Update and apology
First of all I have to apologise for the huge lack of blog postings from me in the last weeks. Luckily my colleagues at PLoS Medicine have been keeping you entertained with their new blog. I’ve no excuses to offer except that working on PLoS ONE has left little time even for sleep. To ease me back into the blogging habit I’ll try to back this up.
The bald numbers show that PLoS ONE is being about twice as popular as we dared to hope. As of this morning there have been 165 manuscripts submitted to PLoS ONE. I’m going to leave it as a surprise for launch day exactly how many of those will be published but suffice it to say that we already have a table of contents whose size, breadth and highlights would do credit to any conventional journal launch.
This roster is only going to grow as the speed of our production system is such that papers accepted in the next three weeks at least will be appearing in the launch release of PLoS ONE. Even papers not yet submitted have time to be included. So don’t delay, submit today!
Of course this has put quite a strain on our editorial board and we have been spending quite a time finding new recruits. Currently we have 168 members and more are joining every day. We have had to change the Ed Board page on our website to a dynamically created one just to keep up.
While on the subject of the Editorial Board I should mention that one of my previous posts elicited the following response from a group of more than a dozen researchers “involved in the broad areas of evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and human cognitive variation” who volunteered their services both as Ed Board members and to help with technical and logistical issues:
“We believe that the inclusion of papers from this area in the open access forum provided by PLoS ONE will result in fortuitous — and long overdue — interaction between the molecular biologists who currently comprise the bulk of PLoS authors and the evolutionary and behavioral geneticists who publish in a largely separate corpus of literature. We envision a journal which publishes papers on behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology alongside papers on gene expression patterns in the brain, on whole genome association studies, and on genomic-scale studies of human evolution.”
I heartily second that and re-extend my invitation to any other groups who feel their areas are going to be underrepresented in PLoS ONE to get in touch.
Anyway that is quite enough self-congratulation from me for one blog post. More soon…….posts that is, not self-congratulation.