Since publishing a couple of papers in PLOS ONE (here and here) over the past few weeks and my respective blogs (here, here, here and here) there seems to be more interest than usual on this blog and much of this has been driven by attention from Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog.
I have summarized this all in the following graphic. I wonder if this represents a virtuous circle that self reinforces interest in the open access articles or this blog? I am not sure which because I only have data from my side of the equation. Also a big component is likely the press that the dispensing paper received. I am totally at a loss as to where this will lead or what it really means. Will It be possible to find another topic that can achieve so much interest? What I do know is that I have tried to be as balanced/ restrained as possible in presenting what has happened over the past several months. I am pretty sure I am not the only person this stuff happens to when submitting papers and I am pretty sure it happens everywhere. The question is how do we improve publishing in science? I am not sure I can answer that in a single blog, but other people should be able to learn from my experiences at least.
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