“Slice of PLOS” Grows Wings

We hope that you’ve been enjoying our blog post series “Slices of PLOS.” These posts were designed to feature research articles published in PLOS Biology, while also highlighting related content from other PLOS journals and from the rest of the Open Access corpus. We’d aimed to discuss and unpackage exciting Open Access research, to curate it in PLOS Collections, to provide some background context and to lead you to related research that you mightn’t otherwise have come across.

During the last few months we’ve brought you Slices about bats, mesocosm experiments, butterflies, bacterial social media and tomatoes. The posts have attracted up to 2000 readers each, suggesting that the overall approach was a successful one, and that perhaps the format would benefit from the higher visibility and accessibility of the PLOS Biology journal itself.

So in the next few weeks we’ll be morphing the “Slices of PLOS” blog posts into a new PLOS Biology article type called “Open Highlights.” Open Highlights will be published in our journal, listed in our eTOC, linked directly to the relevant research articles, broadcast in social media, and indexed, all serving to increase the potential readership for all of the highlighted research articles. Like Slices, each Open Highlight will be linked to a PLOS Collection.

On July 11th you’ll be able to read more about Open Highlights in our editorial and to check out the first example for yourself. We’ll keep Slice of PLOS going for the occasional more informal topic, but in the interim, watch it grow wings and take flight as a fully fledged article type…

Featured image credit: Flickr user puliarfanita