PLOS Medicine: A Stronger Post-Publication Culture Is Needed for Better Science

" ... These days the system does not keep up well with the speed of activity and the volume of research from a vast community. Articles are, by and large, too uncorrectable and unconnected [5], and much significant intellectual effort is not captured at all. Substantive discussions in journal clubs, in email lists, in social media, and at conferences are not distilled into a concise, permanent, accessible record. Most of the unaddressed content of pre-publication peer review is also lost. Post-publication evaluation is highly fragmented. It often appears within future articles, either embedded in the introduction and discussion sections, or in formal research syntheses. Dedicated review journals (and journal sections) select, summarize, and critique publications, usually in an “expert picks” way. There are also rigorously structured systems of post-publication evaluation inside and outside journals [6],[7]. There are more immediate channels to respond to published research, such as letters and comments to the editor, commentaries, and editorials in journals, and discussion in blogs. Dedicated websites have been developed for discussing and sharing research among authors [8], and PubMed Commons (for which I am editor) enables post-publication commenting and linkages by the PubMed authorship community and journal clubs [9]. Somewhere within this activity is the amorphous phenomenon that people call post-publication peer review. For some, post-publication peer review is simply shifting pre-publication peer review to after an article's release [10]. For others, it's any evaluation of an article that is similar to pre-publication peer review. Post-publication peer review overlaps with post-publication commenting, but does not encompass all of that activity ..."