Here's a sketch of my vision of how to make something like the original PLoS Hubs vision (see The demise of the @PLoS Biodiversity Hub: what lessons can we learn? for background). In the blog post explaining the vision behind PLoS Hubs (Aggregating, tagging and connecting biodiversity studies), David Mindell wrote: So, first up, some basic principles. The goal (only slightly tongue in cheek) is for the user to never want to leave the site.

Jonathan Eisen recently wrote that the PLOS Hub for Biodiversity is soon to be retired, and sure enough it's vanished from the web (the original URL hubs.plos.org/web/biodiversity/ now bounces you straight to http://www.plosone.org/, you can still see what it looked like in the Wayback Machine). Like Jonathan, I was involved in the hub, which was described in the following paper: In retrospect PLoS's decision to pull the hub is not surprising.

The PLoS Biodiversity Hub has launched today. There's a PLoS blog post explaining the background to the project, as well as a summary on the Hub itself: Readers of iPhylo may recall my account of one of the meetings involved in setting up this hub, in which I began to despair about the lack of readiness of biodiversity informatics to provide much of the information needed for projects such as hubs.