PLoS — the Public Library of Science — offers a free online collection of articles on flu: PLoS Currents: Influenza. The collection’s goal is “the rapid exchange of scientific results and ideas” to, as Harold Varmus put it, “accelerate scientific discovery.”
This flu collection as well as all of PLoS’s journals are open access — meaning you can distribute or reproduce articles with attribution. Most of the journals are peer reviewed, but PLOS Currents: Influenza is simply moderated by flu experts. Anyone can upload an article — or even just a data set — to the collection at no cost. Once an article has been moderated, it’s fully available to the public.
Susan Jones, a senior editor of PLOS Medicine, explained to me that the Currents: Influenza moderators donate their time to vet articles for “robust science.” The site elaborates: they “make a rapid determination as to whether a contribution is intelligible, relevant, ethical and scientifically credible, but will otherwise not impose restrictions on the nature, format or content of the contributions.” Moderation isn’t as muscular an evaluation as peer review, but it allows PLoS to disseminate articles extremely quickly. This speed is important for following and understanding a disease as fast moving as flu. It’s also an advantage for journalists wanting to stay on the leading edge of H1N1.
You can search PLoS Currents: Influenza using keywords, and you can read any comments that have been written about an article. You can also see how many times an article has been downloaded and how many “stars” (one to five) readers have given it.
If you prefer to stick to peer-reviewed articles, you can try keyword searches on PLoS Biology (an “H1N1″ search turns up these articles) or PLoS Medicine (where an “H1N1″ search brings up these papers). Or try searches on any of the other peer-reviewed PLoS journals avaliable through the PLoS homepage. You can also browse the article-level metrics for any journal article. These tell you how frequently a piece has been cited, downloaded, viewed, blogged about, commented on, etc. Jones explained that these metrics, taken together, can “give clues to which papers are attracting attention” — and therefore which ones might include interesting story leads or angles. She also pointed out that another way to assess the quality of an article is to check it “for a really good explanation of what was done and why.”
