January 21, 2011

Peer review via Twitter gives researchers headaches

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Interesting column on the Nature.com Nature News site comments on how “blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react.”

Excerpts:

“For many researchers, the pace and tone of this online review can be intimidating — and can sometimes feel like an attack. How are authors supposed to respond to critiques coming from all directions? Should they even respond at all? Or should they confine their replies to the conventional, more deliberative realm of conferences and journals?
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To bring some order to this chaos, it looks as though a new set of cultural norms will be needed, along with an online infrastructure to support them. The idea of open, online peer review is hardly new. Since Internet usage began to swell in the 1990s, enthusiasts have been arguing that online commenting could and should replace the traditional process of pre-publication peer review that journals carry out to decide whether a paper is worth publishing.”

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