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Channel Your Community’s Research

At PLOS, we aim to support academic communities in communicating their research in open and accessible ways. The first of the PLOS Channels, a new way for specialist communities to communicate, find and read research content, launch this week.

Channels provide an innovative way of curating and presenting published research relevant to a scholarly community. Each is curated by a small group of Channel Editors, themselves researchers, who continuously bring together and showcase recently published research content selected from the broad scope of PLOS journals. Importantly, Channel Editors can point to resources, news and commentary from many online sources, including articles published in other journals.

PLOS developed Channels for communities to drive according to their own content priorities, without limitation to any particular journal.

With experts at the helm, and content selected by researchers for researchers, we hope to create online venues that become a preferred destination for research communities. To this end, the Channels concept was designed with researchers’ input to adapt to various needs. Channels can be adopted as a resource by researchers in a specialist area, or bring together researchers from different academic backgrounds working towards a common aim. The first three Channels to launch illustrate a variety of applications.

 

VDRR

The Veteran Disability & Rehabilitation Research Channel was born from a collaboration with the US Department of Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development Service, as a new home for the community previously served by the Journal of Rehabilitation Research & Development (JRRD) which ceased publication in 2017. The new Channel, with an expanded international focus, features multidisciplinary research for a global community of researchers and care providers working with veterans.

 

OST

The Open Source Toolkit Channel showcases research from a diverse group of fields that have in common the description of innovative open source software and hardware applications that can be used in research and education. This Channel aims not to serve a specific scientific discipline but to create bridges between vibrant communities that build tools to support democratization and reproducibility of research.

 

The Tuberculosis Channel, led by Academic Editors from PLOS ONE and PLOS Medicine, will launch on World TB Day, March 24th, 2017. This Channel will draw from PLOS journal content covering all aspects of TB from mycobacteriology to computational epidemiologic models, clinical diagnosis and treatment. By integrating these reports with content from a variety of external sources, Channel Editors aim to provide an accessible resource of interest to TB researchers around the world.

We are grateful to the Channel Editors who have stepped up enthusiastically to pioneer the use of this new tool for their communities. More PLOS Channels will follow later this year—some are already in preparation. If you have interest in becoming a Channel Editor or see an unmet need in your community for this tool, we welcome your thoughts. We look forward to working with many more communities to help disseminate their work, create useful resources and foster collaboration within and across specialist communities.

Stay tuned!

 

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