Category Archives: environmental science

PLOS ONE at AGU 2013

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PLOS ONE is excited to participate in the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Fall Meeting 2013, held this week in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Conveniently, Moscone is just down the street from our San Francisco office, so several members of PLOS staff will be in attendance and available to chat with you about the journal. We’re looking forward to meeting both current and potential Academic Editors, reviewers, and of course authors! Please stop by Booth #301 to say hello.

Last week was a very geophysics-oriented one for us, with both the publication of Hansen et al.’s work “Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature” and with the announcement of our call for papers in a new collection entitled “Responding to Climate Change.” What’s more exciting is that James Hansen will be in attendance at AGU and will be giving a talk today (December 10th) on this topic, in support of taking significant, active measures to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

Last year, at AGU 2012, we were a little bit of an unfamiliar face to many. This year, we hope to continue our conversation with the physical sciences community about our commitment to open access and the publication of sound scientific research in all areas of science and medicine, including geoscience, space science, chemistry, and physics.

After AGU, look out for the PLOS booth again in just a few days at the American Society for Cell Biology!

Image Credit: Detailed view of Arctic Sea Ice in 2007, from NASA Visible Earth.

A rockin’ good time at AGU

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Last week the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting was held just down the road from our San Francisco office, and PLOS staff could not pass up the opportunity to make an appearance.

If you were an exhibition hall attendee and could manage to tear yourself away from all the talks, poster sessions, and workshops long enough to pay us a visit, you would have been met with friendly staff from both PLOS ONE and PLOS Currents Disasters, all on a mission to inform as many geophysicists as possible about open access and our various journals. We thoroughly enjoyed spending the week there and meeting any PLOS readers, authors, editors, and reviewers that stopped by to say hello. In particular, our publications manager Krista Hoff was excited to meet and have a chat with one of our longstanding Academic Editors, Ben Bond-Lamberty.

In an little bit of contrast to our recent visit to the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, many passersby did not immediately recognize the PLOS name. They were similarly unaware of our status as a nonprofit, our commitment to open access, and our relatively unique publication criteria. These conversations led to an exciting opportunity for us to explain that we publish in all areas of science, and especially to show our love to the worlds of geology, physics, chemistry, and environmental science.

While free pens were flying off the table, we had stimulating conversations with seismologists, planetary scientists, climatologists, geologists, and environmental scientists. Our rapid-peer-review journal PLOS Currents Disasters was extremely well-received among researchers associated with earthquakes or other chemical and geological hazards (including potential meteor disasters!).

Many scientists found our printed Open Access guide “How Open Is It?” both helpful and informative, and several were big proponents of open-access journals, excited to find that we accept submissions in geophysics research.

Long-time PLOS supporters were thrilled to inform us that they intended to submit at least one paper within the next year, and we definitely piqued the interest of at least a few potential reviewers and academic editors. We had some great discussions about barriers to scientific publishing in general and received insightful suggestions for improving the overall publication experience. We appreciated hearing everyone’s feedback and will be sure to incorporate your suggestions into our future discussions.

Look out for the PLOS booth again in just a few days at the American Society for Cell Biology, where we hope to see yet another side of our growing and diverse PLOS community!

Photo credits: U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library