Express yourself through PLoS ONE

Every month, PLoS ONE takes a different scientific field and focuses on what we’ve published from each. We then reach out to these communities to show them the benefits of publishing with us with the goal of encouraging more of them to do so.

So far this year we’ve covered Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cell Signaling (our number one most published topic), Avian Research and now it’s July we’re going to reach out to the Gene Expression folks (our second most published subject).

Since our launch, we’ve published over 140 articles in the field of Gene Expression and the paper with the most unique page views from Google Analytics is Promoter-Wide Hypermethylation of the Ribosomal RNA Gene Promoter in the Suicide Brain by Patrick O. McGowan et al.

We reached out to the corresponding authors on the paper, Gustavo Turecki and Moshe Szy, to find out more about why the group chose to publish their work in PLoS ONE, what their experience of publishing with us was like and where their research has headed subsequently.

Here’s what Moshe said about why the group to chose PLoS ONE to publish their research. “Our data was provocative and new, truly different from the common wisdom. We wanted a journal that will look at our data as it is and judge the quality of the data rather than be biased against our hypothesis. Unfortunately opinionated dogmas dominate much of the field and from what I read about PLoS ONE I felt that it would be different. In addition, we thought that an online free-to-read publication would provide the widest exposure of our results”.

As to their experiences of publishing with us, I am pleased to report that they were not disappointed. “The review process was tough and critical but honest and unbiased and the comments of the referees guided us as to how to revise the manuscript. We feel that the manuscript was truly strengthened by the comments of the referees”. Finally, on looking forwards from this piece of research, Moshe said “This paper was the first evidence for Epigenetic marks of suicide in the brain of humans and suggested that early childhood events might be behind this. Epigenetics could serve as an interface between the social environment and our genome and could explain the effects of early social exposure on our health and behavior. Seeing these differential methylation patterns in the brains of suicide victims is consistent with this hypothesis. We are interested in further exploring the possibility that epigenetic processes mediate between adverse social environments and the genome. We are studying live subjects and different human cohorts”.

Other top performing papers in the Gene Expression category include miRNA Profiling of Naïve, Effector and Memory CD8 T Cells in number two slot and then in slots three through five Identification of Novel High-Frequency DNA Methylation Changes in Breast Cancer; Identification of Key Processes Underlying Cancer Phenotypes Using Biologic Pathway Analysis; Meta-Analysis in Genome-Wide Association Datasets: Strategies and Application in Parkinson Disease.

The Gene Expression Community is already publishing in PLoS ONE and we welcome more submissions from them and researchers in every scientific field who want fast publication times and the widest reach for their research through open access.