PLoS ONE

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 ONE now blogs at everyONE, 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 from our new blog via RSS or e-newsletter.

PLoS ONE’s biggest news buzz last week was created by a study from an international team of researchers led by Michael Coble of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. 

Here’s some good news for all LaTeX devotees – PLoS ONE now welcomes these submissions.