Article: A new website for the rapid sharing of influenza research

The Public Library of Science has launched a beta site to facilitate the rapid sharing of research being done on influenza. PLoS Currents: Influenza is encouraging researchers to submit their findings in order to facilitate rapid progress in influenza research. All of the content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Clearly, the development on H1N1 as a global concern has created a need for an organized network of information sharing. Since there is so much research being done on influenza and there is such an urgency in understanding and containing the virus, PLoS has a great opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of open communication between scientists.

The curation, organization and presentation of PLoS Currents: Influenza generally relies on Google knol which means that anybody with a Google account is able to contribute an article or comment on an article. However, Google knol has recently allowed communities of knols to be moderated for content, which allows PLoS to rapidly review all articles that are submitted to the knol and maintain moderation throughout the life of the community. The PLoS Currents: Influenza beta has 25 moderators and they are described as an "expert group of influenza researchers". It would be interesting to know if 25 moderators will be necessary to successfully oversee everything within the knol or if the knol could function with fewer moderators while requiring some level of credentials to contribute to the site.

While PLoS Currents: Influenza is available and in development through Google knol, the collection is simultaneously being archived permanently at the Rapid Research Notes, hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. While all of the articles are available in full-text at the RRN site, they also include a link to the Google knol version. The process for adding articles to the RRN archive involves many more restrictions than adding an article to the PLoS knol, the first criteria being that only publishers may submit articles. Additionally, the publishers must submit the articles already marked up in XML according to the NLM's Journal Publishing DTD. I personally would be interested in seeing other repositories that require documents to come already marked up.

Right now there is a lot of buzz about what open access to research should look like. Actually, there appears to be a full-blown fervor over the speculation of how researchers and information organizations should work together to present findings. It seems that everybody has an opinion on how information needs to be free. PLoS is in a unique situation because they already have experience in open access to science, they are an authority on the subject with real-life experience in applying these practices to see how well they work. The success of PLoS Currents: Influenza will provide further insight as to how scientists do their work including when and why scientists reveal their work to the rest of the world. Since PLoS is asking for very preliminary work from researchers, there really is no time that is too early to submit findings.