The 20% Statistician: Five reasons blog posts are of higher scientific quality than journal articles

"I’ve tried to measure blogs and journal articles on some dimensions that, I think, determine their scientific quality. It is my opinion that blogs, on average, score better on some core scientific values, such as open data and code, transparency of the peer review process, egalitarianism, error correction, and open access. It is clear blogs impact the way we think and how science works. For example, Sanjay Srivastava’s pottery barn rule, proposed in a 2012 blog, will be implemented in the journal Royal Society Open Science. This shows blogs can be an important source of scientific communication. If the field agrees with me, we might want to more seriously consider the curation of blogs, to make sure they won’t disappear in the future, and maybe even facilitate assigning DOI’s to blogs, and the citation of blog posts.