PubMed Commons Opens Up Scientific Articles To User Comments

New submitter smegfault writes "In a new trial, PubMed Commons has been released. Until now, post-peer-publication results were restricted to letters to the editor of scientific journals; and even then some journals don't accept letters to the editor. With PubMed Commons, scientific peers can comment on PubMed-indexed articles without the interference of journal editors and peer reviewers. At the moment, eligible for participating are: 'Recipients of NIH (US) or Wellcome Trust (UK) grants can go to the NCBI website and register. You need a MyNCBI account, but they are available to the general public. If you are not a NIH or Wellcome Trust grant recipient, you are still eligible to participate if you are listed as an author on any publication listed in PubMed, even a letter to the editor. But you will need to be invited by somebody already signed up for participation in PubMed Commons. So, if you have a qualifying publication, you can simply get a colleague with the grant to sign up and then invite you.' However, reports are in that anyone with a PubMed / NCBI account can sign up on the PubMed home page."

Comments

Re:what this will look like:

[JanneM]

PLoS has had comments for a long time, and the result is - mostly no comments at all. I suspect the problem is that you're posting in your professional capacity, under your real name. That means you can really hurt your reputation with an off-hand comment; on the other hand, they count for nothing as far as your CV and employment prospects are concerned.

Posting a comment is really a losing proposition, with no upside (you can always contact the first author directly with questions) and potential downsides. So people, rationally, don't comment. Unless PubMed has figured out a way around it, I suspect this will be the end result this time around as well.