Nature Gives Up on Open-Source Peer Review

11 January 2007 at 12:30 pm Peter G. Klein

| Peter Klein |

The open-source, wiki model does not, apparently, work well for scientific publishing. Nature had placed a selection of submitted manuscripts online and invited feedback from researchers around the world, promising to take the feedback into consideration as part of the formal review process. But the scientific community showed little interest. Few authors were willing to participate in the experiement, and the online papers didn’t get much feedback.

During Nature’s trial, only 5 percent of 1,369 papers ranging from astronomy to neuroscience that were selected for traditional peer review were also posted on the Internet for open commentary. Of those, 33 papers received no comments. The rest received a total of 92 technical comments. The journal concluded that many researchers were either too busy or had no real incentive in evaluating their colleagues’ work publicly. In addition, none of the editors found the posted comments influenced their decision whether a paper gets published.

I’m a little surprised by this. According to Lerner and Tirole, the open-source model should work in settings with strong reputation effects. One would think that in small, close-knit, specialized scientific communities the incentives to provide useful feedback — assuming it’s not anonymous — would be fairly high. On the other hand, there are opportunities to do so at conferences, seminars, workshops, the faculty lounge — and even blogs! — and the opportunity costs of doing it via Nature’s setup may have been too high.

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Entry filed under: - Klein -, Institutions.