Opening up influenza research with a new kind of journal

Today is the launch of a new type of online publication, a cross between website and a "real" journal, called PLoS Currents: Influenza. What is it? Well, it's a website for immediate publication of new findings about the influenza virus. Submissions are screened by a panel of moderators (I'm one of them) and if they are appropriate, we will publish them immediately - no delays - and they will be freely available for anyone to read. They will also be given a permanent, searching PubMed identification, just like a regular journal paper.

What's the difference between this and a regular journal? Well, first of all, submissions won't be thoroughly reviewed, which means they don't "count" as journal papers, but it also means you can publish them later in a peer-reviewed journal. The Public Library of Science has already bought into this model - they're sponsoring PLoS Currents, after all - and we expect other journals to do so also. So why publish, you might ask? That's easy: in a highly competitive field such as influenza research, different scientists are often racing to answer the same question. By publishing super-rapidly in PLoS Currents, you will get a citable, time-stamped reference that establishes your discovery, and most importantly, establishes when you made it.

The big win here, we hope, is that scientists will be empowered to announce their results to the world without worrying about being "scooped" - a common fear that leads to many results being kept secret for months while papers are prepared and revised. This in turn will speed up scientific progress overall, which is the real goal behind PLoS Currents.

Also, because we aren't looking for complete manuscripts (although those are fine too), we'll accept new observations, new data, and more speculative ideas (as long as they have some data to support them) in PLoS Currents.

We're also pioneering a new way to author papers, using the Google Knol software. After writing your contribution in Google Knol, submission will require little more than a few mouse clicks. To launch the journal, four of its moderators (with colleagues) have posted the first few contributions just these week. Check it out here.

If PLoS Currents: Influenza is successful, it will open the door to an almost unlimited set of new publications in virtually any scientific field. We chose influenza because, with the recent emergence of the new H1N1(A) pandemic flu strain, it became clear to many of us that waiting the typical 3-4 months (at best) for results to appear was just too slow. Similar delays occur in virtually every other area of biomedical research, and it's time we took fuller advantage of the web to speed things up.