The Collection comprises four reviews and five research articles, and highlights how scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) for HIV prevention in eastern and southern Africa can help prevent HIV, not only at the individual level but also at the community and population level, as well as leading to substantial cost savings for countries due to averted treatment and care costs. Two of the research articles are published in PLoS ONE; the remaining seven articles are published in PLoS Medicine on 29^th November 2011. They can be accessed from the PLoS Medicine VMMC Collection page; the table of contents is also included below.

The first article by Catherine Hankins of UNAIDS, Steven Forsythe of The Futures Institute, and Emmanuel Njeuhmeli of PEPFAR/USAID, offers an introduction to the cost, impact and challenges of accelerated scaling up and lays out the rationale for the Collection. The remaining eight papers focus on the various factors that have important roles in effective program expansion of VMMC, including data for decision making, policy and programmatic frameworks, logistics, demand creation, human resources, and translating research into services.

The potential cost savings of scale-up are clear. An initial investment of US$1.5 billion between 2011 and 2015 to achieve 80% coverage of VMMC services in 14 priority countries in southern and eastern Africa, and thereafter US$0.5 billion between 2016 and 2025 to maintain coverage of 80%, could result in net savings of US$16.5 billion between 2011 and 2025. However, as the articles in the Collection show, strong political leadership, country ownership, and stakeholder engagement, along with effective demand creation, community mobilization and human resource deployment, are essential for effectively expanding and maintaining VMMC programs.

All 9 articles were peer-reviewed, revised and considered in depth by the editorial team, and subjected to all the usual PLoS Medicine or PLoS ONE editorial processes. We would like to thank the numerous peer reviewers for their detailed critiques, which helped to shape the articles, and we would also like to thank the authors for their patience in making appropriate revisions to these reviews. In particular we would like to Stephanie Sansom, guest academic editor, who read all the articles and provided critical feedback and reviewer advice to the editorial team. A special thank you goes to Emmanuel Njeuhmeli of PEPFAR/USAID who served as the main editorial contact for the articles in this Collection.

A question-and-answer Twitter expert session [#VMMC@USAIDGH] will be held on December 19 2011, from 1pm-2pm EST, with Emmanuel Njeuhmeli, Senior Biomedical Prevention Advisor of the Office of HIV/AIDS/USAID Washington, Co-Chair PEPFAR, Male Circumcision Technical Working Group, and an author on several of the articles in the Collection. In regard to this Collection Dr. Njeuhmeli comments:

“The collaboration that led to the findings in the PLoS Collection is a true testament to what international partners can accomplish when they work together and do so effectively to support country strategy for HIV Prevention. I can say with confidence this collaboration has played a major role in moving the needle on VMMC and HIV prevention. This Collection represents extensive collaboration between Ministries of Health, WHO, UNAIDS, PEPFAR and implementing partners to document and share with policy makers and program implementers the estimated cost and potential impact of scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) services in southern and eastern Africa. The papers included in this Collection document the enormous potential of VMMC to alter the course of the epidemic. They also describe the way that country programs have successfully navigated human resource, demand generation and other challenges in an effort to rapidly scale up comprehensive VMMC services.”

Collection Table of Contents :

1)     Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: An Introduction to the Cost, Impact, and Challenges of Accelerated Scaling Up

2)     Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Modeling the Impact and Cost of Expanding Male Circumcision for HIV Prevention in Eastern and Southern Africa

3)     Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: A Framework Analysis of Policy and Program Implementation in Eastern and Southern Africa

4)     Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: A Cross-Sectional Study Comparing Circumcision Self-Report and Physical Examination Findings in Lesotho

5)     Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Logistics, Commodities, and Waste Management Requirements for Scale-Up of Services

6)     Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: A Qualitative Study Exploring the Challenges of Costing Demand Creation in Eastern and Southern Africa

7)     Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Strategies for Meeting the Human Resource Needs of Scale-Up in Southern and Eastern Africa

8)     Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Translating Research into the Rapid Expansion of Services in Kenya, 2008–2011

9)      Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Matching Demand and Supply with Quality and Efficiency in a High-Volume Campaign in Iringa Region, Tanzania

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the VMMC collection are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government and UNAIDS. The collection was produced with support from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The PLoS Medicine editors have sole editorial responsibility for the content of this collection.

Image Credit: PEPFAR Male Circumcision Technical Working Group

Permission to use the CCAL license granted by the PEPFAR Male Circumcision Technical Working Group.

The huge increase in scientific output is presenting scholars with a deluge of data.  There is growing concern that scholarly output may be swamping traditional mechanisms for both pre-publication filtering (e.g. peer review) and post-publication impact filtering (e.g. the Journal Impact Factor).

Increasing scholarly use of Web 2.0 tools like CiteULike, Mendeley, Twitter, and blogs presents an opportunity to create new filters.  Metrics based on a diverse set of social sources could yield broader, richer, and timelier assessments of current and potential scholarly impact.  Realizing this, many authors have begun to call for investigation of these metrics under the banner of “altmetrics.”  Specifically, altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship.

Despite the growing speculation and early exploratory investigation into the value of altmetrics, there remains little concrete, objective research into the properties of these metrics: their validity, their potential value and flaws, and their relationship to established measures. Nor has there been any large umbrella to bring these multiple approaches together.

Following on from a first successful workshop on altmetrics, this collection aims to provide a forum for the dissemination of innovative research on these metrics.

We seek high quality submissions that advance the understanding of the efficacy of altmetrics, addressing research areas including:

• Validated new metrics based on social media.

• Tracking science communication on the Web.

• Relation between traditional metrics and altmetrics including validation and correlation.

• The relationship between peer review and altmetrics.

• Evaluated tools for gathering, analyzing, or disseminating altmetrics.

Papers will be reviewed on a rolling basis in-line with PLoS ONE standard practices.

Please note that all submissions submitted before January 28^th, 2012 will be considered for the launch of the collection (expected spring 2012); submissions after this date will still be considered for the collection, but may not appear in the collection at launch.

Submission Guidelines

If you wish to submit your research to the Altmetrics: Tracking scholarly impact on the social Web Collection, please consider the following when preparing your manuscript:

- All articles must adhere to the PLoS ONE submission guidelines.

- Standard PLoS ONE policies and publication fees apply to all submissions.

- Submission to PLoS ONE as part of the Altmetrics Collection does not guarantee publication.

When you are ready to submit your manuscript to the collection, please log in to the PLoS ONE manuscript submission system and insert ‘Altmetrics’ in the relevant field to ensure the PLoS ONE staff are aware of your submission to the Collection.  Once you have registered, you can follow the steps for manuscript submission.

Please contact Lindsay King (lking@plos.org) if you would like further information about how to submit your research to the PLoS ONE Altmetrics Collection.

Organizers:

Paul Groth, VU University Amsterdam

Dario Taraborelli, Wikimedia Foundation

Jason Priem, UNC-Chapel Hill

About PLoS ONE

PLoS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication.  PLoS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline.

It provides:

• Open-access – freely accessible online, authors retain copyright
• Fast publication times
• Peer review by expert, practicing researchers
• Post-publication tools to indicate quality and impact
• Community-based dialogue on articles
• Worldwide media coverage
• PLoS ONE is published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit organization.

In the new PLoS ONE Collection: RosettaCon 2010, over 15 academic groups from Rosetta Commons have attempted to capture these protocols in a sufficiently complete and formal way. This Collection aims to make several of the latest Rosetta macromolecular modeling protocols from the 2010 Rosetta Developers Meeting accessible to all.

Three main contributions came from the meeting and are represented in the PLoS ONE Collection.

1. New Rosetta applications: Several articles describe specific applications in biology or chemistry, including de novo enzyme design, modeling classes of protein loops, design of temperature sensitive mutations, and design of peptides to inhibit large surface area protein interactions.

2. Rosetta basic science: Several of the contributions in this Collection are Rosetta basic science papers of this type.  Examples include: incorporation of non-canonical amino acids in Rosetta design, multi-state design, new Rosetta kinematics, new protein docking protocols, and anchored design. Each example has the full protocol that lead to the incorrect prediction fully described as well as the correct (“native”) structure; thus these protocols are key elements in defining and judging future improvement in Rosetta and other codes.

3. Rosetta code development: Multiple articles describe new code refactoring, extensions or improvements to the implementation of Rosetta.  Several articles discuss the creation of multi-purpose high level interfaces to the components of Rosetta.  Examples include an XML scripting interface for Rosetta, an interactive python interface to the Rosetta code, and an object oriented API for generating Rosetta fragments.

RosettaCon 2010 provides the larger community direct access to the exact protocols used in each of these papers. This construction was intended to allow other community members and Rosetta users to reproduce the work, allow competing groups to validate and improve upon the work, and finally, make it rapidly accessible to new users with similar biological applications.

It should be noted that this Collection is itself a social experiment and the collaborators wrestled with how best to capture an evolving set of processes in a way that does not overly burden authors, works across a distributed community without a central authority for methods capture, is timely, and is sufficiently self-consistent that readers will invest their time in the results.

The paper, 2010 Rosetta Developers Meeting: Macromolecular Prediction and Design Meets Reproducible Publishing, by Renfrew et al. was adapted to create this post.

Collection Citation: RosettaCon 2010 (2011) PLoS Collections: http://www.ploscollections.org/RosettaCon2010

With the growth of DNA barcoding into a worldwide initiative, the community has gathered for an international conference every two years, beginning in 2005.  The early conferences focused on the reliability of barcode-based identifications and subsequently laid to rest the most pressing of such concerns.  As a result, the 2009 Mexico City conference witnessed an explosion of new applications of DNA barcoding across a rapidly expanding range of fields.

The new PLoS ONE Collection, Proceedings of the Third International Barcode of Life Conference, Mexico City, includes a selection of articles by the speakers at the plenary sessions of the 2009 conference.  The articles represent the broad range of work now going on in the barcoding community, including applications in taxonomy, ecology, biogeography, and even socioeconomic applications such as controlling forest pest species.

One of the highlights of the Mexico City conference was the formal announcement of agreement on the standard barcode regions for land plants.  This new standard opened the door to novel projects on grasses, food webs of plant-eating insects, and on combating illegal logging.

The barcoding community is gearing up for the Fourth International Conference, which will be hosted by the University of Adelaide in South Australia from November 28^th to December 3rd 2011.  Online discussions have already opened and more than 400 abstracts have been submitted.   DNA barcoding continues to expand and accelerate and the PLoS ONE Collection, Proceedings of the Third International Barcode of Life Conference, Mexico City will be an important reference in the evolution of this field.

Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome by Ted J. Kaptchuk et al., had over 265 articles written on the paper. Some of that media coverage came from: The New York Times, TIME, NPR and Bloomberg.

The paper, Experimental ‘Jet Lag’ Inhibits Adult Neurogenesis and Produces Long-Term Cognitive Deficits in Female Hamsters, received media coverage from: Science 2.0, Time, The Globe and Mail, The Times of India, The Daily Mail, The Mercury News and AFP.

Key Steps in Developing a Cognitive Vaccine against Traumatic Flashbacks: Visuospatial Tetris versus Verbal Pub Quiz by Emily A Holmes et al., received media attention from: CNN, New Scientist, Not Exactly Rocket Science, LA Times, TIME, Network World, ABC News and PC Magazine.

Cannibalism in Tyrannosaurus rex by Nicholas R. Longrich, John R. Horner, Gregory M. Erickson and Philip J. Currie was covered by: CNN, Times of India, CTV, Herald Sun, Science Blog, Sify, LA Times, National Geographic, Bloomberg, The Guardian, AOLs, io9, Discovery News, Dinosaur Tracking, Into Oblivion and New Scientist.

Viewing Pictures of a Romantic Partner Reduces Experimental Pain: Involvement of Neural Reward Systems by Jarred Younger and colleagues, received coverage from: USA Today, TIME, CNN, Scientific American Observations, LA Times, Seattle PI, AOL News, Hindustan Times, BBC, The Press Association, WebMD, Scope, Visit Bulgaria, Disease of the Week, The Guardian and The MedGuru.

Iridovirus and Microsporidian Linked to Honey Bee Colony Decline received coverage from: PBS NewsHour, New York Times, The Telegraph, The Baltimore Sun, TIME, The New Yorker, New Scientist, Discover (blog), NPR, Science Blogs, CBS, Ars Technica, and Popular Science.

Scott Sampson and colleagues recently published their paper on two new horned dinosaurs found in southern Utah.  They received coverage from: CNN, The Guardian, National Geographic, Sify, RedOrbit, ABC 4, ScienceBlog, BBC , AFP, Mongabay, and Christian Science Monitor.

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s manuscript, Social Network Sensors for Early Detection of Contagious Outbreaks received coverage from: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Los Angeles Times, MIT Technology Review, KPBS, Wired, Business Week and Science Now.

Homocysteine-Lowering by B Vitamins Slows the Rate of Accelerated Brain Atrophy in Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Randomized Controlled Trial by David Smith et al., received worldwide coverage – with over 300 articles written on the paper. Some of the media outlets that covered the story included: CNN, BBC, Aljazeera, Xinhua, Time(blog), Times of India, Tehran Times, The Guardian, CTV, Seattle Times, Bloomberg, Los Angeles Times, The Telegraph and Reuters.

Fruit and Soil Quality of Organic and Conventional Strawberry Agroecosystems by John P. Reganold et al., was covered by Scientific American, USA Today, Technocrati, LA Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and Science Friday.

Our PLoS ONE: Marine Biodiversity and Biogeography – Regional Comparisons of Global Issues collection which also received worldwide media attention.

A Sinister Bias for Calling Fouls in Soccer by Alexander Kranjec et al., during the month of the World Cup, was a big hit with the media. It was covered by C6-H12-O6, Dormivigilia, Duncan Hull, Research-digest blog, New York Times, Telegraph, U.S. News & World Report and a number of other places in many languages.

Quantifying the Performance of Individual Players in a Team Activity by Duch et al., was covered by Washington Post, National Geographic, Chicago Sun-Times, Forbes and MSNBC.

Choosing Organic Pesticides over Synthetic Pesticides May Not Effectively Mitigate Environmental Risk in Soybeans by Bahlai et al., was covered at CBC, GuelphNow, Alberta Express, Nutritional Blogma, Sify news, Phased and Journal Watch Online.

First Direct Evidence of Chalcolithic Footwear from the Near Eastern Highlands by Pinhasi et al., received widespread coverage and it is impossible to collect all of the hundreds of links to all the articles and blog posts, so here is a more-or-less representative sample: Scientific American, National Geographic, Discovery News, Discover – 80beats, The Great Beyond, CNN and Huffington Post.

The article An Environment-Wide Association Study (EWAS) on Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Patel et al., was covered in Diabetes.co.uk, Health Newstrack, The Money Times and San Jose Mercury News.

Ancient Nursery Area for the Extinct Giant Shark Megalodon from the Miocene of Panama by Pimiento, Ehret, MacFadden and Hubbell, was covered at Laelaps, Discovery News, Not Exactly Rocket Science and Toronto Sun.

First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality by Slater et al., was covered by ScienceNews, LiveScience, Discovery News, CBS News and New Scientist.

Bee Threat Elicits Alarm Call in African Elephants by King et al., was covered in Science NOW, Wired, TreeHugger, BBC, Disney Parks blog, Thaindian News and Vancouver Sun.

Raltegravir Is a Potent Inhibitor of XMRV, a Virus Implicated in Prostate Cancer and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by Singh et al., was covered by Virology blog, Scientific American blog, Salt Lake Tribune and Xinhua.

Laetoli Footprints Preserve Earliest Direct Evidence of Human-Like Bipedal Biomechanics by Raichlen et al. was reported at Washington Post, Scientific American blog, BusinessWeek, Laelaps and Wired Science.

The Alzheimer’s Disease-Associated Amyloid β-Protein Is an Antimicrobial Peptide by Soscia et al, was covered by New York Times Health Feed, Business Week, Suite101, Scientist Live, Alzheimer’s Reading Room and Neurophilosophy.

The article Optimal Waist-to-Hip Ratios in Women Activate Neural Reward Centers in Men by Steven M. Platek and Devendra Singh was irresistible to the media. It was covered widely, some outlets included Herald Sun, Times of India, Telegraph, New York Daily News and ZME Science.

The article Analysis of the Putative Remains of a European Patron Saint–St. Birgitta received coverage from: Register, Gene Expression, Monsters and Critics, A Very Remote Period Indeed and ScienceBlog.

The Extent of the Preserved Feathers on the Four-Winged Dinosaur Microraptor gui under Ultraviolet Light by David Hone et al., was covered by The Open Source Paleontologist, Dinochick Blogs, Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking and Dracovenator.

Images from top to bottom: PLoS ONE e15267,  e13706, e12948, e11871, e10984, e10564, e9769 and e8986

Image courtesy of Pyka M, et al. PLoS ONE. 4(9).

One of the great challenges of the 21^st century is how to translate scientific advancements from physical sciences into medicine. This gap of knowledge is also clearly visible amongst multiple disciplines within medicine (i.e. neurosurgery and radiology, neurology and neurosurgery, psychiatry and radiology and radiology and neurology). In this spirit, the Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics (SBMT; formerly the IBMISPS) has been successfully addressing this educational gap by bringing together physicians, surgeons, scientists and engineers from multiple disciplines to promote cross-disciplinary research and publication.

To foster increased dialogue between these communities, the SBMT is proud to announce that they have partnered with PLoS ONE, in order to create a special collection called NeuroMapping and Therapeutics.  By doing so, the SBMT editorial board has decided to encourage its members to publish their research in PLoS ONE. These articles will then be brought together into a Collection that will highlight this content.

The aim of the SBMT NeuroMapping & Therapeutics (NMT) Collection is to provide a forum for interdisciplinary research aimed at translation of knowledge across a number of fields such as:

• Neurosurgery (e.g. Image Guided Therapy/intervention, brain tumors and  intraoperative navigation, nanoneurosurgery, stereotactic radiosurgery, minimally invasive therapy, vascular neurosurgery, functional neurosurgery…)

• Neurology (e.g. movement disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, neurooncology, as well as image guided device implantation…)

• Psychiatry (e.g. medical imaging for psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, PTSD…)

• Radiology (e.g. fMRI, PET, Nuclear medicine, MR SPEC, MRI, MR-PET, DTI, CT-PET, Focused Ultrasound, SQUID MRI, low magnet MRI…)

• Neuroscience (e.g. stem cell, molecular neuroscience, image guided mapping of genes, proteomics, genomics…)

• Neuroengineering (e.g. iomaterial & tissue engineering, human brain Machine Interface, brain and spinal cord devices, nanomedicine, extraterrestrial/space medicine & clinical practice…)

• Policy (e.g. healthcare policy issues that affect the treatment delivery and usage of certain devices/drugs/imaging technologies…)

This Collection will contain a selection of those articles published within PLoS ONE, which the Editorial Board of the Collection feel are representative of the aims and scope of the SBMT society.  It will continue to expand over time as the number of relevant articles grows and are added to the Collection.

Please click here to listen to a presentation about PLoS ONE and the NeuroMapping and Therapeutics Collection by Pete Binfield (Publisher, PLoS ONE).  This presentation took place at the 8^th Annual World Congress of SBMT on Brain, Spinal Cord Mapping and Image Guided Therapy.

If you wish to submit your research to the PLoS ONE NeuroMapping & Therapeutics (NMT) Collection, please consider the following when preparing your manuscript:

• All articles must adhere to the PLoS ONE submission guidelines.

• Standard PLoS ONE policies and publication fees apply to all submissions.

• Submission to PLoS ONE as part of the NMT Collection does not guarantee publication or inclusion into the final Collection due to highly competitive nature of this collection.

When you are ready to submit your manuscript to the collection, please log in to the PLoS ONE manuscript submission system and insert ‘NMT’ in the relevant field to ensure the PLoS ONE staff are aware of your submission to the Collection.  Once you have registered, you can follow the steps for manuscript submission.

Please contact Lindsay King (lking@plos.org) if you would like further information about how to submit your research to the PLoS ONE NMT Collection.

The following PLoS ONE Editorial Board members have agreed to assist with this collection:

• Dr. David Cifu, Virginia Commonwealth University Rehabilitation and Research Center, US
• Dr. Jeffrey Sutton, National Space Biomedical Research Institute,  US
• Dr. Krystof Bankiewicz, University of California at San Francisco, US
• Dr. Mitch Berger, University of California at San Francisco, US
• Dr. Keith Black, Cedars-Sinia Medical Center,  US
• Dr. Jay Pillai, John Hopkins School of Medicine, US
• Dr. Aria Tzika, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, US
• Dr. Michael Lim, Johns Hopkins Hospital, US
• Dr. Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells, University of Barcelona, Spain
• Dr. Howard Gendelman, University of Nebraska, US
• Dr. Shawn Hochman, Emory University, US
• Dr. Stephen Ginsberg, Nathan Kline Institute and New York University School of Medicine, US
• Prof. Andreas Meisel, Charité Universitaetsmedizin Berlin, Germany
• Prof. Hitoshi Okazawa, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Japan
• Dr. Joseph El Khoury, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, US
• Dr. Karin Peterson, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – Rocky Mountain Laboratories, US
• Prof. Tsuneya Ikezu, Boston University School of Medicine, US
• Dr. Mike Chen, City of Hope, US

Update: The SBMT recently changed its name from the International Brain Mapping & Intraoperative Surgical Planning Society; updates made to this post reflect that change.

On October 5, the Census of Marine Life was unveiled after a decade of joint work and scientific adventure by marine explorers from more than 80 countries.

The Census is one of the largest scientific collaborations ever conducted. It included over 2,700 Census scientists from around the world and took over 540 expeditions plus countless days in labs and archives. The result is an exceptional picture of the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in our planet’s oceans.

Many of the results from this global collaboration can be read in over 2,600 academic papers published in various journals. At PLoS ONE, we are happy to be one of the journals that helped play a role in the launch of the Census by publishing CoML Collections of some of these papers.

Below is a brief overview of all of the collections we have released thus far relating to the Census of Marine Life.  The papers in these collections are included in our new Biodiversity Hub and can be found on the PLoS Collections page.

• Diversity in the Nearshore: The NaGISA Collection explores the relationships between species richness and biomass from different taxa along varying intertidal heights, subtidal depths and latitudes over large spatial scales. The papers also aim to determine the effect of several environmental variables as possible drivers of these gradients of biodiversity.
• Future of Marine Animal Populations (FMAP) Collection analyzes and synthesizes global patterns and trends in marine species abundance, distribution, and diversity, and aims to model the effects of fishing, climate change, and other key variables on those patterns.
• History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) Collection draws together representative examples of how diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the world’s oceans changed overtime.
• Biogeography of Deep-Water Chemosynthetic Ecosystems – The ChEss Collection presents some of the recent advances in biogeography and taxonomy within deep-sea chemosynthetic environments: patterns, processes, and synthesis resulting from the Census of Marine Life ChEss Program.
• The POST Collection provides a sample of the diversity of studies that can be conducted when an existing technological infrastructure such as POST—a large-scale acoustic telemetry and data management system—is available and easily accessible to researchers.
• Marine Biodiversity and Biogeography – Regional Comparisons of Global Issues describes the physical, geological, chemical, and biological characteristics of the region, provides a brief history of research and species discovery, and gives insight into the role of Census activities in promoting and synthesizing this information.
• The MarBOL Collection highlights the large variety of applications of DNA barcodes.
• The TOPP Collection highlights research performed by a large-scale biologging program that has deployed nearly 4300 tags on 23 marine species throughout the Pacific Ocean in a series of studies providing essential input into the effective management of marine ecosystems and conservation of top predator populations.

If you’d like to learn even more about the Census, please visit the Census of Marine Life online at http://www.coml.org. There, you can check out the Global Marine Life Database, see the latest Census discoveries mapped out on Google Earth, and discover many other fascinating resources for marine biodiversity.

In situ photographs of 5 different habitat types. Photo credit: Gollner et al.

The Census of Marine Life Chemosynthetic Ecosystems project (ChEss) explored life at seeps, vents and whale falls, where cool, hot, rich in natural oils or corrosively acidic fluids fuel marine life. The ChEss programme has fostered and facilitated collaborations between hundreds of scientists from over 20 nations around the globe involved in studying species that inhabit these specific deep-water areas, including those with low or no oxygen.

New articles will be added to the initial collection over the next few months, building towards a comprehensive overview of the ChEss programme. Links within each paper are made to additional information sources, including ChEssBase, the most comprehensive database of species described from deep-sea chemosynthetic habitats, and the Encyclopedia of Life, which has detailed descriptions of each of the species mentioned in the collection.

The ChEss Collection will be featured, along with other Census of Marine Life collections, in the pilot version of the PLoS Hub for Biodiversity, to be launched later this year. This groundbreaking resource will aggregate relevant articles from a range of open-access sources including our own journal websites and PubMed Central. Please check out the call for articles to find out more about publishing your Biodiversity research in the PLoS journals.

POST provides a tool for researchers from agencies, universities and other organizations to track marine and diadromous animals along the continental shelf of the west coast of North America. An array of acoustic receivers are deployed in lines, situated in strategic positions along the coast, running perpendicular to shore and out to the edge of the shelf.  The array currently extends over 3,000km, stretching from Alaska, through British Columbia and as far south as California. To date, nearly 16,000 individual animals, representing 18 different species, have been tagged.

For the past eight years, independent researchers have been tagging animals with acoustic pingers that each emit a unique identifier. When a tagged animal crosses a POST line, it is detected by at least one receiver in the line.  As the animal makes its journey, each detection tells the story of the where and when of its movements along the coast.  In some cases, researchers are even able to estimate survival of the group of animals tagged, as the lines are laid out in such a fashion that almost all of the tagged individuals are detected as they pass a line.

Researchers tagging a white sturgeon on the Fraser River, British Columbia, Canada. Photo credit: POST

The large-scale system is made available free of charge and the database, complete with value added mapping and visualization tools, serves as a clearinghouse for data gathered across the entire POST array and similar local networks.  The web portal is not only useful for the scientists performing the telemetry studies, but also interested citizen scientists wondering what marine animals are doing in their neck of the sea.

The first publications in the PLoS POST Collection contain articles published in PLoS ONE and PLoS Biology and highlight some of the ways that this tool can be used to deepen our understanding of where animals go, and where they die, in the ocean.  As POST evolves and the database grows, the information in hand will have even more power; where correlates to environmental data may reveal distribution and behavior changes relative to climate change, and a new perspective on species interactions and trends in movement patterns will be gained through meta-analyses of a massive data set.  It is the hope of all involved that this collection inspires new and novel uses of the POST array, illuminating the world under the waves and contributing to the conservation and management of important species.

A schematic diagram (not to scale) of a line of POST receivers, showing different tagged species being detected by at least one receiver in the line, and detection data being remotely downloaded via a shipboard modem. Image credit: POST

The POST Collection will be featured, along with other Census of Marine Life collections, in the pilot version of the PLoS Hub for Biodiversity, to be launched later this year. This groundbreaking resource will aggregate relevant articles from a range of open-access sources including our own journal websites and PubMed Central. Please check out the call for articles to find out more about publishing your Biodiversity research in the PLoS journals.

AP
The Age
Suite 101
ASNS News (Africa)
Philadelphia Inquirer
AFP
Mongabay.com
The Australian
ABC News
Asylum (blog)
Time.com
The Telegraph (Calcutta, India
Global Adventures
Top News (UK)
Care2 (blog)
The Vancouver Sun
Scientific American
Cosmos Magazine
Denver Post.com
Deep Sea News (blog)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bNKHb1b0p8]

Channel 4 News
Spiegel Online International
redOrbit
The Globe and Mail
The Guardian
3 News.co.uk
G1 Globo (Brazil)
Presseurop
ITN
Radio New Zealand News
Fort Worth Star Telegram
Newser
FOX.com
Tonic
Treehugger
Our Amazing Planet
Estadão
Marine Public Broadcasting Network
Metro
The Hindu (India)
The Daily Yomiuri (Japan)
Digital Journal

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Fwe-L2y7w]

ScienceNews (US News and World Report)
The Guardian (UK)
UPI.com
Times Colonist (Canada)
CNN International
CTV (Canada)
CBS News
The Telegram
MSNBC.com
Independent.ie
Practical Fishkeeping
BBC
Telegraph (UK)
Haaretz (Israel)
Hindustan Times (India)
The Courier-Mail (Australia)
Dailymail.com
Reuters
VOA
Associated Press
National Geographic
National Geographic video
Nature News
ABC News (Australia)
Mirror.co.uk
Domain-b
Conservation Magazine
ScienceNews
Science Codex
Lab Spaces
Science Centric
Life, Nature, Conservation from USA
BioEthics Hawaii
EveryDay Science
Mola mola
Green Antilles
RFF Library Blog