Naturalistic experiment with comments

The authoritative journal on science and medicine - British Nature - on Thursday announced the completion of an experiment that has been conducted on its website since June of this year.

The editors, who considered that it was time to somewhat democratize the process of reviewing publications, decided to give the authors of the works the opportunity to request that their works be posted on the site, where they could be commented on by ordinary scientists and everyone interested. Such a scheme in scientific circles is called peer-review. Previously, each article before checking the pages of the weekly was tested and assessed by a full-time commission of scientists. In obedience to the time trends, Nature allowed the authors of the works to demand to place their works on the website of the magazine, where visitors could read them and express their opinions in the comments. When it came to deciding whether or not to accept the text for publication, the jury weighed both the opinion of experts and the average opinion of the audience.

But after four months it became clear that this practice does not bring the desired fruits. Most online commentators were limited to recalling the “good article” look and squeezing something useful out of them was problematic even with good attendance for such a project — about 5,600 views a week. During the experience, only 125 articles were reviewed on the Web (only 5% of 1,369 papers submitted for consideration), and 33 of them received no comments at all, and the remaining 92 were purely technical comments, none of which influenced the decision on publications.
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But, despite the failure, the editors are planning to repeat this experience, after analyzing the errors and reporting to the widest audience the usefulness of such a method of reviewing. After all, now most scientists simply do not want to give their work to universal access, fearing rival plagiarists.

The peer-review scheme is used by the scientific journal PLoS One , which began its work this week and has already collected quite a few articles on its website that are available in the public domain. Perhaps his experience will help Nature to introduce advanced trends in his work.