Pub-sub/syndication patterns and post publication peer review

I think it is fair to say that even those of us most enamored of post-publication peer review would agree that its effectiveness remains to be demonstrated in a convincing fashion. Broadly speaking there are two reasons for this; the first is the problem of social norms for commenting. As in there aren’t any. I think it was Michael Nielsen who referred to the “Kabuki Dance of scientific discourse”. It is entirely allowed to stab another member of the research community in the back, or indeed the front, but there are specific ways and forums in which it is acceptable to do. No-one quite knows what the appropriate rules are for commenting on online fora, as best described most recently by Steve Koch.

My feeling is that this is a problem that will gradually go away as we evolve norms of behaviour in specific research communities. The current “rules” took decades to build up. It should not be surprising if it takes a few years or more to sort out an adapted set for online interactions. The bigger problem is the one that is usually surfaced as “I don’t have any time for this kind of thing”. This in turn can be translated as, “I don’t get any reward for this”. Whether that reward is a token for putting on your CV, actual cash, useful information coming back to you, or just the warm feeling that someone else found your comments useful, rewards are important for motivating people (and researchers).

One of the things that links these two together is a sense of loss of control over the comment. Commenting on journal web-sites is just that, commenting on the journal’s website. The comment author has “given up” their piece of value, which is often not even citeable, but also lost control over what happens to their piece of content. If you change your mind, even if the site allows you to delete it, you have no way of checking whether it is still in the system somewhere.

In a sense, when the Web 2.0 world was built it was got nearly precisely wrong for personal content. For me Jon Udell has written most clearly about this when he talks about the publish-subscribe pattern for successful frameworks. In essence I publish my content and you choose to subscribe to it. This works well for me, the blogger, at this site, but it is not so great for the commenter who has to leave their comment to my tender mercies on my site. It would be better if the commenter could publish their comment and I could syndicate it back to my blog. This creates all sorts of problems; it is challenging for you to aggregate your own comments together and you have to rely on the functionality of specific sites to help you follow responses to your comments. Jon wrote about this better than I can in his blog post.

So a big part of the problem could be solved if people streamed their own content. This isn’t going to happen quickly in the general sense of everyone having a web server of their own – it still remains too difficult for even moderately skilled people to be bothered doing this. Services will no doubt appear in the future but current broadcast services like twitter offer a partial solution (its “my” twitter account, I can at least pretend to myself that I can delete all of it). The idea of using something like the twitter service at microrevie.ws as suggested by Daniel Mietchen this week can go a long way towards solving the problem. This takes a structured tweet of the form @hreview {Object};{your review} followed optionally by a number of asterisks for a star rating. This doesn’t work brilliantly for papers because of problems with the length of references for the paper, even with shortened dois, the need for sometimes lengthy reviews and the shortness of tweets. Additionally the twitter account is not automatically associated with a unique research contributor ID. However the principle of the author of the review controlling their own content, while at the same time making links between themselves and that content in a linked open data kind of way is extremely powerful.

Imagine a world in which your email outbox or local document store is also webserver (via any one of an emerging set of tools like Wave, DropBox, or Opera Unite). You can choose who to share your review with and change that over the time. If you choose to make it public the journal, or the authors can give you some form of credit. It is interesting to think that author-side charges could perhaps be reduced for valuable reviews. This wouldn’t work in a naive way, with $10 per review, because people would churn outÂ large amounts of rubbish reviews, but if those reviews are out on the linked data web then their impact can be measured by their page rank and the authors rewarded accordingly.

Rewards and control linked together might provide a way of solving the problem – or at least of solving it faster than we are at the moment.