Why the reluctance for open peer review?
From Nature's Correspondence section this week (Nature, 447, 1052; 28 June 2007)
Sir -- I was excited when Nature launched its trial for open peer review last year, but disappointed by the outcome . I have also been tracking the progress of another open review journal, Biology Direct (see article in Nature's peer-review debate ). Even after a high-profile launch with guaranteed indexing by PubMed, this journal has published only 52 articles and received only two comments over 16 months.
In contrast to Biology Direct, another journal that offers open commenting, PLoS One , has published 1,189 articles in its first six months. But has PLoS One achieved its stated goal of post-publication open comments? I find that even the 'most annotated' category of articles usually receives just a few comments. The journal has recently replaced its 'most annotated' with a 'recently annotated' category. A check of all 'recently annotated' articles demonstrates that their commenting rates are low (zero or just a few), even for articles that are likely to have broad appeal and/or are in 'hot' research areas.
Why is there a general lack of interest among the scientific community in open commenting on submitted or published papers? I believe there are two main reasons. First, participation does not earn any tangible credit or benefit for the reviewers and commentators. Second, publicly critical comments are a risk for those who make them.
Shi V. Liu
Scientific Ethics, Apex, North Carolina
[Correction added by Maxine Clarke: Chris Surridge of PLOS One points out in a comment to the post that the journal published just over 550 articles in its first six months, not 1,189. Thank you, Chris.]
Comments
A point of clarification. I'd love to have published over a thousand papers in our first six months but we have in fact published just over 550. That is still a quite amazing total for a journal launch.
As to why there is not a huge number of comments on the papers in PLoS ONE, that is a trickier question. It is clearly not enough to simply provide scientists with the tools and expect them to use them. It will be necessary to demonstrate the value open reviewing of papers has both to science as a whole and to individual scientists for this cultural change to take root.
Maxine adds:
Thanks, Chris: I'll let Dr Liu know next time we hear from him. I have to confess I did not count up myself to check his figures, apologies.
Posted by: Chris Surridge | June 30, 2007 12:48 PM
I would think that the main reason is simply the lack of time for anything except the most critical issues at hand - such as writing and reviewing the "real" articles. It is, after all, not unusual to publicly criticise scientific work at conferences where time is assigned for this communication.
As for the benefits, I'd disagree that participation does not earn any credit or benefit - only thing is, most of the researchers do not yet see the visibility on the net earned by active participation as a 'tangible credit'.
Posted by: Marylka Yoe Uusisaari | July 3, 2007 10:00 AM