I’ve been waiting to write this Blog posting for a while and now I can. As from today PLoS ONE has a user rating system for its articles. All users can now rate articles in three subjective categories: Insight, Reliability and Style. We have made the tool, now we need you to come and use it....
Despite the obvious advantages to hard pressed scientists trying to get to grips with a vast literature this simple system hasn’t been much applied to scientific papers up to this point....
[I]f you go to any of the six hundred or so papers that PLoS ONE has so far published and look in the right had column you will see a little box containing five small stars. Those indicate the overall aggregate rating of the paper based on individual ‘votes’ from individual users.
You can also see there how many users have rated a paper and can expand the box to show the average rating in all three categories. You can also open up a separate page which shows you exactly who has rated a paper, what their ratings were and any comments they have made.
By far the most important thing in the ratings box though is the link marked “Rate This Article”. That will open up a box the window which allows you to give your own opinion....
There is also the opportunity to leave a comment along with your rating. Rating comments are intended to be shorter and pithier than annotation and discussion comments....
I could go on at length about how to use ratings but since it is all written up neatly and using proper grammar on our Guidelines for Rating page I won’t go on about it here. Instead I have a call to arms.
Any user rating system relies, like any system of voting, works better the more people engage with it. So here is my request to everyone reading this blog:
Never read a paper on PLoS ONE without leaving a rating
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/10/2007 03:14:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
