PubMed Commons Opens Up Scientific Articles To User Comments 27
New submitter smegfault writes "In a new trial, PubMed Commons has been released. Until now, post-peer-publication results were restricted to letters to the editor of scientific journals; and even then some journals don't accept letters to the editor. With PubMed Commons, scientific peers can comment on PubMed-indexed articles without the interference of journal editors and peer reviewers. At the moment, eligible for participating are: 'Recipients of NIH (US) or Wellcome Trust (UK) grants can go to the NCBI website and register. You need a MyNCBI account, but they are available to the general public. If you are not a NIH or Wellcome Trust grant recipient, you are still eligible to participate if you are listed as an author on any publication listed in PubMed, even a letter to the editor. But you will need to be invited by somebody already signed up for participation in PubMed Commons. So, if you have a qualifying publication, you can simply get a colleague with the grant to sign up and then invite you.' However, reports are in that anyone with a PubMed / NCBI account can sign up on the PubMed home page."
what this will look like: (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict where this will go first: improved metadata and citation networking. I'm an eligible author with pretty good experience with the system.
The initial comments will not be excessively negative. As I've mentioned before on Slashdot, publications are a summary of findings and never the full story: the authors are always holding back. On average, if it looks like they've overlooked something (from the standpoint of the reader), it's more likely to be an error or oversight on the reader's part than the authors. I think people generally appreciate this point, so they'll be conservative in their criticism to avoid looking foolish.
Getting cited is a really big deal, and not being cited (when your work is highly relevant to the topic) is considered a serious slight. I've seen nasty phone and email messages bounced around because of this. So in the context of comments, you're going to see a lot of things along the lines of "They should have considered author X, work Y from 2003 because it is highly relevant." This is a safe comment to make, but it can also be used to make a subtle point, drawing attention to competing work the authors chose to ignore, etc.
There won't be a lot of novel observations/data/interpretations being presented. Online comment pages will not be considered a place to stake your claim on an idea. Hence, people won't want to be "scooped", and they will reserve key insights for themselves.
There will be a lot of referencing preprint sources as they become more popular. This will be a new form of citation: retroactive citation of "future" (current) works, and it will greatly improve the citation network. This is important because that network is critical (besides in-person networking) to follow the development of a research field.