What Is PLoS-Currents, and does anyone have experience with It?

Question

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

I just saw this message from the PLoS home page:

PLoS Currents: new section on phylogenetic analyses

What is PLoS Currents? Does anyone here have experience with publishing anything there? What is the difference with a normal publication? I see that it is based on the Google/Knol infrastructure, which I also don't know very well what is it. Can someone explain me?

Technically this is not a programming-related question... but it is relevant to biostar, as it is about how to share scientific knowledge over Internet, which is an important part of bioinformatics.

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

It looks like Plos Currents is exploring the concept of collaborative publishing, where the papers are maintained via Google Knol (a type of wikipedia but with a restrictions on editing).

I wonder if the "publish or perish" type of evaluations will ever recognize efforts spent on improving other people's publications.

[Chris Evelo]

Well, they might. Traditional publishers like Elseviers and Thomson Reuters show an interest in altmetrics (http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/ ) and they for instance participated in the "beyond the pdf" meeting (https://sites.google.com/site/beyondthepdf/home ).

Our own contribution to #altmetrics is http://www.citedin.org where we measure how often your Pubmed publications are mentioned on the web instead of in traditional publications.

In general I think we will have to provide tools to measure alternative activities (Biostars reputation score is a nice example), before it will be accepted.

Answer 2

[David Quigley]

Note also that unlike (so far as I am aware) the rest of the PLoS journals, these publications don't have a traditional anonymous peer review mechanism:

First, each section of PLoS Currents is run by a group of expert researchers — the Board of Reviewers led by two or three Editors. This group reviews all submissions and determines as rapidly as possible if the conception, structure and presentation of the submission indicate that it is a legitimate work of science and does not contain any obvious methodological, ethical or legal violations. As long as the work passes this test, it is published.

Also, I think the analogy to Wikipedia is not quite correct. They appear to be using Knol as a publishing strategy to get the "authors submit via word/latex, editor marks up, copy edits, and publishes in a different format" step out of the publication loop, but once the document is published it's citable in Pubmed Central and there is no "edit this paper" button.