2009年4月9日 星期四

Public Library of Science (PLoS) 黑猩猩用肉食換取交配機會

黑猩猩用肉食換取交配機會
黑猩猩
高蛋白的肉類食物對黑猩猩很重要
最新一期《公共科學圖書館﹒綜合》雜誌上發表的文章說，黑猩猩能夠進行"用食物換取交配"這樣的交易。

科學家發現，那些願意與同伴分享自己獵取的肉食的雄性黑猩猩，比那些吝嗇的雄性黑猩猩多一倍的交配機會。

科學家在對科特迪瓦塔伊國家公園黑猩猩的生活進行的觀察中發現，分享肉食使得雄性黑猩猩交配的次數增多。

科學家說，有趣的是，如果一隻雄猩猩和固定的一隻雌猩猩分享肉食的話，它的交配次數就會加倍，同時也可能增加雌猩猩的懷孕機會。

科學家說，高蛋白的肉類食物對黑猩猩很重要，但由於雌猩猩通常自己不獵取食物，所以很少有吃肉的機會。

與人類相似

以前就有科學家提出"食物換取交配"的假說，希望以此來解釋為什麼雄猩猩會和雌猩猩分享獵物。

儘管有這樣的猜測，科學家卻從來沒能錄下這樣的現象，原因是研究者尋找的是分享肉食後立即進行交配這樣的直接交換。

但現在科學家觀察到，這一交易並非一時一事，而是一種相當長久的關係。

那些雄猩猩在雌猩猩沒有發情的時候，仍然會和它們分享獵物。或者在分享後的一兩天之後再交配。

科學家認為，這一研究結果顯示了獵取食物的勝利與交配生育的成功之間的聯繫。

而黑猩猩之間的這種長期性的"食物換取交配"的交易，和人類的配偶關係有相似之處。

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license. As of January 2008 it publishes PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. PLoS ONE was launched at the end of 2006.

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[edit] History

Open Access logo

The Public Library of Science began in early 2001 as an online petition initiative by Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The petition called for all scientists to pledge that from September 2001 they would discontinue submission of papers to journals which did not make the full-text of their papers available to all, free and unfettered, either immediately or after a delay of several months. Some now do this immediately, as open access journals, such as the BioMed Central stable of journals, or after a six-month period from publication, as what are now known as delayed open access journals, and some after 6 months or less, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many others continue to rely on self-archiving.

Joined by Nobel-prize winner and former NIH-director Harold Varmus, the PLoS organizers next turned their attention to starting their own journal, along the lines of the UK-based BioMed Central which has been publishing open-access scientific papers in the biological sciences in journals such as Genome Biology and the Journal of Biology since late 1999.

As a publishing company, the Public Library of Science began full operation on October 13, 2003, with the publication of a peer reviewed print and online scientific journal, entitled PLoS Biology, and have since launched six more peer-reviewed journals. The PLoS journals are what they describe as "open access content"; all content is published under the Creative Commons "attribution" license (Lawrence Lessig, of Creative Commons, is also a member of the Advisory Board). The project states (quoting the Budapest Open Access Initiative) that: "The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

[edit] Business model

To fund the journal, PLoS charges a publication fee to be paid by the author or the author's employer or funder. In the United States, institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have pledged that recipients of their grants will be allocated funds to cover such author charges. PLoS still relies heavily on donations from foundations to cover the majority of its operating costs. PLoS was launched with large grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation which combined made up 13 millions US dollars.[1]

One criticism of charging author-side fees is that it fails to recognize the high cost of filtering and evaluating the high number of submissions the high-impact journals receive. To maintain standards, a strict review system is used that will in general lead to a large proportion of those papers that do not meet the (high) standards of a journal to be rejected for publication. Setting up and maintaining a review system requires substantial effort of both editors, editorial office and reviewers, and is hence one of the most costly elements of scientific publications.

[edit] Impact

The initiatives of the Public Library of Science in the United States have initiated similar proposals in Europe, most notably the "Berlin Declaration" developed by the German Max Planck Society, which has also pledged grant support for author charges (see also the “Budapest Open Access Initiative”).

[edit] PLoS journals and their websites

(all ISSNs are "EISSNs", for the electronic edition)

[edit] See also


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