Meticulously researched and incredibly entertaining, Theft explores 2,000 years of musical history, from Plato’s admonition that “musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state” to the recent “Blurred Lines” case – and everything in between.
Our friend and colleague Bassel Khartabil was Creative Commons’ Syrian project lead, an open source developer, a teacher, a Wikipedia contributor, and a renowned free culture advocate. He was also a devoted son and husband, and a great friend to many in the global open knowledge community. We were heartbroken and outraged to learn earlier … Read More “Announcing the Bassel Khartabil Memorial Fund”
We are deeply saddened and completely outraged to learn today that our friend and colleague Bassel Khartabil has been executed by the Syrian regime. Bassel was Creative Commons’ Syrian project lead, an open source software programmer, teacher, Wikipedia contributor, and free culture advocate. He was also a devoted son and husband, and a great friend … Read More “Statement on the death of CC friend and colleague Bassel Khartabil”
Last month we announced the Community Activities Fund as part of our ongoing efforts to support the activities of CC communities and beyond. Creative Commons is committed to building and fostering a vibrant global commons through the activities and projects they undertake. Our fund was created in response to direct community requests, and we could … Read More “Announcing the First Round of Grants for the Community Activities Fund”
The CC 4.0 licenses are now translated into Italian The official Italian translation of the Creative Commons 4.0 Licenses and CC0 waiver is now available! Led by CC Italy, the translations also benefited from the collaboration with CC Switzerland. The working group was hosted and coordinated by the Nexa Center for Internet & Society at … Read More “Annuncia la traduzione 4.0 della licenza in Italiano!”
In 2003, PLOS published its first research article and this month we’re proud to announce that we have now published more than 200,000 research articles across our seven Open Access journals. It has been an amazing journey to reach this milestone.
“In only 14 years of existence, PLOS has helped catalyze the rapid growth of the Open Access literature. The 200,000th article is a remarkable milestone for PLOS and for the scientific community that has supported the Open Access movement.”-Veronique Kiermer, PLOS Executive Editor
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who have helped rapidly create this large corpus of diverse, Open Access research:
Funders and institutions all over the world who supported publication of this rich body of research under a model that provides unrestriced access to all
PLOS was incorporated in 2001 as an Open Access advocacy organization and became a publisher to prove the value of Open Access, beginning with PLOS Biology in 2003 and PLOS Medicine in 2004 as open alternatives to prestigious subscription journals. In 2005, PLOS launched PLOS Genetics, PLOS Pathogens, and PLOS Computational Biology as proof of concept to show that research communities built around and across specific areas and disciplines could thrive with an Open Access model. In late December 2006, PLOS ONE spearheaded the innovative editorial approach focused on evaluation of research independent of perceived impact; this editorial approach has now been adopted by journals from nearly every scientific publisher. Since its founding, PLOS ONE has published more than 175,000 research articles based on three compelling features: advancing quality science for everyone, moving publication forward in all scientific disciplines, and favoring speed to publication over subjective assessment of significance.
In 2007, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, PLOS launched a fourth community journal, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases(NTDs). Together with the journal’s leadership and global community, we now proudly celebrate the 10th Anniversary of PLOS NTDs and the more than 4,500 research articles that contribute to advances in the field.
Open Access continues to gain momentum but there is further work to be done. At PLOS, we are constantly looking for ways to use emerging technology and new ideas to open up scientific communication—to make it faster, more efficient, more connected and more useful. We look forward to the next 200,000 articles and continued involvement with the scientific community.
Over the last three weeks, we at the Global Digital Library have conducted workshops in Nepal and Ethiopia, as a part of the initial phase of our project. These user tests are an important part of our work as they provide us with initial user feedback on prototypes and personas. For both workshops, we have made prototypes based on a great mix if content and tech from different open sources and OER projects including resources from Storyweaver by Pratham Books.
Localization using Storyweaver
Localization and translation will be an important part of our work and as a point of reference, we have tested both our own tool for localization and a tool developed by Storyweaver.
We at the GDL project are in the early stages of developing our platform, but if you want to join the community of translators now, you can start using Storyweaver. Our friends at Storyweaver have developed a great website with stories and books that you can read or translate into you own language.
To prepare our workshops we made this tutorial that also can serve as the first practical introduction for anyone that wants to join our movement of translators, using the Storyweaver platform. Check out this 4-minute video to get you going!
PLOS works to remove barriers to public access of scientific research. Typically, these barriers are considered in terms of copyrights and journal subscriptions, but unfettered access to network infrastructure also contributes to supporting readers’ access to scientific literature. In simple terms, unencumbered dissemination of scientific research depends on a fair Internet. The provision of a fair and open Internet lies in the hands of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and government agencies that regulate these providers. PLOS supports today’s Day of Action in the United States, led by Battle for the Net, aimed at publicizing the issues surrounding Open Internet Rules and their critical role in maintaining Internet freedoms as currently in place.
In February 2015, the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) reclassified broadband providers as common carriers rather than information providers under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, the law that continues to regulate modern communication modes such as the Internet. This gave the FCC authority to ensure that established, large corporations including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon can’t block, slow (throttle) or otherwise interfere with Internet traffic. Innovations in online businesses and services, including those of PLOS, have thrived under Title II regulations. Importantly, these regulations in the US provide each and every user of the Internet a guarantee that ISPs and government regulators treat all data on the Internet the same, without discriminating against or charging differentially by user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment or mode of communication (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality). These protections are known as net neutrality; scientists and those working to support the scientific endeavor rely on net neutrality for unprejudiced access to databases, the literature and information services.
Allowing ISPs to sort traffic based on content, sender and receiver opens the door for corporate and government censorship which would greatly hinder access to scientific information around the globe.
In the US, the current FCC Commissioner wants to weaken these protections and this could have consequences for all scientists, not just those in the US: access to information around the world could become pay to play without these protections. Services provided by publishers such as PLOS and other providers could be restricted for all our users around the world, unless we pay for priority access to our content. This will affect any Internet traffic that routes through the US, from services relying on servers located in the US to requests that are routed through the US. For instance, most of the Domain Name Server (DNS) requests for South America, Central America and the Carribbean are routed by servers located in Florida.
Today, July 12, 2017, is a Day of Action in support of a fair and open Internet. Visitors to the PLOS.org homepage (www.plos.org) and active PLOS staff blogs (The Official PLOS Blog, EveryONE, PLOS Biologue, Speaking of Medicine, PLOS Channels and Collections, PLOS Tech and PLOS Podcasts) will see a message of explanation and letter of support for net neutrality in the form of a pop up window. This message will appear only today, once per site, per device. Visitors to these web pages can choose to either immediately close the pop up by clicking on the x in the upper right or fill in the four boxes to send a message to the FCC in support of its current Open Internet Rules and the efforts to dissuade FCC Chairman Ajit Varadaraj Pai from his plan to roll back these rules. Public comment continues for an additional 60 days following the Day of Action. Form letters or personalized comments may be sent directly from https://www.battleforthenet.com/.
PLOS is purposefully not placing this notice on any journal content or information pages, so that access to our content is not impeded in any way.
The unique morphology of the spiny ant, uncovered with the use of an advanced form of 3D microscopy known as 3D X-ray microtomography, garnered this species a place this year among the Top 10 New Species of 2017. The Top 10 New Species list honors the legacy of Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, known for his pioneering work on the hierarchical classification of plants and animals that developed beyond genus and species into modern taxonomy. The list is compiled by the International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) working with a panel of international scientists as selection committee members.
SUNY-ESF President Quentin Wheeler. (Photos for SUNY-ESF by M.J. Okoniewski)
PLOS spoke with Quentin Wheeler, founding director of IISE and president of the College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, on assessing research impact, the purpose and influence of this list and the impact of climate change on species diversity.
Policies and Purpose
Research reporting these new species is published in a variety of journal types, from subscription to Open Access. When asked if there are considerations of access to research when the members of the international selection committee evaluate nominations, Wheeler states that “the selection committee is encouraged to focus on the organisms rather than where they were published.” This de-emphasis on journal choice is a hallmark of the IISE selection process; work that is posted on a preprint server, rather than published in a peer-reviewed journal, may also be eligible for consideration. “What matters is compliance with the international codes of (botanical and zoological) nomenclature which requires publication that can now include electronic publication. So long as the requirements of the code were met during the previous calendar year, a species is eligible for consideration,” he says.
In an era of continued global extinction of animals, plants and microbes, Wheeler hopes the Top 10 New Species list brings research outcomes to the public that help convey the acute relevance of climate change. “Our goal is to increase awareness of the loss of species in the biodiversity crisis and the important roles played by taxonomy and natural history museums in biodiversity exploration and conservation. The wide media attention gained by the Top 10 (and this year’s PLOS ONE article) has hopefully played a role toward that goal,” he says. While he is not aware of specific policies shaped directly by the list, the hope is that it “keeps the importance of species exploration in the minds of those making such policies.”
Valuing Work, Not Impact Factor
Over the past 10 years of generating this list, one notable detail is that selected work is published in journals with impact factors ranging from less than one to greater than 20. When asked what this says to him and the scientific community about the value and relevance of evaluating a work based on its own merit, rather than on the journal in which it appears, Wheeler is quite direct.
“As a scientist and scholar, I like to think that science is a meritocracy of ideas and that their value derives from the quality of the work and its impact rather than the impact factor of the journal overall. Taxonomy is a very special case that is not at all served well by impact factors as they are today calculated.”
He explains this concept more fully. “First, the best taxonomic work is comprehensive and comparative in the form of lengthy taxonomic revisions and monographs. Such long works are not accepted by most journals with high impact factors. Second, even the best taxonomic work is rarely cited because once species are known they are typically identified by field biologists through secondary literature (field guides, etc.). Even the secondary literature is often omitted from citations by ecologists and others, and the primary literature is only rarely cited outside of other taxonomy papers.” Due to the long-term nature of taxonomy work, “we routinely consult papers from 1758 forward,” says Wheeler. “Thus the true impact of the work is measured over generations which is quite different from most experimental fields where papers are outdated in just a few years.”
Last year two species on the list made their debuts in PLOS ONE: the description of a new Galapagos giant tortoise species and a new genus, species and subfamily of isopod crustacean. Together with this year’s winner and the four PLOS ONE articles describing top species in 2014, this cohort of articles has collectively received over 290,000 views, 3,500 shares and broad media coverage since publication, indicating their influence and interest for taxonomists and the public at large.
Connectivity and Credit
As with other scientific disciplines, innovation and modernization are a must in taxonomy, and Wheeler is in favor of such policy shifts. First, he recommends mandating a “central deposition of all nomenclatural acts, including descriptions of new species” as it now takes several years to track down all new species named in any given year. He also believes “the actual technical description of species should be open access, even in journals that are not. The descriptive material should be intellectual property of humankind and available to everyone.”
Further modernization, according to Wheeler, would establish electronic connectivity between published work and the central repository. “That central repository, likely IPNI for botany and ZooBank for zoology,” he says, “ought to be connected via hyperlink to every scientific name published. Were this done it would be a service to editors by assuring the correct scientific name is being used and spelled correctly. Also by virtue of that link we could electronically track the usage of scientific names and give “impact” measure of the use of the names as credit to the taxonomists.”
PLOS encourages scientists making these discoveries to publish the entire research article, not just the technical data, in fully Open Access journals and repositories to ensure the work has maximum visibility and reach. ORCID iDs can help in linking taxonomy descriptions, datasets, published work and grants to individual researchers for maximum credit and recognition. Those interested in learning more about the biodiversity crisis can watch a brief interview with Quentin Wheeler and those interested in learning more about new species and biodiversity can browse this selection of PLOS articles.
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Quentin Wheeler is founding director of the International Institute for Species Exploration and president of the College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, New York. He was previously vice president and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, chair of entomology and director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium at Cornell University, Head of Entomology at the Natural History Museum in London and Director of the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation.
On occasion The Official PLOS Blog presents Thought Leadership interviews with scientists leading the way on issues integral to the transformation of science communication and advancement of Open Science. Previous interviewees include Bruce Alberts and Trevor Bedford. Here we present our conversation with Sandra Schmid from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Image Credit: University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Over the years, Sandra Schmid has gained a reputation for academic strength and leadership, most recently as Professor and Chairman of the cell biology department at University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Medical Center. She’s also gained a reputation for her honesty regarding varied issues, including the position of post-docs, “if it were a job, we’d pay you better and give you retirement benefits,” the training of faculty, “few of us as mentors, as Principal Investigators, were ever taught how to run a lab or how to mentor individuals” and how she participates in open discussion of research before publication “mostly over beers.”
Schmid has been particularly vocal about the misuse of journal impact factors (JIFs) as a way to evaluate researchers and, as she claims, “the unfortunate consequences to the scientific community of their misuse.” At UTSW, Schmid’s home institution, there has been no overt discussion among the leadership regarding JIFs and where faculty should choose to publish. There is no formalized preference for high impact journals. “In fact, we celebrated the founding of eLIFE [a journal which rejects the use of JIFs] and have faculty on the Editorial Board of the journal,” says Schmid. The JIF was “never intended to and indeed does not measure the quality or impact of the individual papers in a journal,” says Schmid. It was originally developed and commercialized by Eugene Garfield to help librarians decide on which journals they should spend their subscription dollars.
“Individuals and institutions are being spuriously judged – by other scientists, funders, governing bodies and administrators – based indirectly on JIF, rather than directly on the quality and impact of their work,” Schmid wrote in “Negative Consequences of the Misuse of Journal Impact Factors for Scientific Assessment” as part of the 8th Forum on the Internationalization of Sciences and Humanities.
Flawed Statistics
The JIF is a statistic calculated based on the average citations of a selection of papers in a given journal. One major problem with the JIF is that citations are highly skewed, with most articles receiving fewer citations. Since citation distributions are skewed, averages are meaningless. “Indeed,” writes Schmid, there are journals that “flaunt their JIF in marketing material to authors that would ironically not accept papers reporting such flawed statistics.” This skewed distribution was clearly demonstrated last year through a collaboration between multiple publishers, including Université de Montréal, Imperial College London, PLOS, eLife, EMBO Journal, The Royal Society, Nature and Science (see Measuring Up: Impact Factors Do Not Reflect Article Citation Rates). The analysis, posted on bioRxiv, showed that citation distributions of journals with clearly distinct impact factors greatly overlap—in other words that all journals publish many papers with similar lower numbers of citations, and few highly cited papers.
A Better Option: Citation Distributions
The authors of the bioRxiv analysis call for publishers to make publicly available the actual citation distributions of their journal’s articles, rather than rely on irrelevant and misleading JIFs. Since journals use many different techniques to artificially increase their impact factor, including publication of review articles (which are often more highly cited than the original research papers they review) and front matter, including commentary and mini-review articles (that generate citations but are not counted as “citable” content) comparison across journals is problematic. It is hoped that public disclosure of article citation distributions will lead to more granular comparisons and better informed decisions by authors on where to submit their work.
Then and Now
From the perspective of a senior investigator with a long-established career and history of publishing quality work at all tiers of influence, what has changed for Schmid when deciding where to publish is that in the past, “journals had different purposes and different scopes” and that was good. Before there was the JIF there was an understanding of what journal went with what type of data. “We sent our best biochemistry to Journal of Biological Chemistry; our best cell biology to Journal of Cell Biology. If we happened upon a new and potentially important discovery, even before we understood mechanism, we’d communicate it rapidly in Science and Nature because they were three figure papers.” Before the advent of supplemental materials, more meaty, in-depth studies were published in non-page limited, subject-specific journals.
When asked in the post-print era, how do researchers decide where to publish, Schmid replies, “That is the unfortunate part.” A lot of the decisions are being made by postdocs telling her about impact factors, although she cautions that “publishing in high impact factor journals doesn’t mean it’s high quality work.” Early career researchers are looking at numbers as a distinguisher between journals, says Schmid, so her efforts are focused on getting these scientists to think more broadly. Her response and recommendation? First and foremost is to choose the journal where the work will get in front of the audience that matters the most. Schmid is crystal clear when outlining her main considerations for deciding where to publish her work and the work from her lab:
Are the people who handle my paper able to identify qualified referees?
Are the editors going to understand the discussion and criticisms and be helpful in handling my papers; do they understand my field?
Do my peers read and respect the content in this journal?
Unintended Consequences
The real question for Schmid is how to get the “impact factor genie” as she calls it, “back in the box.” Why is this so important? Scientists and publishers often focus on the limitations of JIFs and the benefits of evaluating work at the article rather than journal level. However, there are more than just limitations to the JIF. According to Schmid there are very “specific and unintended consequences of the abuse of JIF as a tool for individual and institutional assessment.” Many of these, she notes, are direct; others are subtle, downstream ramifications:
Deferred communication of discoveries that might launch new fields as reviewers and editors demand more information per paper
Discouraged follow-up or augmentative studies to verify results due to over-interpretation of findings for the purpose of artificially inflating a work’s value
Misguided evaluation of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty by their individual papers rather than the combinatorial impact of their work in context
Wasted time and resources spent satisfying unnecessary demands of reviewers and editors in high-impact journals
Demoralized early career researchers forced to package an entire thesis or postdoctoral project into one comprehensive paper
A Better Option: Article-Level Metrics
Perhaps wanting to get that impact factor genie back in the box was more than a mistaken mixing of two idioms. The difficulty of reverting to a situation that formerly existed (putting the genie back in the bottle) combined with the repercussions of doing something that causes unexpected and unintended negative consequences (opening a Pandora’s box) does describe the situation the scientific community has with JIFs. Fortunately, this is not an impossible situation to remedy. Article-Level Metrics were developed by PLOS as a better means to assess research value in an electronically networked world. They are gaining acceptance across a broad swath of the scientific community, from scientists to funders and more, since they provide granularity, breadth and proximity (PLOS ALMs are updated daily to monthly, depending on source and age of the individual article). ALMs also allow different scholarly research outputs to be tracked, such as policy impact, datasets, software and code. Schmid also recommends simply using PubMed as a portal for assessing the influence of an article, stating, “from title to abstract to download is a good metric,” although not as complete as a suite of ALMs.
Leadership in Practice
In 2013 as Schmid took up the position of Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at UTSW, she offered an employer’s manifesto (published as a Science Careers column) on the approach her department would take in hiring new assistant professors. This manifesto promised “a better job of screening applicants—and to avoid inappropriate criteria such as journal impact factors.” The idea was to encourage applications from qualified candidates who “might feel sidelined because their paper has yet to be, or perhaps won’t be, published in a high-impact journal.” Schmid closed her column with an enthusiastic “Let’s run this experiment!” Four years later, she shared some of the results with PLOS. Using their Academic Jobs portal the entire faculty is engaged in viewing applicants and every candidate that has piqued the interest of even one faculty member is interviewed via Skype, removing the need for reaching a ‘consensus’ that might rely more on JIFs. Those few candidates whose programs are most likely to thrive in the department’s specific environment are invited to campus to visit. Since taking this approach “our new faculty are indeed thriving,” says Schmid.
This approach suggests that a reduction on emphasis of JIFs in favor of more constructive and meaningful measures of evaluation, both quantitative and qualitative, fosters an assessment program that is both fair and thoughtful. This is how science should be; if it works for people it can work for research outputs as well.
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Sandra Schmid is Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair in Cellular and Molecular Biology, Professor and Chairman, Department of Cell Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She was co-founding editor of Traffic, Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Biology of the Cell and president of the American Society for Cell Biology. Schmid was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Vice-Chair of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Scientific Advisory Committee.
