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PLoS journals (open access), very impressive success story Friday, 17 February 2006 6:17 pm

Posted by Dongmei in Internet Resources, biology, e-journals, open access, science related news.
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This is a post from the STS list by Flora Grabowska (Science Librarian, Vassar College), originally published in the 1/27/2006 PLoS e-Newsletter, it’s posted below in full for you to peruse. It’s pretty impressive stuff considering the short history of these PLoS (Public Library of Science) journals since their launch dates (they vary).

Impact Factor

PLoS Biology received its first Impact Factor from the ISI of 13.9, placing it #1 among general Biology journals, above the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and the EMBO Journal, both well established journals published by prestigious scientific organizations.

PLoS Stats

Unique Users

The number of unique users visiting our journal web sites, every month, as identified by their IP addresses, has more than doubled in 2005, from approximately 74,000 in January to over 160,000 in December (aggregated for all journals).

Downloads

PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine papers were downloaded over 180,000 times (full paper downloads, not just hits) in December 2005. The Community Journals’ usage stats are also growing nicely, with PLoS Computational Biology receiving nearly 22,000 hits in December, just six months after its launch.

PLoS Journal Downloads

PLoS Journal

 2003 2004 2005

PLoS Biology

 220,544 (3 months) 1,039,434 1,917,744

PLoS Medicine

   100,720 (3 months) 881,572

PLoS Computational Biology

     125,661 (7 months)

PLoS Genetics

     112,079 (6 months)

PLoS Pathogens

     38,951 (4 months)

PLoS articles have garnered wide media coverage in the U.S. and internationally. The ability to quickly publish open access quality research articles allows for broader dissemination. PLoS articles are routinely discussed in popular press including: New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, NPR, Guardian, and BBC.

American Chemical Society’s new journal, and its Wiki Friday, 10 February 2006 5:52 pm

Posted by Dongmei in biology, chemistry, e-journals, science related news, wikis.
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The world’s largest scientific society, American Chemical Society (ACS), US, has announced the launch of its new peer-reviewed publication, ACS Chemical Biology, a global forum for biologists and chemists working jointly to understand cellular processes. Editor-in-chief Laura L. Kiessling, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and MacArthur Foundation Fellow at the University of Wisconsin will lead ‘ACS Chemical Biology’.

The journal, available online at www.acschemicalbiology.org, offers interactive community features updated on a weekly basis, and is open to all scientists, including a WIKI forum, designed to encourage communication between chemical biology community members.

It’s interesting to notice how the STM (scientific, technological and medicinal) publishers start to make use of this new technology.

– from Knowledgespeak

The Neuroscientist (new journal subscription for the neuroscience minor) Thursday, 26 January 2006 3:32 pm

Posted by Dongmei in Library Resources, e-journals.
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It’s now available on our e-journals portal. The Sage link will take you directly to the publisher site with few clicks to go to the actual article level compared to other third party links. And it has the complete archive (from Apr. 2000 to current).

You can also set up email alerts for TOC (Table of Contents), citation alerts for a specific article, author/keyword alerts for this journal or other Sage journal on the publisher’s site, to keep you abreast with the field. You do need to register first on the Web site though.  

Biological Sciences collection in JSTOR Monday, 23 January 2006 10:55 am

Posted by Dongmei in Library Resources, e-journals.
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If you haven’t used JSTOR for a while, you’ll notice a new collection “Biological Sciences” if you click on browse. It’s a collection of more than 50 biological science journals. Before that, we only had two subsets of the Biological Sciences collection: the Botany & Plant Sciences collection and the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology collection.

The new Biological Sciences collection includes those two subsets, the Paleontology, the Zoology subsets, and some general science journals, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (1915-2003) and Science (1880-2000).

Of course, besides searching or browsing in JSTOR, you can also search these journals individually on our e-journals portal by title (or title keywords) or ISSN.