Put up or shut up time, all ye OpenSciencePostPubReview Waccaloons!

PubMed Commons has finally incorporated a comment feature.

NCBI has released a pilot version of a new service in PubMed that allows researchers to post comments on individual PubMed abstracts. Called PubMed Commons, this service is an initiative of the NIH leadership in response to repeated requests by the scientific community for such a forum to be part of PubMed. We hope that PubMed Commons will leverage the social power of the internet to encourage constructive criticism and high quality discussions of scientific issues that will both enhance understanding and provide new avenues of collaboration within the community.

This is described as being in beta test version and for now is only open to authors of articles already listed in PubMed, so far as I can tell.

Perhaps not as Open as some would wish but it is a pretty good start.

I cannot WAIT to see how this shakes out.

The Open-Everything, RetractionWatch, ReplicationEleventy, PeerReviewFailz, etc acolytes of various strains would have us believe that this is the way to save all of science.

This step of PubMed brings the online commenting to the best place, i.e., where everyone searches out the papers, instead of the commercially beneficial place. It will link, I presume, the commentary to the openly-available PMC version once the 12 month embargo elapses for each paper. All in all, a good place for this to occur.

I will be eager to see if there is any adoption of commenting, to see the type of comments that are offered and to assess whether certain kinds of papers get more commentary than do others. All and all this is going to be a neat little experiment for the conduct-of-science geeks to observe.

I recommend you sign up as soon as possible. I’m sure the devout and TrueBelievers would beg you to make a comment on a paper yourself so, sure, go and comment on some paper.

You can search out commented papers with this string, apparently.
has_user_comments[sb]

In case you are interested in seeing what sorts of comments are being made.