The PLoS Impact Explorer visualises which papers in the Open Access PLoS family of journals are making an impact online.
posted by alby on Nov 18, 2011 - 20 comments

Evidence Based, Culturally-relevant African First Aid Guidelines and Training Materials, from researchers at the Belgian Red Cross and Stellenbosch University. [more inside]
posted by The White Hat on Jul 20, 2011 - 3 comments

More evidence of brain plasticity: Some blind people are able to use echolocation to perceive space and objects around them in surprising detail, even though the time differences in echoes necessary to do this are two small to be consciously perceived. An fMRI study by Lore Thaler, Stephen Arnott and Melvyn Goodale revealed that people who are especially adept at this use their calcarine cortex (a.k.a. V1 or primary visual cortex) to process spatial information from the echoes. The original paper. A shorter discussion. (Previously)
posted by nangar on Jun 20, 2011 - 13 comments

Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia. Aimed at scientists editing science articles.
posted by jjray on Oct 6, 2010 - 48 comments

Ever since the Women's Health Initiative published data showing increased risk and little benefit with post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy it has become more controversial and the FDA now recommends using the lowest dose possible for the shortest time, if using it at all. Why was HRT so popular in the first place? It now appears one reason was that what appeared to be legitimate articles in peer reviewed journals were actually ghostwritten by drug companies. [more inside]
posted by TedW on Sep 24, 2010 - 22 comments

For a little welcome diversion from your political, financial, climatological and other worries, how about orificial hirudiniasis? Here's a new species of nose-dwelling leech. Its ancestors may gave lived in Tyrannosaurus rex noses but our new friend here will be perfectly happy in yours. (The linked fulltext research paper is from the Public Library of Science's flagship peer-reviewed online journal PLoS ONE, but it's the Beeb's notice that has the absolutely OMG EWW pix.) Nature is so cool.
posted by jfuller on Apr 15, 2010 - 50 comments

Researchers long ago rejected the theory that vaccines cause autism, yet many parents don't believe them. Can scientists bridge the gap between evidence and doubt? A five-thousand-word article, via Danny Yee.
posted by cgc373 on May 30, 2009 - 282 comments

The Public Library of Science has collected articles about global poverty as part of the Council of Science Editors Global Theme Issue on the subject. While many of the articles listed at the CSE site are not online, some journals, like the American Journal of Nursing have their articles available.
posted by OmieWise on Oct 24, 2007 - 2 comments

The Public Library of Science has been getting some good press lately. An Editorial at the Sacramento Bee, The New Scientist, Washington Post and The Boston Globe, have all written up The PLoS, the organization founded by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues, is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world -- a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year.
They are committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. Check it out at publiclibraryofscience.org.
posted by Blake on Aug 19, 2003 - 5 comments