Hilary

nobody has a comment about this statement"Many scientific publications are careless, useless or false, and inhibit scholarly communication and scientific progress"? - Christina Pikas

Well, that statement is not wrong, depending on how you/he defines "many", "careless", "useless" and "inhibit". "False" is pretty concrete, but how many false publications (compared to "sound" publications) are we talking about here? Lumping that together with the subjective concepts is rather "careless" if not "useless" to me. On page 106 he claims 'Most colleagues from .... concede that' without a reference. Again, pretty "careless" if not "useless" to me. You can nitpick any publication like that. - Wobbler

Poschl mentions Copernicus's Discussion forums (eg http://www.biogeosciences-disc...) It's unclear how papers that go through open peer review in one of Copernicus's forums, but are later rejected, will be treated by other publishers if the author then attempts to publish that article elsewhere. Copernicus argues their discussion forums are akin to preprint servers, but are authors aware of the implications of this when submitting to BGD? This is, I think, one of the biggest problems with this model. - Hilary

Add to that his 'The most promising way to improve' and on page 106-107 'The most promising, if not the only practicable way to substantially improve' and this reads more like a "Letter to the Editor" opinion piece rather than a "Research article". Especially since he is advocating public Open Peer Review (OPR) without mentioning its current lack of popularity/acceptance, additional common criticism of OPR and how this method will address them. - Wobbler

Pöschl gave a very interesting and detailed talk yesterday on the Berlin Open Access days with a lot of rather impressive statistics on his geosciences journal. Will blog about this soon. PLoS One could learn a lot from this. I talked to him a little bit afterward and he really has a lot of experience and insight on open peer review and incentivizing scientific discussion. There's a lot to learn from this guy for our community here! - Björn Brembs

I am checking out his website and his publication list does not seem to have this publication of his listed. In fact, I do not see any publication of his on scholarly communication/open peer review. Do you have any sources of his on this issue? I am interested in his views on incentivizing scientific discussion (and open peer review). - Wobbler

Pöschl had this reference on almost all of his PPt slides yesterday. I was meaning to look it up when I read it on FF this morning, actually (talk about coincidence). Here are his older slides, the latest version should be up later, he said: http://www.atmospheric-chemist... (pretty close to what he showed yesterday) - Björn Brembs

My blog post on Pöschl's presentation: http://bjoern.brembs.net/news.... - Björn Brembs

I think he has a lot of good points, but I still do not see him address the issues of limited capacities, work overload, little reward for referees and of course quality/competence management. Basically the same issues PLoS ONE faces when talking about open discussion. And when taking in account of those issues, I can understand how this concept can work for a very small number of journals. But once it is introduced as “the new certification process” we realize how overloaded we really are and how inefficient this system is. - Wobbler

I also see this as a problem for a large scale implementation, but he may have a point , when he says that his system deters real crappy papers and that the papers that do get submitted require less revising than the average paper today. This would help reduce the load. Notwithstanding, a reputation system where good reviewing contributes to reputation, would distribute load further and hence reduce the load on the individual, I completely agree there! - Björn Brembs

Personally, I think that has more to do with the 1k price tag than the discussion thing. Which also raises another (potentially negative) access barrier issue, e.g. the just sound science vs both sound and significant science issue. Essentially, what he/that journal is doing is add a price tag for authors, which makes them think twice before submitting, and "add" more "peer reviewers". So I can definitely believe the avg quality of both the preprint and the postprint are higher. - Wobbler

In many conventional journals you have page charges, at the very least for color figures. 1k is pretty low, so I'd say the threshold would be low, too. But this may be different in different disciplines... - Björn Brembs

I know, I was not criticizing it or anything. Until we have full OA, I guess author-pays is going to be needed if OA is to be financially sustainable (to some degree). I guess there IS an argument for better submission quality when there is in fact a price tag for authors. - Wobbler