More on PLoS One
A photo of a starling by Coen Elemans, lead author in a new PLoS One paper about superfast songbird muscles.There’s another point about PLoS One that I wish I’d made in my earlier post: it’s the only journal publishing scientific articles on a broad range of topics that doesn’t have the extremely competitive acceptance rate of Science or Nature. An author submitting a manuscript chooses a journal based on more than just impact factor, of course. A well-respected subject-specific journal is often the best place to send work, especially if you’ve published related results there before and it’s regularly read by colleagues in your discipline. But what if your manuscript characterizes something that crosses multiple fields? Something of unusual or quirky significance? Maybe it’s not earth-shattering enough for Nature, but it would be a shame to leave it underexposed in a subject-specific journal.
Suddenly, PLoS One is perfect.
And in the spirit of the thing, let me tell you about new research published in PLoS One. Coen Elemans, from the University of Utah, and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania provide the first direct evidence of superfast muscles in songbirds. They found that the syringeal muscles in starlings can produce twitch contraction halftimes of 3.23±0.44 ms, the fastest isometric twitch kinematics ever measured in vertebrates. Superfast muscles are a special type of muscle and appear to have evolved multiple times in different vertebrate taxa (rattlesnakes shake their rattle with superfast muscles, for example). These findings have already earned mentions in The New York Times, National Geographic, MSNBC.com and many newspapers both stateside and international. They’re relevant to multiple subdisciplines, and publishing them in, say, a muscle physiology journal would have left them overlooked by the birdsong community. Fortunately, PLoS One enjoys high exposure: in the New York Times alone, ten reports on PLoS One articles were published so far this year, almost a third of the number of reports on PNAS articles. Not bad for a journal with an entirely different editorial and publishing process.