Scientific Publishing in Web 2.0

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The Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open access, web-based publisher, has launched its newest venture, PLoS ONE. PLoS ONE aims to bring scientific publishing into the Web 2.0 era, with a simple interface for commenting on published research articles. This feature is not unique to PLoS ONE, as the Nature blogs and BioMed Central both allow commenting on articles. What makes the site unique are the annotation features, personalize alerts, and rating of journal articles. Whereas the previous implementations of commenting on journal articles were an accessory to the publishing process, PLoS ONE strives to make this a central feature. The site is currently listed as "beta", not because of the quality of the journal articles (all peer reviewed), but because they're still working out some of the tools that will make the journal truly interactive.

And the article I mentioned a few days ago -- you know, the one about copy number variation between humans and chimps -- has been published. As of now, there are two comment threads, one of which contains a link to my blog post. Pretty cool.

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According to Peter Sauber's Open Access News blog Nature has shut down public reviews of papers.
BTW, PLOS one looks nice in IE 7.0 while its pages appear quite messy in Firefox 2.0 on my computer.

I saw that Nature had stopped their open review trial. Here is their blog entry on it.