PLOS Impact Factors
One of the most prominent open access publishing initiatives is the Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS has created a number of freely available e-journals designed to challenge the near stranglehold that for-profit publishers like Elsevier have on the STM journal market. Sounds good, but are PLOS’s journals being used?
According to a recent e-mail from Karla Hahn at ARL, the answer is definitely yes:
“PLoS Journal IMPACT Factor 2006
The 2006 impact factors were released in June, and PLoS journals once again did extremely well:
- PLoS Biology, 14.1 (still top of the biology category)
- PLoS Medicine, 13.8 (a tremendous increase from last year’s 8.4)
- PLoS Computational Biology 4.9 (top of the Mathematical and Computational Biology category)
- PLoS Genetics, 7.7
- PLoS Pathogens, 6.0
PLoS ONE Is One Year Old!
In 2007, PLoS ONE had over 3,000 papers submitted and over 1,300 published papers. These papers averaged about 150 activities per month, which include annotations, comments, ratings, etc. In addition to all this is the trackback feature as well as Journal Club participation.
The latest article with outstanding media coverage is Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur , which has received a huge and positive response by the news media and bloggers. The story was featured on the radio—on NPR’s Morning Edition (’Mesozoic Cow’ Rises from the Sahara Desert) —and on television—on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Google had registered over 583 news reports and 1,855 blog posts about Nigersaurus (only three of which, unfortunately, were trackbacked to the article itself).”
The PLOS Blog has more if you’re interested.
