Liz Allen's blog

Hear Harold Varmus on NPR's Science Friday this week.

Liz Allen — Wed, 9 Apr 2008 10:58:14 -0700

Dr Harold Varmus, Chairman of the PLoS Board, is being interviewed on NPR's Science Friday this week about his PLoS Biology Editorial that was published yesterday (just after the NIH Public Access policy was enacted) in which he applauds the newly enacted NH Public Access Policy as a positive step toward ensuring greater access to and better use of the scientific literature.

You can hear Harold's unique perspective on the NIH Public Access Policy (he used to be Director of the NIH and announced the formation of PubMed Central) by listening to NPR's award-winning Science Friday, hosted by veteran science correspondent Ira Flatow, on 4/11. He's due to be speaking at approximately 12.15pm PDT/3.15pm EDT.

To get your question of comment on the air during the broadcast please dial 1 800 989 8255 in the US. We tried to find a number for you to call from outside the US but have not yet succeed. I'll update this post if we find one.

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Harold Varmus on NPR's Science Friday

from A Blog Around The Clock on Thu, 2008-04-10 07:11

Tomorrow at noon, tune into NPR's Science Friday, as you do every week anyway, I know, and you do not need to be told by me, but this time, make sure you hear Harold Varmus being interviewed about the implementation...

April 7, 2008 - NIH Public Access Policy implemented today

Liz Allen — Wed, 2 Apr 2008 14:17:53 -0700

The NIH public access policy goes into effect today - now all NIH funded research articles must be deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) upon publication. The easiest way for researchers to comply with the new law is to publish with PLoS because we have always automatically deposited complete articles in PMC.

It’s been a long and winding road to get to this point and PLoS has been closely involved from the very beginning. Inspired by the desire to harness the potential of the internet to foster faster, freer exchange of biomedical knowledge, Harold Varmus, then director of the National Institutes of Health, proposed an electronic publishing site called E-biomed that would provide barrier-free access to the peer-reviewed and pre peer-reviewed scientific literature. After a period of public review (during which E-biomed met with fierce opposition from established publishers, sound familiar?), Dr. Varmus announced the creation of PubMed Central. Launched in February 2000, PMC is the NIH’s free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature and is the repository into which all NIH funded research articles must be deposited from today.

The more recent timeline (which probably started back in 2004 and included a period of voluntary compliance with the policy that was not particularly successful) leading up to this important day was neatly encapsulated by the current director of the NIH Elias Zerhouni during his presentation (view at 15.05 minutes) at the recent NIH Open Meeting seeking public comment on the implementation of the new policy (mandated by President Bush on December 26 2007). The Library Journal wrote this interesting piece after the meeting entitled NIH Public Comments Reveal Librarian Support, Publisher Anxiety.

On this important day, for those of you in the NIH research community who are publishing their work, I’d like to recommend this resource from our friends at SPARC who have worked so hard with many many others to make today a reality. In closing, I think I can be forgiven for reminding you once again to send your work to us, we really do make it quick and simple for you to comply with the new law!

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NIH public access law is now being implemented

from A Blog Around The Clock on Tue, 2008-04-08 09:01

As many of you may be aware, yesterday was the first day of the implementation of the new NIH law which requires all articles describing research funded by NIH to be deposited into PubMed Central within 12 months of publication....

K.T. Vaughan, our 1000th PLoS Facebook Group member and the mystery of Beard 24

Liz Allen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:59:35 -0700

K.T. Vaughan, a Pharmacy Librarian from UNC and Harvard graduate, is the 1000th member of the PLoS Facebook group (we're up to 1007 members in about a year) and we are delighted to have her on board. I've been messaging her through the group to find out more about her daily life and why she supports PLoS.

I've learnt so much about grass roots PLoS supporters like K.T. by looking at the huge range of job roles, interests and yes I admit it, photos, of our members. What a good looking crowd we are! We have talented folks from every corner of the globe undertaking a huge range of activities from prolific science communicators and founders of aligned non profits to researchers and open access advocates not to mention many PLoS staff and board members plus a healthy smattering of Nature folks too.

As for K.T, her work schedule is publicly available for all to see. The only part of her week that was hard for me to understand was what she gets up to on Tuesdays from 4-5pm when "Beard 24" appears on her agenda. This caused me to wonder whether chin hair, like haircuts, now qualifies for a number and if so, what a number 24 would look like (perhaps like the ex-PLoS Poet in residence Jacob Evans) but less fancifully i expect she's probably offering up training and hands-on guidance in a room somewhere on campus.

Here's what K.T. said on finding out that she was our 1000th member."Hey, that's cool! Bora sent me an invite, and I've been a fan of the journals since their inception (we once hosted Hemai Parthasarathy for a series of talks at our library when she was still with PLoS)".

As for my role as group creator and what this means for the content of the site, I try to post multiple times each week and I cover pretty much anything and everything - jobs that we want to fill, photos of members wearing their t-shirts in far flung places, hot research articles, government open access mandates, general publishing trends towards freely available content, calls for action (this is always fun), copyright democracy, the list is endless.

You can post items for discussion, photos, or get hold of me and have a moan if something that we are doing is frustrating you (I'll do my best to fix it).

Getting involved is easy. Simply visit facebook.com, sign up for an account (which takes moments) and then visit the group, you can join if you like what you see.

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Congratulations to K.T.Vaughan

from A Blog Around The Clock on Tue, 2008-03-18 18:56

For becoming the 1000th member of the PLoS Facebook group. I think some swag will be going her way... ;-)...

Can science blogging save scientific communication?

Liz Allen — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:57:12 -0800

This was one of many questions debated at the Second Annual Scientific Blogging Conference in North Carolina this weekend which I attended together with over 200 other folks who work in scientific communication.

When I told my friends I was going to North Carolina this weekend to attend a blogging conference they either said, “cool - why?” or "you're weird – why?”.

To those that know me and understand something of today’s media scene there was no mystery. Blogging is gaining ground on every level – audience popularity; ability to delve in depth into specific areas of science; reputation for transparent discussion; opinion from experts on today’s most pressing issues.

Another important reason to attend was to claim my free bag of science schwag. This sounded intriguingly similar to the bags of free goodies that make celebrities salivate, except that I rather doubt they would have been as pleased as I was to receive freebies such as a cool calendar featuring not different Harley Davidson motorcycles or the stars from Grey’s Anatomy but Coral Reefs.

Something that did surprise me though was the fact that so many of the mainstream media were represented, I heard from folks who develop content for NewsHour, Discovery channel, MSNBC to name but a few.

A common theme of this event was the way that the lines between different content delivery channels - tv, film, newsprint, web, blogs - are becoming blurred. Each offers a different audience, author voice and level of objectivity but at the end of the day all need to work together in order to really speak to the public on the power and importance of scientific discovery and thinking.

Another topic which inspired some quite heated to and fro was the lack of debate about scientific issues in the current US presidential campaigns. It was good to learn more about Science Debate 2008, a campaign aimed at stimulating this much needed debate.

Finally, the collective voice rose up against the proportion of media coverage devoted to Britney Spears mental well being (or lack thereof) vs issues of importance in science. Human nature being what it is, there was no obvious solution to this problem save for continuing to strive to de-mystify science and make it relevant for as broad a range of the world’s population as possible.

Blogging can certainly play a huge part in that - putting scientists and scientific communicators in touch with their audience and giving them a right to reply like never before.

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Can science blogging save scientific communication?

from Greg Laden's Blog on Wed, 2008-01-23 14:02

Can science blogging save scientific communication...

from heated on Wed, 2008-01-23 10:36

Bookmarked your post over at Blog Bookmarker.com!

PLoS ONE is one year old today

Liz Allen — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:47:07 -0800

Like any toddler, its parents are exhausted but looking forward to celebrating. During the past year, the milestones have come thick and fast and we’ve recorded them all with pride.

The birth – when we launched on 12.20.2006 our joy was somewhat curtailed by a small earthquake that occurred in San Francisco as the site appeared. We were born and were in an earthquake simultaneously – an exciting arrival into the world.

Putting on weight – no problems there, we’ve attracted papers from some leading figures including Paul Sereno, Steve Irwin, David Sloan Wilson, Evelyn Fox Keller, their papers show the breadth and depth of PLoS ONE coverage.

The first smile – this came when we realized that our seamless new electronic production system exceeded our expectations. Not only could it handle the predicted volume, it could manage in excess of that, allowing us to publish more than 1300 articles in our first year.

Learning to roll over and then walk – we bypassed these stages and went straight to running speed, publishing articles from acceptance to publication in 14 working days.

Social interaction – we’re a natural at this! Our post publication tools of commenting rating and discussion make it easy to play nice in the sandbox. Normally someone picks up and uses these toys frequently and for the most part they do so nicely.

Learning to talk – we rapidly gained fluency and a reputation for good community based open dialogue about article quality and impact. Thanks to this and open-acces s, where all articles are freely and fully accessible online and authors retain copyright, we’re quite the conversationalist.

Being the center of attention – we don’t need to throw tantrums because our media coverage has been second to none. All the big media players have featured multiple stories from PLoS ONE. The paper, Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur received nearly 600 separate items of media coverage in an impressive media blitz.

How are we celebrating? With a new home page redesign which is live today. This project had two core goals 1. getting readers to the content they want as quickly as possible now that PLoS ONE has blossomed into a such a large and diverse resource 2. encouraging dialogue around articles by providing users with interesting routes into content - such as journal clubs, or articles that are particularly commented upon or newsworthy. We’re also sending care packages to editorial boards members who indicated that they wanted one including a celebratory t-shirt, business cards and mouse pads, because we appreciate the enormous hard work that they have put into making our baby thrive.

What developmental milestones will we reach next year? We have many new features to introduce and we want to publish even more of your work, so please keep it flowing. We’d also like to see even more of you get familiar with and use the tools, so we’ll be encouraging that.

Finally a giant THANK YOU... to our community for believing in us early on, when we weren’t entirely sure we believed in ourselves and for sending us your work, we couldn’t have made it this far without you and to our staff... you guys rock.

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Your chance to participate in Patent review - Peer to Patent needs you

Liz Allen — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:20:39 -0800

Part of our role at the Public Library of Science (known as PLoS) ), the non profit open-access scientific and medical publisher, is to let you know about other collaborative sites, which, like PLoS ONE, encourage dialogue and progress through participatory tools such as rating and annotation of the freely accessible content.

The building blocks of patents, which are the life blood of new products and processes, frequently lie in replicable scientific and medical research, which PLoS rapidly makes available to the world.

We'd like to take this opportunity get you up-to-speed with the Peer-to-Patent pilot, an initiative of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and New York Law School, which opens the patent examination process to participation and collaboration for the first time for the benefit of the public (not just the inventor).

Here's a great quote about the reasons for establishing the project from Beth Noveck, the founder of the project, from this scene-setting paper that she wrote: "There is a crisis of patent quality. Patents are being issued that are vague and overbroad, lack novelty, and fail the constitutional mandate "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

The number of patent applications filed in the US is increasing every year and the hope is that the granting of non-meritorious patents, that are a liability to the owner and the public, can be reduced. Inventors that submit a patent application for public review will have their applications expedited and will be given priority in the review process. While the average waiting time in the Technology Center 2100 of the USPTO (TC2100) which covers computer architecture, software, and information security, is now nearly 4 years (44 months), participants in Peer-to-Patent receive a First Office Action in only 23 months, and as little as 7 months if the inventor opts for early publication. That is potentially 3 years faster at no additional cost to the inventor!

In addition, having an overly broad or non-meritorious patent can be a liability to the patent owner and harmful to the public. The owner of a non-meritorious patent is more likely to have her patent challenged which can cost millions of dollars and take years to resolve through litigation. In the end, if an inventor loses his/her patent, much of the time and resources put into the development and commercialization of the invention will have been a waste. On the other hand, if a non-meritorious patent is not challenged or invalidated and continues in force, it can diminish public access to important scientific and technological breakthroughs. Scheduled to run for one year (beginning June 15, 2007), the pilot program asks members of the public to participate in the patent examination process by contributing relevant literature ("prior art"), commentary and suggested avenues for research directly to the USPTO. Contributors will receive feedback from the patent examiner about the relevance of those submissions to the patent examination process. Peer-to-Patent is also seeking participants to rate and annotate the submissions of others. The "Top 10" public submissions are forwarded to the USPTO for their consideration.

Although the patent examiner controls the ultimate determination of patentability, the general public has an opportunity to share information that, if relevant, can be used to narrow or even defeat the claims of a patent application. In essence, Peer-to-Patent allows the examiner to search the "human database" of people in the community who are knowledgeable about a particular area of innovation - people exactly like you. The pilot is currently limited to applications pending in TC2100. The Office is considering an expansion of the pilot to other fields of science if the pilot shows that the public review is capable of improving the patenting process.

Now is the time for you to get involved and show that this can really work and bring tangible benefits to the process. Peer-to-Patent is an opportunity participate in this important governmental decision-making process that, if unimproved, has the potential to lock up downstream innovation and research. It's a chance to make a real difference in the quality of issued patents. This is also an opportunity to gain professional status and recognition for this work. While all applications in the pilot relate to computer hardware or software, they include innovations such as biomedical applications that are simply implemented through a computer.

To join, please visit Peer-to-Patent. There you can find instructional materials about the patent system , including short video introductions . For more information about becoming a patent peer reviewer, please download the project brochure.

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Oops we missed our own birthday

Liz Allen — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:53:57 -0700

We need a birthday and anniversary planner to help us keep up with our significant dates - yet another thing for our new SF office manager Colin Dixon to take charge of, although at ten years old (see photo) that would appear to be child labor. Some people will do anything to be the youngest member of PLoS.

We were so busy publishing our authors' content that we almost overlooked PLoS Biology’s 4th birthday which was last Saturday October 13th. It took a post by our friends at scienceblogs.com to wake us up to the fact that it’s time to celebrate our 4th year. With an impact factor of 14.1, up from last year, and a superb Venter collection in March, there’s much to be proud of. Congratulations to all.

The experience of having our birthday reminder blogged by someone else, made us quickly realize that PLoS Medicine turns 3 on October 19th. When we started out the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) called us “the boldest new kids on the block”. Some of those CMAJ editors left to launch Open Medicine, who on our second birthday called us their “older sister”. Perhaps turning three will accord PLoS Medicine “Aunt” status although we remain kids at heart.

On December 20th PLoS ONE turns one and has already published 1000 papers and also PLoS itself turns five in the same month.

We have some serious partying to do, over to you Colin!

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Hamsters love PLoS.org

Liz Allen — Mon, 9 Jul 2007 12:09:37 -0700

Check out the new PLoS Group on Facebook. If you don't already have an account you'll need to register which takes a couple of minutes, see below.

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. We hope that you like our picture entitled "Hamsters love PLoS.org". It was drawn by one of our founders' kids and has even appeared on a tee-shirt.

As Chris Surridge mentioned in his previous post, I started this group just over one week ago and I am delighted to report that we already have 160 members. It's interesting to see photos and read bios of the wider PLoS community and you can see pics of staff members too (scary).

Joining the PLoS Group is easy. If you don't have a Facebook account, just provide your name, email, password and birthday, complete the security check, check the terms of use and you are registered. Then you can view our page, the whole process takes two minutes max.

The PLoS Facebook Group is a spot where I'll post:

News of cool functionality Releases on PLoS ONE.
Discussions on how to acheive Science 2.0 goals.
Volunteer Opportunities – ranging from helping us mail t-shirts, web support/coding, special projects, translations.
Events – fun, social-networking activities in the PLoS/Open Access/Creative Commons community.
Answers to your questions about scientific and open access resources - social networks like Facebook are great at connecting you with others who can assist you.

You may also fundraise for PLoS (a 501c3 nonprofit organization) via Causes on Facebook, a brand new, opt-in application that enables you to recruit your network to support PLoS and our open access initiatives.

We look forward to connecting with friends—old and new--on Facebook.

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We need your help - volunteer for PLoS

Liz Allen — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:47:05 -0700

PLoS is a growing organization of 50 dedicated folks based in San Francisco, USA and Cambridge, UK. Like lots of new ventures, there’s too much to do and not enough people to do it. That’s where you come in. We need volunteers to assist with a broad range of tasks that span all skill levels. Join us and not only will you work with interesting people in a cutting edge environment but you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you are supporting the PLoS mission in a “hands on” way.

Here’s a quick overview of who we are looking for:

WEB/IT

1. Help Desk/Systems Intern. We need someone to assist our full time support person. The role involves (deleted comma): workstation sweep duties, IT materials organization, inventory data accuracy, special projects, server maintenance, helpdesk, and backups. In return we offer training for certification in one of A+, N+, MCP – XP. Full job description available on request.

2. Content Specialist. The web team will need somebody to parse/fix all PLoS articles before they are migrated to our new publishing platform. Necessary skills include an understanding of XML and attention to detail.

3. Web Team Volunteer. We need help researching open standards, help with basic design tasks, etc.

MARKETING

Our team needs help mailing promotional items, media kits and other PLoS freebies, as well as general administrative support (such as researching lists, etc).

GENERAL SUPPORT

We’re always on the look out for people who are happy to work in any capacity--from moving folks between workstations to core clerical activities.

If any of these roles sound interesting, email volunteering@plos.org and we’ll register you on our database. And, if you feel you have a useful contribution to make but it’s not listed above, please don’t hesitate to tell us about yourself also via volunteering@plos.org. We seek volunteers in our San Francisco office only initially and any information supplied will be kept in confidence for use by PLoS staff only.

We look forward to seeing some friendly new faces at PLoS.

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National Day of Action – calling all students!

Liz Allen — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 15:37:56 -0800

February 15, 2007 is the National Day of Action for students that support open sharing of scientific and scholarly research findings on the Internet. You can take action by signing this US petition for public access.

The day is organized by Freeculture.org, the international student movement for free culture, in collaboration with the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) and also marks the fifth anniversary of the landmark Budapest Open Access Initiative, when the worldwide open access movement first took form.

Events across the US will highlight the importance of taxpayer access to publicly funded research and rally support for Congressional passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act.

At PLoS, we have always been committed to the cause of Open Access (OA) and we regularly get out and about in the community to spread the word and empower individuals to get active for the cause.

We recognize, however, that there’s still a lot of work to be done to advance OA at the grass-roots level and beyond, and that partnering with other organizations such as the ATA and Freeculture.org offers the best chance of influencing policy and opinion.

In the spirit of the National Day of Action, PLoS will keep you updated and informed in the OA space and give clear guidance to researchers on how to quickly and effectively take action.

So what can students do to get active for OA?

Sign the US petition for public access.
Join the Freeculture.org Facebook group
Download some of the new buttons and banners that we’ve provided for your blogs, emails, and websites to show others that you support OA and PLoS.
Whenever you see this red action alert icon on PLoS sites you can follow the link and take affirmative steps for OA such as signing a petition or calling your local representative.

Look out for this blue icon on PLoS sites - it will be linked to educational OA content so you can easily keep informed.

If you want to get more involved, contact Donna Okubo.

So watch this space and our sites – and let’s make OA happen!

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