ONE for All: The Next Step for PLoS

PLoS ONE, will initiate a radical departure from existing scientific publishing platforms by being more inclusive and by taking advantage of the increasing functionality of internet-based communication

Adaptation and habitat preference in a hybrid zone between Bombina bombina and Bombina variegata in Croatia

This thesis describes a hybrid zone between two taxa of toads, Bombina bombina and Bombina variegata in north eastern Croatia. The two taxa can be distinguished at four diagnostic enzyme loci. Clines at these loci are highly concordant; there is strong disequilibrium and substantial heterozygote deficit. Both the linkage disequilibrium and heterozygote deficit are asymmetric, being greater on the bombina side than on the variegata side. Different habitats are identified across the zone and a strong association with the genotype of the populations sampled from them is found. This relationship is consistent across the hybrid zone. The dine is best described by a model which incorporates both a difference in gene frequency between habitats and a width which varies from place to place. Mark recapture studies show extensive movement, which implies that the association between habitat and genotype is due to a habitat preference. Translocation experiments suggest that there is adaptation to the habitats. A habitat preference combined with mixing between habitats will inflate linkage disequilibrium over and above that expected from dispersal alone. Non-random mating and selection in relation to the environment will also contribute to the disequilibrium. As a result, inferences made using traditional dine models, where disequilibrium is mainly generated by dispersal, no longer apply. These results are very different from those made from a previous analysis of the Bombina hybrid zone in Poland. There the dine showed a smoother transition of genotypes and a sharper step in gene frequency at the centre of the dine. The differences to the transect described here can be accounted for by a habitat preference. A habitat preference has important implications for the mechanism of sympatric speciation since it will restrict gene flow between populations in different habitat

Open Access Increases Citation Rate

PLoS Biology has published a research article that investigates a bibliometric rather than a biological question: do open-access articles have a citation advantage

Now is the time to work together toward open infrastructures for scholarly metadata

As part of Open Access Week 2021, Ginny Hendricks, Bianca Kramer, Catriona J. Maccallum, Paolo Manghi, Cameron Neylon, Silvio Peroni, David Shotton, Aaron Tay, and Ludo Waltman make the case for community action toward open infrastructures for scholarly metadata. Discussing the impending loss of Microsoft Academic, the need for more sustainable infrastructures and the contributions these can make to research equity, they outline how stakeholders across the scholarly communications ecosystem can contribute to making open metadata a reality now

Progress on Open Science: towards a shared research knowledge system. Final report of the Open Science Policy Platform

This final report of the EU Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP) provides a brief overview of its four-year mandate from 2016 to 2020, followed by an update on progress by each stakeholder group over the past two years since the publication of the OSPP’s recommendations across the European Commission’s eight ambitions on Open Science, (OSPP-REC1). This summary of Practical Commitments for Implementation with specific examples of progress by each stakeholder community across Europe (see Annex A) is followed by a perspective from each group on the major outstanding blockers to progress and possible next steps. The group of 25 key stakeholder representatives have then come together to propose a vision for moving beyond Open Science to create a shared research knowledge system by 2030

Does Medicine without Evolution Make Sense?

Should evolutionary biology contribute to the education of medical students

A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions

Although the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is widely acknowledged to be a poor indicator of the quality of individual papers, it is used routinely to evaluate research and researchers. Here, we present a simple method for generating the citation distributions that underlie JIFs. Application of this straightforward protocol reveals the full extent of the skew of these distributions and the variation in citations received by published papers that is characteristic of all scientific journals. Although there are differences among journals across the spectrum of JIFs, the citation distributions overlap extensively, demonstrating that the citation performance of individual papers cannot be inferred from the JIF. We propose that this methodology be adopted by all journals as a move to greater transparency, one that should help to refocus attention on individual pieces of work and counter the inappropriate usage of JIFs during the process of research assessment