Welcome to PLoS Biologue

Welcome to PLoS Biologue, the new blog for PLoS Biology

PLoS Biologue is where the journal team and our guest contributors would like to engage with you, our readers and broader audience, on issues of interest and relevance to the biological community. Topics you can expect to read about here will range  from new discoveries in the biological sciences, to new developments and campaigns in open access publishing, to community issues, such as policy, funding and science outreach.

So why launch a blog to achieve these aims?  A blog provides a place for comment and opinion with lower barriers to participation than those found at  the more formal setting of a journal website.  Moreover, the publication of a paper in a journal is often just one part of a bigger story. Where did the paper come from, how did the ideas proposed in it develop and how do those ideas impact the field, what discussions do they stimulate, and what are their societal implications? We want to capture and engage with such discussions here, particularly as we know that papers in the journal’s magazine section (see for example Franz de Waal’s recent Perspective piece)  and research section (see for example the article by Levi et al) stimulate such discussions, sometimes on PLoS Biology’s website but often elsewhere.
While we the journal team will be writing here about the ideas and topics that interest us, we also welcome your ideas for topics to post about here. To help us gauge what you’re interested in reading about, please take a moment to fill out the poll just to the right of this post. You don’t need to register, just click on the top three poll entries  of most interest to you. And if you have a good idea for a post that you want to write yourself, get in touch  – just send us a short description of your idea that includes why your post would be suitable for PLoS Biologue to biologue@plos.org

So stay posted for more on PLoS Biologue. You can receive updates on PLoS Biologue by subscribing to our RSS feed or by following PLoS Biology on twitter.

We look forward to you joining the debates and discussions here at PLoS Biologue about the science, and the science-related issues, that matter to you.