PLOS ONE PHYLOGENY - Ross Mounce

"I’m proud to announce an interesting public output from my BBSRC-funded postdoc project: PLUTo: Phyloinformatic Literature Unlocking Tools. Software for making published phyloinformatic data discoverable, open, and reusable ... The aim of the PLUTo project is to re-extract & liberate phylogenetic data & associated metadata from the research literature. Sadly, only ~4% of modern published phylogenetic analysis studies make their underlying data available. Another study finds that if you ask the authors for this data, only 16% will be kind enough to reply with the requested data!  This particular data type is a cornerstone of modern evolutionary biology. You’ll find phylogenetic analyses across a whole host of journal subjects – medical, ecological, natural history, palaeontology… There are also many different ways in which this data can be re-used e.g. supertrees  & comparative cladistics. Not to mention, simple validation studies &/or analyses which extend-upon or map new data on to a phylogeny. It’s really useful data and we should be archiving it for future re-use and re-analysis. To my great delight, this is what I’m being paid to attempt to do for my first postdoc; on a grant I co-wrote – finding & liberating phylogenetic data for everyone!  Why PLOS ONE?   It’s a BOAI-compliant open access journal that publishes most articles under CC BY, with a few under CC0 ... It’s a high-volume ‘megajournal’ publishing ~200 articles per day, many of which include phylogenetic analyses ... Killer feature: as far as I know, PLOS are the only publisher to embed rich metadata inside their figure image files ..."