PLoS ONE and Chemical blogspace: About no Impact yet

Journals in chemistry are pretty well fixed. JACS, Angewandte Chemie are clear leaders. Nature and Science if you have something that will attract many scientists. For the rest many smaller journals exist more dedicated at particular research areas.

PLoS ONE is a new journal that changes the way science is published: it publishes anything that is scientifically sound and does not make any judgement on impact and lets the community deal with that. Cameron Neylon recently had him taped to discuss article-level metrics used at PLoS ONE (see also this).

And, PONE (as they affectionately call it) seems to be steadily growing to, at least, become a BIG publisher. Clearly, not dedicating yourself to a small discipline helps. And the IT we have had around for the past 10 years make this large scale publishing possible. The impact of a paper becomes clear through those article level metrics.

Finding interesting papers, however, may be a bit more difficult. There are dedicated RSS feeds listed at the front page:

And I recently subscribed to the Chemistry feed (RSS).

One of the sources taken into account for the article-level metrics is Postgenomic.com, and you may be aware that Chemical blogspace is using the same software. However, us ~60 active have not been paying attention this PONE feed. Well, there have appeared only 84 papers yet in this subsection:



... but only one has been cited in Chemical blogspace, which is a bit disappointing:

So, what are your reasons you do not read this journal yet?

I have spotted one paper which I will soon read and review: How Large Is the Metabolome? A Critical Analysis of Data Exchange Practices in Chemistry (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005440).