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Hilary

ArXiv to begin asking for voluntary donations: http://arxiv.org/help/support/

suelibrarian, Claudia Koltzenburg, Jean-Claude Bradley and 4 other people liked this

"Cornell University Library is beginning an effort to expand funding sources for arXiv to ensure its stability and continued development. We intend to establish a collaborative business model that will engage the institutions that benefit most from arXiv — academic institutions, research centers and government labs — by asking them for voluntary contributions. We are working with library and research center directors at the institutions that are the heaviest users of arXiv to refine our plan and to enlist support. We expect to release the plan, with a call for broader engagement and contribution, in early 2010." - Hilary

5 more comments

Doesn't really help the "Green OA is a financially sustainable practice" meme much :( - Wobbler

I wonder if to some extent this is a matter of having to demonstrate profitability rather than sustainability. In most things academic, it isn't enough to show you're breaking even, regardless of what the service might be. - Mickey Schafer

Although in the case of OA services, "breaking even" sounds like a sufficient enough objective IMO. Making profit might eventually stifle collaboration, increase competitiveness and decrease the overall efficiency and effectiveness of scholarly communication. It doesn't help that "sustainability" is probably a weaker incentive than "profitability", though. And that financial sustainability is still a question mark. - Wobbler

I would be SUPER EXTRA interested in the Cornell-library-internal politics behind this one. If I had to venture a guess, with library budgets getting hit bad everywhere, somebody gave arXiv the $400K fisheye. Easy to do, since OA is *still* seen as a non-core library activity. There's also SCOAP to compare it to: "libraries are chipping in for THAT, why not THIS?" - D0r0th34

What chafes my scrote is that $400K is pocket change relative to gummint spending on physics research in total, plus the fact that without arXiv physics will have to go back to the "beg a publisher and wait six months" model of information transfer, likely reducing ROI on that research funding by considerably more than $400K -- and yet, here we are with arXiv needing "donations". The stupid, it burns. - Bill Hooker

lol, Bill, I have several bad jokes about powder, but they don't seem appropriate given the reality here. - Mickey Schafer

Cameron Neylon to Cameron's feed, scienceapps, The Life Scientists

I'm going to do a round of looking at some of the Science Social Networking sites again. Is anyone active on ResearchGate, Epernicus etc. and interested in testing functionality?

November 20 - Comment - Like - Share

John Delacruz, Jack H. Pincus, Dan Hagon and 24 other people liked this

I'm interested in joining the testing. Need to agree on criteria for comparison before starting, though. - Daniel Mietchen

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I'm willing to keep an open mind but so far FF surpasses these in terms of networking and ease of use. But if you want to experiment I have accounts in many of these and I would be willing to try. - Jean-Claude Bradley

I'm really just looking to make sure that things haven't moved on and improved significantly, particularly in the light of the NIH projects. - Cameron Neylon

I tend to migrate to social networking sites based on "pull" - virtually the only time I go on LinkedIn or Facebook is when I get an email alert to something relevant to my interests. I would assume that if there was anything really cool going on in these new sites I would get these alerts generated by actions by you and my other friends. - Jean-Claude Bradley

BTW Cameron - that is one of the issues I'm finding with Wave - I tend not to check it because I don't get alerts that there are updates - is there a way to get an email alert for Wave updates? - Jean-Claude Bradley

Yes, there is an email alerter. I'll add you and it to Wave... - Cameron Neylon

Agreed to the general point though - if there isn't a pull, I'm not going there really. And I think that is a big issue with Wave - people just aren't checking in. - Cameron Neylon

@Jean-Claude I don't think there's currently a way of doing this with the current interface without adding a robot but I saw there's a robot on the Haskell public wave which has similar support http://wave-xmpp.appspot.com/public... - Dan Hagon

I'd be interested in testing (I recently started looking over Epernicus for an article on NGS). Where is the email alerter for Google Wave? Currently, I'm using Waveboard (Mac), which alerts you when there's activity. However, it needs to be running in order to do so. - Walter Jessen

Just added you to a Wave with the email notifier Walter... - Cameron Neylon

New SNS from American Institute of Physics, got email invite today: http://www.aipuniphy.org/ - Andrew Lang

I have accounts on Epernicus, SciLink, Laboratree, and maybe could consider BenchFly a social networking site too, but like JC, I don't go to any sites besides FF and Twitter (and those are typically through 3rd-party apps), not even Facebook or LinkedIn, unless I get some alert. But I would be happy to see if anything's changed in those science-oriented sites I mentioned - Shirley Wu from twhirl

I do get alerts that new people have joined the organic chemistry group in Research Gate but there is no discussion and my questions have not been answered there by anyone so not much motivation to check in. - Jean-Claude Bradley

I have accounts at NN, Epernicus, BioCrowd and SciLink. I have begged for account deletion at the latter for months, to no avail and have not visited most of the others for as long as I can recall. So: active - no, interested - no. It's all FF/Twitter for me. - Neil Saunders

It's alright - this is a benefit of the doubt exercise - making sure that things haven't changed or that we've missed something. My brief look around yesterday suggested that nothing much has but I wanted to make sure I'm not missing something. - Cameron Neylon

What about the criteria for comparison other than some "pull" functionality (which they all seem to have, to different extents)? Does usability boil down to feed import/ export and (hierarchically) threaded conversations ordered by novelty and importance, as at FF? - Daniel Mietchen

When considering the usefulness of the individual platforms, perhaps discipline-specific ones should also be on the list? Besides http://polymathprojects.org/ (maths), these would include, for instance, http://openanthcoop.ning.com/ (anthropology), http://www.apecs.is/ (polar research), or this very life science group at http://friendfeed.com/the-lif.... - Daniel Mietchen

It would be worth doing a compare and contrast - also things like Math Overflow and even some of the chemistry blogs act more like community sites. Seems particularly apposite with respect to Pawel's blog post yesterday about the idea to set up a next generation sequencing community site. - Cameron Neylon

I have a ResearchGate account but don't actively use it. I currently do some FriendFeed, Nature Network (where my blog is hosted) and Google Wave, but mostly Twitter. - Martin Fenner

The last issue (November 23) of the German computer magazine c't has an article on social networking for scientists. They like ResearchGate and Mendeley, but also include ResearcherID, Scholarz (a German network), Nature Network, SciLink and Scientist Solutions: http://www.heise.de/ct... - Martin Fenner

That c't article (which shall come out in some OA fashion soon) may serve as guidance but I found the choice of networks therein rather arbitrary, and the comparison between sites was done on a more general level rather than on the basis of specific criteria. - Daniel Mietchen

The article makes two obvious omissions: a) no mention of CiteULike (or Connotea), b) no mention of the recent $12 Mio social networking NIH grant to U of Florida/Cornell University. There are some more things in it I don't like, so I wrote a letter to c't magazine. - Martin Fenner

Cameron, what criteria were you thinking of using? - Mr. Gunn

Key questions: a) What is the immediate impression on signing up? Is there a pull for people to come back? b) What functionality is being offered? Is it immediately available? How dependent is it on having a network in place? c) Funding model and stability d) User numbers, ideally active users and accounts, but whether we can get those is another question. Those aren't very objective criteria and they are built on my biases but nonetheless - Cameron Neylon

Sorry if this is slightly tangential to the discussion, but I was imagining a new kind of social network for publication of research results here: http://virtualchrisleonard.co.uk/blog... - Chris Leonard

Chris - when you talk about "credit" are you expecting tenure and promotion committees to count it or do you have some other system in mind? If you set something up I have content that might be suitable to play with. As for citability - in our last few papers we have used blog posts and wiki pages as references and have not had any problems with that - so I think the system is quite flexible and can accommodate the types of activities you are proposing. - Jean-Claude Bradley

I think Chris means system credit or karma. The idea as I understand it is somewhere between Friendfeed and Stack Overflow - Cameron Neylon

Thanks Cameron, yes, that's what I meant by 'credit' - however, by quantifying and metricising that credit, there is a possibility that one day tenure and promotion committees may want to use it as another measure of a scientists influence in a field. Apologies to Cameron for hijacking his thread. There is another discussion on this blog post here: http://friendfeed.com/chrisle... - Chris Leonard

That's fine, it's not my thread, it the communities thread :-) Pointers are good, they link up the information. - Cameron Neylon

Blog postings to replace (journal) papers and (in-depth) peer review a luxury that can only be acquired if paid for and to be replaced by blog comments instead? Weakening both readability and certification? That does not sound like a healthy idea. - Wobbler

Wobbler: why should blogs lack any aspect of peer review? the standard of any publication depends on how editorial powers are used - Mike Chelen

...and we already pay for peer review. It just isn't a cost transferred as actual cash. - Cameron Neylon

But blogs do not have any editorial powers? What advantage do blog postings have over (journal) papers? They lack format = lack of consistency = lack of efficiency = lack of scalability. Are you seriously suggesting that blogging/blog posts have the potential to replace journal publishing/ (journal) papers as the primary scholarly communication model/channel? Upgrading the traditional... more... - Wobbler

@Cameron: that's true, but now peer review is at least mandatory for the primary scholarly communication model i.e. scholarly publishing. Replacing that with something else and having peer review only on request/payment is a very different story. - Wobbler

Wobbler - there is a difference between requiring the peer review to be performed before making some information public and allowing it to take place after that. I do not see why the latter option would generally fare worse than the former. In fact, we already practice it here at FF, with numbers of likes and comments roughly indicating the popularity of a topic, while the quality has to be sought in the individual comments (and of course the source item that started the thread). - Daniel Mietchen

... it isn't a cost transferred BY YOU as actual cash. Yet. It should be, in my not-terribly-humble opinion, however, because the market disconnect in the current system has proven ridiculously unsustainable. Wobbler, some of my blog posts have had more measurable impact than anything I've ever written. Sure, it's a lightning-strike sort of thing, and most of my blog posts languish in... more... - D0r0th34

@Daniel: I'm not talking about post-"publication" peer review. That's still different from random blog commentary on blog posts. There's no evidence that what we're doing here isn't just a "niche" thing that works well because we're a niche. There's certainly no consistency in quality in our blog postings (well, at least not in mine :p ). Not to mention a lack of consistency in... more... - Wobbler

@D0r0th34: No, we should absolutely not ignore lighting strikes. But we should see them as lightning strikes and consider them to be an exception more than a rule and focus our attention on something that provides that level of quality more as a rule than an exception. Blogs as a complement to (journal) papers is great. But once you start to see it as a primary source, a replacement for... more... - Wobbler

We don't know about our OA bets. As for slow-and-steady, a well-run blog isn't? Lightning strikes aside, building a reputation and a readership is hardly an immediate thing. - D0r0th34

@D0r0th34: That's one more reason why blogging as the primary scholarly communication model is a broken idea. "Popularity" and "building a readership" will be important for blogs (and other post publication peer review models) to be visible/significant. But aren't we going after journals for using their JIF to attract peeps to read their stuff? How is "blog (poster) popularity" to get a... more... - Wobbler

I think the most important property of non peer-reviewed scientific communication is that the content be easily indexed and searchable. Relying on comments and rankings can be very misleading indicators for utility in long tail systems. For example we get over 100 searches a day for our solubility data via Google and Wikipedia but we have never had a comment or any type of feedback from the people who searched for and found information. - Jean-Claude Bradley

Shrug. System-gaming goes on everywhere; there are a number of studies of citation-impact gaming, if you look. Also, why is connectivity a bad thing? We are talking about scholarly *communication* after all, right? Restricting "what counts" only to what goes through the baroque serials-publishing process is IMO an extraordinarily blinkered and limiting view of how knowledge really advances. Sure, it's not easy to come up with more inclusive views -- but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. - D0r0th34

The problem is that I'm not sure we can talk about "gaming the system" rather than "an intrinsic part of the system that everybody will be forced to play or greatly risk invisibility" when it comes to blogs and other models relying on postpublication "peer review". PLoS ONE is, intentionally or not, already trying to stake their claim on an as large a readership/community as possible.... more... - Wobbler

@D0r0th34: And connectivity can be unfair if your serious/scientific works are getting more attention than others simply because you've managed to draw a bigger crowd through non serious/scientific stuff. On a slightly more personal note: for someone who occasionally complains about the (lack of) readability of (journal) articles, I had expected that you, of all people, would appreciate... more... - Wobbler

I have to say reading down this I am unsure of whether the complaints apply to blogs or journal articles. Consistent structure and copy editing would be nice but it is rare for both blogs and journal articles. Quality is an issue across the board. Going back to peer review - it's only mandatory for the author, refusal rates for reviewers are going through the roof and unless we acknowledge that cost the system will collapse sometime soon. - Cameron Neylon

@Cameron: Consistent structure and copy editing are rare for journal articles? They are? Not entirely sure about copyediting, but surely most, if not all, journal papers have a recognizable structure? And I don't think they're as rare or rarer than for blog postings. I also think the issue is with peer review, and not with the (journal) paper (format). As such, we should find ways to... more... - Wobbler

Of my recent papers, only one received close copy editing by anyone but me. And that was the Nature piece for which to be honest I would have been happier if the editor had got a co-credit. And formats are all over the place - maybe consistent for a single journal but that's not use to me. The costs of both peer review and publication are so high we need to find a way to lower them -... more... - Cameron Neylon

@Cameron: I'm not sure that's a convincing enough argument for me. Maybe your other papers were written clearly enough already? You're a prolific blogger/writer, Cameron. It's not weird to assume that your ability to communicate concepts clearly is higher than the average scholar. Maybe high enough to not warrant copyediting (in a lot of journals)? My impression of journals is that... more... - Wobbler

Well others can pitch in but perhaps a different anecdote. Until I started getting into arguments with Maxine Clarke I didn't even realise that journals might do copy editing. Nature and similar are very different beasts to the average of course. - Cameron Neylon

So, generally speaking, only the high profile/impact journals provide copyediting services? Hmm, that is definitely not what I expected. If you had to estimate the % of journals that provide copyediting services, what % would that be? The (top) 10% of all journals? - Wobbler

I have the same experience as Cameron - the only time my manuscript was copyedited was when I published in Nature - Jean-Claude Bradley

So far as I'm aware, no-one here wants to replace peer-reviewed journals entirely by blogs. Yet that seems to be what you're arguing against, Wobbler. For some functions, journals are a lot better than blogs. But for other functions, blogs are a lot better than journals. At the least, I really can't imagine how, say, DHJ Polymath or Galaxy Zoo or the Open Dinosaur Project or [fill in... more... - Michael Nielsen

Most of this is as a response to an FF comment by Chris Leonard on the 23th of November in this thread, who is arguing for exactly that. - Wobbler

Cameron, any progress on the roundup? Is there any information I can provide from Mendeley? - Mr. Gunn

Right - getting there slowly! Have set up a wiki page (ignore the state of the rest of the site I am working on it!) at http://wiki.cameronneylon.net/index... You should be able to login with openids, any problem give me a yell. I would suggest a week by week schedule to dive into and try and use a specific site, give it a good shot and then report as we go. I... more... - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, what do you mean by "stability" - things like a service being bought/shut down vs. server outages? What about one week to agree on parameters and sites to check? I added data portability. - Daniel Mietchen

I was thinking more of medium to long term financial stability - but technical stability is a good criterion in terms of functionality. Data portability is a good point! - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, I spoke with Drew Endy, Bill Flanagan, and a couple other PIs that use OpenWetWare (Maureen, Pam) last week about the future of OWW. There are two major issues (a) funding and (b) overhauling the platform. I think funding will work out, if we can figure out what is the best way to do (b). Bill and Drew have some good ideas at this point, but in my gut I think we're still not... more... - Steve Koch

I guess my easy question for everyone who's familiar with OWW: Do you think with the resources we have (one full-time excellent lead developer) we can transform OWW into a killer openscience resource for many more people going forward? One thought that keeps coming to me is that something could be (needs to be) done to tap into the energy of the user base. I.e., obsessed students who... more... - Steve Koch

Another thing that keeps coming into my head since the conference call last week: FriendFeed is quite possibly very similar to what many people need for OpenScience. As far as science goes, we generate information from all kinds of different sources (Machine-specific data; gel photos; microsoft word; evernote; scratch paper; blogging; etc.). This needs to be aggregated and shared in a... more... - Steve Koch

Oh, and to clarify a bit: I don't want to replace FriendFeed with OWW. I want to use the FriendFeed model as a starting point for the new OWW. As an OpenScienceAggregator / Networking tool. As others have pointed out, much of the value of friendfeed is that it's not limited to scientists generating data. - Steve Koch

Steve, that's a great way of asking the question. I'd go one step further and say how can we make it the framework in which we can integrate all the other things we do on other services. It's never going to be a no-brainer to move from what you use to something else - there is always the simple problem of the activation barrier to change - its a question of the balance. But my guess is... more... - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, I agree with you exactly: I don't want people to switch, and indeed I want to think "one level above." Do you think there's a real possibility for doing that? - Steve Koch

If we could coordinate a series of activities and get proper funding then yes. Quite a lot of interest in the pieces of this (including the grant I'm currently rushing to finish), Chris's ideas further up this thread, OWW obviously, Mendeley/Citeulike/Zotero. But coordination is the hard bit - and getting agreement that its what enough of us want. Do I think we have a clear idea of what... more... - Cameron Neylon

Should we include some discipline-specific ones or are we going for general-purpose only? - Daniel Mietchen

Hilary

Endowment losses lead Stanford University to close its 58,500-volume physics library: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps...

October 26 - Comment - Like - Share

Richard Akerman, Pedro Beltrao and s t e v e liked this

The university has also dismissed 3.2% of its non-faculty workers. The value of the endowment dropped 27% in the fiscal year ending Aug 31. - Hilary

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'Stanford will save “hundreds of thousands of dollars annually” by closing its physics library, said Michael A. Keller, the university librarian. That facility, one of 21 Stanford libraries, was chosen because most physics literature is available electronically, Keller said.' // Never thought about it this way before, but it makes sense. I guess centralized eprint repositories are not only "competing" with publishers, but also libraries? - Wobbler

Absolutely. We have scientists of varying stripes here who proudly boast how little they use the (physical) library. However, the closing of small branch/departmental libraries is soon to be a nationwide trend, and not just in the hard sciences. Babysitting underused public spaces is just not the best use of librarian time or library resources these days. - D0r0th34

Though the volume count is a bit of a red herring. Other than weeding, these books aren't going to be thrown out; they'll be consolidated with another collection. - D0r0th34

Much as I'm a print person, what Dorothea sez: Smaller branches have been problematic for big academic libraries for a long time; they're expensive to run relative to value add. In disciplines where almost all the literature is electronic, it's hard to argue for maintaining the physical space *as a library.* (My alma mater, Berkeley, was consolidating smaller branches even when I was... more... - Walt Crawford

But won't this make the whole "institutional repositories + some kind of open protocol like OAI-PMH = OA win" a bit harder to realize? - Wobbler

Er, it was ever easy? Besides, with any luck at ALL some of that librarian energy that isn't going into keeping the lights on might head for IRs or OA. (Yes, I'm dreaming.) - D0r0th34

Hold on a second. I think I went on the wrong path somewhere. When Stanford says 'most physics literature is available electronically', did they mean arXiv or their own institutional repository? If it's the latter, then I confused "print versus digital" with "institutional versus disciplinary/centralized". And if that is the case, I guess it's not that big of a deal? - Wobbler

They meant the formal published literature (bought by the library, of course, but not housed in a physical space) as well as arXiv and other OA resources, I suspect. As a rule, most faculty have absolutely no idea where a paper they're reading came from or who paid for it. - D0r0th34

I see, OK thanks for clarifying that. That still means Open Access = everything digital = a bit of a problem for (some) librarians? Weird how I never considered that perspective before. I wonder how they (will) adapt to the increasing popularity/significance of OA and search engines for those OA sources? Other than being let go, of course. - Wobbler

This information still doesn't organize, preserve, find, or evaluate itself. :) I'm thinking we'll have jobs for a good long while yet... - D0r0th34

I see. Alright then :) Not sure if you've answered this before D0r0th34 (and if you did, I apologize for bringing it up again), but are you more for the "institutional repository + open protocol" route to OA or the "disciplinary/centralized repository" one? - Wobbler

I don't care. OA is OA. Whatever works. Disciplinary is easier to sell to researchers, so fine by me. I'm still not out of a job -- remember that arXiv is run by Cornell University *Libraries*. - D0r0th34

I see. K thanks :) - Wobbler

Any time. The danger in disciplinary repos, of course, is sustainability. If a disciplinary repo doesn't find an institution to be its sugar daddy, it may fold. (Google "Mana'o repository" to see what I'm talking about.) There's also some free riding going on in the library community -- many aren't ready to support OA with additional budget and staff resources at this juncture. I think that will change (I think it has to!) but faculty are still the prime movers. - D0r0th34

It has also been a few years since I stepped into a library .. I don't even know where the UCSF library is. I am guessing that a lot of libraries already do this but given the shift to online shouldn't the role of the libraries include helping people find what they need using current tools. Ex - setting up automatic queries, getting suggestions on what to read via online bookmarking... more... - Pedro Beltrao

Yes, we do that. Quite a bit. :) - D0r0th34

Richard Akerman

mendeley_com: Nice! BBC article featuring Mendeley, @f1000 and Google Wave: http://bit.ly/2Rhdkr - http://twitter.com/mendele...

October 26 from Twitter / Favorites from... - Comment - Like - Share

Colby, Roger Pettett, Daniel Mietchen and 2 other people liked this

mendeley_com: Nice! BBC article featuring Mendeley, @f1000 and Google Wave: http://bit.ly/2Rhdkr - Richard Akerman

Oooh, it has a quote from Cameron as well. Sweet. It seems the general interest in "Science 2.0" is indeed rising. Good news! - Wobbler

as usual, the general public seems ahead of the curve... - Björn Brembs

Cameron Neylon

Nature Communications: A breakthrough for open access? - http://blog.openwetware.org/science...

October 5 from Science in the open - Comment - Like - Share

Mike Chelen, Anders Norgaard, Slavomira Vladimirova and 20 other people liked this

Will our institutional subscription receive retroactive discounts for lots of open access content? I'm guessing that will be a big no. - Jenny Reiswig

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I could be wrong but would see it mostly as mostly profit driven. PLoS ONE is showing the the most sustainable way to publish high quality open access is to have a base that publishes a lot more of more specific content that is not reviewed on perceived impact. If I was any other publisher (aside from PLoS and BMC) I would be concerned about this move to cover this broad base. How many... more... - Pedro Beltrao

I think Pedro has it right. - Bill Hooker

persuasive analysis, Pedro, thanks - D0r0th34

Exactly, Pedro! - Björn Brembs

I'm a bit confused as to why communications or letters journals are coming out now. I blogged this last time I had reliable Internet at home. & +1 for Pedro's take - Christina Pikas from iPhone

Pedro, I think that is kind of the point I was trying to make. If N Comms goes for volume they will be accused of diluting quality - and devalue the brand. But if they don't then what is the point? Sure its about profit. But so is PLoS ONE, nothing wrong with that - particularly if it supports good service provisions. But I agree I still think we have too many journals and making more isn't going to help - it just seems all that we are capable of doing at the moment. It will break, sometime soon. - Cameron Neylon

Other thing that I forgot to raise from the Scientist article. Page Limit?!?!?! In an online only journal? - Cameron Neylon

well, there are length-sensitive issues that have nothing to do with typesetting. Copyediting, for instance. - D0r0th34

I was thinking about the page limit thing for digital papers wrt peer reviewing the other day (actually, I seemingly always think about most things from the peer review perspective), but wouldn't a "no page limit" journal be a b*tch to peer review for? Nowadays, the limit is like 10-20 pages per article, right? What if the "no page limit" thing increases that "acceptable standard" to 30-40 pages? That's like twice the content to peer review? Ouch... - Wobbler

Page limits vary a lot from journal to journal. I've occasionally seen extremely dense 100,000 word articles in mathematics. Peer review at the standards expected by mathematicians may take several months of full time work or even more for such a paper. - Michael Nielsen

Wow, really? Amazing. So how does that work exactly? I assume they can somewhat figure out beforehand whether it's worth publishing or not and peer review is there mostly to make sure everything is written down right before they publish it? But with the whole idea of "no page limits", I'm assuming we're also expecting scholars to spend more time peer reviewing longer articles? Or "no page limits" in the sense of "everything else is supplemental, like (raw) datasets for example"? - Wobbler

I figured it would be either trying to contain the time or costs of copyediting and refereeing but again it seems to me to miss the point of the opportunities offered by online only. Anyway doing a Q&A with them to hopefully appear next week so we get some answers - also apparently more information coming with the call for papers next week as well. - Cameron Neylon

I guess one approach of longer articles is for the authors to include a 1 page "summary" of the article and which parts describe what so editors/peer reviewers have an easier time screening for what they think is suitable for their journals or not? I think I read about such an idea before. When articles do get lengthier, I think this idea becomes more feasible. - Wobbler

Well my answer would be to admit that in depth peer review of every paper in a timely fashion is simply not feasible and is in any case unaffordable. If we could admit that and move on then we might make some progress. - Cameron Neylon

fully agreed - so where go next? open post publishing peer review - then why do the (traditional) 'publishing' in between at all? how much 'branding' do readers really need to figure out what they want to read? - Claudia Koltzenburg

I think, on average, lengthier articles create issues with peer review. And to make the problem worse, those articles are also going to be more prone to mistakes (because there's more content in the article). That's two things you absolutely do not want even as separate issues. And with the page limit change they will come in pairs, because they're somewhat mutually inclusive. Then... more... - Wobbler

@Claudia - I think the evidence shows that readers are less and less interested in branding. It is authors that care about it. @wobbler there is clearly a place for comprehensive reviews, but I agree that really length papers probably are mostly data rather than paper and should be treated differently. It would be interesting to know whether there was a correlation between the length of papers and the time referees spend on them. Very difficult to measure accurately though. - Cameron Neylon

@Cameron, yes, agreed, I guess it would be interesting to compare the author/reader overlap in scholarly output/process/input workflows with any other slice of life where two or more such overlapping interest stakeholders are involved in a jousting game - and then see if this gets us new aspects to look at - or indeed to add in Björn's recent one: http://ff.im/9rySu - Claudia Koltzenburg

@Cameron: currently, that seems to be the only type of a lengthier article that would not decrease but increase peer review effectivity and efficiency. All the others are bound to make the (current) certification processes a lot tougher. Oh well, guess something to think about when it happens on a large scale. Maybe, as you've said, we'll have found a good solution for that. - Wobbler

Well, palaeontologists LOVE no page/figure limit because they can finally describe their fossils in detail that is useful to other researchers: http://svpow.wordpress.com/2009... . Also, don't forget that longer papers tend to gain more citations (either because there's more data, or because they are more memorable, or because they are more like reviews). - Bora Zivkovic

just added to the OAD list of research questions the jousting game idea voiced 3 comments further up in this thread, check out the list and add your own: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki... - Claudia Koltzenburg

Michael Nielsen

Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch | vanityfair.com - http://www.vanityfair.com/busines...

October 4 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

Cameron Neylon, Pedro Beltrao and Christopher Granade liked this

Utterly fascinating. Show's how a very smart, very driven person - in this case, Rupert Murdoch - can act in very stupid ways, by being out of the loop. What I find fascinating is the fact that this can happen: it means Murdoch's entire network of friends and colleagues must be similarly out of the loop, effectively isolating him from a very important part of culture. - Michael Nielsen

2 more comments

Never have much liked Murdoch, so I can't really feel sorry for him shooting himself in the foot like this, but I do feel sorry for the very many employees whose lives are going to be made worse for his Luddism. - Christopher Granade

I'm not sure I'd call it luddism so much as social isolation from the effects of technology. I wonder if he has grandkids (or if he spends much time with them). This is surprisingly common with powerful or successful people: they end up cut off and isolated from the society they live in, and then make stupid decisions as a result. (Definitely agree about the employees.) - Michael Nielsen

Maybe his friends and colleagues 1. know him too well to think they could change his opinion and 2. don't want to end up on his blacklist. - Wobbler

Mickey Schafer to Mickey's feed, Science 2.0, The Life Scientists

Hi, Folks -- a PLoS publishing question -- a former student of mine (doing grad work in autism - vestibular system connection) is in grad school and has her project ready for publication. She's been accepted to a small, very specific OT pub, one UF doesn't even have a sub. to and so she went and purchased one herself.

September 30 - Comment - Like - Share

Shirley Wu, Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie), Steve Koch and OpenSci Info liked this

I've suggested that she consider PLoS as an alternative, and she's interested in that (potentially wider audience!), but is a bit nervous about the "commenting" function...doesn't want to get "trashed" on her first publication. What is the best way of demonstrating this function, and quelling her nerves? - Mickey Schafer

10 more comments

I imagine passing a formal peer review stage should reduce the odds of her getting trashed post-publication significantly. Then again, I don't know what the OT/UF pub/sub things mean, so maybe I'm missing an important detail :) - Wobbler

oops! OT = occupational therapy; pub = publication; sub = subscription -- she was invited by her initial journal choice to submit a brief report. This is original work for her (she had the idea, she did the initial studies as an undergrad; she was "accepted" into grad school to finish her work before she'd even applied; she's now finished the project). I said I'd help with the manuscript. The point about passing peer review is a good one! I guess I should have though of that...:-). - Mickey Schafer

I'm confused too, a bit. But...As for worry about PLoS, you and her could have a competition to see who can find more examples of papers that have been trashed so far. I've never seen one :) - Steve Koch

You could point out that very few papers receive comments ;-) Of those that do, I've never seen "trashing". - Neil Saunders

Unfortunately, what Steve and Neil said ;-) - Bora Zivkovic

I don't think she'll jeopardize her acceptance if she CommentPresses the work (or something similar). Find out first, of course, but that may be a way through. - D0r0th34

@bora, tell them to add openID and Facebook connect. When I added anonymous commenting to my site, people actually started commenting on articles because they didn't have to register. Unless if you think the only worthwhile comments will come from those who will sign up for an account? I think it's worth a shot. As far as this post goes, I think your student should be confident in the... more... - Brian Krueger - LabSpaces

@Brian - second that. Often I just can't be bothered to register on a blog site to comment, BUT if I can quickly sign in via my OpenID (as in single sign-on) it lowers the bar substantially for me. Anonymity isn't an issue to me, but registering again and again all over is a killer. - 'Mummi' Thorisson

I did mention that relatively few comments get posted...her PI is more concerned that PLoS One doesn't have a citations ranking yet, though he did say that both PLoS Medicine and Biology are "highly regarded" -- so far, she's really interested in some kind of OA publication since she sees the value of immediate access to a wider audience. I've also recommended she explore some of the... more... - Mickey Schafer

I also agree with Brian. IMO, the only real issue about getting "bad" feedback is that you usually can't do a whole lot about it. It's not like you can just "open, edit, save, republish" your article. Still, if PLoS thinks it's good enough to publish (after revisions from the peer review feedback, optionally), it's unlikely that she'll get trashed. - Wobbler

Right now, I'm experiencing an interesting sense of caution -- this is her professional life, not mine. My job is to help her succeed in her profession, so the question emerges what is the best model for early, pre-doctoral, pre-tenure-track-position publication? I tend to think OA is a good route b/c the potential for article-level citation counts shows a positive impact; clearly, her PI is going with the highest IF available, and that makes sense for post-docs/jobs. - Mickey Schafer

Michael Nielsen

World's best Tetris player - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

September 18 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

Steve Koch, Ricardo Almeida, sirishkumar and 4 other people liked this

This guy is to Tetris what Tiger Woods is to golf. Skip to 4:40 and watch the pieces go invisible. - Michael Nielsen

6 more comments

Haha, and the description is going 'it's slow in the beginning'? What the heck? I can barely see it fall right from the start of the game. Insane. - Wobbler

I love how relaxed he is at the start - clearly, for him that's a very easy pace at which to play the game. - Michael Nielsen

There's actually a pretty good comment at YouTube: "When he dies...his brain will be used to lay the foundation for SkyNet " - Michael Nielsen

I don't dare suggest there's a relation between a person's ability to play Tetris and his overall intelligence, but I do wonder if there's something special about it. I wonder how well he does/ would do academically? - Wobbler

Awesome. Useless in and of itself, but awesome. I wonder what else he's good at? - Bill Hooker

I'd say in the "Flow state" phase diagram ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... ) he doesn't move from Boredom to Flow before about 3:00 ... - Andrew Perry

wow, if that is real this person has some amazing reflexes and memory. Playing with invisible blocks ?ouch - Pedro Beltrao

Noah Gray to Noah's feed, Science 2.0, Science Online

Physicists can't be bothered w/ journals. "For scientific discourse, [journals] are completely unnecessary" - http://blogs.nature.com/news...

August 10 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Bronwen Dekker, Kubke, Mike Chelen and 13 other people liked this

"They found that the main advantage of the ArXiv is its immediacy. Some 20% of an article's total citations are accumulated before the paper is published in a journal." - Noah Gray from Bookmarklet

13 more comments

Original paper: http://arxiv.org/ftp... [PDF] - Noah Gray

That certainly matches the common lore in my field (quantum information). There are parts of physics where the arXiv isn't so commonly used - the figure I've seen is that a little over half the papers in physics are uploaded to the arXiv (most well before publication), but that coverage varies quite a bit between fields. For papers in theoretical quantum information, I'd guess the... more... - Michael Nielsen

I wonder how they deal with "different versions" though? What if their final journal publication is (slightly) different compared to their preprint in ArXiv? Technically, 2 different papers are being cited then, right? - Wobbler

Wobbler - That sometimes does cause problems, especially since many journals change arXiv citations to journal citations. When the author hasn't read or even looked at the journal version, well... - Michael Nielsen

Automatically "updating" citations is one way for journals to downplay the importance of preprint archives and other digital repositories. It does seem to be common practice; of the four citations Roach Motel got before it was published, three were to the published article. - D0r0th34

If citations are split between the preprint and the published version, do search engines (or other instruments) consider the citations all for the same paper? I've never really thought about this before, but I'm kind of interested now. - Wobbler

Wobbler - My understanding is that SPIRES does, and Citebase tries to (but it seems to have spotty coverage). I don't know of other sources that do. SPIRES doesn't cover the whole arXiv, just the areas related to high-energy physics. But in those areas it's really useful for tracking the influence of a paper. - Michael Nielsen

But since they are two (slightly) different papers, wouldn't counting the citations for both the preprint and published versions as if they were for one paper to be technically incorrect? What if the published version has some things changed/removed from the preprint version that was the reason the preprint version was cited in the first place? - Wobbler

Nice study! - Björn Brembs

I agree that it's factually incorrect, Wobbler, but it still happens. *shrug* - D0r0th34

Wobbler - Yes, that occasionally happens. I don't think it happens all that often - there's one paper where I know I need to be very wary about this issue, and a few more where I know I need to be at least a little careful. But I guess it's entirely possible there's a whole bunch of instances where I'm unaware of the disparity. - Michael Nielsen

I see. Well, I guess this is probably more an exception than a rule, so it's not all that bad. Still, this does seem to be a problem deeply rooted into the preprint/dynamic aspect. I wonder if this can be fixed? - Wobbler

The solution, IMO, is for people to be careful to cite the version they actually read, and for journals which change arXiv citations to journal citations to stop doing so. - Michael Nielsen

And to stay consistent; search engines and other services have to list both versions with their respective amount of citations. Good suggestion. Thanks for the information! - Wobbler

Mr. Gunn

http://www.uic.edu/htbin... Can anyone tell me what the first paragraph is supposed to mean?

August 2 - Comment - Like - Share

I'm starting to understand why some of the FF (Science 2.0) crew found the article difficult to read. I myself am unsure about the 'high–level papers always have faults' part, but as for the rest; I think they're trying to say two things: 1. It's difficult to get published in a journal when your article is a critique of the limitations of the journal publishing model and 2. reaffirming... more... - Wobbler

I wonder if they're trying to say something like (1) 'we think our difficulty publishing this is evidence the system is broken' (2) 'don't counter this with facts, we know there are some exceptions to what we're saying but we think things are more this way than not' (that's my translation of 'high–level papers always have faults') and (3) ''we're not criticizing individuals, just the system they work in' - Matt Baggott

Christina Pikas

Reinventing academic publishing online Part I: Rigor, relevance and practice - http://firstmonday.org/htbin...

August 1 from Connotea: cpikas's bookmarks - Comment - Like - Share

Rafael Sidi, Joe, Fiacre O'Duinn and Richard Akerman liked this

Somewhere on FF (too lazy to search) someone gave FM an "ugh" and someone else said it "wasn't so bad". Both were people I respect. Anyone care to comment in more detail? - Bill Hooker

9 more comments

A journal about the internet without RSS/atom feeds. Strange. - Marcos de Carvalho

First Monday goes back to the dawn of the web -- certainly well before RSS/Atom. Perhaps I'm not surprised that the platform hasn't been updated... - Peter Murray

FM's feed is: http://www.uic.edu/htbin... Credit for this information goes to D0r0th34. - Wobbler

Cool! Thank you. - Peter Murray

FM's care and attention to matters of text artisanry is... nonexistent. - D0r0th34

Thanks, it was hard to find the feed. - Marcos de Carvalho

No offense, D, but my interest in matters of text artisanry is... minimal. I care about content, and ONLY about presentation to the extent that it interferes, or doesn't, with my consumption of said content. - Bill Hooker

Their copyediting is so abysmal that in some of their articles I've read, it DOES interfere. I can let go of pretty typography too, but bad copyediting is fingernails-down-chalkboard for me. Disservice to both author and reader. - D0r0th34

@Bill - I started to browse this, but ugh. There are sometimes very readable and interesting pieces in FM, I'm not sure this is one of them. Certainly not very readable. - Christina Pikas

"not very readable" -- are you talking about the writing, or the layout? If the latter, would this help -- http://lab.arc90.com/experim...? - Bill Hooker

Thomas Brox Røst to Thomas's feed, Science 2.0

Reinventing academic publishing online. Part I: Rigor, relevance and practice - http://firstmonday.org/htbin...

August 1 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Mike Chelen, Nina Jansen, Graham Steel and diego morelli liked this

"While current computing practice abounds with innovations like online auctions, blogs, wikis, twitter, social networks and online social games, few if any genuinely new theories have taken root in the corresponding “top” academic journals. Those creating computing progress increasingly see these journals as unreadable, outdated and irrelevant. Yet as technology practice creates, technology theory is if anything becoming even more conforming and less relevant. We attribute this to the erroneous assumption that research rigor is excellence, a myth contradicted by the scientific method itself. Excess rigor supports the demands of appointment, grant and promotion committees, but is drying up the wells of academic inspiration. Part I of this paper chronicles the inevitable limits of what can only be called a feudal academic knowledge exchange system, with trends like exclusivity, slowness, narrowness, conservatism, self–involvement and inaccessibility. We predict an upcoming social... more... - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

2 more comments

There's something funny about (some) journals publishing papers that claim how old fashioned and limited the current 'feudal academic knowledge exchange system' is and how we need to drastically change things to improve its effectivity and efficiency. As the authors themselves state: 'Previous iterations of what you’re about to read have been dismissed by information systems (IS)... more... - Wobbler

could be that their dense and difficult -to-read writing style kept them out of some venues - Christina Pikas

agree with Christina! - Mickey Schafer

Shirley Wu

Overheard regarding papers published in PLoS ONE - "it was rejected somewhere else", "The bar is 'not crackpot'", "people publish in CNS because that's where the attention is, I don't know anyone who reads PLoS ONE", "The reputation of the journal is a good way to filter out noise". Is there truth to these claims? Discuss.

July 30 - Comment - Like - Share

Cesar Sanchez, 'Mummi' Thorisson, Mike Chelen and 19 other people liked this

Almost all papers, in all journals, have been rejected from somewhere else. Our bar is "is it science, is it conducted properly, is it reported properly, and do the conclusions follow the data etc" - the bar is not "is it sexy, or impactful, or a major advance". At the same time, we are not CNS - as we are not selective. CNS combined publish just 5,000 articles a year between them but... more... - Peter Binfield

40 more comments

Peter, I certainly don't disagree with what you're saying and think PLoS ONE is valuable and innovative. But I was wondering if these negative judgments are pervasive (FF/twitter is a bit of an echo chamber and the real world can be a shock sometimes) and if so how to change them. There are those who argue that CNS has high precision even if they miss some good papers and so it's more... more... - Shirley Wu

The problem with echo chambers is that the Internet echoes forever; and forever is a long time. We just need to push out as much positive info as possible to try to combat any negative comments which may have been made rashly, or in error, but which get re-referenced for eternity. Our article-level metrics program will presumably show people whether any given paper in PLoS ONE is 'high'... more... - Peter Binfield

There's this thing known as FUD. Happens when someone sees their status eroding. The whole PLoS articles are not as good is just that, FUD - Deepak Singh

Indeed, it may be fear, uncertainty, doubt. It may also be lack of information and hard data. We are going to fix the latter. Certainly, people are voting with their feet - we have 37,000 published authors in under 3 years, and people are publishing with us in ever increasing numbers (http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2009... ) - Peter Binfield

"it was rejected somewhere else" - perhaps. This is hard to tease out, but I have a feeling that most of the manuscripts that come to PLoS ONE have never been submitted elsewhere - Bora Zivkovic

"The bar is 'not crackpot' - good bar, IMHO. Why is any other bar necessary? Think. Really. - Bora Zivkovic

"people publish in CNS because that's where the attention is, I don't know anyone who reads PLoS ONE" - who still reads journals? Srsly? Don't people search online for papers they are interested in? Do physicists read biology papers when their copy of Nature arrives? No, they read Nature for "news and views". - Bora Zivkovic

"The reputation of the journal is a good way to filter out noise" - perhaps a century ago when every scientist could read every scientific paper and understand it, and every scientist was a 'Victorian scholar' who felt the need to keep up with ALL of science. Today, you read papers in your narrow field - you find them online. News from other sciences you can find in pop-sci magazines, on blogs, etc. - Bora Zivkovic

@Bora, I think there are still a fair number of people who don't search for papers necessarily, but browse TOCs, and so only browse the journals they're familiar with. During the discussion, someone asked, baffled, "but there are already so many papers [without PLoS ONE publishing so many more], how would people find ones of interest to them??" - Shirley Wu

A related discussion - based on a correspondence in Nature by a proponent of the views Shirley cites - is at http://ff.im/4GWlM . - Daniel Mietchen

@Shirley - although ToCs are certainly an important discovery tool, any publisher will tell you that the vast majority of their usage comes in from Google (who then read an article, and leave again to run another search) - Peter Binfield

@Peter, that would make sense, but I'm wondering if that necessarily translates into Google being the majority of people's preferred method for finding papers. At least the impression I got from folks in my lab was "so many papers, so little time" and so they're skeptical of anything that adds to the glut of papers without clearly adding value. They might agree on the principle that... more... - Shirley Wu

They also think, "if [a peer reviewer] didn't make a value judgment on whether this paper is significant, why should I waste time reading it?" - Shirley Wu

"I'm wondering if that necessarily translates into Google being the majority of people's preferred method for finding papers" - Good point. I guess you would want to measure time spent on page by people who come via the 2 (or more) routes to see how targeted their interest was - Peter Binfield

@Shirley - Then they are admitting that they would prefer one (or perhaps 2 or 3) other people to decide what is important for them, and so decide on their behalf what they should be reading. Doesnt sound like a very informed way to filter imho... - Peter Binfield

@Peter, more that a million people access papers through google 25% of the time will mean that publishers see google as a huge source of traffic, but doesn't mean that people think of google as their preferred method to find _NEW_ papers. - Shirley Wu

@Peter, well, it's using expert opinion. We all use it to some extent in areas we're not familiar with. If people aren't that internet savvy or aren't that organized, they depend on other people or name-brand journals to bring things to their attention. Also, commenting on papers hasn't really taken off yet - just a matter of time, probably - but it just means that the post-peer review process hasn't really proven its value yet. - Shirley Wu

"but it just means that the post-peer review process hasn't really proven its value yet." - indeed, and we DONT view our efforts as post-pub peer review. We view it as a new way to do post-pub evaluation / filtering / discovery. - Peter Binfield

Oh, the other thing that someone mentioned was "comments are valuable" - meaning "why would I give away my intellectual capital?" People are willing to share their comments with their labs or close colleagues, but not to the public or to the general scientific community. Is this just another mindset we combat with positivity and action? How to combat the vicious cycle of "no comments, so no value", "no value, so i won't comment"? - Shirley Wu

"Is this just another mindset we combat with positivity and action?" - I would say we combat it by showing them the power of being open about these things. For example, social bookmarking only works when everyone shares their bookmarks - in this example there is a clear benefit to both contribute and use. If people realised that by leaving comments they would be advancing science;... more... - Peter Binfield

@Daniel, ah yes, I remember that thread now. Unfortunately I think many scientists are similar in mindset to the letter writer. They don't know about or understand new ways of receiving content, which might seem strange to those of us here, but there are many more people out there than are in here. - Shirley Wu

Also, you could use the same argument about peer review: "My time and thoughts are valuable, why should I do peer review". Apparently academia feel that the quid pro quo works in that situation at least (and that is done anonymously!) - Peter Binfield

@Peter, true, though I think some of that is tied to the reputation of the journal again - being a reviewer for Nature > reviewer for PLoS ONE (in their eyes), editors know them, they can talk about it and gain status. They get tangible and subtle career boosts. Whereas commenting on papers online and publishing in PLoS ONE doesn't get someone tenure (yet). "It would be very brave and... more... - Shirley Wu

Peter - given the problems that journals have finding suitable reviewers, I would hesitate a bit calling that a working system. - Daniel Mietchen

@Daniel :) - Peter Binfield

Another link that may be useful reposting here: Pubfeed at http://pubfeed.cs.toronto.edu/ basically allows you to treat the whole web of scholarly articles like a TOC alert (just a bit more customizable) and pipe that into your preferred feed reader. - Daniel Mietchen

@Shirley - please dont forget that there are 25,000 journals in the world and millions of papers published per year. CNS is just 3 titles, and if you lump together all similar titles (highly exclusive, professional editors, well known brands, conferring 'bragging rights' on anyone who works with them) then you are still talking about just a handful of the titles, with a small percentage of the content. We need a system that works for everyone, not just a small sub-set - Peter Binfield

@Peter, oh, I'm well aware, just parlaying bits of an impromptu debate I had earlier today with people who don't see the value of venues like PLoS ONE. These are all arguments they make, and while I don't agree with them, it is tough to convince people - Shirley Wu

You could try asking them exactly how many downloads their last paper in a 'high impact' journal got... - Peter Binfield

Fair enough, but you know, I really don't think they think about that. They think "what will be in my CV?" and they think any journal that is somewhat competitive [includes other PLoS journals, BMC journals, etc] looks better than one that accepts anything that's methodologically sound. Again, not my view, but perhaps one that is held by many. Do people list # of downloads on their CV for publications? - Shirley Wu

They dont, because they dont have the data. However, people do list if their paper was rated by F1000; or if BMC designated it a 'highly accessed' article. So I think they will start to say "this paper was downloaded 5000 times in the first 3 months which put it in the top x% of all PLoS ONE articles, the top y% of all PLoS articles, and the top z% of ALL articles" (when the rest of the world starts quoting this data) - Peter Binfield

Ironic isn't it; it's not a battle with the publishers, but with other scientists! I overheard a conversation yesterday concerning choice of bioinformatics journals. It centered entirely around impact factors and at one stage someone said "I think BMC Bioinformatics is online *only*" - as though that were a bad thing. - Neil Saunders

And it's clear that anyone who mentions "filtering noise" simply is not using the web effectively. Presumably their web use is limited to search, after which they print PDFs and go away. Concepts that seem simple to us - RSS, feed readers - are unknown to them. - Neil Saunders

I think of it as trying to set up a social experiment. If I'm right and a more cooperative model can produce better science than the current hypercompetitive structure, then over the next decade or so, facility with new methods and metrics that center on Open practices will provide a competitive edge for some researchers, and unwillingness to change will put others at a disadvantage. We... more... - Bill Hooker

Good thoughts Bill. It's not enough to say "this way is better" just because we believe it to be. We have to demonstrate that it's better - or find out that it isn't. - Neil Saunders

And isn't that the scientific way? - Deepak Singh from IM

"I think there are still a fair number of people who don't search for papers necessarily, but browse TOCs" Could it be that those are the people publishing in CNS and miss the most important papers for their work? http://bjoern.brembs.net/comment... It's only one example, as anecdotal as it gets, but it shows two things: 1. CNS 'quality' is merely correlational and highly noisy.... more... - Björn Brembs

My environment is rather positive about PLoS ONE. We all know about the difference between relevance and quality. While many PLoS ONE papers might not be of widespread interest, the review process is of comparable quality or better to smaller conferences and e.g. high volume BMC journals. Other journals have severe issues with reviewer quality these days, and it seems to become worse. - Roland Krause

I'm still wondering about the degree of scalability of post-publication (significance) peer review systems. Is it really realistic to think that once (all) journals go OA and implement such a system that the entire scientific community will benefit? Assuming that it's "fair" for all journals to get equal amount of attention from "scholarly feedback communities", how can we encourage... more... - Wobbler

I agree with Bill Hooker's statement just above. Those who echo Shirley's original quote will be at a disadvantage, which means better odds for the Shirley's of the research world. - Jason Hoyt

I often say something along the lines of what Bill said. The environment is changing. To succeed in the new environment, one has to change not just one's publishing habits, but also rethink how to do research and how to write it. Thus, people who think about it early on will be able to gain advantage over people who are still stuck in the old ways of doing things. As the new environment... more... - Bora Zivkovic

Science Online

The value of work published in Nature Precedings (0 replies) - http://network.nature.com/groups...

July 15 from Nature Network consolidated... - Comment - Like - Share

Mr. Gunn, Graham Steel, Alexey and 3 other people liked this

All good questions. As to the first: "Has anybody gained in terms of carrier or selection for posts or success in grant applications specifically from publication in Nature Precedings?" Surely the value of NP (and similar) is to the community as an open repository, rather than to the individual. Can't help feeling that it's the "what's in it for me?" attitude which retards progress towards "open science". - Neil Saunders

15 more comments

Neil, so true - Deepak Singh

Neil - exactly - I don't understand the attitude that a specific instance of communication has to directly correlate with a specific benefit. It just doesn't work that way. I can't point to a specific email or phone call I made that directly and independently led to a paper or funded proposal but I'm not waiting for that proof to use either form of communication. - Jean-Claude Bradley

I don't know why the idea of "indirect benefit" is so hard to assimilate, but it sure seems to be. - D0r0th34

I wonder if the concept "ambient intimacy" could be extended to something like "ambient value" or "ambient contribution"? Distributed knowledge (if that's the right phrase) makes a different kind of impact, something akin to environmental awareness (as a cognitive state) -- perhaps what drives memic information... - Mickey Schafer

Still, I can see how one would like to get some kind of benefit for doing research, authoring a paper and then communicating it. Depending on the type of research, there can be a lot of resources invested in it. To then share it openly and go "while you won't really benefit, everybody else will, so be happy with that" seems a bit unrealistic. How will they compete with others for... more... - Wobbler

This study has been done. OA does provide a citation advantage. Now what was that link ... - Mr. Gunn

http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitat... - D0r0th34

Well, that's my point. Maybe he's just looking for those kind of answers/sources. Nature Precedings is technically OA. It's just that the OA is for preprints and not for peer review/copyedit enhanced articles. But I'm pretty sure I've heard of similar citation benefits for arXiv, so it's all good. - Wobbler

We haven't done any formal studies about whether preprints on Precedings show a citation benefit, however, there are a lot of studies that show that articles where a preprint is posted on ArXiv receive more citations to the published articles (even if the published articles are not OA). Another study of ArXiv preprints found that citations attach preferentially to earlier works in a new... more... - Hilary

Actually I was the one who posted those questions on http://network.nature.com/groups.... I agree that research to a degree in terms of at least knowledge generated should be selfless.But it is impractical to say that I do not expect anything from my nature precedings post! - Arun Shanker

Whats more is if scopus and the likes are going to index it and preprints are going to be quoted and cited. If so there is every reason that nature precedings should get an impact factor. After all science published in any form should have an impact and at least in terms of recognition the author should benefit - Arun Shanker

I see the that the questions I have posed themselves have not featured in this discussion. Just for the benefit of stand aloners on this feed I am reposting them here! Actually I would like members here to throw some light on the following questions 1. Has anybody gained in terms of carrier or selection for posts or success in grant applications specifically from publication in Nature... more... - Arun Shanker

No, Wobbler I am not looking for any specific "these kind of answers (and stats)?" I was just curious! - Arun Shanker

I meant that more as an example rather than as a limited scope of answers. Since you do seem to fancy the idea of impact factors for preprint repositories, I'm guessing that benefits in the form of early/more citations is of interest to you? How is that as one answer to your first question? - Wobbler

Spot on Wobbler! That answers my 1st ! correctly! I am looking a t the following 1.Should I really put my research on this vehicle? I envisage that there will be an impact factor for this kind of postings! I did see an article which in the author’s own words was rejected by NATURE without the referee process posted in the preceding and a lot of comments on it. Guess the authors thought it apt to post in precedings. In fact I would be happy to get my work in a journal half the impact factor that nature has - Arun Shanker

and BTW here is my post on Nature Precedings. I am taking a gamble against publication of this research on at least a 2-3 Impact factor Journal?http://precedings.nature.com/documen... - Arun Shanker

Maxine to Science Online, Science 2.0, The Life Scientists

Why NSF cannot fund high-risk, high reward research. - Web Science - the World of the World Wide Web - James Hendler's blog on Nature Network - http://network.nature.com/people...

July 12 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Mietchen, Michael Habib, Tanath and 7 other people liked this

Excellent post. - Maxine from Bookmarklet

That seems, on the face of it, a shockingly-subjective decision. "How to ensure collaboration among the diverse research communities, especially given the number of strong intellectual leaders among the team members"? How can a panel decide that groups are not capable of effective collaboration? - Neil Saunders

Perhaps based on the size/diversity of the research team? '36 researchers in 11 different fields at 8 universities' and they apparently haven't mentioned or assured the panel that 'many of the people in the proposal had coauthored with each other, and were all known for working in large groups' as he seems to imply. So with that said, I'm not sure I find his first point very valid... more... - Wobbler

Cameron Neylon

Pub-sub/syndication patterns and post publication peer review - http://blog.openwetware.org/science...

June 20 from Science in the open - Comment - Like - Share

Claudia Koltzenburg, Daniel Mietchen, Claus Metzner and 6 other people liked this

What this makes me think about is incentives, again. Why do people do peer review? People comment on blogs for all kinds of reasons; how many of them obtain in the article-review space, and what could we do with that? I like your proposal, Cameron, but it feels a little too build-it-and-they-will-come for me to endorse it wholeheartedly. - D0r0th34

18 more comments

Actually I wouldn't even recommend building it at the moment - just thinking that the problems match up. My guess is that the reasons people do formal peer review are not the same as the ones that drive blog commenting/reddit whatever. The latter involves validation by having other people respond and depends on very rapid turn around. No-one ever gets a specific return on peer review... more... - Cameron Neylon

*nodnod* - D0r0th34

Pretty sure the Kabuki analogy is from Bora: "the formalized kabuki dance of the use of Scientese" http://scienceblogs.com/clock... - Bill Hooker

mmm - that's helpful - but I think it post-dates the conversation I had with Michael which would have been SciFoo '08 so around July...I need some sort of instantly accessible annotated record of every conversation I've ever had.. hmmm - Cameron Neylon

Was Bora at that meeting? Maybe he got it from Michael at the same time. - Bill Hooker

I don't believe so - entirely possible it is independent - or conversely that I've constructed the memory out of bits and pieces - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

Incentives, incentives, incentives. We need more of these kinds of posts! Thanks Cameron. I so wish our grant would go through, we could develop something like this for the small scale and see how communities adopt it and how incentives need to be tweaked. - Björn Brembs

I remember the phrase coming up in conversation, at about the same time as Cameron remembers. But I don't think I said it (don't think I've ever used "Kabuki dance" in conversation), although I wouldn't absolutely swear to that. My memory is that it was, um, Cameron, who said it. - Michael Nielsen

:-) Oh dear...I'm pretty positive it wasn't original to me...anyone else want to claim credit? - Cameron Neylon

I think this has been discussed here before. I think those discussions ended with proposing that we needed something like what we have on FF. Someone uploads something somewhere, like on their personal website. Then everybody can comment at it here/at a central place to make sure that we all follow the same discussions. Of course, FF's format isn't actually all that ideal to properly... more... - Wobbler

Comment from David Crotty on the blog post that bears some thought - Cameron Neylon

Yes, I think you're both right. Although I still think your "control" perspective is more relevant as a "everyone communicating on the same platform" perspective. I don't think it's so much about control as it is about visibility, acknowledgment and accreditation. After all, when you submit a peer review report you're also giving away your hard work over to the journal editors. You no... more... - Wobbler

I'm thinking that that's quite an important point. What I'm reaching towards is that we need to create a market in comments and related information - that satisfies the "why bother" argument - but to do that the comment/information has to start off in the authors control. Haven't had time to reply to David properly yet as have been away but need to follow up on that... - Cameron Neylon

But anyway, let me focus on the idea of potential solutions for a second. Let's say someone has thought of a potentially good idea on how to improve/encourage open scholarly communication and collaboration. And say that it requires some IT infrastructure. So you would need a (small) development team and finances to support such a team. What do you do with such an idea? "Just" blog it?... more... - Wobbler

I generally take the "blog it, discuss it, try to get as many people interested as possible, then realise I don't have enough time to keep up, then worry about trying to find funding, then...."...I don't know what the best approach is but trying as many as one has resources to chase seems a good approach - Cameron Neylon

Ally with Science Commons. They seem to like good ideas, and help people make them happen. - D0r0th34

@CN: Would you try to publish it first before you try to blog it? I'm not just talking about sudden ideas popping in your head, but perhaps an idea that popped up in your head and that you've been refining for quite some time. @D0r0th34: I see, that's interesting. So there is a "for scholars" kind of organization to make these kind of things happen. Thanks for the tip :) - Wobbler

Wobbler - arguably I have done exactly that with "the web native lab notebook" which was a blog post, a talk, and a slidedeck, and is now submitted as a paper, similarly the Google Wave stuff. Most has been blogged rather than published as in my view that is a more effective and efficient way of getting it in front of (at least some of) the right people. The fact that I am now trying to... more... - Cameron Neylon

I see. Interesting, thanks for sharing. - Wobbler

Cameron Neylon

This is what friendfeed _should_ look like... - http://www.flickr.com/photos...

May 1 from Flickr - Comment - Like - Share

Lars Juhl Jensen, Joe Bonner, Shirley Wu and 25 other people liked this

Definitely. I can't stand it! Might have to leave. - Maxine

31 more comments

what are the differences, white background and no sidebar or ava? - Mike Chelen

Mike: added icon for feed type... I still don't get it why they removed that... now it becomes much more difficult to filter (hide) particular feeds of people... I tend to hide flicker for people who post lots of scenery photos... - Egon Willighagen

When and how are FF going to make money? - Michael Barton

Well, not by annoying all the present users anyway! I'd pay them in order to have the old design - wonder if that has occurred to them as a revenue stream? They could call it "premium" or something;-) - Maxine

@Michael: that's a very good question. I definitely value FF enough to pay for it, especially if they gave me back the old design. - Bill Hooker

There is a serious question in here, because I suspect FF will evolve away from what we want if my theory about person-centric versus object-centric behaviour is correct. At some point this community may need to decide to build our own or look at whether our influence is sufficient to have an effect on their business model. - Cameron Neylon

Maxine, you'd make a wonderful salesperson :) I thought the whole point of "Web 2.0" was to empower users with additional/optional features of their choosing. Making things "simpler" and/or "easier" by removing said features is soooo "Web 1.0". - Wobbler

If you were a paying customer, I bet they would be more inclined to hear your complaints about the interface. - Michael Barton

They should give us an API and let us code our own version of the site... otherwise if they continue to move to being more Twitter/person-centric it, we should just crowdsource a replacement. - Richard Akerman

@Maxine "FriendFeed Classic"... oh wait, I think a beverage company has already tried that - Richard Akerman

The FF folks have been public about this design being step 1 to being skinnable - Deepak Singh

this is now what mine looks like too - now where is the "group related items"? - Frank

I honestly don't understand why they felt they had to make the changes they did. Don't they understand the value of being distinct from Twitter? "Skinnable" would be fine w/ me. - carolh

Greasemonkey and Stylish -- you can do it, too -- http://dltj.org/article... - Peter Murray

We should remember that FF right now is a technology playground, always in beta. There'll be more changes ahead. And one day, with enough users, they will move to monetization, which will probably mean ads and pro accounts. I think what they've achieved is great, but I don't expect it to last and try not to take it too seriously. There was no FF about a year ago, who knows what there'll be in a year from now. - Neil Saunders

Hate beta design so much I loaded AJ Batac's GM script otherwise it is awful and ugly so now it looks pretty much like Cameron's pic, but without the feed icons. I really miss those. - Sally Church

Greasemonkey scripts in Firefox make it all better...Thanks Neil for the aggregation! - Noah Gray

comment highlighting by author and friend would be a pretty cool feature to add - Mike Chelen

Sally, I have the feed icons back on mine. One of the three scripts Neil posted a little while back replaces them. One of the userstyle/userscripts also does comment highlighting of your and your friends comments. - Mr. Gunn

@Cameron way up there (btw is there a GM script to number the comments?): I see what you mean about this community possibly having to build our own in the future. What I've participated in during my 4 months on friendfeed has been too ridiculously valuable to see it disappear. On the other hand, while they made ff look more like twitter, it's still more or less working for me. Scary, though, to know that we probably really don't matter to their business model. - Steve Koch

Not exactly. I like the new user avatars and the fact that we have the 3 sidebars on the right (Friends and Lists, Groups and Saved Searches) I do want the service icons back, and the new colors are awful. - Alejandro

The "saved searches" is pretty cool...is that new? - Steve Koch

saved search came in with the beta; part of the new filters functionality (basically creates filter based on the search) - Neil Saunders

Sally: the realtime updates are soooo cool though, it does seem to use more resources. can always hit pause right? or disable through browser scripts - Mike Chelen

Tried it... but I loose oversight in what I already read and what not... - Egon Willighagen

Neil: been playing with saved search more trying to determine ongoing usefulness, new and interesting feature, almost didn't notice :D - Mike Chelen

@Steve Yes, this is my worry. It's unclear whether we are just a tiny part of the overall user base and therefore not of interest or a potentially high value user community and therefore have a stronger voice. To be fair it seems like most other users do prefer the avatars and whatnot so yes, I think the question of at what point we decide its not working and what we do when/if that... more... - Cameron Neylon

I imagine their basic problems are (1) getting enough users (cf FB, Twtr) and (2) revenue. I imagine on (1) they think most existing users won't be like me and will just get used to it, and new users might be attracted by the Twtr-like look. And (2) they've created lots of ad space on either side of the central commenting pane. Or I am wrong totally and this redesign is a step in a merge with Twtr. Not sure if this is a joke or not. - Maxine

There's always been two different modes of use for FF. Some people use it for aggregation of activity on other services and some people use it as twitter with comment threading. As the developer Paul Buchheit said, he thinks the money is in the real-time chat aspect and not in aggregation. I'm sure we're all familiar with how it feels to like unpopular things, the only question is whether or not it's worth leaving. I'm not at that point yet, only partly because there's nowhere else viable. - Mr. Gunn

Loving Peter's greasemonkey suggestions http://dltj.org/article... - Jodi Schneider

My FriendFeed looks like this, though I have my font set to Arial (instead of Trebuchet MS) and the page background light-grey: #DDD. I like how the grey helps focus my eyes on the white content frame, yet the default grey of FriendFeed is way too dark. I'm enjoying the #DDD background a lot. - Meryn Stol

My FriendFeed also looks a lot like this except that I have put the #ccc gray background back in, eliminated the share box at the top of the page, and removed the color coding of "likes" and comments (I find it distracting to read text on a non-white background). - Lars Juhl Jensen

Science 2.0: Noah Gray

Reviewing the reviewers - http://network.nature.com/people...

April 14 - Comment - Like - Share

Mackenzie Cowell, Daniel Mietchen, novoseek and 12 other people liked this

Last paragraph seems odd: "yes, I have information and insight that could help tenure committees etc make better decisions; no, I won't make it available". I don't understand the connection between that decision and the anonymous nature of peer review. - Bill Hooker

20 more comments

The P2P post author suggested that factoring in review quality along with publication/citation could provide a better measure of an individual scientist. As an editor, I have exceptional knowledge of each referee's reviewing caliber and prowess. But since the review process in anonymous, there is no way to connect good reviews with individual scientists. So until the review process is open, I think attempting to assess peer review as a means to value an individual scientist is silly. - Noah Gray

So tenure and faculty search committees will have to work to determine the worth of their scientists or prospective hires, rather than rely on silly metrics like impact factor and # of reviews in "hot" journals. Why not try evaluating the person's science and complete contribution to the community? - Noah Gray

Ah, now I get you. How about, Dr Applicant lists "reviewer on eleventy-seven mss for Nature" on her resume -- would it also be OK for her to list someone like you as a contact to verify that statement, a kind of "reviewing referee"? If the committee contacted you, in confidence, would you then tell them what you know about Dr A's reviewing work? - Bill Hooker

I like where this is going. - Mr. Gunn

I would be most happy to have that discussion. It would be extraordinarily more informative for the committee than any quantification of review numbers. How long would that conversation be, 15-20 minutes? I mean it is essentially a "letter of recommendation" of sorts, right? I'm interested in whatever it takes to get the tenure/hiring decision handcuffed to real total scientific merit, which is not measured exclusively by C/N/S publications. - Noah Gray

It wouldn't necessarily need to be a discussion. Assuming, and this is a big assumption, that journal editors have the time and incentive to systematically assess every peer review of their peer reviewers, to come to some final “grade” of their work for that journal. Then they could just send those grades, or the average grades, to these committees that are asking for them, in... more... - Wobbler

It would help to have a publicly available database of reviewers shared by all journals, with some digital summary for each reviewer (number of reviews, average respond time, journal satisfaction grade). Journal names not to be disclosed for public, but available for the members of consortium of journal editors - genereg

I'd like to combine the best of the above suggestions, while simplifying a potential database and maintaining it for public consumption. The subjectivity pointed out by Wobbler is unavoidable, so I would propose a system that would not only signal value or pain regarding a reviewer's work, but also be of minimal impact upon the workload of the editors: RefDigg. - Noah Gray

Most reviews are solid and useful, but don't elicit either a euphoric or vitriolic response. But for those that manifest as one of the latter, the editor could "vote up" or "vote down" the performance of the reviewer. With all refs starting at zero, the reviews could distribute form there. Still subjunctive, but likely scored in relation to the other reviews on the same paper, so perhaps at least internally controlled (please don't skewer me on that one...). - Noah Gray

This would have to come out once a year so that individual ratings (or lack thereof) would be much harder to pin on a specific editor. The public would have a record of who is contributing to their field, and there would be less argument involved in deciphering more complicated rating systems. Basically, as a ref, you are rewarded or punished for being an outlier. - Noah Gray

However, in practice, I think journals would not want to contribute to such a platform, because they don't want to lose their competitiveness. Good reviewers are obviously highly valuable for journals. Why would high profile journals share this valuable knowledge with others? The journal peer review's primary objective is to help a journal decide whether work is worth publishing (after... more... - Wobbler

A clarification, the peer-to-peer post (which is my blog) Noah discusses here is itself a guest post responding to an Editorial and some published correspondence in Nature, therefore it is part of a continuing discussion. I would also like to mention in light of the discussion here that Nature's Editor in Chief personally wrote to a large number of our peer-reviewers to thank them for... more... - Maxine

@Wobbler Based on my conversations with investigators, new and old alike, they are inundated with reviewing requests on a regular basis, so it is not as if journals have any proprietary information with regards to reviewers. A simple PubMed search reveals the names of many appropriate reviewers. One editor's experience with a particular ref may differ from another, but I hardly see a digg-like loose rating system giving away secrets. - Noah Gray

@Maxine You're right, review assessments are subjective, which is why it might be easiest to rate only the extreme experiences (identifying distribution tails tends to be more accurate). An incentive for refs to provide the most useful review (and thus get rated) might enhance the overall process as well. There are lots of holes and flaws in such a system, so I am simply brainstorming potential designs. Reviewing is a lot of work and everyone should have a chance to be rewarded for it. - Noah Gray

A similar discussion took place some time ago at http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlser... on the basis of this paper: http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlser... . - Daniel Mietchen

Noah: That's good to hear :) If incentive is not an issue, then there remains the resources issue. I once asked a BMJ's editor whether they used their own peer review quality assessment tool systematically. He told me that, because it takes around 2 to 10 minutes per peer review, they simply do not have the time to rate/score each and every one of their peer reviews. So assuming that a... more... - Wobbler

I don't get this 2-10 minutes. Seems a tiny amount of time to me. - Maxine

Well, as I recall in their case: up to 10 minutes a peer review, with 2 peer reviews per research paper. Roughly 1500 research papers being reviewed a year. That translates to 3000 * 6 minutes (let's say that's the average time needed for each assessment) = 300 extra hours. I guess this depends on the journal, but I can imagine even taking as little as an extra 5 minutes to review a peer review can amount to quite a bit of time in the long run. - Wobbler

The issue is not the time but what exactly we are talking about. My peer review assessment module is located b/t my ears and everytime I make a decision on a manuscript I am assessing the reviews. Therefore, I'm just doing my job, not requiring 300 additional hours... - Noah Gray

That's true, but I'm more referring to specific standardized "tools" such as checklists with scores. Things that will help keep those assessments more objective, or at least focusing on the same points. Example: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi... and more specifically: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi... - Wobbler

If you are interested in developing a workable web 2.0 peer-review process, please engage with the Sci-Mate project: http://www.sci-mate.org/wiki... - Christopher Dyer

Hilary

Submission to multiple journals: a method of reducing time to publication? - http://www.bmj.com/cgi...

April 10 - Comment - Like - Share

"[The authors] emailed 95 corresponding authors asking how many times they had submitted their manuscript before it was accepted. Of the 40 who replied, about half (18/40) had submitted the paper to two or more journals, and for a quarter of those the time to publication was 20 months or more (compared with about 12 months for those who published in their first journal)." - Hilary

2 more comments

The authors propose that permitting multiple concurrent submissions might work best with author-pays OA models. - Hilary

This paper is also available in UKPMC: http://ukpmc.ac.uk/article... - Hilary

Sounds like a peer reviewer's nightmare. Which indirectly makes it a journal's nightmare. - Wobbler

Science 2.0: Kevin D. White

Signs of epistemic disruption: Transformations in the knowledge system of the academic journal - http://www.uic.edu/htbin...

April 4 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Mietchen, Patricia F. Anderson, Mickey Schafer and 4 other people liked this

"This article is an overview of the current state of scholarly journals, not (just) as an activity to be described in terms of its changing processes, but more fundamentally as a pivot point in a broader knowledge system. After locating journals in what we term the process of knowledge design, the article goes on to discuss some of the deeply disruptive aspects of the contemporary moment. These not only portend potential transformations in the form of the journal, but possibly also in the knowledge systems that the journal in its heritage form has supported." - Kevin D. White

7 more comments

Nice article, from what I've read at least; I haven't finished it yet. Wow, this is like 35 pages in Word with Palatino Linotype font 12. On a slightly different note: do you know if this journal supports any RSS feeds? - Wobbler

This looks interesting but is going to take some time to wade though. - Cameron Neylon

I get a database error when I try to access it. - Michael Nielsen

odd, its fine for me... - Cameron Neylon

There is a First Monday feed; I have it in my Bloglines. http://bloglines.com/public... - D0r0th34

Thanks Dorothea - Cameron emailed me a copy. - Michael Nielsen

I'm only abut 1/3 of the way through it myself but I did find this snippet humorous "...average length of an article increased by 80 percent between 1975 and 2007" - Kevin D. White

Thanks D0r0th34. I got it! - Wobbler

Cameron Neylon

Eye-opening access - http://network.nature.com/people...

March 29 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Michael R. Bernstein, Jason Stajich, Mickey Schafer and 3 other people liked this

Stephen Curry describes a recent paper in Biology Direct, which refutes an older paper in Cell, published complete with referees and authors correspondence, and names. Of course PLoS ONE was doing this previously... - Cameron Neylon

8 more comments

That reminds me; I wonder what authors and reviewers generally feel about attaching their commentary to their papers when reviewers get the option to exclude their identities. I know open peer review, where identities are known during and after the peer review session, isn't that well received in general. What if the identities of the reviewers are not revealed? - Wobbler

Is it common for PLoS ONE to publish reviewers' and authors' comment, Cameron? I've not read many of their papers but haven't noticed this feature. - Stephen Curry

It was introduced for a while, when referees agreed that they could be included, generally with the referee's name but it was pulled for reasons that I don't currently recall, not sure whether it was a technical or social issue. I'm sure Bora/Pete can comment on that. Also they've just gone live with article level metrics so if you look now things should look quite different. I don't think it was ever common. Possibly 20% of papers the referees agreed for their comments to be made public I think - Cameron Neylon

We posted reviewer comments for a period (6 months ish) and hope to re-start in the near future. We still occasionally do so, but we stopped at that time due to resourcing issues and also a feeling that we hadnt got it quite 'right'. - Peter Binfield

Ah, I didn't know that. It probably explains why only about 20% of articles have reviewer comments attached (http://friendfeed.com/e...). @Cam if that's the 20% you're thinking of, there's no data on how many agreed, just how many papers have the reviews attached -- not important until you know that the practice only lasted 6mo. - Bill Hooker

@Peter: can you comment further on what you felt you had not got right? - Bill Hooker

@Cameron - Where can you find the 'article level metrics'? Had a quick scan with no joy. - Stephen Curry

@Bill - the comments were often of a minor 'typo' nature; had often been dealt with in revision stages (and hence were irrelevant); had sometimes been successfully disputed by authors in rebuttal letters (which weren't posted); were labor intensive to post etc - Peter Binfield

@Stephen - the middle tab on all PLoS ONE articles. Check out an example at: http://www.plosone.org/article... - Peter Binfield

Maxine

Scott Adams Blog: How I Saved Newspapers 03/27/2009 - http://dilbert.com/blog...

March 27 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Bora Zivkovic liked this

"As you know, traditional newspapers of the dead tree variety are falling victim to the Internet. Most newspapers have an Internet presence themselves, but they don't generate enough in the way of advertising dollars. And once a local paper is online, it competes with every newspaper in the world. Their only competitive advantage is local news, and so far that doesn't seem to be enough. My solution is what I will call super-local news." - Maxine from Bookmarklet

Interestingly enough, the only paper newspaper I read is just such a publication -- highly local stuff with good coverage of zoning changes, development news, etc. - Mickey Schafer

Analog RSS :) - Wobbler

Maxine

The time it takes to review a paper - http://blogs.nature.com/peer-to...

March 10 from Peer-to-Peer - Blog Posts - Comment - Like - Share

James Stewart, Yaroslav Nikolaev, Bora Zivkovic and 2 other people liked this

half a day feels about right to me, slightly longer for grants in my experience, perhaps up to a day in total - Cameron Neylon

12 more comments

The Mark Ware survey on peer review (published sometime last year) reported that 'Asian and Rest of world respondents reported times over twice as long (13.4 and 12.5 hours respectively) as Anglophone reviewers (5.6 hours).' I've always wondered why there is this difference in average times for peer reviews. - Wobbler

It's pretty easy to decide when an ms is incoherent, fatally flawed or unsuitable for a journal. That takes an hour or so. Better manuscripts take considerably longer. I even sometimes repeat calculations to make sure all is well, which takes time. Usually takes 6-7 hours over a couple of days. - Chris Cotsapas from Nambu

Yeh, I just wish a few less of those incoherent and fatally flawed papers were published (irritable this week trying to figure out just what on earth one group actually did - just appallingly badly written papers - gobsmacked they got through peer review) - Cameron Neylon

I see myself as the harsh-but-fair reviewer: I'll give BoD (benefit of doubt) for quirky english but not for incoherent narrative, special pleading or shoddy methods. There's enough garbage in the literature already... - Chris Cotsapas

Eh - I suppose I'm a Guardian of Truth - dispensing BoD to all and sundry. Mmmm, BoD for all. [OK, must stop now before this goes *too* far.] - Chris Cotsapas

Really bad mss and really good mss are similarly fast reviews. It's the ones in between that take the time -- I guess I spend a full day, 10-12 hrs, over the course of several days or a weekend, on most of the mss I review. Like Chris, I repeat calculations, look things up in the lit, and so on. I like reviewing. - Bill Hooker

peer-review of my paper took 4 months in one of "cell press" journal, after that was terribly rejected! - Alexey

Alexey - you have to figure it takes a week for an editor to read, another to discuss with the others, one or two to find reviewers, two for them to read and reply, then another one to two for the editors to read, digest and discuss the reviews prior to getting a response into the equation. It takes time... - Chris Cotsapas from Nambu

Alexey, Chris, yes I would guess a good editor gets it out the door to referees in a couple of days (unless there is triage) and then the next 1-4 months is the time it takes to percolate to the top of the referees pile of things to do. - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, I suppose it depends on how many other mss the journal received that week... - Chris Cotsapas from Nambu

currently reading 3 manu a day... + writing personalized editorial decision letters, attracting the best reviewers, and making difficult decisions with contradictory reports... I confirm that, yes, it takes time; more time than there is in one day - Thomas Lemberger

Thomas, that's an interesting number (3). So you spend about as much time on each paper as a referee does(ish)? An average number (and distribution) for this would be quite interesting - Cameron Neylon

I don't know how much time referees spend on our (MSB) papers. Sys bio papers tend to be challenging so I believe referees spend more time than for a 'classical' mol biol paper. To monitor the process, referees & editors could tweet their activity continuously, but not easy to respect confidentiality... - Thomas Lemberger

Cameron Neylon

What is the cost of peer review? Can we afford (not to have) high impact journals? - http://blog.openwetware.org/science...

March 3 from Science in the open - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Mietchen, Benno, Thomas Brox Røst and 24 other people liked this

This is why I think we need to move away from the entire concept of high impact journal and look at things on the level of each individual paper. As you say in your post, lots of citations = high "page rank" = high impact (more worthwhile?) paper. - Jason Winget

25 more comments

@Cameron I look forward to your promised entry... :) Nice post BTW - Duncan Hull

@Duncan I haven't kept it yet - just trying to hold myself to it... - Cameron Neylon

@Jason definitely agree and lots of current push in that direction but have also been having an interesting discussion today about where to send a paper (I keep saying PLoS Biology/Comp Biol) everyone else wants higher impact...or worse actually, higher perceived impact, e.g. Phys Rev Lett - Cameron Neylon

Great post - adds further weight to the argument that journals are historical baggage better left behind. - Björn Brembs

Exactly, Cameron. That's how the system reinforces itself. We need someone high profile (that tenure committees will follow) to raise awareness of this. Impact is better assessed at the level of the paper, not the journal. - Mr. Gunn

my response is somewhat different - to still have these detailed responses and criticisms, but to make them findable, usable by others in the field such that they forward the work, they are a contribution to the community, not just the original author. Those detailed comments are only available to maybe less than 10 people so that is a waste. - Christina Pikas

Christina - that's a really good point. I think it works both ways - the community can benefit from the debate and the authors benefit from a wider field of criticism. A good question to ask of that though is whether the authors will actually pay that much attention to comments if they don't have to - as opposed to getting the next thing out the door. Or to put it another way, how do you demonstrate that improving a paper through taking account of post publication comments gets you more citations? - Cameron Neylon

Very interesting - I will have to take some time to process this. - Richard Akerman

@CN: Your "solution" ignores the possibility of peer reviews improving manuscripts in such a way that it would make them "worthwhile" (to peer review, in your scenario). Rather significant, considering that peer reviews are also supposed to improve manuscripts aside from being a filter for journals/editors. And there is the old issue of "lack of (qualitative) community input" with post-publication peer review. - Wobbler

Yes and no, it's not a zero sum game. My "problem" doesn't include all the papers that currently aren't published because of poor reviewing either. But this works reasonably well on Arxiv. People find the things they are interested in and cite them and those that aren't of interest to anyone sink without trace. The key things are as you say a) actually getting the community input (is PageRank on its own enough?) and b) making all the "publications" discoverable in a useful way. - Cameron Neylon

But what I'm suggesting sets a much lower bar than currently (get lucky in finding referees that suggest to publish with specific modifications rather than, simply find someone somewhere who gets something out of what you've written). My personal belief is that the number of rubbish papers that do get published is lower than the number of ones with some value that don't (or never get written at all). That is probably colouring my thoughts here. - Cameron Neylon

Sorry - I don't think that last one made much sense. If there is something to be improved by peer review then it can be improved before or after "publication". Surely it is more likely to be improved if more people have the opportunity to comment? Still requires community input though - which remains the major problem I agree. But if you accept that we _have_ to reduce costs somewhere then I would argue that is the obvious place to do it. - Cameron Neylon

The problem I see comes out of research indicating that present-day scholars are looking to read LESS, not more, and doing their best to spend as little time as possible on any given paper. How happy are they going to be to find that they now have to read a bunch of comments in addition to a paper? I'm guessing not very. - D0r0th34

no, probably not, but if the choice is between that and a 25% increase in refereeing duty? But yes, any way of reducing one burden needs to demonstrate that it doesn't increase other burdens. In this case I would say that if you need to read comments to decide whether you are interested in deeply reading the paper then the system has failed. But once you're interested I would have thought comments would add value, and even potentially reduce reading/comprehension time if well executed - Cameron Neylon

I still don't think "community input" is a good idea. It lacks enforceable quality standards, it lacks accountability and it is not as "efficient" as using 2 peers on 1 manuscript. Of course, there is the issue of resubmitting rejected manuscripts elsewhere and in the long run taking more than 2 peers per manuscript/publication. So I'm also in favor of looking into reusing peer reviews rather than soliciting for "peer reviews" that may not be "peer reviews" in terms of quality. - Wobbler

I don't really want to get into an argument about peer review (been there done that, wearing the scars (-; ) because what I was meaning to discuss was the criteria about how to choose between different models but I feel I could re-write your sentence above "I don't think traditional peer review is a good idea. It lacks enforceable quality standards, it lacks accountability...". Peer review is community input surely? We can argue the details about mechanisms and some will be more efficient than others. - Cameron Neylon

Well, journal peer review (which is what I meant with traditional) has journals enforcing some kind of peer review standards. And if those peer reviews aren't good and the papers turn out to be less than worthwhile the journal publishers will feel that in their pockets (in the long run). But I guess I am digressing now... - Wobbler

My concern has always been with that "some kind of peer review standards". In some cases they are high, in some low, in very few cases do we have any clear statement of what they are or of what the actual rules on the ground are. NPG is the exception here in that Maxine and others work very hard to try and make it clear but I am beginning to think that NPG is the exception to many things. - Cameron Neylon

It is curious that there are no standard checklists for peer-review - or even an acknowledgment of who the peers should be. For example it would be good to know up front that the data presented in the discussion were verified with the information provided in the experimental section and supplementary materials - usually that is not done but readers might assume otherwise - Jean-Claude Bradley

I have no problems with the rules being different at different journals. Indeed, why have different journals if they're not? A checklist of issues that we should be able to find about (minimum number of referees, is supplementary information refereed, is the publish decision a majority of referees or an editorial one...). But that still doesn't help with all those papers that are rejected from Nature, rejected from Science, get into Cell (or some other permutation). I think that is difficult to predict. - Cameron Neylon

Well, if I were going to destabilize the system, here's how I'd do it. Instead of an "accept/reject/revise" decision based on a single journal, have peer reviewers who work for a stable of journals, and change the decision to "accept for X journal/reject/revise." Repetitive paper-reading cut by what I would guess to be a substantial percentage. - D0r0th34

Some communities are working in that direction. PLoS already does this to a certain extent I believe, and NPG will pass referees reports on to other NPG journals (I think, perhaps someone can confirm that?). I think a bunch of neuroscience journals got together last year to organise a consortium as well. Most journals won't play this game though because it paints them as playing backstop to another journal - Cameron Neylon

Yes, I figured as much... but honestly? too bad. - D0r0th34

It is kind of fair enough in some ways. Journals live or die by their perceived status. It is unlikely that a paper in e.g. JACS would be rejected as unsuitable but appropriate for Nature, but no-one would want to admit that publicly, because it then defines a fixed pecking order. - Cameron Neylon

"My personal belief is that the number of rubbish papers that do get published is lower than the number of ones with some value that don't" that's a very important point, Cameron, one that I'd strongly support. - Björn Brembs

The good point about peer review is that as a reviewer, you're *forced* to read and comment on the paper. If this doesn't happen anymore, don't you think it's likely that you'll have a lot of papers that have never been read at all? For instance, if I've heard a talk about a topic and the paper comes out I feel relieved I don't have to read it, because I already know what's in it. - Björn Brembs

Cameron Neylon

15022009170 - http://www.flickr.com/photos...

February 15 from Flickr - Comment - Like - Share

If it makes you feel better my windows machine crashes several times a day :) - Jean-Claude Bradley

6 more comments

I'm not sure better is the right word :-) I've been told to document crashes, when, and where and what I was running. Was also supposed to note how hot the video card was but I forgot that... - Cameron Neylon

Can't remember last time a windows machine crashed for me without a hardware malfunction. Must've been years, seriously. - Björn Brembs

Some time ago I experienced BSODs while starting up the computer. I didn't look too much into it, but I eventually got tired of it and googled the BSOD crash code. The most likely reason was a bad driver, but I forgot what I installed/upgraded to recently and the BSOD screen didn't show me which driver it was. So I got a bit techie and had the minidump file analyzed by windbg. Thanks to that I found out it was my Comodo Firewall update that kept crashing my computer at start up. - Wobbler

Pretty sure this is a hardware fault but it is intermittent and I can't reproduce it in the shop. And I shifted to a Mac because I had a windows machine that had ongoing problems and I thought it would be more reliable... - Cameron Neylon

Can't the BSOD error code give you more clues? RAM? Graphic driver? Anything? - Wobbler

err and where would I find them? Not even sure what a BSOD is? It's a full scale freeze and crash and there is nothing I can find in the console log after reboot - Cameron Neylon

Oh wait, you're not on Windows. Drats, I need to focus better :p Never mind then. - Wobbler

Cameron Neylon

How Dare They Hold Us Accountable? - http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog...

February 12 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Bora Zivkovic, Steve Koch, Björn Brembs and 7 other people liked this

"Being paid by the public to chase your ideas wherever they may lead is a privilege, not a right" -- amazing how many researchers forget this. - Bill Hooker

12 more comments

While I think (financial) accountability of research is indeed important, I can understand the frustration of having to make an accurate cost-benefit analysis (CBA) for what are essentially still ideas or "models" at best. Apart from the fact that scientists may not have the skills to make a good CBA, made even harder by the non existence of the subjects, it sounds like another perspective for scholars to game the system. - Wobbler

I don't think this is a cost benefit analysis though - just a couple of paragraphs on what the impact might be. If there is no point - even in the long term in doing this research ("might enable faster than light travel..") then what's the point? - Cameron Neylon

Sorry - should be clearer than that - the impact may not even be from the research but from e.g. training, education, public engagement etc etc etc. - Cameron Neylon

I would agree that we should be aware of the applications of our research, but two pages is a lot of text, and there is an implication here that applied research is more likely to be funded. - Bob O'Hara

...and if the work has applied implications, it should be mentioned in the application anyway. Why bother to do this? - Bob O'Hara

Hmm I should have read that blog post more thoroughly. You are right Cameron, it does appear to have that purpose. In that case I don't really see the big deal. A weird way to word it, though: "the potential economic and social impacts of their research"? Can't they just say "give us a cost breakdown"? On a related note: I'm pretty sure researchers are good at telling their peers why their research is significant, so that can't be the difficulty. Putting a price tag on its estimated benefits might be. - Wobbler

Bill - most people paid to do this also put a tremendous amount back into the general system, via teaching, admin for their institutions and for the general enterprise (committees, peer review etc), mentoring, applications of various sorts, ...and lots of other things. The biggest single comment I hear from researchers is how little time they have to actually do any research. - Maxine

Maxine, agreed. People put a lot back in but there is still a very deep sense of entitlement that rubs me up the wrong way. Definitely agree that it would be better for the money spent to get a better ROI (by which I mean science per buck, not necessarily in money terms) but equally the presumption that I should be able to do what I do without a real sense of the privileged life I lead....? - Cameron Neylon

Wobbler - I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. The BBSRC isn't asking for a costs breakdown, they're asking for 2 pages of BS about how the research will make lots of money, or save cute animals. - Bob O'Hara

I haven't applied to the BBSRC for years, but can someone who has tell me whether it already has a space in its grant applications to explain the applications, or if the guidelines ask for it anyway. - Bob O'Hara

See David Colquhoun http://dcscience.net/?p=1108 and Captain Cook applies for a grant http://dcscience.net/?p=1119 - Duncan Hull

Bob O'Hara: that's what I first thought, too. I felt it was worded oddly if all they wanted was a cost breakdown. I stand by my first point then :) - Wobbler

Cameron - agreed on the need for accountability and transparancy (if that is what you are saying). We've run leaders stating similar and have been pretty unpopular with some readers as a result. My comment above was in response to Bill's remark rather than to the post at the link (which I confess to not having read, though I have read David Colquhoun's post referred one up by Duncan, and previously posted it to the Science Online room). - Maxine

Science 2.0: Fitzgerald Steele

GPeer Review - Digitally Signed, Distributed Peer Review - http://code.google.com/p...

February 10 - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Mietchen, NextBio, Frank Norman and 8 other people liked this

Has anyone had a chance to digest GPeerReview? Technically, its pretty simple...it uses GPG to digitally sign your review (along with a hash of the original paper...presumably this will allow you to associate you review with a particular revision of a paper). More generally, it allows you to post your paper electronically, and gather reviews for it outside of the journal/conference 'review' process. That seems to be a pretty powerful possibility. But challenging in terms of adoption. Who's got time to read/review papers that are just floating around out there? Should there be some type of weighting system, where senior scientist or expert reviewers have more influence? Also, we know from social media that the easier it is to rate something, the more likely people are to actual take the time to rate. But I don't think we want to reduce peer review to a digg-like process, or even a Netfilx 1-5 stars. - Fitzgerald Steele

40 more comments

"Google's entry" may not be accurate. The project is hosted at Google Code, but there's no indication that it's a Google project or that the developer works for Google. - Neil Saunders

*blush* Good catch. I think I assumed the 'G' stood for Google. I feel like I made a net-n00b mistake. =) I've amended the link and original comment to remove 'Google' references. I still think it is an interesting take on peer review, though... - Fitzgerald Steele

I'm still confused. Aside from the digital signature/encryption, how is this different from say a website/repository which allows registered (verified) scholars to comment on papers? How will they encourage/enforce quality/professionalism? And what exactly is the incentive to do this instead of another peer review for an established journal (editor)? - Wobbler

What kind of standards/methodologies will they be enforcing? It's dangerous to sacrifice quality for the sake of convenience/a larger user base. The important part of peer reviewing is that it is done right and people will appreciate the time and effort that has gone in it. Making it "easier" is not as big of an incentive as "doing it right the first time" and having it treated with proper care/respect. - Wobbler

I can see what they're trying to achive (a very lightweight way of creating verified reviews that you can pass to people) but I think the social issues (am I going to send a critical review of someones work to them?) and the technical issues (its a text file! Can anyone remember how to get them into Word?! (-; and contains scarey words like "key" and "hash") will make it pretty unlikely to get used. As a concept its cute though. - Cameron Neylon

I don't think it is really "peer review", more like a "digital signature". See Richard's comments here: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Maxine

Yes, it's just a way of generating a signature but one that is configured around writing a text document that points at a web page. Like I say, the principle is interesting, I can't see the uptake being high. - Cameron Neylon

To address Wobbler's comments, the key difference is that it's not dependent on a central repository. These reviews can exist anywhere, or multiple places, meaning that no one group controls their usage or display. You just put it on any page and let search engines handle the indexing. It's very anti-authoritarian, which means it could be very beneficial for people who live where there is state-sponsored censorship of media. - Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn. I see, but couldn't an "independent" comment website function in the same way? I recall a "peer review website" that allows people to refer to preprints in arXiv and simply put write a "review" for it. One big issue with that is that there is a total lack of standards or any type of quality control. It's no different than just letting random peeps comment on something. - Wobbler

Independent comment websites will post reviews about a paper whether or not the author likes them. With GPeerReview authors just put the reviews they like on their resumes. Comment sites usu either let anyone post comments, or they use some kind of voting mechanism to establish credible reviewers. These aren't reliable. GPeerReview just builds a big network connecting reviewers, reviews, and papers, and lets you analyze it to establish credibility however you want. - Mike Gashler

Hold on, what exactly happens with the accessibility of the reviews? Is your system/platform keeping track of all the peer reviews that are carried out? It generates some kind of hashed key for their CV's that employers can access? Authors can choose to simply do nothing with the reviews if they don't like them? How reliable is it if the authors can decide which reviews they show and which not? - Wobbler

I think you're still missing something, Wobbler. This is infrastructure, not a service. We need to move past the "website with a bunch of curated stuff on it" to "a bunch of websites with stuff on them, connected via open standards." Curation is a layer that can be applied independently at the level of the data, or links to data. - Mr. Gunn

The average opinion for any new idea will always be negative. There are plenty of critics for anything different. What means more is whether an author can muster credible support for his publication. This way, new ideas can prosper even if some people don't like it. - Mike Gashler

Especially if the people running the repository of items don't like it. - Mr. Gunn

I am having a little trouble visualizing all this it. Could someone provide a scenario of the whys and wherefores and hows of all of this for those of us who are a little slow? That is, “I am a young neuroscience postdoc. I am working on a paper. What do I with it under this system and why would I want to? Basically for input from others in my field? Is there a central repository where... more... - Hope Leman

Hope, I don't think the whys, wherefores and hows are very clear to many people. This is essentially just a simple tool to associate digitally reviews with documents. The developer has some ideas about how it might be used, which might best be addressed by questions at the Google Code site. - Neil Saunders

There is something in their discussion of the purpose of peer review (see the Q/A on the wiki) with the graph analysis that sounds like an IF for individual researchers -- what is a measure of "connectedness" to the scientific community? I share some of Hope's frustration with "scary" words -- how is this infrastructure and not service when the code creators are selling it as a way to build a researcher's reputation? Would this be useful for drafts? Does their "publish" just mean "make available"? - Mickey Schafer

If it makes it any clearer, Mickey, I do believe that they mean "make available online" when they say publish. The argument about researcher reputation is just a selling point. If you had a new kind of road-making material, you'd sell it as something that allows roads to carry a heavier load, but you wouldn't actually be carrying those loads. Does that analogy help clear things up? You'll never get why this is important as long as you think a central repository is needed or desired. - Mr. Gunn

Mickey and Mr. Gunn--that is a fascinating distinction you both make between publish" and "make available." Could you please elaborate? - Hope Leman

I'm not going to go into the whole centralized vs decentralized argument, but the "not desired" comment is a rather bold statement. A number of centralized repositories are doing well and likely the biggest reason why OA institutional repositories, and OA itself in a way, even exist today, let alone gain in popularity. If there are some objective indicators that central repositories are not desired then I'd sure like to see them. - Wobbler

Hope, for me the distinction between "publish" and "make available" is technical in that "publish" (traditionally) means that a text is made accessible by an organization or institution and is thus associated with that institution, ex: so and so is published by Nature or has a preprint in arXiv. "Made available" means the author is making the text available independent of another body -- this is not OA, but could be considered ON or unpub.manuscript. - Mickey Schafer

Mr Gunn -- the analogy is useful, though my engineering friends might argue that $$ are related to actual likelihood of use for proposed purposes. I am curious about your final comment -- my understanding is that Gpeerreview would be a "piece of code" producing an eval that any user could attach to any text. The text author could then decide whether to include the review in their resume. Gpeerreview is not a place where the text itself is made available. Is this incorrect? - Mickey Schafer

I'm not sure I would call what arXiv does "publishing" either. They archive and make e-prints available. I think it's fair to say that scholars associate "scholarly publishing" with organizations that have some form of quality control (i.e. peer review) and also take some responsibility for the quality of the publications. arXiv does neither (well OK, a quick screen, incomparable to journal peer review). I don't think many people will fault arXiv for having preprints or even postprints of lesser quality. - Wobbler

So for this project to call it "publishing" before they get "peer reviewed", utilizing their system, seems, to me at least, to be a gross misinterpretation of what the concepts of "publishing" and "peer review" truly mean. Anyway, I am (still) wondering how this system exactly verifies "the integrity of the reviews" as it says on their website? I don't see any quality controls for peer review mentioned, let alone enforced. - Wobbler

I think distinguishing "scholarly pub" from simply "pub" is a good one. Publication doesn't have to be scholarly to fit the definition above. It's the additional process of peer review that makes the difference. Even my daughter's 2nd grade class "publish" final drafts of written work, and, do so with the understanding that they are authors within the institutional framework of "Mr. Canelas' 2nd grade class". This is publication figured broadly. - Mickey Schafer

Mickey and Wobbler--what do we call it if something is published in a scholarly journal that requires authors to submit the same material to Wikipedia--that can be then edited at will by anybody at all? Any comments on this: Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in Wikipedia or Perish http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive... At least papers in... more... - Hope Leman

I agree Mickey. However, since the context in this case is "scientific publishing", at least according to the GPeerReview site, I think it is important to make that distinction. Course, it's going to be a whole different story if they want to revolutionize publishing and change its meaning. But currently there is the understanding that scholarly (self-)publishing is achieved, at the very least, after (journal) peer review (by qualified third parties) and the rest can fall under "self-archiving". - Wobbler

Has anyone got this invitation to a symposium on peer reviewing? Only 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that "peer review works well as it is." (Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192). "A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and an analysis of the peer review system substantiate complaints about this fundamental aspect of scientific research." (Horrobin, 2001). Horrobin... more... - Ralf Klamma

It is spam, isn't it? - Ralf Klamma

It isn't Google and it isn't peer-review. Misleading title. Read the link. And see Richard A's comment at http://friendfeed.com/e... - Maxine

Oops, I missed your comment Hope Leman. I would classify Wikipedia "publishing" as "normal" publishing and not "scholarly publishing". One obvious distinction between journals and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia doesn't publish original findings first: their quality doesn't rely on peer reviewers but references. In that sense, Wikipedia is more an archive than a scholarly venue. You don't really publish at Wikipedia, you order and archive information based on existing resources. - Wobbler

Hope - anything published in a journal has a doi associated with it. (Preprint servers have something similar, a Handle.) Anything else that happens to versions of that document, in Wikipedia, an archive, or anywhere, is fine or not-fine, depending on your point of view. But "version control" as you call it, is provided by the doi. (See Crossref.org for more details about doi.) - Maxine

As for the Wikipedia thing: as long as those articles in RNA Biology that Wikipedia references to are also OA, I don't really see the problem. It's a pretty good PR stunt IMO. They're using the popular Wikipedia as another venue to raise awareness of their journal articles. Free publicity, it's not a bad thing for both the journal and the article's author(s). It would make sense to give the authors some kind of extra authority over their submitted summaries: to increase the accuracy of any future edits. - Wobbler

Hmm, according to Suber's blog, the articles this policy refers to are not OA articles. Wow, these guys are really playing the publicity game hard. I don't see how they can justify putting a summary of their journal articles on Wikipedia with references that can't be accessed or verified by its readers. Isn't that the whole idea behind Wikipedia's accountability? Then again, as just a link resource it's also valuable. Hmmm, I guess I'm on the fence with this one. - Wobbler

Wobbler, it sounds to me like the intent is actually to revolutionize publishing and change it's meaning. Discuss amongst yourselves if this is the best way to do it. RE: centralization - it really is the best way, theoretically, because the central repository maintainer(or people who can get to them) don't have undue influence on the system. However, in a practical sense, there's no reason you must have either one or the other, because not everyone gets the need for a distributed system. - Mr. Gunn

Other than constraints concerning costs and efficiency, I REALLY doubt (centralized) repositories or even journals practice that kind of undue influence on scholarly communication. And if it happens it is the exception, not the rule. I find that a bizarre motive to “fight the system”. Complain about unfair treatment when the people in question have a lot to gain from getting sound/quality stuff and nothing from pissing off their suppliers of said quality? Unlikely. And that goes double for OA repositories. - Wobbler

Making your own manuscripts available online is self-publishing at best. If that’s considered revolutionizing (scholarly) publishing then arXiv and other repositories have revolutionized it years ago. And newsgroups/websites have done it before them. This is a digital signature/ encryption tool, it’s not a peer review tool. Its very core design of a decentralized, unaccountable communication unit for anyone but the authors of the papers makes it highly questionable. - Wobbler

Whether you’re into centralized or decentralized architectures, one thing will always play a role when it comes to scholarly communication: accountability. Do you really think the scholarly community is waiting for a new peer review system that’s even less accountable and less transparent than the current system? One of the main complaints of the current journal peer review is that its... more... - Wobbler

Plus, have you/they even thought about efficiently putting scholars to good use? Since nobody but the author(s) can track the "peer reviews" (and I use this term in the LOOSEST way possible) how do we know some third or fourth rate scientist isn't gathering "peer reviews" (again loose!) at a 1:4 "nice"/"crappy" ratio before it reaches 5 "nice" "peer reviews" (don't make me say it... more... - Wobbler

I'm not sure where you're misunderstanding lies, Wobbler. Yes, it is just a tool for digitally signing stuff on the web. In that context, it's parallel to the AuthorID efforts discussed here ( http://friendfeed.com/search... ) and elsewhere. Totally unanswered are the issues of accountability, transparency, and review quality. But since anyone who cares to develop a spider can track these, perhaps there would be some accountability and transparency after all? - Mr. Gunn

The misunderstanding lies in me taking the things they state on their website seriously while you see it as a PR stunt. As for your last point: No, because 1. nobody but the people with the right key/textfile can access the peer reviews (and even if they could, who would verify all the accumulated "peer reviews"?) and 2. spiders can only track what the authors allow to be tracked/uploaded somewhere. So these data are useless since it's been tainted right from the beginning. - Wobbler

Michael Barton

Website idea: Rank scientific articles by relevance to your research; get uptakes on them via citations and pubmed "related articles".

February 7 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Kevin Z, Wobbler, Sean McBride and 6 other people liked this

citeulike and it's kin do this in a social-network sort of way. (Here are users that posted similar articles). I agree, though - building up a text corpus from existing papers and using it to make recommendations could be a fun and useful project. - Chris Miller

9 more comments

i've been saying this for years -- academic publications should have (a) amazon-style recommendations, and (b) flickr-style "interestingness". - Joe Dunckley

This is a problem of data, not of technology. Amazon has millions of people with a clear clickstream through a website. We've got people with PDFs on their desktops. MESUR is a good start at addressing some of that, but it will still only help for high-traffic areas. - Richard Akerman

What about someone behind an academic firewall? As long as I'm not selling the service, would it be a breach of copyright to mine the journals that my school already pays for access to? - Chris Miller

Yeah, the Amazon system wouldn't work without all that underlying data. That said, shouldn't citeulike, Papers, etc just make this part of what they do? - Deepak Singh

I think http://www.Biowizard.com does something like that. - Berci Mesko, MD

@ChrisMiller Most journal licenses explicitly prohibit programmatic access to the journal article contents. That is, any crawl, harvest, or machine processing of the metadata or fulltext is a violation of the licensing terms. (I'm not defending this position, I'm just stating the current situation.) - Richard Akerman

Perhaps you could focus on the OA journals/repositories and their articles? That might increase the acceptance of OA while helping scholars retrieve relevant/significant research free of charge. - Wobbler

It's really annoying for me that I miss relevant articles because I don't go to pubmed regularly and repeat the same searches. More than just repeating a search I need also to search horizontally via author name or by following the citation tree. - Michael Barton

I agree with wobbler. If BMC + PLoS could create some kind of combined service across their literature, would this not provide more citations for their journals? More citations => higher impact factor => more authors ponying up open access fees to publish there. - Michael Barton

@Michael I just remembered (since I'm doing some PMC Canada planning this afternoon) that the next phase of UKPMC will involve text mining, they're partnered with EBI and NACTEM. That should provide some quite powerful results across the free (but otherwise not fully open) articles in UKPMC. - Richard Akerman

Maxine

Martin Kettle: Tony Blair's elevation to the ear of President Obama is wholly sensible | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment...

February 8 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Cameron Neylon liked this

Excellent piece, perhaps best appreciated by UK readers. - Maxine from Bookmarklet

That makes sense. Aside from the Iraq debacle, Tony Blair has proven to be a highly intelligent, charismatic and competent leader. Governing the USA for 4-8 years is more than the Iraq issue. So having an intelligent man who's been there and done it all, including the fall into "political irrelevance", tell you about it is highly valuable. Like if you're about to write a paper on X, would you not want to read papers by peers on X to increase the odds of your actions leading to significant/original success? - Wobbler

I think you would, Wobbler. I'ts both normal and fashionable to knock Blair in the UK but I have always rather liked him. But I am strange, in that I don't watch much factual TV, and never news/politics programmes, so I have never actually seen him in that medium, only read about him (or things by him). I like my news and politics with this perspective! - Maxine

Science 2.0: Thomas Brox Røst

Sprouts - http://sprouts.aisnet.org/home...

January 27, 2009 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Hope Leman, Christina Pikas and Wobbler liked this

"Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems is an Open Access publication that provides a fast-turnaround outlet for authentic and original research and work-in-progress carried out by scholars of the information systems field and members of AIS, the Association for Information Systems. Sprouts is devoted to research about the ways in which information is generated and used in the prevailing complex socio-technical landscape" - Thomas Brox Røst from Bookmarklet

The term "publication" is a bit unclear, though. Isn't this an OA repository much like arXiv and SSRN and others? - Wobbler

I agree with Wobbler on that. - Hope Leman

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