Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Bavarian rhapsody

I promised a photo of Bavarian merry-making and here it is courtesy of Thorsten Jochim.

The controversy over the Google heist posting has quietened and there are the signs now of some sensible debate emerging. This piece from Even Schnittman writing on the OUP Blog is an example. There's also rather a good piece in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung marred only by their describing me: 'von Statur einem Möbelpacker ähnlich...' - not quite sure what it means but I suspect the worst. One lesson I've learned from the affair is that increased visitor traffic (visits leapt several fold for a few days) doesn't necessarily translate into increased ad revenue. Dammit!

I know some of my readers are more interested in the ins and outs of the British independent book trade than significant events in the world of scientific information. I am also aware that I've blogged about things going on at Nature Publishing Group a lot recently. But I can't help it. They keep coming up with really interesting new projects and ideas. Here's the latest, Nature Precedings (no, it's not a spelling mistake) described here by Timo Hannay:

'Nature Precedings is a free online service that enables researchers rapidly to share, discuss, and cite their early findings.

Written scientific communication takes place mainly through journals, but the web provides new, complementary opportunities for more rapid, participative and informal approaches. Nature Precedings accepts contributions from biology, medicine (except clinical trials), chemistry and the earth sciences. Submissions are screened by a professional curation team for relevance and quality, and are usually posted online within hours. The service is free of charge to both authors and readers. It has been created in collaboration with an outstanding group of partner organisations: British Library, European Bioinformatics Institute, Science Commons, and Wellcome Trust. You can find out more at Nascent, Nature's own blog, and on O'Reilly Radar.'

 

#    |  Comments [3]  | 
6/19/2007 3:27:42 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
'von Statur einem Möbelpacker ähnlich’, I'm told, means ‘being similar to the build of a removal man’.
Nicholas Blake
6/19/2007 4:52:56 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Thanks. I am flattered.
richard charkin
6/21/2007 7:28:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Nature Precedings needs to have a good rating system for open, community-based review to work well. Currently, submitted articles can be voted for, but that does not tell one how many would have voted against it. Nor does one get to know the negative points unless they go through the whole article themselves. Such negative points may have been mentioned in some comments but they are not easy to spot. Further, one is usually disinclined to write textual comments unless one has a strong interest to do so.

With open preprint systems, being able to find useful and reliable ideas and data in articles is perhaps more important than being able to submit one. This becomes apparent as the number of articles increase, when searching can return hundreds and thousands of articles. One can’t go through all of them, and a few ‘bad’ articles can easily cause frustration and distrust in the quality of the submissions.

But if search criteria can include objective measures of article quality, then one can indeed easily find valuable material. Nature Precedings should therefore opt for a point-based rating system where different aspects of articles can be appraised.

Thus, instead of just letting one vote for an article, one should be allowed to rate its different aspects on, say, a 1-5 scale. Such aspects can include:

1. clarity
2. originality
3. novelty
4. presence and quality of experimental data
5. logical procession
6. depth
7. proper referencing

In effect, this would be a proper peer-review system.

The ratings, both their average and their spread, should be displayed alongside articles.

A good review/rating system will discourage submission of bad articles, build trust in the usability and reliability of content in Nature Precedings, and encourage quality submissions.

(similar comments posted elsewhere on the web by me)
Santosh Patnaik