Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, July 09, 2007

Jumpstarting participation in open review

Bora Zivkovic (a.k.a. Coturnix) is the new Online Community Coordinator at PLoS ONE.  His job is to stimulate participation in open review and he wants your help.  From his blog post about it, First Day at PloS:

As most of you probably know, I got a job as an Online Community Coordinator at PLoS ONE. Today is my first day at the job! I got the job in an unusual way as well - by posting about it on my blog (and the managing editor posting a comment "Is this a formal application?"). The rest is, as they say, history....

While my CV and the cover letter were fine, what really got me the job were my blog commenters! That is: YOU! You demonstrated my ability to build an online community better than any Resume can reveal. Although, to be fair, it took me three years to build this community and now I have three months to build one on PLoS! So, I need your help and I am unabashedly begging for it.

So, my #1 goal...is to dramatically increase the number of comments and annotations on the PLoS ONE papers, without compromising their quality....

As you are aware of, commenting is a positive feedback loop. If you go to a blog post (or a PLoS ONE paper) and see "0 comments" you are unlikely to be the first one to comment (but you are still more likely to do so than a scientist with no experience on blogs whatsoever!). But if you see "3 comments" or "7 comments" or "35 comments" you will be curious and you will click to see what others are saying. By the time you are done reading through the comments, you are already deeply involved and thus much more likely to decide to post a comment of your own (especially if you disagree with some statement there)....

PS:  Good luck, Bora.