Diseases transmitted by insects form a huge burden on human and animal populations. Insect control has historically been one of many strategies for control of diseases such as dengue, malaria, and sleeping sickness. The debate on whether GM insects could be used for disease control began as soon as transgenic insects were first produced in the 1980s. Since then, several experimental releases of GM insects have taken place. These trials show promise for limiting the spread of many vector-borne diseases (most notably Dengue fever). Articles in this collection showcase different aspects of this new technology including development, environmental impact, and regulation. Public discussion of the science and application of GM insects is necessary as new developments bring potential wide releases closer to a reality.

In an Editorial, Michael J Lehane (Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) and Serap Aksoy (Yale School of Public Health) state that GM insects “may provide great promise for new means of controlling diseases with a devastating impact on people’s lives. If so, then public acceptance is likely to be a key issue in their implementation.” With many countries considering open field trials of GM insects, a Viewpoint by Guy Reeves et al. examines the regulation process of the first 3 countries that have had field trials of GM insects. Commentary by John Mumford highlights that both national and international regulations are required due to factors regarding each country’s individual environmental risk to GM insects.  In a Commentary from an industry perspective, Luke Alphey and Camilla Beech argue that “the agencies tasked to regulate GM insects have appropriately taken a cautious, thorough approach that allows progress towards realisation of the substantial benefits GM insect technology could potentially provide, while rigorously protecting the public and environment.”

The articles in this collection highlight many different points of view surrounding the research into GM insects. As the recent history of GM insect development demonstrates, public discussion is necessary as scientists continue to research GM insect technologies to control some of the world’s most devastating diseases.

This blog post was written by Renata Santillan (Publications Assistant of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases). Image Credit: James Gathany, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A highlight of the event was the publications workshop. A panel of editors from a variety of journals fielded questions about the ins and outs of the publication process. Our own PLoS Pathogens editors Kami Kim, Dominique Soldati-Favre, and Artur Scherf contributed to the panel along with Silvia Moreno who represented for PLoS ONE.

PLoS Pathogens was pleased to sponsor two prizes for outstanding presentations at the meeting. Congratulations to Christina Mueller (University of Geneva) and Sebastian Lourido (Washington University School of Medicine) who impressed the judges to become the recipient of these awards.

Christina’s presentation described the essential role of Toxoplasma gondii armadillo repeats containing protein (TgARO) in the biogenesis of rhoptry organelles. Rhoptries, together with micronemes are specialized secretory organelles that crucially assist Apicomplexans in host cell invasion. In the absence of TgARO, T. gondii parasites show a severe and selective defect in invasion. This dramatic impairment is caused by a defect in rhoptry organelle biogenesis. Electron microscopy revealed that rhoptry organelles are absent and in addition, single rhoptry-like structures appear at unusual sites within TgARO depleted parasites.

Sebastian’s work also investigated the biology of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii in this case exploring the roles of calcium-dependent protein kinases (CDPKs). One of these kinases, CDPK1, is responsible for regulating the secretion of specialized organelles that mediate motility and host cell invasion by the parasite. Unique among parasite kinases, CDPK1 has a large ATP-binding pocket that can accommodate bulky ATP analogues, which can allow for the tracking of its direct targets in the context of a cell lysate. Combining this with other genetic approaches, Sebastian’s group is in the process of identifying the targets that contribute to regulated secretion, with the hopes of understanding the cellular pathways regulating this central process in the parasite life-cycle.

The full abstracts for these and other presentations are available now online.

This blog post was written by Elizabeth Flavall (Senior Publications Assistant of PLoS Pathogens).

This new environment is scalable to support the future growth of the journals, flexible in that it can store any type of data/content, built to minimize downtime, much easier for developing new features and best of all, it makes the journal websites perform much faster.

The migration to New Hope occurred over a 3 day period in November and New Hope officially went into production on November 14. This migration was the culmination of months of development and testing. The migration was completely seamless and users experienced no downtime!

Three weeks after the migration to New Hope, we can show that the new platform really did enhance our journal’s performance. For example:

• Average load time of this PLoS ONE article went from 4 seconds to 0.8 seconds.
• Nightly indexing of article data from Mulgara to Solr used to take 3-6 hours. From MySQL to Solr, the indexing now takes 24 minutes.

Warmest congratulations to the New Hope development team (and our intrepid Linux systems administrator) for building a streamlined new home for the PLoS Journals!

openSNP receives a grand prize of $10001 and PaperCritic wins $5000, with a special extra prize of $1000 awarded to rOpenSci for the best Mendeley/PLoS mashup. Warmest congratulations from all of us at PLoS to all of you!

“I always tell developers to work on stuff that matters. It’s time to stretch beyond the consumer internet, and what better place to focus than on furthering the cutting edges of science?” said Tim O‟Reilly, Founder and CEO of O‟Reilly Media.

The Binary Battle is an innovation challenge similar to the X-Prize, giving anyone access, for the first time ever, to a layer of social and demographic information about research, enabling research to be used by any application as a data source, like FourSquare uses location or Twitter uses status updates. This access was provided by the Mendeley and PLoS APIs. The winners were chosen by popular vote and an all-star panel of judges including Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly media, Juan Enriquez, Managing Director of Excel Venture Management, John Wilbanks, former VP for Science at Creative Commons, James Powell, CTO of Thompson Reuters, and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com.

“We chose to implement PLoS and Mendeley early on in the development of openSNP as both are a great resources to find the latest publications on SNPs.”, said Bastian Greshake, a developer on the openSNP team. openSNP is a community-driven platform for publicly sharing genetic information, designed to enable crowdsourcing of associations between genetic traits and the physical manifestation of those traits, such as eye color or propensity for some diseases. Read an interview with the openSNP team at the Mendeley blog.

Today PLoS Medicine is delighted to announce the publication of a sponsored Collection, in conjunction with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) -  Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision for HIV Prevention: The Cost, Impact, and Challenges of Accelerated Scale-Up in Southern and Eastern Africa.

The Collection comprises four reviews and five research articles, and highlights how scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) for HIV prevention in eastern and southern Africa can help prevent HIV, not only at the individual level but also at the community and population level, as well as leading to substantial cost savings for countries due to averted treatment and care costs. Two of the research articles are published in PLoS ONE; the remaining seven articles are published in PLoS Medicine on 29^th November 2011. They can be accessed from the PLoS Medicine VMMC Collection page; the table of contents is also included below.

The first article by Catherine Hankins of UNAIDS, Steven Forsythe of The Futures Institute, and Emmanuel Njeuhmeli of PEPFAR/USAID, offers an introduction to the cost, impact and challenges of accelerated scaling up and lays out the rationale for the Collection. The remaining eight papers focus on the various factors that have important roles in effective program expansion of VMMC, including data for decision making, policy and programmatic frameworks, logistics, demand creation, human resources, and translating research into services.

The potential cost savings of scale-up are clear. An initial investment of US$1.5 billion between 2011 and 2015 to achieve 80% coverage of VMMC services in 14 priority countries in southern and eastern Africa, and thereafter US$0.5 billion between 2016 and 2025 to maintain coverage of 80%, could result in net savings of US$16.5 billion between 2011 and 2025. However, as the articles in the Collection show, strong political leadership, country ownership, and stakeholder engagement, along with effective demand creation, community mobilization and human resource deployment, are essential for effectively expanding and maintaining VMMC programs.

All 9 articles were peer-reviewed, revised and considered in depth by the editorial team, and subjected to all the usual PLoS Medicine or PLoS ONE editorial processes. We would like to thank the numerous peer reviewers for their detailed critiques, which helped to shape the articles, and we would also like to thank the authors for their patience in making appropriate revisions to these reviews. In particular we would like to Stephanie Sansom, guest academic editor, who read all the articles and provided critical feedback and reviewer advice to the editorial team. A special thank you goes to Emmanuel Njeuhmeli of PEPFAR/USAID who served as the main editorial contact for the articles in this Collection.

A question-and-answer Twitter expert session [#VMMC@USAIDGH] will be held on December 19 2011, from 1pm-2pm EST, with Emmanuel Njeuhmeli, Senior Biomedical Prevention Advisor of the Office of HIV/AIDS/USAID Washington, Co-Chair PEPFAR, Male Circumcision Technical Working Group, and an author on several of the articles in the Collection. In regard to this Collection Dr. Njeuhmeli comments:

“The collaboration that led to the findings in the PLoS Collection is a true testament to what international partners can accomplish when they work together and do so effectively to support country strategy for HIV Prevention. I can say with confidence this collaboration has played a major role in moving the needle on VMMC and HIV prevention. This Collection represents extensive collaboration between Ministries of Health, WHO, UNAIDS, PEPFAR and implementing partners to document and share with policy makers and program implementers the estimated cost and potential impact of scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) services in southern and eastern Africa. The papers included in this Collection document the enormous potential of VMMC to alter the course of the epidemic. They also describe the way that country programs have successfully navigated human resource, demand generation and other challenges in an effort to rapidly scale up comprehensive VMMC services.”

Collection Table of Contents :

1)       Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: An Introduction to the Cost, Impact, and Challenges of Accelerated Scaling Up

2)       Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Modeling the Impact and Cost of Expanding Male Circumcision for HIV Prevention in Eastern and Southern Africa

3)       Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: A Framework Analysis of Policy and Program Implementation in Eastern and Southern Africa

4)       Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: A Cross-Sectional Study Comparing Circumcision Self-Report and Physical Examination Findings in Lesotho

5)       Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Logistics, Commodities, and Waste Management Requirements for Scale-Up of Services

6)       Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: A Qualitative Study Exploring the Challenges of Costing Demand Creation in Eastern and Southern Africa

7)       Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Strategies for Meeting the Human Resource Needs of Scale-Up in Southern and Eastern Africa

8)       Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Translating Research into the Rapid Expansion of Services in Kenya, 2008–2011

9)      Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: Matching Demand and Supply with Quality and Efficiency in a High-Volume Campaign in Iringa Region, Tanzania

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the VMMC collection are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government and UNAIDS. The collection was produced with support from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The PLoS Medicine editors have sole editorial responsibility for the content of this collection.

Image Credit: PEPFAR Male Circumcision Technical Working Group

Permission to use the CCAL license granted by the PEPFAR Male Circumcision Technical Working Group.

In keeping with PLoS’ mission, we periodically publish articles that explore the issues surrounding open access. This cross-journal collection provides some key resources to help educate and advocate for open access. New articles will be added to the collection as they are published at www.ploscollections.org/openaccess.

In this blog post, we have organized the Collection content into different categories. Please feel free to share this information widely, as all PLoS content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Open Access: An Overview

• Why Full Open Access Matters
• Why PLoS Became a Publisher
• Who Pays for Open Access?
• Progress toward Public Access to Science
• The Publisher’s Pushback against NIH’s Public Access and Scholarly Publishing Sustainability
• Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009
• Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development
• On the Path to Global Open Access: A Few More Miles to Go

Research Advantages and the Reuse of Open -Access Content

• Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate
• Full Text and Figure Display Improves Bioscience Literature Search
• Systematic Characterizations of Text Similarity in Full Text Biomedical Publications
• Could an Open-Source Clinical Trial Data-Management System Be What We Have All Been Looking For?
• Next Stop, Don’t Block the Doors: Opening Up Access to Clinical Trials Results
• Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article
• Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles
• Empirical Study of Data Sharing by Authors Publishing in PLoS Journals
• Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research
• University Public-Access Mandates Are Good for Science
• Open Access: Taking Full Advantage of the Content

Funding Open Access

• Institutional Open Access Funds: Now Is the Time
• Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing

Impact on Policy and Global Public Health

• When Is Open Access Not Open Access?
• Open Access to Research Is in the Public Interest
• Whose Copy? Whose Rights?
• Global Health Delivery 2.0: Using Open-Access Technologies for Transparency and Operations Research
• The Impact of Open Access upon Public Health
• Open-Access Science: A Necessity for Global Public Health
• ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature

Postdoc Cocktail Hour on Tuesday 6th December 7pm

We’d like to invite postdoctoral researchers to discuss career development with Editorial Board members and staff at a cocktail hour.  Located within a block of the meeting, this event will feature a hosted bar and refreshments and will be limited to 40 postdoctoral researchers, so reserve your space now. If you cannot attend ASTMH but would like to find out more about our journal and how you can get involved, please contact us at plosntds@plos.org.

Several teams utitilized the PLoS APIs in order to run some interesting experiments:

1. Science and Gender: This app mashes up the PLoS Solr API and other sources to test if one can “predict gender, with a reasonable margin of error, based only on author names found in articles published by PLoS.”
2. SciSentiment: This app uses text analysis (facilitated by the PLoS Solr API, the PLoS ALM API, and the Mendeley API) to see if a prediction can be made for future citations. (You can view some of the preliminary results here, here, and here.)
3. Subjects: This data visualization tool, created by PLoS dev team members Jen Song and Joe Osowski, uses the PLoS Solr API and the D3.js tool to create beautiful graphics that show relationships between subject areas assigned to PLoS papers. Here are a couple of the resulting visualizations (click to enlarge):
   

   A display of all the subjects that are associated with PLoS articles. Subjects with the same color belong to the same top level subject area (the largest of which is the primary subject area--each size indicates how often that subject is associated with an article). Click through and hover over each bubble to see the number of instances.

   

   The chord chart displays relationship between subjects. The line between the subjects show how many times the subjects show up together in an article. Click through and hover over each subject area to see its relationship to other subject.

Visit this summary or view this video in order to learn more about the rest of the great Science Hack Day projects.

We’d like to thank Joe Osowski, Jen Song, and Alex Kudlick, the PLoS devs who attended, created, and supported some great hacks, as well as our friends William Gunn and Matt Senate, who were heavily involved in the PLoS-centric projects. Also, many thanks to Ariel Waldman and the rest of the Science Hack Day organizers for including us in their event!

Update: Vote! We’ve opened up a poll for you to voice your opinion on who should win the Binary Battle. We’ll take the aggregate total decided by the public and add that to the judges’ votes to determine the overall winner and runner-up. You’ll have until 11:59 PM Pacific time on Monday, November 28th, 2011 to get your vote in.

Over the past six weeks, PLoS and our friends at Mendeley have been hard at work reviewing all the fantastic apps submitted to the PLoS/Mendeley Binary Battle. We’re pleased to announce the finalists, honorable mentions, and our PLoS Picks. Stay tuned for our announcement of the winners on November 30, 2011!

Finalists (in alphabetical order)

• Collabgraph
• Droideley
• KLEENK
• openSNP
• PaperCritic
• PLoS Impact Explorer
• ReaderMeter
• rOpenSci
• ScienceCard
• TiNYARM
• Total-Impact

Honorable Mentions

• Mendeley Comparison Grid
• Homepage reSearcher
• Vyzkumap

PLoS Picks

Some of our favorite apps featuring the PLoS APIs:

• PLoS Impact Explorer: Developed by Euan Adie, Product Manager at the Macmillan-funded startup, Digital Science, the PLoS Impact Explorer app is an extension of Adie’s Altmetric service, which tracks and scores academic output (scientific articles and datasets) based on the mentions it has received in the press, on reference manager websites, on social media websites, and in literature reviews. This app features a clean, intuitive interface and nicely integrates the PLoS Search API, Mendeley reader counts, and Altmetric’s scores for academic output.
• ScienceCard: PLoS Blogger, Martin Fenner, has created a deceptively simple and very useful app that collects and cleanly displays altmetric and citation information for authors’ published articles (including information pulled from the PLoS ALM API). Registering for ScienceCard is a breeze—in five minutes, you can create an easy, automatically-updated webpage to which can link, use as a reference when collecting altmetric information on your publications, or integrate into your own webpage or webservice using the ScienceCard API. The only downside to this app is that two of the services it incorporates—Altmetric and CrossRef—don’t allow you to click-through to find out more about the numbers displayed on your ScienceCard.
• Total-Impact: Total-Impact fulfills an unmet need for how researchers can collect and display a variety of altmetrics in one place. The app’s contributors (including PLoS authors Heather Piwowar and Egon Willighagen, plus Jason Priem, Cristhian Daniel Parra Trepowski, Paul Groth, Mark Hahnel, and Dario Taraborelli) admit that Total-Impact is a work in progress, as they are managing from 1-20+ different metrics (i.e., citations, downloads, Mendeley readers, unique IP views, etc) for a wide range of academic output (i.e., peer reviewed articles, Slideshare decks, Dryad datasets, etc). Major kudos to the Total-Impact team for taking on this challenging project, and for employing the PLoS ALM API so well!

What next?

The list of finalists will now be reviewed by a panel of influential judges from technology, media and science. Stay tuned for our announcement of the Binary Battle winners on November 30, 2011!

PLoS has been invited to participate in a range of events celebrating Open Access Week 2011, and we’ve also planned one of our own in cooperation with friends at the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and Mendeley.

Check out the following events for a taste of what we’re doing, and read further to learn more about the hundreds of other events happening internationally for Open Access Week 2011.

Monday, October 24^th

• In Conversation: Heather Joseph (Executive Director, SPARC) and William Gunn (Head of Academic Outreach, Mendeley)
  San Francisco, CA, USA
  9:00 am – 10:30 am Pacific

PLoS invites you to join us at our San Francisco offices for a conversation headed by Heather Joseph and William Gunn. On the table—besides breakfast—will be an OA policy update from SPARC and information on the advantages of the reuse of OA content from the perspective of Mendeley. Spaces are limited. To reserve your spot, RSVP via email to dokubo@plos.org no later than Thursday, October 20.

• Karen Spiegelman (Editorial Manager, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLoS Pathogens) speaks at the University of Manitoba
  Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
  For more information, visit the University of Manitoba Libraries.

Tuesday, October 25^th

• “Open Access Opens Doors” panel discussion featuring Megan Hall (Associate Editor (Intern), PLoS Biology)
  Stanford University School of Medicine
  Palo Alto, CA
  For more information, visit Stanford University.
  
• “Why OA? – Major Open Access Publishers BioMedCentral and Public Library of Science speak on why they support this business model” featuring Jennifer Lin (Product Manager, PLoS)
  University of British Columbia
  Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
  For more information, visit Scholarly Communications at the University of British Columbia.

Wednesday, October 26^th

• Panel discussion featuring Susan Jones (Senior Research Editor, PLoS Medicine) and representatives from the Wellcome Trust, Elsevier, BioMedCentral, and more
  London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
  London, UK
  For more information, email dokubo@plos.org.

Thursday, October 27^th

• “Alternative Metrics for Impact and the Future of Open Access” webcast featuring Pete Binfield (Publisher, PLoS ONE and the PLoS Community Journals), hosted by Mendeley.com
  1:00 pm Eastern
  For more information, visit the event registration site.

• Damian Pattinson (Executive Editor, PLoS ONE)
  University of Northampton
  Northampton, UK
  For more information, visit the University of Northampton Libraries.
  (Canceled)

If you can’t make it to our events, we hope to see you at one of the hundreds of other events being hosted internationally by the OA community.