Hemai Parthasarathy is Managing Editor for
Once upon a time, you formulated a hypothesis and designed the experiments to test it. You applied for a grant. You were awarded the money to pursue your line of inquiry. You did the work. You wrote the paper. Your colleagues reviewed your work and found it to be true. You published your paper. The conclusions of the paper joined the cannon of scientific knowledge. The End.
This platonic ideal of the scientific method is, sadly, at best science fiction and at worst history of science. The reality, as everyone knows, is much less linear—simultaneously more frustrating and more exciting. Publishing a paper is somewhere within an iterative loop that involves proving your point before you write the grant, working backwards to the rationale from a completely unexpected finding, and ultimately receiving a set of mixed peer reviews, which an editor interprets into a binary decision to publish your paper or not, in one peer-reviewed journal or another. And quite often, it is only with publication of the paper, that its worth is judged in earnest. Ultimately, worth is assessed by whether the scientific community decides to build upon a particular finding. More immediately, results are evaluated in journal clubs and scientific meetings, and a whole discussion surrounding a particular paper can be transmitted by word-of-mouth within a particular community, without ever being documented.
Last month,
Although open online discussion of content is quite common in some fields (e.g., medicine), and is all the rage in entirely different contexts (e.g.,
We hope that e-letters serve as the first step in implementing a broader program that provides a more interactive forum for publication of research. Although we have had requests to allow anonymous postings, we feel that there is enough anonymity in the publication process, and that transparent discussion—both positive and negative—should be encouraged. Ultimately, we would like to institute a system in which questions such as “How useful did you find this article?” and other sorts of immediate feedback mechanisms could serve as a tool to aid readers in allocating their limited time and attention.
Comments will be posted on
Thus, we will endeavor to provide some level of oversight to foster a constructive dialogue about issues relevant to a particular article. Obviously, the degree of editorial oversight we can provide will, in part, depend on the volume of comments we receive. But we will cross that bridge when we get to it. Our sister journal,
We welcome your feedback on this new service, and we hope that you will use it to make open-access publishing a still more valuable resource within your scientific community. Write to us!