PLoS One Beta is released - a new way to publish and discuss scientific papers

Well just got an email from Chris Surridge of PLoS One saying their Beta Site is open to the public. I am excited by this new journal and system and plan to submit many of our papers there. People should check it out for themselves and hopefully give comments to them to make the system better. Some detail from the email is given below.

The first paper there that struck my eye is a paper on polyploidy in halophilic Archaea. This paper, by Sebastian Breuert, Thorsten Allers, Gabi Spohn, and Jörg Soppa suggests that polyploidy is more common in archaea than was previously appreciated.


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The email says:

Before your first visit, I want to let you know about the inherent challenges of this project and the philosophy that compels PLoS to confront them.

We want to speed up scientific progress and believe that scientific debate is as important as the investigation itself. PLoS ONE is a forum where research can be both shared and commented upon - we are launching it as a beta website so that the whole scientific community can help us develop the features.

What makes the site beta? Not the content, which features peer-reviewed research from hundreds of authors across a diverse range of scientific disciplines. It's the additional tools and functionality surrounding these papers that will be continually refined and developed in response to user feedback.

It is this union of continually evolving user tools provided by the Topaz publishing platform and extensive content that will make PLoS ONE a success.

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The first beta release of PLoS ONE features tools that allow users to annotate articles and participate in discussion threads. Our goal is to spark lively discussion online and we'd like to invite you to participate. Future updates will include user ratings for both papers and the comments made about them, personalized content alerts and much more.

We will be watching with interest to see how our new platform and software responds to high volumes of traffic and encourage you to give your feedback on your first experience via the site itself.