“You” may be the person of the year in some circles, but those circles don’t include the well-respected Nature magazine. Back in June, Nature started an experiment in peer review in which articles submitted to the weekly science journal were considered in the open, over the Net, rather than the usual private, anonymous peer review process for such journals.  Nature has pulled the plug on the experiment, in large part because it had trouble getting a sufficient number of submitters to permit their drafts be dissected in public. As noted on TechDirt, “it’s a lot of hard work getting the system to provide enough value to get people to participate.” Ars Technica opined that the loss of anonymity doomed the experiment. Or was it a communications problem? As one commenter on TechDirt posted: “I’m a biology researcher. I read Nature weekly in print, and I peruse its website also. I still had NO idea there was any sort of open access peer review in trial at Nature until some colleague mentioned it to me. And even then I couldn’t find where it was very easily on their website.”
We’ll have another chance to see how this works soon. As reported by the Journal, “Another experiment with collaborative editing got under way this week. A new online scientific journal called PloS ONE invites readers to post comments or questions about articles once they are published. PLoS ONE is published by the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of scientific literature that is accessible to the public.”