PLoS One / Postgenomic mashup

Chris Surridge has an interesting post over at the PLoS blog about the comments (or the lack thereof) on PLoS One papers. He mentions one paper in particular that has a long discussion thread associated with it on Gene Expression but no real comments on the actual PLoS One site.

As a temporary solution (?) to the problem of blog comments not being immediately accessible from the paper, summaries of notable manuscripts are going to be posted to the PLoS publishing blog with open comment threads. Based on the three posts already up I think this is a terrible idea.

Partly this is personal preference - I hate blogs that just replicate tables of contents - but more importantly I think that it misses the point.

People like the GNXP folks have taken the time and trouble to build up a loyal community that fosters debate and to create an environment in which visitors enjoy interacting with the site and with each other. Sticking up an abstract or two on your own blog just isn't going to compete with that, doesn't matter how much traffic you get.

Blog properly - engage your audience - or don't blog at all. It's a personal communication medium, that's one of the reasons why people feel more comfortable commenting in a blogging environment. A link and an abstract on a publisher's blog isn't personal, it's an advert. The PLoS One blogs are generally a good read at the moment, don't ruin them.

I'm not just PLoS bashing here: I like the ideas behind PLoS One and we do the same 'if we blog the abstract then people will comment!' thing at Nature on some blogs (the ones I don't read any more). The intention is good, it's just misguided, IMHO.

Anyway, I think that a better solution would be to embrace the existing science blogosphere and to explore ways of working with it more closely. As a proof of concept, here's a Greasemonkey script that adds science blog trackbacks to PLoS One.

It's doesn't look particularly nice, mainly because I didn't have time to style things very well. Feel free to do with it as you will, though (you could get it working with PLoS Two, for a start).