This blog is being monitored...
I'm just back from our company's annual briefing & pep rally, where our efforts at blogging, here and over at Free Association, were honorably mentioned. I had been entirely unaware, and was quite astonished to hear, that the top brass - NPG Managing Director Annette Thomas! - regularly read the blog including your comments via RSS feed. Jeez... my scare of the week!
Silliness aside, this is really a very very good thing. Our voices and yours are being heard. Your numerous comments on "DBPR" are making an impression. Who knows, there might be some movement on this issue. If there's any other burning issue you think we should be discussing here, send us an email. The email address is above, slightly camouflaged to discourage the spammers.
In our current issue, we've dedicated the editorial to introducing the blog to our wider readership, in yet another effort to increase participation. Our colleagues at Nature Cell Biology also mull the pros and cons of blogging in their current editorial. They seem reluctant about taking the plunge at this time, because they see us and Free Association having a slow start. I think they are correct in attributing this to scientists' general lack of time, information overload, and reluctance to get involved in public discussions. But of course any new publishing venture needs some initial investment followed by patient courting of the audience, and we remain optimistic that the neuroscience community will adopt Action Potential as a useful forum for feedback and discussion.
You may have noticed that we haven't put any new papers online this week. Enjoy the little breather - there'll be a lot of very fine papers coming over the next two Sundays.
Comments
It would be good to see more people using the blogs, but as you point out, information overload and especially lack of time may preclude many people. However, I know at my institution many of the (usually younger) scientists are active bloggers themselves. Personally I came to this blog late because it wasn't until the recent editorial that knew it existed!
Posted by: Ian Brooks | January 13, 2006 02:27 PM
Promote discussion of scientific articles.
Hi. Thanks for starting this blog and providing a forum for discussion about peer review or other general issues. As a reader I had hoped for a format that better promotes discussion of the scientific papers. Look at the “Rapid Response” format of British Medical Journal. A blog is created in close connection to the scientific paper under discussion. When you read an article it’s clearly visible that there is a discussion going on and that readers can contribute. I think the format is excellent, including guidance instructions and a requirement to declare competing interests. May I suggest very a small change in style of your blog: Put every article that you announce on this blog in a separate post. This would collect all comments about one paper in one separate place. Also it would be helpful if the full text version of scientific articles had a visible link to discussions on the blog.
Posted by: Andreas Montelius | January 14, 2006 02:55 PM
Ian, I'm glad you read the editorial and are checking out the blog. Welcome!
Andreas, thanks for sending me to the BMJ website. I agree their "Rapid Responses" feature is excellent, a straightforward and efficient way of allowing feedback on papers. It is not a blog, however. We had quite some discussion about what format our NN online forum should take before launching the blog. We went with the blog format because of its great flexibility. It is work in progress - so keep the suggestions coming. Maybe a few months down the road we'll decide that something like "Rapid Responses" would work better for us and our audience.
Concerning your suggestion of a blog entry for every paper: we tried that with our December issue's COSYNE special (see blog entries dated December 8th). The drawback is that the blog looks ugly with a long list of one-liner entries. Only one of six COSYNE research articles received any input (though that was a very good comment).
I think we'll keep putting the links to new papers here in blocks for now, but I'll open a dedicated "thread" for any paper that actually attracts comments. Fair compromise?
Posted by: Annette Markus | January 16, 2006 05:12 PM