Mobile elements are genomic elements exchanged outside of vertical inheritance mechanisms. They include, but are not limited to, plasmids, transposons, bacteriophages, repeat regions, and genomic islands, and may be exchanged within a species (lateral), between different species (horizontal), or across different kingdoms (orthogonal). We are interested in the role that mobile elements play in ecological niche colonization by microbes, especially the development of endosymbioses between bacteria and eukaryotic hosts.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

PLoS Resources on Ebola: The Flipboard Choice

Today PLoS (Public Library of Science) announced the creation of a resource that pulls together all Ebola-related articles published in their suite of seven peer-reviewed journals. PLoS articles are and always have been freely available to everyone, so it's not really news that their Ebola research is, well, freely available. Other publishers, more traditionally non-OA, have generously created their own open access Ebola collections (Science and Science - Translational Medicine, for example). This is laudable to a certain degree, but smacks of ambulance chasing. Influenza? TB? Coronavirus? None rise to the level of importance necessary to open the vaunted annals of research?

Anyway, I'm not here to rant about disease research that is funded by US government money should be OA. Except I just did, and it should.

I was surprised and intrigued by PLoS' decision to release their Ebola collection on Flipboard. I consider myself a savvy user of social media in science, but I confess I did not see this coming. Is Flipboard a popular tool for disseminating information in science now? Or is PLoS breaking new ground with this?




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