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.

Call for Bio::Blogs#19

Duncan Hull has volunteer to host the next issue of Bio::Blogs (a bioinformatic related monthly blog journal). It will be out in the beginning of March on the O'Really? blog. The suggested theme for this month is the relationship between Biology and Engineering inspired on the interview published on Edge.org "Engineering and Biology": A Talk with Drew Endy. Anyone can send links for this issue on this topic but also for other interesting bioinformatic posts to bioblogs at gmail.com
We could also try to format if automatically using FeedJournal as suggested by Neil.

Late Links: Bio::Blogs#18 + new blog

I have been away from the web for the last few weeks as I moved to San Francisco to start my first postdoc. I will be working at UCSF in the Lim Lab and the Krogan lab on the evolution of signaling in yeasts. I'll try to blog more about it later during the year. I am looking forward to getting to know the bay area and hopefully make the most of the great (and apparently relaxed) science & technology environment.

Early this month Michael Barton edited another great edition of Bio::Blogs mostly dedicated to open science. He also put together an essay on the subject that is worth reading and commenting on. The next edition of Bio::Blogs will probably come back here to Public Rambling on the 1st of March (unless there is another volunteer).

Also in these last few weeks Lars Juhl Jensen started blogging at Buried Treasure. I met Lars at EMBL while I was doing my PhD and he always had time to help me out when I had some work related question. Like Roland Krause said Lars is one of the most prolific researchers in computational biology I ever met.