New JoVE blog & commenting on papers

Anna Kushnir's new blog for JoVE is up and running (actually it has been up and running for a while, I'm a bit behind with blogging. Those January Open Science posts are coming at some point, too). It's a nice mix of content.

Of particular interest are a couple of interesting entries talking about the online participation - or lack thereof - of scientists. See also Noah Gray's take on neuroscientists and web 2.0 and David Crotty's 'why web 2.0 is failing in biology' post.

Did you skip over all those links? You shouldn't, really. At least read David Crotty's.

So, yeah, anyway, why scientists don't comment on papers - my take is that being too busy and being afraid of the consequences don't come into it.

Sure, they're valid concerns - but everybody is busy at work and everybody realizes that what you say on the internet is recorded forever by Googlebot. People still write ranty forum posts and blog comments.

IMHO the main reasons scientists don't leave comments are:

There's no point - who's going to read it? Will you get any feedback? Will you get any credit for it?

and

It's too much work - writing a comment should be a one click operation. Well, two clicks, one to get the focus in the textbox and the other to press 'submit'.

Science publishers can address both of these issues, but we've been failing to do so.