Announcing PLoS Currents: Disasters | Speaking of Medicine

“Today, there are ever more pressing needs for up-to-date information to be quickly available and easily accessible. This has never been more true than in the field of disasters, where slowness in sharing knowledge can be the difference between life or death for thousands of people, or the avoidance or mitigation of catastrophic outcomes for an ecosystem. Despite the breadth of technological possibilities available, publishers and scientific journals  have not provided adequate solutions for publication during fast moving emergencies. One study, published in 2009 showed that the majority of the epidemiological articles on the SARS epidemic of 2003 were submitted after the epidemic had ended, many several years after – and this for an emergency that lasted just a few months. The UNIDSR [United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction] has identified that, ‘the sharing of research findings, lessons learned and best practices’ are a priority in its Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015 [HFA]. PLoS is proud therefore to announce the launch of PLoS Currents: Disasters, a new, innovative open-access publication for the rapid communication of new research results and operational analyses derived from the study or management of all types of disasters. All research is citable and permanently archived in PubMed Central as well as indexed in Scopus and PubMed. Our primary aim is rapid dissemination to make essential, and in many cases otherwise hard to publish, findings as widely available as possible as quickly as possible, so they can be used and built upon.  We have implemented an integrated authoring, editorial, and peer-review system called Annotum, a new publishing platform, which we believe can cut the publishing time down to a few weeks, or even days. Authors directly compose or insert their manuscript in the web-based application and peer review occurs within it.  All of the content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CCBY), which means that articles are immediately free to read but more importantly can then be reused in any way, provided that the authors are attributed correctly... In addition to the decreased publishing time through a streamlined review and production process, it offers: [1] Flexibility: open article formats to reflect the diverse types of disasters-related research [2] Revisions: updated versions of articles that document the latest results or analyses. The most recent article,  from 16 international experts in the fields of research, education, ethics and operational aspects of disaster medical management, highlights a critical issue in disaster management and describes a template for uniform data reporting of acute medical response in disasters. PLoS Currents: Disasters is supported by an international group of  researchers, practitioners,  who serve on its editorial and review board...”