A tangent related to the primate cloning paper has understandably received less attention, but deserves its own thread. In the same issue of Nature containing that paper, an accompanying editorial described how Nature, for the first time, implemented a relatively new policy by seeking the independent confirmation of this particular “high-risk” finding (or “strong claim”) during the review process.
Discussion is heating up regarding a new proposal that could change the face of peer review in neuroscience. At the PubMed Plus leadership conference this past June, sponsored by the Society for Neuroscience, the creation of a Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium was proposed.
This is an entry that should have been written back in June, a time that pre-dates my involvement with Action Potential! Back then, nature.com incorporated and launched a new free service called Scintilla that collects data from hundreds of news outlets, scientific blogs, journals and databases and then makes it easy for the user to organize, share and discover exactly the type of information in which he or she is interested.
Scintilla incorporates interesting features from several different Web 2.0 technologies including The Hype Machine (aggregation), Google Reader (checking selected sources), last.fm (recommendation engine based on other users’ activities), and del.icio.us (social network based around content). It is pretty slick and easy to use. For the content producers, here is a statement from NPG. They even have an interesting solution for science bloggers concerned about losing advertising revenue to those reading through this service.
Give it a try and tell me what you think.
If one comments on the merits or an aspect of a manuscript in a public forum, but nobody ever reads it, does your opinion exist? That is the question I asked myself today after seeing that Neuron has added a feature to its website designed to provide the readers of selected papers the opportunity to comment on the findings. They say that this was in response to community feedback. I don’t doubt that such feedback exists, as I have heard similar things in my travels, but at this point in scientific publishing (at least in neuroscience), it seems that the idea may still be well ahead of its time.
Neuron’s forum is not the first for this sort of thing, as PLoS and PLoS ONE have had such an entity from their respective beginnings. Now, admittedly, I have not done a careful analysis of how many articles can actually boast even one comment made by the public, but I have made it a habit to always click on that little link imploring me to read comments made by my colleagues whenever I navigate over to a paper that has such a feature. I have seen very few postings, and those that I have seen (on PLoS ONE in my case), were actually posted by the authors themselves.
I am enthusiastic about the idea of a place for the community to provide feedback on publications, as such forums give a voice to anyone willing to speak their mind. This is unlike the website Faculty of 1000, in which only selected scientists are invited and required to provide opinions about the work of their colleagues.
But it seems that either too few are confident enough to make any statements (good or bad) on the record regarding a paper, in case their opinion ends up being short-sighted, or too few care enough to spend the time required to construct a succinct, insightful comment that is unlikely to yield them any benefits. And, to return to my question at the beginning, for those few that dare to comment, is anybody reading these opinions?
Neuron is taking the right approach and has commissioned top scientists to “get the ball rolling” and make comments on the featured manuscripts, but after that initial windfall subsides, we will see how many more postings are made. Let’s just give it some more time to sink in. With everyone beginning to use the web more and more for almost everything, I’m sure that this initial drought of forum comments will give way to a more robust dialogue, making public opinion forums a fundamental part of scientific research participation.
The physics community already has theirs. Now biology has its own site dedicated to the informal discussion of unpublished results. A new site launched this week, Nature Precedings, allows scientists to upload unpublished manuscripts while they are under consideration at a journal, perhaps inciting conversation and feedback regarding the work even before the article is accepted. In this day and age of caution and paranoia surrounding results (go to any scientific meeting these days and count the number of presentations that focus on published results vs. those that highlight unpublished ones), how do you think this will impact the neuroscience and publishing communities?
I see a definite place for this type of resource, providing a repository of additional data and user comments regarding techniques and discoveries, as a complement to the volumes of published papers that have undergone reviewer-mandated quality-control measures. But change comes slowly, especially when change involves freely releasing one’s precious data that have taken years to amass. I am skeptical as to how quickly this concept will integrate into the world of neuroscience. With the ease at which data can be anonymously reproduced and subsequently submitted, I feel that many neuroscientists will be cautious about what data they are willing to let go for free.
However, as a counter, this type of system works well for the physics and mathematics community (plenty of discussion fodder here)…
This is an experiment that should be interesting regardless of its outcome, my favorite kind.