I was one of the lucky few who was given access to a dump of “social” statistics for PLoS One (my term). The data were given to us to analyze as we please, to glean from them what we may (I don’t really know who all the others were). I decided to look at some trends that might give some semi-quantitative insights into the scientific mind and commenting, and provide some commentary on what this really means, if anything.

Speaking as an entrepeneur, criticizing a startup for high-flying rhetoric and missed revenue projections in its first five years of operations is kind of ridiculous. If we did this kind of fisking on every web company – or even on Nature’s web 2.0 operations, which I doubt pay their own bills with ads and revenue – we wouldn’t have very many startups left to kick around.

Wow, have you read Declan Butler's nasty little hatchet job that was just published in Nature about the Public Library of Science (PLoS)? My jaw hit the top of the table in my little coffee shop where I am ensconced -- why would Nature demean their journal by publishing such a snotty little screed where they attack the normal, but probably painful, financial ups-and-downs of a new journal?

"An interactive open-access journal for the communication of all peer-reviewed scientific and medical research"