innovative qualities, together with their utility, benefit to their community and long term prospects. Any area of innovation is eligible – it could, for example, be a novel type of print or online publication or service, or even a radically different approach to a marketing campaign.

PLoS ONE is proud to have won this prestigious award. The innovations that we have implemented have ranged from our innovative editorial criteria (which mean that all submissions are judged based purely on whether they deserve to join the scientific literature, and not on some subjective measure of ‘impact’ or ‘quality); our innovative features and functionality (such as our Commenting, Note Making and Rating functionalities); our innovative outreach to the community (via, for example, this blog, our twitter stream, our facebook page, our FriendFeed presence and our employment of an online discussion expert);  and our continuing innovation (for example, our article-level metrics program). However, it is not sufficient just to be innovative, you also have to be successful (!), and considering the fact that in just 3 years we have grown to become (currently) the 3rd largest journal in the world, I believe that PLoS ONE has demonstrated that we are not just innovative but also widely adopted and extremely successful – something this award confirms.

We thank the ALPSP for recognizing these qualities by presenting us with this award. Chair of the judging panel was Hazel Woodward (University Librarian & Director of Cranfield Press) and her fellow judges were Richard Gedye (Research Director, Oxford Journals), Geoffrey Bilder (Director of Strategic Initiatives, CrossRef), Ann Lawson (Publisher Relations Executive, EBSCO Information Services), Mark Ware (Director, Mark Ware Consulting) and Hugh Look (Senior Consultant, Rightscom).

From left to right - Lindsay King and Rebecca Walton (both Publishing Managers at PLoS ONE and with the journal since before launch), Ann Lawson (EBSCO), Hazel Woodward (chair of the judges)

The award recognizes the contribution and efforts of many people, including all the staff who have worked on the journal since launch in 2006, our team of volunteer Academic Editors (who now number almost 900), all our authors, all our reviewers and of course all our readers. As the Managing Editor of PLoS ONE, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of these people for the support and encouragement they have shown us and that they continue to show us.

Lindsay and Bex with the ALPSP's Publishing Innovation award, given to PLoS ONE on Sept 10th 2009

Earlier this year, PLoS ONE was nominated for the ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) award for Publishing Innovation, 2009, and was short-listed alongside nominees as varied as Elsevier’s Brain Navigator, The Royal Marsden Hospital Manual of Clinical Nursing Procedures, and The LEAP exemplars, Internet Archaeology.

Lindsay King and I have worked at PLoS ONE since before the journal’s launch in 2006 and we’ve always felt that PLoS ONE is unique in a number of ways, from its pioneering editorial policies to its regular technical innovations, including the commentary and rating features available on all of our articles—in short, PLoS ONE has always sought to revolutionise the way in which scientific research is published and so we were honoured to be shortlisted by the ALPSP for this prestigious award.

The ALPSP’s 2009 award winners were announced last night as part of its annual conference at the Belfry Hotel, near Oxford, and Lindsay and I were lucky enough to be able to attend. I’m sure the meal was delicious although I for one was too nervous and excited to remember much about what we ate!

After dinner and a very entertaining speech from Derek Law, it was time for the first award to be announced—and it was for Publishing Innovation. The Chair of the judging panel for this award and for Best New Journal, Hazel Woodward, University Librarian & Director of Cranfield Press, took to the stage to explain some of the reasons for the panel’s choice of winner. As Lindsay and I were listening, we started to think, “this does sound a lot like PLoS ONE” but of course we didn’t want to count any chickens, even if we completely agreed that we are a “bold” development, which has already demonstrated—and will continue to demonstrate—its pursuit of and capacity for innovation (paraphrasing from Hazel’s speech).

And then we heard the magic words: “And the winner is…PLoS ONE.” We hurried up onto the stage to collect our award and a framed certificate from Ann Lawson, of EBSCO, the sponsors of the award (coincidentally, Ann had been sitting at the same table as Lindsay and me all evening, although didn’t give us any hints during the meal of our impending victory!). We posed for some photos and then returned to our seats while the rest of the awards were announced and while we weren’t literally mobbed after the event had finished, a number of people came up to us to congratulate us on behalf of everyone at PLoS ONE and PLoS.

All and all it was a very fun night. Working for PLoS ONE is always exciting, although also sometimes quite tiring (!), but winning the award has made it all worthwhile. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the ALPSP, EBSCO and, most importantly, all of our authors, editors and reviewers throughout the world, without whom PLoS ONE could not be the successful—and innovative—journal it is today.