The launch of PLOS One in 2006 established a new era in academic publishing. Recognized as the first online mega journal, PLOS One pioneered the field of large, open-access, multi-disciplinary, online journals. At its peak in 2013, PLOS One was the largest journal in the world and published more than 30,000 manuscripts in a single year.
September 20th 2019, marked an important anniversary. On that date in 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Spain in a quest to circumnavigate the globe. In the exactly 500 years since Magellan and his crew set sail, the world has gone through incredible changes and this once-thought impossible feat has become a regular part of our global economy.
The importance of scientific findings is generally considered in terms of the impact that those findings have in the scientific community. As impact itself is a somewhat vague concept, scientists rely on citations as a metric for measuring impact. The Impact Factor of a journal is based on the number of citations that published article receive, and authors themselves can track the total number of citations their publications have received.
Although we tend to think of ourselves as individual members of the Homo sapiens species, our bodies are home to countless other species, such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses, that in many cases are essential to life. The collective genome of all the organisms residing both on and inside our bodies is referred to as our microbiome and is gaining the attention of scientists in various fields.
