Technology

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.

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.

On May 7 - 8th, I attended the inaugural meeting of the Concept Web Alliance. CWA wants to enable interoperability between large triple stores like the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC) and provide an Open Access mechanism for accessing the triple stores. This is great for the projects in life sciences as the semantic triple stores are becoming the de facto way to store data for gene expression and sequencing, biobanks, etc.

Yesterday, we migrated PLoS Biology to the Ambra/Topaz platform. This completed a two year, 5 journal, ~9000 article migration involving many of the PLoS staff. Now all of the PLoS journals have the same feature set including notes, comments, ratings, article impact metrics, etc. Migrating all of the PLoS journals to a single platform is a major milestone for PLoS and will allow us to finally create cross-journal features such as cross-journal search.