http://web.archive.org/web/20030324230036/http://www.quickreviews.org/
http://web.archive.org/web/20051125081307/www.science-advisor.net/
http://web.archive.org/web/20061115051156/http://www.physcomments.org/

All these sites have failed. I suspect there’s little percentage in contributing, if you’re an expert, unless there’s already a lot of other experts contributing, at which point network effects kick in.

Great post and comments!

http://biocurious.com/give-plos-a-chance

Thanks for the thought provoking post!

I don’t have enough expertise to parse the hullaballoo surrounding the original flagellum paper, so I’ll just have to wait for the dust to die down.

But I did appreciate Carl’s backing away one long step and taking an overview at some of the issues raised.

In any event, it’s always fun to note that real scientists may be relied upon to do anything BUT march in the kind of conspiratorial lock-step that the IDiots and Creationists invariably accuse them of.

Wikipedia’s Featured Article Candidates process is a good example of the sort of disputation arena I’d like to see in more places.

I think that we must be prepared for the (agreed, unfortunate) possibility that most, if not all, “interactions in this venue” may be more, ahem, *robust* than we might like. As a layperson interested in science, my hope is that this will not discourage wide, free, public electronic dissemination of scientific papers.

Re the fight with anti-evolutionists as a cause of aggressive interactions, I think aggressive interactions may be found in abundance in the wider blogosphere, in e-mail fora and newsgroups before that, in peer-reviewed scientific journals before that (letters to the editors have been particularly good sources) and in discussions between scientists in various formats going back as far as one wishes (Frazier-Ali had nothing on Hooke-Newton).

I think you’ll find that it’s a pattern common to every blog out there, with a few notable exceptions. The great majority of the time an author doesn’t draw the sort of person given to voicing his opinion readily. So a popular blog doesn’t get much commentary out of its traffic.

Wikipedia seems to be able to arrive at consensus, right? Would that be an appropriate court system?

we also had a very low rate of commenting on papers.

I exepect a comment for each thousand readers. If the community is small, don’t expect many comments. Of course, if the original article is a troll… ymmv. This one per thousand rule of thumb comes from help desks. Most everyone seems to think someone else will notice that it’s broken and will call it in. There seems to be a personality type that comments. Reasonable people adapt themselves to their environment. Unreasonable people adapt their environment to themselves. So progress is due to unreasonable people.

Not being a medic, I haven’t explored how well this works for serious articles, but at least the system is running.

Bob

It could also be that they have other venues for discussion in which they’re more comfortable and which have bigger audiences of familiar participants.

There’s no requirement that people discuss what’s at PLOSone *at* PLOSone, is there?

One other reason there might not be a lot of comments over at PLoS is because it’s hard enough to keep with the literature as it is. Just ask an editor how difficult it can be to get reviewers of manuscripts. I would be curious to see if the authors you contacted would have blogged about it had you not contacted them.

There are various other issues that are also worrisome, but that is the big one. Because the paper was clearly aimed as a shot at the ID/creationists, and was made Open Access, and pro-evolution people were already taking the hints and talking the paper up, I think it was better to deflate it right off the bat.

So I think this is a special case. Most papers, e.g. at PLoS, don’t have these problems and so they don’t attract much attention either on blogs or the journal comments pages.

We need a court system, but all we’ve got is trial by fire. While Time magazine tells us that we have built the digital reincarnation of the Athenian Agora, it’s really more like a Viking feast house, with Beowulf’s soldiers wearing mead-stained blankets and pretending to be philosopher-kings.

For the record, I have had contact with both Howard Ochman and Nick Matzke about topics of mutual interest before this episode, and I greatly appreciate the work that both of them do (i.e., Howard’s genome research and Nick’s work for NCSE plus his flagellum ideas). And yes, scientific arguments can get heated and I myself have written more than a few (*ahem*, dozen) harsh reviews of manuscripts that were not up to snuff. But you’re right — scientists are not used to the blogging environment and we expect there to be a minimal level of decorum to the criticisms, especially when it is one-sided and in public. Nick’s comments may have wonderful scientific merit (I am not an expert in that area), but stomping on toes on a blog is not how one’s reputation is advanced within the scientific community. I totally support the use of blog as a medium for discussing and debating scientific topics, but it does not follow that all interactions in this venue must be adversarial and aggressive. That it often seems to be so is perhaps a symptom of the fight with anti-evolutionists. Fighting that battle directly is, after all, Nick’s primary job but it is not Howard’s or mine. I would rather not have the tone of that “debate” color the way we interact on issues of real scientific substance. Scientists may not know much about blogging, but bloggers likewise need to learn about the etiquette of scientific engagement.