The journal Nature is abandoning an experiment aimed at bringing Wikipedia-like group editing into the world of scientific publishing.
For several months beginning this past summer, Nature has invited scientists whose articles were shortlisted for publication in the journal to first post their work online for public review....The scientific magazine's move was intended in part to see if a more-open review process could expose low-quality or fraudulent papers that critics of the current system say too often slip into print.
But Nature, which is published by a unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., said in an editorial in Thursday's issue that it was ending the experiment due to lack of participation. The journal found that in the competitive world of scientific publishing, the vast majority of authors were unwilling to post their papers and few scientists were willing to criticize their peers' work publicly by posting comments on Nature's Web site....
Meanwhile, another experiment with collaborative editing got under way this week. A new online scientific journal called PloS ONE invites readers to post comments or questions about articles once they are published....
Comments.
First my standard disclaimer: open access is compatible with every form of peer review and does not intrinsically favor or resist any of them.
It's a mistake to compare open review to Wikipedia. Open review invites all comers to offer assessments or judgments, while Wikipedia invites all comers to revise the primary text itself. Moreover, most systems of open review only post judgments with attribution, while Wikipedia contributions are anonymous. Finally, of course, most systems of open review --including Nature, PLoS ONE and early proponents of the model like Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics-- combine internal expert review with open external comment.
Reader comments at Techdirt suggest that the Nature experiment was not widely known, even by Nature readers. (I blogged it on September 18, 2006.) In addition, since individual reader assessments may be partial, addressing only a point of intersection with their own research, their value grows over time as the mosaic fills in. Hence authors and referees may be more willing to take part in a permanent open-review forum than in an experiment that could disappear at any moment. (The Nature experiment was only scheduled to last three months.) And it's certainly possible that hopeful Nature authors would rather have the premium whuffie of Nature's standard imprimatur than the unknown value of the new alternative. If true, then PLoS ONE and Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics should give us a better test of open review than Nature did.
Update. The most detailed account I've seen of the experiment, outside Nature itself, is Christen Brownlee, Peer Review Under the Microscope, Science News, December 16, 2006. Unfortunately, it's only accessible to subscribers.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/21/2006 11:47:00 AM.
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.
