Publishing house scale of web server evil

Kevin Burton recently checked to see which operating system the websites of different US presidential candidates are built on. The executive summary: Democrats use lots of Linux while Republicans (Ron Paul excepted) mainly use Windows.

Some have suggested a correlation between Windows web server usage and being evil*. This makes sense as only somebody with no soul could love ASP.

Does the theory hold true in the publishing world?

• PLoS run Linux
  
• Nature run Linux
  
• Science run Linux
  
• Wiley run Solaris
  
• Elsevier run Windows 2000
  
• Springer run Windows 2003
  

So from a purely progressive science on the web point of view.... yeah, sort of.

Springer, Elsevier and Wiley are pretty big companies and have lots of different sites, so maybe it's doing them a disservice to assume that whatever serves their root domain is their primary choice of OS. For example, I couldn't tell what Elsevier's ScienceDirect site runs because NetCraft returns 'unknown', so maybe it runs Linux.... or maybe NetCraft just doesn't have an entry for CRUSHED UP PUPPIES AND THE SWEAT OF THE OPPRESSED.

Trade publishing, for completeness:

• Canongate (arty Edinburgh based independent) run Linux
  
• Penguin (ironically) run Solaris 8
  
• Macmillan (publish Jeffrey Archer, employ me) run Windows 2000
  
• Simon & Schuster (publishing Lindsey Lohan's autobiography) run Windows 2003
  
• HarperCollins (owned by News International) run Windows 2003
  

* Don't read this the wrong way. Microsoft do lots of cool stuff nowadays too. But IIS is cold and heartless.

Publishers, trackbacks and shared data

The elevator pitch version of this post: if you're a science publisher interested in the web then let's talk about collaborating on a shared system that will stimulate online discussion, kickstart commenting and recognize the sometimes valuable contributions already being made every day by science blogs.


I'm a strong believer in allowing commenting on online papers. This is something under serious discussion at Nature (the question is how to do it properly). The vast majority of researchers read, organize and discover papers online; we should give them the tools and opportunity to discuss papers online, too.

It's easy to be dispirited by the lack of comments on early adopters - though what would an appropriate number of comments on a paper be? Is one comment pointing out a critical error worth more than a hundred saying 'nice paper'?

In the relatively near future two things will happen to help push commenting forward:

• We'll (scientists in general) develop systems that track and credit scientific contributions - including relatively minor ones like wiki edits and comments - that aren't in manuscript form.


• We'll make it easy enough to leave comments and for content stakeholders to be alerted so that they can reply for a positive feedback loop to kick in - more authors responding means commenting is seen to be more useful, so more comments are left... etc.

Until then, though, there is a way of supplementing comments submitted directly to journals: science blogs.

I think it's fairly safe to say that the number of blog posts discussing papers is much, much larger than the number of online comments left on papers from all STM publishers combined. Prove me wrong and I'll take you out for cocktails.

Some specific examples of papers discussed in blog posts:

This recent paper in Cell has no comments but three blog posts written about it. This paper in PLoS One has two blog citations but only one comment (which is a link to one of the blog posts - this has been discussed previously on the PLoS One blog).

So how can publishers use blog content to supplement commenting systems? I think Postgenomic is the answer, or at least a good starting point.

Postgenomic is a science blog aggregation site with an open source codebase. The data it collects is accessible via a REST based API.

Postgenomic follows several hundred science blogs and tracks the papers that they link to. Publishers can easily - and should, IMHO - access this data and display blog trackbacks next to the papers that they publish online.

Technorati or a homegrown system could possibly be used to do the same thing. Here's why STM publishers should use Postgenomic instead:

• Postgenomic was written specifically to deal with scientific literature. It handles tricky things like disambiguation: a single paper X might be linked to at different URIs by different blogs (imagine that one blogger links to the abstract on PubMed, another to the PDF and a third to the fulltext view). It understands DOIs and PMIDs. We have a lot of experience with this sort of thing at Nature - see Connotea.


• As the list of aggregated blogs is strictly controlled there's no need for publishers to manually curate each and every trackback on their papers.


• Postgenomic has been running for more than a year and is recognized by the community - at least to the extent that new blogs are submitted regularly. If somebody starts a new blog and wants to be included on paper trackback whitelists, or a blog changes address or an archive is deleted then it makes sense for there to be one, central place for this to be dealt with. The science blog community is relatively small already, why fragment it further?

My suggestion is that wherever you'd allow comments on papers you also collect trackbacks, displaying the title and excerpt of blog posts citing the paper in question.

Blog trackbacks on papers are a winning proposition for everybody involved. Bloggers get recognition and increased exposure, readers get more relevant content, publishers get papers worth coming back to after you've downloaded the PDF, authors see more discussion surrounding their research.

If you're interested in talking about this further then please get in touch.

Leave Nature HQ, walk left, see...

Cheeky monkeys. Can't help but feel that the money would've been better spent elsewhere, though. Yes, I know that it's an ape not a monkey.