Can postpublication commentary online revolutionize the scientific literature?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0177
As reported recently , media attention to retractions—and sometimes the lack of retractions—in the scientific literature has involved some probing of the scientific community’s internet-age capacities for self-correction. Now a New York Times Sunday commentary has engaged the scientific community’s internet-age capacities for self-improvement.
The Times‘s online editors enthusiastically composed the article’s home-page teaser blurb: ‘Internet-based crowdsourcing has come to determine the course of scientific research.’ But here’s the gist of the actual argument:
The truth is that every decent article now aspires to become the wiki of its own headline. Sure, there is still the authority that comes of being a scientist publishing a peer-reviewed paper, or a journalist who’s reported a story in depth, but both such publications are going to be crowd-reviewed, crowd-corrected and, in many cases, crowd-improved. (And sometimes, crowd-overturned.) ... Some scientists are already experimenting with variations of this idea within the stately world of peer review. New ways to encourage wider collaboration before an article is published — through sites like ResearchGate — are attempts to bring the modern world of crowd-improvement to empirical research.
The author, Jack Hitt, illustrates by summarizing two incidents he sees as precursors to change that’s coming: the crowd-discredited scientific report of the reappearance of the ivory-billed woodpecker after half a century, and the blogosphere-discredited announcement of a bacterium that seemed able to live on the toxic element arsenic.
Hitt mentions ResearchGate , which claims to have more than 1.5 million members, including 51 604 physicists, and which follows a vision ‘to create a platform that provides researchers with the tools they need to collaborate on a global scale.’ But he does not mention the Faculty of 1000 , which was described last year in a Chronicle of Higher Education article as biomedicine’s attempt ‘to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among researchers, authors, and readers.’
Nor does Hitt mention CrossMark , the new initiative of the CrossRef publishing collaboration. A CrossMark press release doesn’t seem to emphasize the inclusion of commentary in a scientific paper’s postpublication life. But in a Nature opinion piece last year, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky predicted that CrossMark’s ‘Record’ tab will give publishers a way to include ‘material they didn’t produce, such as blog posts, media coverage, letters, additional data and metrics such as downloads.’
Marcus and Oransky created Retraction Watch . In their Nature commentary they observed that including ‘additional material such as worthy blog posts’ about results ‘could strengthen the value and extend the imprimatur of those journals that are willing to embrace these new tools.’ They asserted that if ‘journals aren’t willing to start reviewing and compiling additional content related to their papers, someone else will do it.’ Hitt also omits actual ‘pushback’ examples from his statement that ‘among scientists, there is pushback, fear that incorporating critiques outside of professional peer review will open the floodgates to cranks.’ He doesn’t seriously explore all that scientists are already doing along the lines he advocates, but he does introduce the general notion to Times readers.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.