There's a list of open access journals at the wittily named Directory of Open Access & Hybrid Journals, but the two big names are BioMed Central and Public Library of Science. Both offer open access (BMC started doing so a little before PLoS, though PLoS is exclusively open access), and both charge fees for publishing; BMC is for-profit and PLoS not. Open access has also resulted in more experimentation with the standard publishing model - some journals allow reviewers of manuscripts to make their comments public (also a Very Good Thing - it hopefully stops the venting of frustrations that some reviewers seem to relish - Environmental Microbiology publishes select examples of these in their Christmas issue, which is a good laugh for everyone except the poor person at the bench who had their next grant riding on the publication) and even allow comments from readers. PLoS One has taken this the furthest, where commenting on papers can be located to specific items within the text.
It's this that's really interesting. Allowing readers to comment on papers adds a lot of value to them; other scientists might ask for clarification of points, suggest contrasting views, or develop collaborations. The article potentially becomes the start of a debate leading to further findings - how exciting! Only, in reality, this doesn't really happen. According to research available at Nascent (a blog from the publisher Nature - note, not an open access publisher) BioMed Central articles, between November 2002 and January 2008 managed 945 comments. By my reckoning that's about 3 comments a week shared between all these journals. Lordy! They must smell bad. Something for rivals PLoS to crow about? Not really, they have the same problem and Nascent is soliciting help from people to categorise PLoS's comments in the same way as they did for BMC.
But why is this the case?
Any one journal article is going to have a small pool of interested people - research is incremental and takes place in little niches, occasionally research has impact outside its own niche and that's probably when you would get more comments. The Nascent article doesn't correlate number of comments by impact of the paper.
Comments are more formal than in other places where users can leave comments and require more careful formulation - YouTube for example. The top three comments on the current most viewed vid are "omg, brilliant!!!!!","man u r craz" and "Awsome!" Not the sort of comment you're likely to get at BMC as scientists talk to each other in a different way and are likely to be judged by the authors on the quality of their comment. Though I know plenty of researchers are thinking "that tedious old ham has been churning out the same old crap for years" they're unlikely to say that to the author's faces. Mostly. A large number of the comments are actually from the authors themselves, adding additional reference material or acknowledgements - a nice thing to be able to do.
The reality of the situation is that you're not going to get many comments on journal articles and actually, it doesn't matter. One thing the Nascent article does conclude is that the comments generally improve the value of the article they're left on. Even if that happens on only one or two articles, it has justified the inclusion of a commenting mechanism. Also, it's likely to get steadily better, scientists are a recalcitrant bunch for people who are supposed to be at the cutting edge of knowledge, they have a lot of inertia when it comes to change.
However, I think the publishers are missing a trick. Commenting mechanisms would be a great tool for public engagement. Let's compare that youtube video again to a random paper from PLoS (OK, I admit it's not entirely random, I know some stuff about probiotics). Quite a lot of people like listening to music, quite a lot also like classical music, many can appreciate the skill in video-editing, guitar-playing and one or two might think he's silly for wearing that hat (not me of course - my hairline's receding and shortly I will be wearing a hat whenever I'm in public). Our random paper is about probiotics, you can buy them in the supermarket and quite a few people down them regularly, they improve the health of your digestive systems (well, some do, some don't, it's complicated). It's also about inflammatory bowel disease; most people with internet access also have a bowel, 1 in 400 people in the UK have IBD and the figure is similarly high in the US. That's a lot of vested interest. Scientific language is complicated, and deliberately so - complicated concepts have to be conveyed unambiguously to allow the sharing of research with other scientists, but it also creates a barrier to those that have never heard of subepithelial cells or mucosa.
If publishers encouraged (or even required?) authors to produce a peer-reviewed, lay summary of the work in the paper and then allowed general commenting, think of the benefits. The scientists would learn something about public engagement, highlighted as lacking in Robert Winston's recent New Scientist article. The public would be able to see behind the dusty drapes of these massive archives of human knowledge. The two groups might even start to chat about research, its impact and its importance or otherwise.
PLoS and BMC have the tools ready-made for something like this, it'll be interesting to see whether either of them take their publishing one step further.
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