PLoS Blog

From September 14-16, 2009, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) held its inaugural conference in Lund, Sweden. The talks from the meeting are now available online.

This guest blog, on the addition of article usage data to the PLoS Article-level metrics program, is written by Cameron Neylon, a biological scientist who is an Academic Editor on PLoS ONE, runs the blog Science in the Open, and works in the UK at the Science and Technology Facilities Council. He has also created this video (which focuses on how to use social bookmarks), on the previous release of Article-level metrics.

Last night (September 15), we updated the PLoS Journals to Ambra 0.9.4. This release culminates a many-sprint development effort and huge data migration to provide per-article usage statistics. The article usage statistics join the other article usage data (citations, bookmarks, blog posts, etc.) to allow users new ways to evaluate the value of articles. Mark Patterson has posted a blog entry about the Article-level Metrics at PLoS. More information about our article-level metrics program can be found in our PLoS FAQ and the Article-level Metrics website.

As part of our ongoing article-level metrics program, we’re delighted to announce that all seven PLoS journals will now provide online usage data for published articles. With this addition, the suite of metrics on PLoS articles now includes measures of: online usage; citations from the scholarly literature; social bookmarks; blog coverage; and the Comments, Notes and ‘Star’ ratings that have been made on the article.

As planned, we are now opening up the process and are seeking ideas for Pearls from the wider pathogens community.