This is the first post from me on the PLoS Blog. My name is Liz and you can check out my background here.
While preparing to launch this project, a curious thing happened. Before posting any adverts, before sending out a press release, and even before we started officially talking about PLoS ONE, a very observant scientist and blogger (who is also a PLoS Computational Biology Author) sparked a conversation with a single post. We quietly watched as word spread. And we loved it.
You see, this is exactly the type of dialogue and debate that we have been hoping PLoS ONE would ignite.
PLoS is adopting a forward-looking approach to publishing that goes beyond disseminating peer-reviewed research to the widest possible audience, but also promotes collaboration and encourages debate. We strive to support conversation within the global community of scientists in every way possible.
PLoS ONE will be the first title to embrace this ideology.
In this blog you can expect to read more about this thing we are calling “open access 2.0″, and most importantly, more about our vision for scientific communication, with all of its potentials and obstacles. We want to hear your thoughts too.
It is only through a lively and balanced debate that the best solution will emerge. Please join our discussion.
PS: Don’t forget that you have the power to start your own debate in classrooms, in listservs, on your own blog, basically anywhere you and your peers congregate.
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As Liz mentions above, part of the PLoS ONE mission is to facilitate debate and discussion of published research, through facilities like the ability to post comments on PLoS ONE articles.
One difficulty with this is that the proliferation of places to post comments on published research can make finding all the comments on an article quite difficult. For example, comments can be posted attached directly to the article on the PLoS site, or at Postgenomic, in one’s reference library at CiteULike or Connotea, at HubMed, one’s personal blog, and probably other places that I’ve missed.
How is a researcher interested in a particular article to find all the comments associated with it? Bloggers came up with a solution in the case of blog posts, TrackBack.
I think PLoS has an opportunity here to create a solution in the case of journal articles, perhaps based on the DOI and journal information. It would be fantastic if each article had a link to a page that aggregates all the comments on it that can be found on the web. For more arguments in favor of this, see Eagleman, D.M. & Holcombe, A.O. (2003). Nature, 423(6935):15.
What say the PLoS ONE team?
(perhaps this post belongs on the Technology page, but it appears that one cannot post a comment there until one of the PLoS team starts it off with a blog entry)
(statement of interest: I am a member of the PLoS ONE advisory board)
Alex,
I’m with you all the way on this one. It would be a superb idea. You are also right that it will be something worth discussing on the ‘Technology’ strand of this blog, once that gets underway. For now I’ve encorporated a more detailed response into the Week One Reactions post.