Nature initiates linkbacks from articles to blog posts
November 5, 2008
A comment posted by Charles Sutton to a recent entry on Letters to the Editor versus blogs for post-publication discussion notes:
A disadvantage of the blog-discussion-format is that there is not a direct link from the paper to the blogs that discuss it.
Nature has a solution.
A recent post on Nascent notes:
We launched a new blogs portal on nature.com earlier this week. It’s part of a general overhaul of blogging at NPG which amongst other things involve link backs from articles to the blog posts writing about them (bloggers get traffic, our readers get conversation around papers – works for us both) and improving the blogging experience for users on Network.
Well a partial solution anyway. They are still wedded to their Total Information Awareness approach in that you have to submit your blog and claim it via some registration credentials. In short, pseudonymous bloggers have to tell Nature who they are. So that’s kind of stupid and continues their failure to understand the root cause of their inability to spark online discussion of papers.
(h/t: RPM)
DrugMonkey 
November 5, 2008 at 4:06 pm
And 5 out of 7 PLoS journals have a trackback functionality as well.
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November 5, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I see Nature is trying to keep up with PLoS!
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November 5, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Still it’s a step in the right direction.
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November 6, 2008 at 12:20 am
Coturnix- do 5/7 PLoS journals have a podcast as cool as Nature’s?
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November 6, 2008 at 1:30 am
i.e. you have to give them an email address. It’s perfectly possible to use your Nature Network account to log in, and use a pseudonym for that account (at least one of your sciblings has done that).
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November 6, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I wrote that Nascent post. Just to clarify – you don’t need to claim your blog with your real name for it to be in the index. You don’t even need to submit it yourself.
It does need to be submitted by somebody because we use the index as a whitelist to keep out spam blogs and crazy pseuds.
Also, re: keeping up with PLoS – hell yeah. Their publishing platform is pretty cool.
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November 6, 2008 at 5:39 pm
we use the index as a whitelist to keep out spam blogs and crazy pseuds.
What I wonder about is how necessary such approaches are and how many comments you are losing because people just don’t want to give out too much info?
Don’t spam filters and IP bans for cause get you most of the way there? What would be the actual person-hours overhead to clean things up?
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November 7, 2008 at 5:23 am
> spam filters and IP bans
Yeah, that’s a fair point. This way other bloggers get to decide what’s on topic and what’s not, though. On a tangent the registration process at nature.com proper *is* remarkably dumb, it goes on forever. Maybe we can build in a shorter, less invasive registration form on Blogs.
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November 7, 2008 at 9:17 am
HAHAHAHAHAH!
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