Content Matters

Scientific journal Nature announced this week that they will cancel the open peer review process that they had begun this past June.

Open peer review, using a wiki-based environment, was an experiment to improve the peer review of submitted papers by posting them to an open server for public comment.  The traditional peer review process relies upon two or more "referees" who anonymously review each paper so that Nature's editors can decide whether to accept or reject the paper. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, the goal of open peer review was to see if public review might help uncover potential fraud, following the retraction of two papers earlier in the year by a South Korean scientist researching cloning.

According to Nature, the open peer review process gained a lot of interest, but little participation.  Participation among authors was voluntary and only a small percentage of them chose to do so (perhaps out of concern that the public might not treat their papers fairly).  Of those who did participate, the number of comments received was minimal.  The editors at Nature speculate that the limited response might be due to concerns about providing comments in an open forum.

While it's disappointing that this experiment did not succeed, the fact that they tried this open peer review process is a testament to the team at Nature.  I have previously posted about Nature's position as an innovator among content providers.  While this experiment may not have produced the results they'd hoped for, I have no doubt they will continue to push the envelope in testing new technologies.

Clarification: Maxine Clarke posts on Nature's Peer to Peer blog a clarification that they did not shut down the open peer review site, per se, but that they had completed the three month (extended to four month) trial of the process.