In the News

During the last week of April and the first week of May, PLoS ONE published over 100 papers, with another 57 following today. With such a great range of papers, covering topics from some very noisy bats and the eating habits of Paranthropus boisei, to endangered amphibians and substandard antimalarial drugs, it is perhaps unsurprising that PLoS ONE has recently been featured even more prominently in the news than usual.

Since we launched, the largest number of papers we have published in any discrete topic is Cell Signaling. We are excited that this community is responding to the PLoS ONE publishing model and we want to encourage more submissions! As part of this Call for Papers, we analyzed our Cell Signaling articles to see what is being published at PLoS ONE, and which papers are proving to be the most popular or the most interesting. These results can be read in this post.

This week, we were delighted to discover that PLoS ONE had appeared in the New York Times for the sixth week in a row, with an article and part of a podcast on a paper by Iriki and colleagues who trained degus (a type of rodent) to manipulate a rake (“as smoothly and efficiently as croupiers in any Las Vegas casino,” according to the NYT), in their paper, Tool-Use Training in a Species of Rodent: The Emergence of an Optimal Motor Strategy and Functional Understanding.

A great example of a PLoS ONE paper, which has benefited from the post-publication features of the TOPAZ publishing platform, is the article, Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia, in which Lee Berger and colleagues describe the fossils of small-bodied humans found in two rock caves on the Micronesian island of Palau.

Continuing the trend for a prominent PLoS press presence (my favourite new tongue-twister), PLoS ONE enjoyed yet another week of great news coverage last week, with four papers generating a large number of news articles and blog posts. It’s been another week of contrasts, from Antarctic fish to Arctic fires, and from memory in moths to cocktail chatter; and this is just a small selection of the 42 papers published last Wednesday. The only surprise was that not many journalists, apart from the Times of India, picked up the paper by Dale et al. in which the researchers used the Wiimote to measure participants’ arm movements in learning tasks.