PLoS ONE gets listed in Web of Science and will get its impact factor (IF)

Some good news for the Open Acess-movement in general, and for those who have published in PLoS one in particular, particularly Tom Gosden and Fabrice Eroukhmanoff (alongside with me): PLoS ONE will now be listed in Web of Science, meaning that your articles, as well as all future articles in this journal, will now be searchable and appear in ISI:s databases. This is very good news, as the lack of inclusion by PLoS ONE in ISI has been somewhat negative when trying to convince people to publish there: scientists are quite conservative and hesitant to publish if they are not absolutely confident that their papers will be read widely and cited.

It does not matter to argue, in my experience, that Web of Science, is not the only database and not necessarily the best or most inclusive one. PubMed, for instance, is much faster and better, and Scopus covers many more journals than WoS. Many scientists do not seem aware of the fact that these search engines and data-bases are commercially driven, and thus not driven and organized by scientists, with the primary goal of helping scientists. Thompson/ISI simply happen to be one of the oldest data-bases, and the one which claims credit for the term "Impact Factor"(IF), and very questionable measure of journal impact which has recently been criticized by many.

Putting these issues against IF aside for a moment, PLoS ONE will, as a side-effect, soon also get its first IF, since it was needed to be included in ISI before that was possible. It will of course also be interesting to see which IF PLoS ONE will get, although I would not primarily use that as the only or most important criterion where to publish. It is interesting that it took three years before ISI accepted to include PLoS ONE in their data-bases, given that there are many low-impact journals like Odonatologica which has long been included in ISI.

I suspect, although I do not have any proof for this, that ISI are nervous for the new publication model that PLoS ONE advocates, where perceived impact and "novelty" is played down and there is more emphasis on technical quality. In the end, this might hurt the commercial interests of ISI if scientists start to increasingly become more critical to journal-level IF:s (rightly so!). In a better future, there will hopefully be more emphasis on scientific content and article-level metrics of authors, rather than on journal-level metrics, which largely belongs to the pre-internet era and sends out a message that journals like (say) Evolution or American Naturalist are not as important as we, in the field of evolutionary biology, generally think that they are.

Write a blogpost about evolution, compete, get famous and win a ticket to an interesting conference!

When I started blogging, I was met with a lot of scepticism among many of my colleagues, who were very suspicious about the bloggosphere. "It is waste of time", or "Why are you doing this?" where two common knee-jerk reactions, especially among some of the more senior members of our department. I always felt these reactions said more about the people who expressed them, than it said anything about the utility of blogging. Remarkably, some senior members still have these opinions, although they have now been prooven wrong so many times over and over again, so you do not hear these stupid comments much more in the open.

In my opinion, blogging is an excellent new form of communication, that is here to stay. However, blogging is only one new form of communication, and it will certainly not replace all other forms of communication. But blogging is a new information channel, and it would be as stupid to dismiss this new communication channel today, as it would have been to be against the television in the 1940-ties or the phones about 100 years ago. How could one be against new ways of communicating science and other important issues?

Today, we have several interesting research blogs in the Ecology Building apart from this one: Anders Hedenströms "Animal Flight Lab" and the "CAnMove"-blog being two excellent examples of such interesting research group blogs. There is now also a general agreement among many scientists that "Public Outreach" (which blogs are one example of), can actually be beneficial to you also in your scientific career. Is anybody really surprised?

The negative views against blogging among some of my colleagues reminds me about the scepticism against "Open Access" (OA)-publishing a few years earlier, and the scepticism against PLoS ONE in particular. I am quite amazed about how extremely conservative many scientists are against new things: blogs, social media like Facebook or OA-publishing. These new means of communication are here to stay - and it does actually not matter if this-or-that less known second-grade researcher at Lund University says about these phenomena, as long as they work and accepted by the broader international scientific community.

It is after all the international arena that is important - not what less-informed self-proclaimed "experts" claim at stupid coffee-room discussions in the Ecology Building. It is therefore with great satisfaction I can tell the readers of this blog that PLoS ONE was recently awarded a prestigious price for the most innovative scientific journal in 2009. This award was provided by the very prestigious organisation ALPSP ("The Association for learned and Professional Society Publishers"). The motivation for providing this award to PLoS ONE was partly:

"in recognition of a truly innovative approach to any aspect of publication. Applications are judged on their originality and innovative qualities, together with their utility, benefit to their community and long term prospects. Any area of innovation is eligible – it could, for example, be a novel type of print or online publication or service, or even a radically different approach to a marketing campaign."

(Need I say that nobody from backward university Lund is involved in this organisation?)

Part of PLoS ONE's and other PLoS-journals success is the approach to provide information about number of downloads and citation indices in conjunction with each published article, something that will hopefully make it even more attractive to publish in PLoS, as it is clearly an "added value" to have access to this information directly from the article -rather than having to go through a data-base like ISI (for instance). Inlinks, links to blogs and other articles citing the focal article will all contribute to increase the reader traffic to PLoS-articles in the near future. For instance, here you can see such information statistics for an article in PLoS ONE that Tom Gosden and I published two years ago, we have now more than 10 citations and almost 2000 downloads! Not bad, in my opinion.

But also scientific blogging is a growing activity, that becomes more and more important, both for journalists and for scientists like us who would like to communicate our results to the laymen and amongst ourselves. Now you actually have a nice opportunity to write a blogpost about evolution and win a price. You can read more about this competition here and on the blog "A blog around the clock".

Basically, if you write a blogpost about some evolution-theme, you could send in that blogpost (i. e. the URL) and participate in the competition of the best blogpost. The award to the winner is quite nice: you will get 750 US$ to cover the costs of attending a science communication conference: "Science Online 2010", that will take place in North Carolina in early 2010. The competition is funded by the "National Evolutionary Synthesis Centre" (NESCENT), a prestigious scientific centre in North Carolina, funded by the National Science Foundation.

This particular blog is a group blog, and not my private one, meaning that anyone one of us could send in a blogpost and participate in this competition, if you wish. Or we could nominate on of us, if we think that there is some particular blogpost that you found especially interesting. I would encourage you all to seriously consider this possibility, even though you should feel no pressure to participate if you do not wish to. However, I hope the general message goes through: blogging can be useful. Also for scientists interested in evolutionary biology. Don't listen to the nay-sayers! They are just loosers and yesterday's scientists. Just as they were wrong on OA-publishing and PLoS ONE, they will be wrong on blogs and Facebook. With historical hindsight, they will be laughed upon.

Rapid evolution of rodents: another PLoS ONE study in the media

Some of you might be interested in this recent study published in PLoS ONE about rapid evolutionary changes in morphology in rodents. I served as an academic editor on this interesting paper, that has gained quite a lot of media attention, e. g. in Science News and in Los Angeles Times. Since I was academic editor for this article, I was interviewed about it and I briefly comment upon it in the Science News article.

Although media attention and coverage is not, and should certainly not be, the only criterion for scientific "quality" (whatever that is!), it is further testimony of the advantage to publish in "Open Acess"-journals in general, and PLoS ONE in particular. This study is also interesting because it shows the value of museum collections as a source for ecological and evolutionary research, a point that Shawn Kuchta has repeatedly emphasized in our lab-meetings (and which I completely agree with, of course).

Oliver Pergams and his colleague Joshua Lawler used a large data set consisting of thousands of museum specimens, collected from various places of the world and during a long time period (more than a century) to track changes in morphology of the skull of rodents. They analyzed statistically which traits that changed, and how much. They further linked these morphological changes to two ecological factors: increasing urbanisation (i. e. increasing local human population densities) and climatic factors.

They found that both urbanisation and climatic factors were statistically significantly related to the morphological changes they observed. Although not all these morphological changes are understood from a functional viewpoint, and the genetic basis of the changes are not known, the study is strongly suggestive. Rapid evolution in rodents might thus be a result of both humans directly, and possibly indirectly through anthroprogenic climate change.

On isopod antipredator adaptations in PLoS ONE

This week, Fabrice Eroukhmanoff and I have a paper about antipredator adaptations and phenotypic integration in the famous aquatic isopod (Asells aquaticus), the main study organism in Fabrice's Ph.D.-thesis work. The paper is published in the popular and fast growing "Open Acess"-journal PLoS ONE, which despite some initial skepticism, has rapidly emerged as a major scientific publisher.

I would encourage you to read this paper and if you have time and have registered as a user at PLoS, feell free to comment upon it. This is one of the major strength of publishing in PLoS-journals: the interactivity between readers and published articles.

Here is the abstract for those who are interested:

Fabrice Eroukhmanoff, Erik I. Svensson

Abstract

"It is increasingly being recognized that predation can be a strong diversifying agent promoting ecological divergence. Adaptations against different predatory regimes can emerge over short periods of time and include many different traits. We studied antipredator adaptations in two ecotypes of an isopod (Asellus aquaticus) that have, diverged in parallel in two Swedish lakes over the last two decades. We quantified differences in escape speed, morphology and behavior for isopods from different ecotypes present in these lakes. Isopods from the source habitat (reed) coexist with mainly invertebrate predators. They are more stream-profiled and have higher escape speeds than isopods in the newly colonized stonewort habitat, which has higher density of fish predators. Stonewort isopods also show more cautious behaviors and had higher levels of phenotypic integration between coloration and morphological traits than the reed isopods. Colonization of a novel habitat with a different predation regime has thus strengthened the correlations between pigmentation and morphology and weakened escape performance. The strong signature of parallelism for these phenotypic traits indicates that divergence is likely to be adaptive and is likely to have been driven by differences in predatory regimes. Furthermore, our results indicate that physical performance, behavior and morphology can change rapidly and in concert as new habitats are colonized."

PLoS launches new campaign on Article Level Metrics (ALMS)

As many of you are aware of, I am quite critical of the "Impact Factor"-hysteria when it comes to journals. It is very weird, I think, that an article's importance should be measured by where it was published. To be sure, there is a correlation between the Impact Factor (IF) of a journal, and the number of citations of the average article there (per definition), but the correlation across all articles is at most moderate (around 0.5, if I remember correctly).

This high variance means that many individual "low-impact"-papers are regularly published in "high-impact"-journals like Nature and Science. These papers receive few citations, many of them fewer citations than papers published in more specialist journals in our field such as Evolution or American Naturalist.

Clearly, something is wrong here. Should a person who is lucky to get a paper in to Nature, but which is not cited a lot, be offered a job or a research grant, while a competitor who have published a much more cited article in a "normal" journal not get the job? Clearly not, if you ask me. What should matter, ultimately, is the citation rate and importance of individual or articles or authors, not journals.

This is where I think scientific assesment will move in the future. We can think of, for instance, the increasing use of the "h-index" to evaluate individual scientists, which seems to replace the length of publication lists or the journals where people have published as a criterion to decide who are the "best" scientists. The general message should be: try to publish fewer, but better papers, because you will be evaluated as an individual and there are no shortcuts or easy ways of cheating these new measures.

Along these lines, the new and rapidly growing OA-journal PLoS ONE has just launched a campaing for Article Level Metrics (ALMS). The staff at PLoS ONE hopes that these new measures, which includes per-article performance measures such as citation rates, number of downloads, coverage in media and the bloggosphere, inlinks and other measures of "importance" will outcompete old-fashioned journal Impact Factors (IF:s). IF:s are increasingly subject to criticisms, and I would not hesitate to call them old-fashioned and yesterday's hat.

Just as the "h-index" quickly became popular and established itself as a new evaluation tool of individual scientists and their performance, ALMS will hopefully also contribute to deconstruct and remove the "monopoly" of IF:s and the naive use of them by hiring agencies. The journals that should worry most about this should be the traditional high-IF journals like Nature and Science. Their whole existence and high prestige has been built more or less solely on the absurd IF-system, and if starts cracking down, their future might be in jeopardy and they can certainly not take anything for granted. Here you can follow a "Webinar" where the Editor of PLoS ONE (Peter Binfield) explains more about ALMS.

"Ida": a new triump for PLoS ONE

In case you have not used the search engine "Google" today, I would just like to highlight that the image of today refers to an article published in PLoS ONE, about a 47 million-year old primate female specimen with the nickname "Ida". This article has created a large "buzz" in the bloggosphere and media, with over 700 links detected by Google News within 24 hours of the publication release!

It is another major publication and media triumph for PLoS ONE, as this remarkable paper would perhaps only a few years ago have been published in Nature or Science. These traditional, non-OA journals, now probably have to worry somewhat about their future as the PLoS-group is emerging more and more as a serious competitor when it comes to public outreach and news coverage. This is partly due to the advantage of the OA-format in general, although not the entire story. The PLoS staff are obviously very professional when it comes to media coverage and outreach, and almost every week there is one or several PLoS ONE articles that hit the news headlines and attract the attention of the mighty bloggosphere.

It is particularly interesting that it is the paleontologists who have taken PLoS ONE to their hearts, while ecologists and evolutionary biologists are extremely conservative and traditional, even hostile or suspicious in many cases (in my experience) towards this new journal. It is an interesting research question for a sociologist of science to find out this major difference in attitude between the paleontological and the ecological/evolutionary research communities. Perhaps it is because there are many more competing and good journals in ecology and evolutionary biology, compared to paleontology? Here you can read a short interview with the authors of this fossil-paper where they explain why they decided to publish their work in PLoS ONE, rather than a more traditional scientific journal.

Trackback

Rankings of "Open Access"-journals: PLoS ONE rocks!

As several of you might know, I have been complaining about how conservative attitudes some of my colleagues have towards "Open Acess"-publishing in general, and towards PLoS ONE in particular. This is quite frustrating, as me and several of my colleagues in the Editorial Board are doing our best to promote this new "revolutionary" journal, with the hope that it will in the long run change the entire publication landscape - to the benefit of both scientists, readers, taxpayers and the general public.

There are two classical objections against PLoS ONE by ecologists and evolutionary biologists. First, some of them are afraid to publish in PLoS ONE since it is not yet listed in Thomson's databases (ISI), such as "Web of Science". This is the database from which Impact Factors (IF:s) are calculated, and Thomson actually has a monopoly (!) on how to calculate IF:s. Since Thomson has up until now refused to list PLoS ONE in their data-base, some of my scientific colleagues are afraid that work published in that journal will be "forgotten" or not appreciated by the scientific community.

This objection partly shows a lack of knowledge and the misunderstanding about citation data-bases as reflecting some kind of "objective truth". In reality these data-bases are run by commercial companies with their own agendas. ISI is certainly not the only data-base, and it is one of the slowest to list new publications and it does only cover a small minority of all scientific journals. Scopus, for instance, covers more journals and so does probably also Google Scholar and PubMed. Thus, there is luckily severe competition among different data-bases, and hopefully ISI will soon become outcompeted and run out of business by better and faster alternatives with better litterature coverage. ISI is for the scientific world what Microsoft is for the computer world: a mean big company that we should all hate!

The second objection is that PLoS ONE has a publication policy that aims for "technical quality", rather than arbitrary and subjective criteria for acceptance of papers, such as "novelty". In that respect, PLoS ONE differs significantly from all other journals, including Science, Nature, PNAS and PLoS Biology. The philosophy of PLoS ONE is that it is the future scientific readership that should judge whether a paper is "significant" or not, not a few subjective referees or journal editors. The scientific process does not end with the publication of a paper, it starts. This is when a paper is read, discussed and (hopefully) gets cited and thus "accepted" as being important by other scientists.

Some researchers consider this as a weakness of PLoS ONE, and fears that it will become a "dumping ground" for poor quality papers that have not been published elsewhere. I, and many others, on the contrary view this as as strength of PLoS ONE, and I can honestly not say that I think that PLoS ONE has become such a vehicle for bad papers that some feared that it would become. But I am of course biased in my views, since I am involved in the journal, and it is up to others to decide about this.

Given the inherent problems with impact factors and how they are increasingly becoming "corrupt" and the arbitrary parts of traditional publication (biased referees, commercial data-bases, unfair editors etc.), I think we probably all agree that there is a need for newer ranking criteria of journals. These criteria could be based on things like number of downloads of articles, number of citations, more or less informal "ranking lists" by the scientific community, blog coverage, coverage in media etc. None of these rankings are likely to be perfect or reflect the final "truth", but they would provide a nice complement to the traditional measures, such as impact factors of journals.

The blogger "The Open Source Paleontologist" have done some such ranking lists of OA-journals, and you can read about them here, here and here. Although these ranking lists have their limitations and only deal with the paleontological science community, they are nevertheless interesting and revealing. I predict that we will see many more of these lists in the future, and I bet that the traditional "impact factor" hysteria, will soon go away (to the benefit of all science).

Not surprisingly, and pleasingly to me, PLoS ONE does very well in these ranking lists: it is always in the top 15 list of journals, and often among the top 5. Way to go, PLoS ONE!!! I am delighted. And the young scientists among you who reads this should of course not be afraid of publishing in PLoS ONE in the future, it will benefit your careers.