PloS One doesn’t…at least not in the traditional sense. The latest journal from the leading open-access publisher Public Library of Science went live last month. It has about 90 papers; reviewers made sure the papers didn’t have major experimental or analytical flaws, but they didn’t judge them based on significance, according to this article from this week’s Nature.
The idea is to get the papers published first (online only), then have readers comment and rate them. Based on that data, along with download and citation stats, editors would highlight the papers the community thinks are important.
It’s an interesting experiment, similar in spirit to the trial Nature launched earlier this year with open peer review (see here for the results of the experiment published last month). Nature has decided not to pursue this kind of peer review, largely because of the small number of useful comments publicly posted on the submitted manuscripts.
Which leads me to think that the more appropriate place to bring in input from the online community is after the traditional peer review process. Let readers vote on, recommend and comment on papers after they’ve emerged successfully from peer review. Then scientists might feel more confident that these papers are at least worth commenting on. Nature and Nature Network are encouraging this kind of communication. We will roll out new functions for commenting and discussion forums this year.
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