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).

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.

We’re saddened that Mark will be moving on from PLoS, and at the same time delighted to see him move on to such an important open-access project.  As a founding member of PLoS, Mark has achieved a great deal over the past eight years.  He has been instrumental in establishing PLoS as a world leader in open-access publishing and has helped us to launch journals as well as initiatives in research communication that consistently break new ground.

Mark’s also represented PLoS and open access more broadly in a number of different ways, for example by helping to found the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

On the new project, Mark said “This new journal, sponsored by three of the world’s leading funding agencies, has the potential to be a tremendous positive force for change in research communication and will drive forward open access to all research outputs.” and added that “Of course, it’s very hard to leave PLoS after so long, but the organization has never been stronger than it is today.”

We wish Mark, Randy and the new open-access publishing project all the success in the world, and are looking forward to future collaborations.

Just eight days after announcing our call for App ideas, we received over 70 top-rate suggestions for scientific and medical apps from our community. Many addressed issues already important to PLoS—post-publication peer review and contextualizing and filtering research for a variety of disciplines. Others submitted ideas that were just plain cool but outside of the scope of the Binary Battle competition.

Now we are passing these ideas along to members of the developer community, who have the coding skills to bring them to life.

Below, we have broken these ideas into two groups:

• Ideas that can use the PLoS or Mendeley APIs and can be entered into the Binary Battle competition
• Cool ideas that don’t use the PLoS or Mendeley APIs (and are therefore outside of the scope of this competition) but you might want to tinker with anyway.

Selected Binary Battle-eligible ideas include:

• An app for displaying the impact of diverse research outputs on your CV or website. For example, how many blogs have written about your paper, how often have your datasets been mentioned in scientific lit, etc. An existing app that does just that, called Total Impact but it needs to be taken from prototype to full-fledged app. More info here and here. Suggested by Heather Piwowar: hpiwowar(at)gmail(dot)com or total-impact(at)googlegroups(dot)com
• Create an easily embeddable, dynamically-updating list of PLoS or Mendeley papers from a particular lab or institution that researchers can put on their websites. Suggested by Sébastien M. Crouze:  seb(dot)crouzet(at)gmail(dot)com
• From a bunch of papers, recursively extract all the references they contain and establish a ranking of the most cited papers. It will help to found “must read” papers from a certain website, subject area, author(s), or institutions. Suggested by anonymous.
• Search papers in Mendeley or PLoS based on geography or genes. Suggested by Sjurdur Hammer:  sjurdur(at)hotmail(dot)com and anonymous, respectively
• A tool that will automatically export illustrations and figures (as well as their attributions and CC licenses) from PLoS papers to the Wikimedia Commons. Suggested by anonymous.
• More ideas here

Other cool ideas

• A searchable directory that could collate grant/funding opportunities from across all Federal, State and Foundation entities that are currently silo-ed into individual, closed databases on individual websites. This master databank should then be sortable by field, interest area, investigators (e.g. young investigators, tenure-track faculty, postdoc, etc.), funding amount, etc. Suggested by Llewellyn Cox, PhD:  llewellc(at)usc(dot)edu
• A citizen science measurement app (like NYC Cricket Crawl) via GPS, photo, video, audio recording that sends data in standardized format. Suggested by mik3cap.
• An app for identifying bat species from the sounds they make. You would hold up the smartphone and it would record a sound and then give you a species identification on the phone. Suggested by Dr. Kate Jones: kate(dot)jones(at)ioz(dot)ac(dot)uk
• An educational App which finds the most recent common ancestor between any two species on the planet. Suggested by aulridgejr(at)gmail(dot)com
• More ideas here

To sign up to develop an idea or request an API key from PLoS or Mendeley, fill out this form. We encourage you to work with other devs who share an interest in the idea you choose, and also to contact the scientist who conceived of the idea, should you seek more input or wish to invite them to collaborate.

Finished apps for the Binary Battle competition must be received by September 30^th. Tim O’Reilly looks forward to seeing your creations – happy coding!

Please remember that your Conference Postcard should be between 800-1000 words, and should include:

o A synopsis of what was presented.

o Reasons why you think your chosen highlight is outstanding.

o How it related to the theme of the meeting.

o The impact it had on attendees.

o Additional references considered useful.

You can find full information regarding what is needed and who has given their agreement for their session/talk/workshop to be written about on the ISMB website: http://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2011-program/plos-postcards.

This API provides those who want to enter the PLoS/Mendeley Binary Battle an additional data source to use along with the PLoS Search API.

We also have an open-source article-level metrics project site for other publishers who want to build on what we started and use this code on their own statistics. Publishers who have questions about using the code on their own journals should email Pete Binfield, Publisher of PLoS ONE and the Community Journals.

Here’s what Rich Cave, PLoS Director of IT, said about this development: “Releasing our ALM code base is a natural extension of our open philosophy. Not only are all our open-access articles freely available online but the tools that we use to add value to them are open-source.”

For those who follow our Article-Level Metrics project, it’s worth noting that we’ve also added PubMed Central usage statistics including the number of unique views and PDF downloads.

We hope that today’s announcement will provide the community with a powerful new way to leverage our content and their own and provide more reasons for developers to enter the PLoS/Mendeley Binary Battle.

Today it was announced that PLoS ONE has been named a SPARC Innovator by the Association of Research Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. We are very proud to have received this significant honor from a leading resource in Open Access (OA) advocacy.

In particular, SPARC’s recognition of PLoS ONE (which you can read in full on the SPARC website) highlights our contributions to changing the way science is communicated (namely, post-publication peer review and alt-metrics) and our success in proving that Open Access publishing is a viable and successful business model.

“PLoS ONE is a game-changer. It breaks through the preconception that authors—and readers—require a journal to determine the significance of scientific research, and demonstrates that the community is ready and willing to take on that role,” says Heather Joseph, SPARC’s Executive Director.

In welcoming this award, we also want to highlight the fact that our tremendous success has been made possible thanks to the dedication of our staff, authors, editors, reviewers and everyone in the PLoS ONE ecosystem. This award and others are for them.

This announcement has been cross-posted from the everyONE blog.

Your Conference Postcard should be between 800-1000 words, and should include:

o A synopsis of what was presented.

o Reasons why you think your chosen highlight is outstanding.

o How it related to the theme of the meeting.

o The impact it had on attendees.

o Additional references considered useful.

Preference will be given to reports that demonstrate evidence of additional research into the topic. No permission from speakers is required beyond those obtained by ISMB.

Please find full guidelines on the ISMB website.

Send your submission to contribute[at]plos.org by August 2nd

Need inspiration? Check out previous Postcards articles at our new collection.

Arguably, it was PLoS ONE that began this trend when it was launched in December, 2006, to provide a venue for all rigorous science regardless of potential impact.  The peer review process focuses on a set of criteria to assess whether the submissions are methodologically sound and properly reported.  What the peer review process does not evaluate is how ‘important’ the work might be.  Instead, the idea is that the post-publication phase can be used to filter, assess and organize content using approaches such as article-level metrics, expert assessment and so on.  One of the goals of this approach is to provide an alternative to the cycles of submission, rejection and resubmission that are prevalent in some fields, and which delay the communication of new findings by months or even years.

In this way, PLoS ONE effectively seeks to publish all publishable work and imposes no artificial limits on what it will publish, unlike a traditional journal which might attempt to select only the most ‘impactful’ papers. In addition, because the journal uses a publication fee business model in which the revenue from each article covers its costs, it is economically viable to publish a very large number of articles. The combination of these two factors also means that the journal is able to grow very rapidly.

Remarkably, PLoS ONE became the largest peer-reviewed journal in existence inside four years (and will publish as much as 1.5% of the articles indexed in PubMed in 2011), and over the past 12 months has been emulated by many other established publishers in various disciplines.  The tantalizing prospect is that these new ‘open-access megajournals’ might grow at a pace that is similar to PLoS ONE, and could therefore potentially account for a substantial proportion of the research literature in a matter of a few years.

At COASP this year, participants will hear from representatives of several of the publishers that have launched or are planning the launch of open-access megajournals, including: Pete Binfield, PLoS (PLoS ONE); Richard Sands, British Medical Journal Group (BMJ Open); Dave Ross, SAGE (SAGE Open), Sara Grimme, Nature Publishing Group (Scientific Reports); Phil Hurst, Royal Society (Open Biology), and Tracy DePellegrin Connelly, Genetics Society of America (G3).  We’ll hear about the progress, successes and challenges.

There will also be a related session on other approaches to scalable OA publishing.  Peter Strickland will present Acta Crystallographica Section E, a megajournal published by the International Union of Crystallography, which blurs the distinction between a database and a journal.   Matt Cockerill, BioMed Central (BMC Series) and Paul Peters, Hindawi (ISRN Series) will complete the presentations with talks on scalable and innovative open-access publishing platforms and journals series.

The combined approaches that will be presented at COASP this year could have a transformative impact on research communication.  The primacy of the journal as the mechanism for the organization of published research articles is being challenged, and now is the time for all publishers to consider how these developments might affect their own operations.  We look forward to seeing you there.

Competing interests: Mark Patterson (Director of Publishing at PLoS) is on the Board of OASPA, and helped to organize the upcoming ‘megajournal’ session at this year’s COASP.