Richard Cave's blog

UnitedLayer, our collocation facility for the production servers, experienced an outage yesterday. From UnitedLayer: "A series of power brownouts occurred today at 2:56 PM PST due to PG&E instability related to the recent storms. Our 300KVA UPS system is not working as designed, the temporary repairs from last week did not hold. We anticipate a faulty motherboard."

The PLoS journal websites are experiencing an outage due to a hardware malfunction after our colocation (United Layer) experienced a brown out due to lightning.

We will update the PLoS journals with the Ambra 0.9.5 release tonight. This release focused on development of the long-awaited PLoS Queue syndication module. Starting in January, PLoS will send article packages directly to PubMed Central at publication time. Article packages are currently sent to PubMed Central the same time as they arrive at PLoS so if any errors are found by the PLoS editorial or production teams, we need to send the fixed article packages back for revision. Sending these article packages at publication time will save a lot of time/effort if any errors are found. This also allows us to automatically send article packages, XML and PDFs to other external repositories in the future. The admin panel and publication workflow were updated for this new syndication service.

It seems that the storm slamming the Bay Area also affected the co-location facility UnitedLayer. A power "glitch" in their building brought down one of their big UPS units. This caused power outage to all of their network equipment. When their routers restarted, they were not serving external traffic. And their backup routers also failed.

Last night (September 15), we updated the PLoS Journals to Ambra 0.9.4. This release culminates a many-sprint development effort and huge data migration to provide per-article usage statistics. The article usage statistics join the other article usage data (citations, bookmarks, blog posts, etc.) to allow users new ways to evaluate the value of articles. Mark Patterson has posted a blog entry about the Article-level Metrics at PLoS. More information about our article-level metrics program can be found in our PLoS FAQ and the Article-level Metrics website.