Earlier this year, PLoS sent out a series of surveys to authors whose work was considered by our journals in 2008. We wanted to find out what authors think about all aspects of our services – from submission and peer review, through to publication and the functionality of the PLoS journal web sites.

In 2009, in this online world, how do most scientists and medics find the articles they need to read? The answer for the content published by PLoS (and no doubt by many other publishers) is via one of the now ubiquitous search engines, be it one that only searches the scientific literature, or more likely, one that searches the entire web. Given that readers tend to navigate directly to the articles that are relevant to them, regardless of the journal they were published in, why then do researchers and their paymasters remain wedded to assessing individual articles by using a metric (the impact factor) that attempts to measure the average citations to a whole journal? We’d argue that it’s primarily because there has been no strong alternative. But now alternatives are beginning to emerge.

PLoS Medicine now blogs at Speaking of Medicine [17], and we won't be posting here any more. We outgrew this site in terms of functionality and ease of use a few months ago and it's time to redirect everyone that visits this channel to our new home. You can sign up for updates via RSS [18] or e-newsletter [19].

"World Hepatitis Day...does not usually make the headlines in the same way that World AIDS day does, but viral hepatitis affects about half a billion people globally (perhaps 1 in 12 of the global population) and so the relative publicity associated with World Hepatitis Day does not accurately reflect the importance of hepatitis as a public-health problem.”

In this World Hepatitis Day blog ahead of the formal publication of their Perspective article in PLoS Medicine, Paul Klenerman, Vicki Fleming and Ellie Barnes of the University of Oxford describe research by Christian Drosten and colleagues [22] about a new low-cost diagnostic test for Hepatitis C for use in developing countries. The research was recently published in PLoS Medicine.

The editorial [25] published in this week’s PLoS Medicine [26] looks back over the 5 years since the journal made its first call for papers and describes a new evidence-based approach to the aims and scope of the journal, which emphasizes the focus of PLoS Medicine on the diseases and risk factors that cause the greatest losses in years of healthy life worldwide.