Peer review and other debates
This week's contributions to Nature's Peer Review Debate include a thought-provoking piece by Richard Akerman about the effects of information technology on peer review. It follows on nicely from Chris Anderson's article last week. Richard also has a follow-up post on his blog and a collection of related links in Connotea.
Another contribution is from our own Brenda Riley, who works on the Molecule Pages, a free information resource about the proteins involved in cellular signalling. Technically it's a database, but it's also peer-reviewed like a journal (in a process run by editors like Brenda). There are some unique challenges to this approach, which she describes.
Speaking of debate, there seems to be a lot of it going on at the Nature Newsblog, especially in response to stories about Stephen Hawking's latest theory, earthquakes in California, and the economics of open-access publishing. The latter — which has also sparked some discussion on Declan Butler's own blog and a response on the PLoS blog — is perhaps the only one that comes even vaguely within my field of expertise. I may post on it before long because there does seem to be an awful lot of nonsense being said on the topic... so why shouldn't I add to it? ;)
