Publishing

The PLoS Pathogens editors and staff are thrilled to announce the debut of “Pearls,” a new series in the journal that will begin publishing monthly, starting with this June’s issue.

Each Pearl will be a concise primer on a topic of importance, meant to fill the gap between research articles and textbooks. Pearls will be tailored for graduate students and post-docs, while providing a format accessible to a general readership.

Today, we’re delighted to share our first Progress Report with you which has the theme of “Liberating research. Accelerating science". We would encourage you to share it with your colleagues, friends and family so that we can spread this information.

A Review article published today in PLoS Computational Biology describes the process of semantically enhancing a research article to enrich content, providing a striking example of how open-access content can be re-used and how scientific articles might take much greater advantage of the online medium in future.

Some new features have just been added to the articles in the PLoS Journals (all except PLoS Biology), and we wanted to give a short summary of the key changes. This site redesign represents another step in the development of Topaz, the open source publishing system that will shortly host all of our journals once PLoS Biology migrates to the platform in a couple of months (see also Rich Cave’s blog post).

Last week, in celebration of the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, a number of UK-based PLoSsers made the trek to London’s Natural History Museum to attend the annual celebration of Darwin’s Birthday Party, held annually by the Centre for Ecology and Evolution (CEE) since 1994. The CEE is an organisation set up to foster communication between ecologists and evolutionary biologists working at various institutions across London.