PLOS ONE: career suicide?

The biggest news to academic publishing recently is probably the release of impact factor (IF) by Thomson Reuters. The famous OA journal PLOS ONE received its biggest drop in IF and is expected to fall even lower.

There has been various discussions about PLOS ONE, for example here at Early Career Ecologists. There must be some reason why the authors decide to publish there, be it timing issue or being frustrated by the long peer-review process.

Some claim (it should be in fact) that quality of each article should be assessed independently, instead of using the impact of the journal to be a proxy. However, PLOS ONE may really be a career suicide, especially junior faculty (at least in my place). The following real scenario say it all.

An anonymous source from the Grant Panel meeting. A panel chair assessed some grant proposals, went over the PI's CV, spotted 3 PLOS ONE articles. Without going into any detail, he said something badly about the competence of the PI, like "This guy does not make quality science". I don't know the final outcome of the proposal, but it didn't look good.

Face the truth in Hong Kong. Only tenured professors can play the PLOS ONE game.

The SEQanswers wiki (SEQwiki) selected as the semantic MediaWiki of Jan 2012

SEQwiki is a wiki database of the available tools for analyzing high-throughput sequencing (HTS) data (it currently includes over 500 such tools), a global listing of HTS service providers (it includes over 100), and a set of tutorials explaining how to analyze HTS data to address specific biological questions. SEQwiki is created and maintained by SEQanswers

Let's see how the scientific community perceives SEQwiki,

...... the community site SEQanswers (http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43) at present provide the most current census and capabilities list of almost all of the existing alignment and assembly programs [1].

SeqAnswers wiki has a frequently updated list of all types of high throughput sequencing related software (http://seqanswers.com/wiki/Special:BrowseData) including those useful for epigenomics [2]. 

There is a large community of users and developers for the Illumina platform; the http://seqanswers.com website is an excellent resource when starting to explore the variety of programs available for analyzing the data generated [3].

SEQwiki is available at here

For more, visit Description at Semantic Mediawiki or refer to [4]

References

[1] Flicek P, Birney E: Sense from sequence reads: methods for alignment and assembly. Nature Methods 2009, 6:S6-S12.


[2] Huss M: Introduction into the analysis of high-throughput-sequencing based epigenome data. Briefings in bioinformatics 2010, 11:512-523.

[3] Kircher M, Heyn P, Kelso J: Addressing challenges in the production and analysis of illumina sequencing data. BMC Genomics 2011, 12:382.

[4] Li J-W, Robison K, Martin M, Sjödin A, Usadel B, Young M, Olivares EC, Bolser DM. The SEQanswers wiki: a wiki database of tools for high-throughput sequencing analysis. Nucleic Acids Research. 2011.