#PLOS Hub for Biodiversity – soon to be retired

Just got the email below.

Dear Subscriber,

We are writing to you as someone who is a registered user on PLOS Hubs: Biodiversity to let you know that we will shortly be retiring it.

Thousands of Biodiversity articles, including research from all fields plus associated magazine content, have now been published across the PLOS journals. With this healthy level of ongoing activity, the community has outgrown the original need for the Hub, which was created to give greater visibility to their previously widely dispersed content.

Rest assured that we are developing more powerful tools for our journals to help those working in this community rapidly find and filter Open Access content, and continue to seek novel ways to re-organize and present it for discussion.

If you have any specific questions please email our user services team.

Best wishes
The PLOS Publications and Products Team

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis

7 thoughts on “#PLOS Hub for Biodiversity – soon to be retired”

  3. So the idea is, this was a sort of manually updated table-of-contents for biodiversity articles in PLOS journals, and there are now too many of them for that to be either necessary or feasible? If I got that right, it seems reasonable,

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    1. well, as someone who did a little bit of contributing to the hub I think the real issue was the system was just not very good — curators got an email once a week with potential articles to include and then we would send back IDs for those articles we thought would be good … there was no way for people to log in and do any type of direct curation or addition it was all through an indirect email based system which I confess I hated …

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    2. I was involved in some of the discussions to set up the hub, for an account see http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/biodiversity-informatic-fail-and-what.html (and also http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/plos-biodiversity-hub-launches.html ). I think the Hub lacked ambition, it could have been a platform for marking up and cross linking biodiversity-related content (e.g., taxon names highlighted and linked, geographic localities extracted and added to searchable maps). But PLoS were on a deadline, and the biodiversity informatics community couldn’t provide them with what they needed, so we pretty much got what we deserved.

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