We’ve just been given the latest stats on our top downloaded articles for February, which make for some interesting reading. As you will (hopefully!) already know, Methods in Ecology and Evolution switched from being free for all to opt-in only at the start of this year, and we’ve seen some dramatic changes in download patterns since the switchover.

Our Application papers have been heavily downloaded over the past month, no doubt aided by our recent decision to make them free to access for everyone. We’ve also seen high downloads of papers with strong online extras, such as the amazing footage accompanying A capture-recapture model for exploring multi-species synchrony in survival, by Lahoz-Monfort et al., and the fascinating explanation of the methodologies and equipment involved in Non-intrusive monitoring of atmospheric CO2 in analogue models of terrestrial carbon cycle, by Lukac et al. Our papers with author podcasts have also received a high level of interest, with Freya Harrison’s Getting started with meta-analysis our top paper for February 2011.

It’s really great to see the effort these authors have put into their papers paying off, and I hope that this will encourage future authors to really take advantage of the facilities we have for supporting the use of online enhancements, and in turn help increase the uptake of new methodologies by the wider research community.