PeerJ Questions: a new way to never 'Publish & Forget' again - PeerJ Blog

"One of the disappointing aspects of publishing research today is that once an article is published, it is often 'written in stone.' In reality, research continually evolves and new questions arise, thus leading to new papers. But what about the finer details within the already published manuscript? Readers often have nowhere to turn for answers as simple as 'where can I purchase this reagent?' to more complex questions about specific methodologies or alternative conclusions - for example 'how did you merge the data together?'. We shouldn’t just publish and then forget, but rather we should strive to enrich what is there, and ideally connect the thoughts that are rumbling around in our heads with that information.  One solution, today’s solution, is to email authors any questions. There are several obvious drawbacks to this: 1) delays in response, or no response at all; 2) authors may have to field the same questions again and again; 3) it could be a question that any domain expert could answer and not just the authors; and 4) answers change over time and others may not be able to access them. In the digital age it seems like we should be trying for more scalable solutions. This is why we have been planning PeerJ Questionssince before we even started publishing. It might just be our greatest effort yet to bring something new to the format of academic publishing.  Whenever you visit an article on PeerJ each paragraph, figure and table is now enabled for 'annotations' - open to anyone to use. Annotations are questions that can be trivial or deep. Anyone can answer a question, but once the question is live, authors are notified first in case they have the immediate answer. And better still, both the people who ask a question, and those that answer one, can receive academic contribution credit within the related article subject areas. This is done through a peer system of voting up and accepting ‘quality’ or ‘valuable’ answers ..."