Painful, kind of hilarious, typesetting error in a #PLOSOne paper from my lab – should I try to get it fixed?

Saw this tweet:

@phylogenomics Funny/interesting typesetting trainwreck in equation 4 of PLOS PhyEco paper. English letters were replaced by Greek!
— Michael Hall (@mikehall_dal) March 30, 2015

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So I went and found the paper.

Wu D, Jospin G, Eisen JA (2013) Systematic Identification of Gene Families for Use as “Markers” for Phylogenetic and Phylogeny-Driven Ecological Studies of Bacteria and Archaea and Their Major Subgroups. PLoS ONE 8(10): e77033. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0077033

And discovered what he was pointing to

Then I looked at the Pubmed Central version of the paper and it was the same.  So I wnet and found the arXiv version of the paper and it looked correct.

So apparently, PLOS One somehow replaced “nonmember” with

Brutal.  And even worse, this may have been there all along and I missed it.  So I responded:

@mikehall_dal OMG OMG OMG how could I not notice that? (maybe this changed somehow) OMG
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 30, 2015

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js And then Michael Hall pointed out another mistake.

@phylogenomics And while I’m on the topic, is the base for equation 3 supposed to be e and not epsilon?
— Michael Hall (@mikehall_dal) March 30, 2015

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@mikehall_dal oh #FFS – yes – I have no idea what happened there – thanks for finding this
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 30, 2015

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@mikehall_dal note – note in the arxiv version http://t.co/Q8gnIrgU4X
— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 30, 2015

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@phylogenomics Ahh, that’s much better. Looks like every equation has a wee bit of Greek-ification (n to nu in 1 and 2). Fun! 🙂
— Michael Hall (@mikehall_dal) March 30, 2015

Aaargh.  And funny too.  So now the question I guess is – should I fix it? And if so, how do I do that?

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Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen