Two Years Later: Journals Are Not Yet Enforcing the ARRIVE Guidelines on Reporting Standards for Pre-Clinical Animal Studies

There is growing concern that poor experimental design and lack of transparent reporting contribute to the frequent failure of pre-clinical animal studies to translate into treatments for human disease. In 2010, the Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments (ARRIVE) guidelines were introduced to help improve reporting standards. They were published in PLOS Biology and endorsed by funding agencies and publishers and their journals, including PLOS, Nature research journals, and other top-tier journals. Yet our analysis of papers published in PLOS and Nature journals indicates that there has been very little improvement in reporting standards since then. This suggests that authors, referees, and editors generally are ignoring guidelines, and the editorial endorsement is yet to be effectively implemented

Measures of Impact

PLoS Biology receives a preliminary impact factor

RWU Scientists, Alumni Publish Report Exposing Impossible Test Results Claiming to Detect Fish Caught by Cyanide Poisoning

PLOS ONE publishes whistle blower report that debunks a method credited as the answer to a serious problem in the marine aquarium trade

Repeated Evolution of Digital Adhesion in Geckos: A Reply to Harrington and Reeder

We published a phylogenetic comparative analysis that found geckos had gained and lost adhesive toepads multiple times over their long evolutionary history (Gamble et al., PLoS One, 7, 2012, e39429). This was consistent with decades of morphological studies showing geckos had evolved adhesive toepads on multiple occasions and that the morphology of geckos with ancestrally padless digits can be distinguished from secondarily padless forms. Recently, Harrington & Reeder (J. Evol. Biol., 30, 2017, 313) reanalysed data from Gamble et al. (PLoS One, 7, 2012, e39429) and found little support for the multiple origins hypothesis. Here, we argue that Harrington and Reeder failed to take morphological evidence into account when devising ancestral state reconstruction models and that these biologically unrealistic models led to erroneous conclusions about the evolution of adhesive toepads in geckos

The end of HIV: Still a very long way to go, but progress continues.

In an Editorial accompanying PLOS Medicine's Special Issue on Advances in Prevention, Treatment and Cure of HIV/AIDS, Guest Editors Steven Deeks, Sharon Lewin, and Linda-Gail Bekker discuss priorities in the field and the content of the issue

The PLoS Community Journals

2005 will see the launch of three new open access journals from the Public Library of Science - PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogen

Within-Journal Demonstrations of the Open-Access Impact Advantage: PLoS, Pipe-Dreams and Peccadillos (LETTER)

Eysenbach's (2006) study in PloS Biology on 1492 articles published during one 6-month period in one journal (PNAS) found that the Open Access (OA) articles were more cited than the non-OA ones. The online bibliography on the OA citation advantage http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html records a number of prior within-journal comparisons that found exactly the same effect: freely available articles are read and cited more. Eysenbach’s further finding that the OA advantage (in this particular 6-month, 3-option, 1-journal PloS/PNAS study) is greater for articles that have paid for OA publication than for those that have merely been self-archived will require replication on much larger samples as most of the prior evidence for the OA advantage comes from self-archived articles and is based on sample sizes four orders of magnitude larger for both the number of articles and the number of journals tested