Pretty much everybody with a background in research knows PLOS, either through its mega journal PLOS ONE (most probably the biggest OA journal), or one of its other journals. However, it was kind of surprising to us when we recognized a while ago that there is also a PLOS podcast, the PLOScast. This podcast, being public for a year now, offers more than a dozen episodes so far, each being an interview with some very interesting guests – some of them well-known all over the place, such as Cameron Neylon, Matt Shipman,Geoffrey Bilder and many more. We got the wonderful opportunity to talk to Elizabeth Seiver, the host of the PLOScast (and herself being a meta researcher at PLOS with a psychology background) and Jennifer Laloup, the producer of the show. We talked about how PLOScast came to life and how they have been able to constantly grow it. We also share some of our own history and experience. We can absolutely recommend to give the PLOScast a thorough listen and we hope that there will be many more episodes to come. Hopefully, this episode is as interesting for you, as it was for us. Thanks Elizabeth and Jen! And now, enjoy!
In the world of scientific events conferences are the classic event format. However, there are many others and currently we can see more modern and more open formats evolve – science slams, hackathons, unconferences or unseminars. We have invited two scientists who have initiated unseminars to their scientific surroundings (both in the field of bioinformatics). Natasha Wood organizes an unseminar series in Cape Town, while Aidan Budd is actively involved in an unseminar series in Heidelberg. As our German listeners will know we had Aidan already as a guest and spoke with him about the HUB (Heidelberg Unseminars in Bioinformatics). With this episode we want to widen the horizon, not only by looking to South Africa, but also by doing this episode in English and also touching slightly other topics.
For quite a while now we’ve talked about having English episodes in the Open Science Radio from time to time. Now is the time to actually give it try. Before we are releasing the first episode in English, this is only a very short introduction to let everybody know what the this podcast is about and who’s doing it.
As we’ve said, we are always happy for feedback and even ideas for topics that you would like us to speak about. For now, have fun!
