Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Jonathan Eisen@PLoS

PLoS has a new Academic Editor in Chief that blogs, works on evolution and has been at SciFoo twice. Jonathan A. Eisen, explains his reasons for accepting the job in an editorial available online. Among other things, he states:
Second, I want to work with the professional staff at PLoS Biology, the Academic Editors, and anyone else in the community who shares my desire to build new initiatives that will keep PLoS Biology as a top-tier journal. These would include ideas like producing issues dedicated to particular themes, actively recruiting excellent papers in fields where OA is not yet common, producing more outreach and educational material, and engaging bloggers and fully embracing the Web 2.0 world.
I actually would like to get a bit more involved with what they are doing at PLoS, in particular with what they might be discussing for PLoS ONE and the hubs. Maybe I can pester them later on during the year. For some reactions on the news and more information, here is the related Postgenomic cluster.

I wonder if we will ever see the AEIC of Science/Nature/Cell blogging :). The editorials are the closest article format to a blog post but they insist on a somewhat exaggerated formality. Just as an example here is a link to the 2007 archives of the (great) editorials of Frank Gannon from EMBO reports.