Monday, May 13, 2013

Please take the time to nominate somebody or something today

{Update: the OSTP's new deadline to nominate is May 23, 2013]

Good morning everyone, first some space goodness from Chris Hadfield


h/t to Chris Hadfield's G+ feed and Mario's G+ feed

I have known astronauts. The thing they all really really really want to do is to go back. If in some forum or if you have a position of influence, of if NASA, CSA or any space agency ask you who should go up, tell them Chris, or anybody with that profile. fits that bill. Chris is coming back to Earth today. I am rooting for him for a second extended trip on Space Station. 

If you are not in a position of influence with regards to selecting the next astronauts to go up but you read this blog and you are a US person, it means you care about some of the most advanced research there is and you are yourself an agent of change (If you are not a US person,, I don't think you can nominate anybody as the form seems to require a US address. Please note that you are a US person if you have a US address).  It is important to raise this community's recognition by nominating some of its champion of change. As you know The OSTP is seeking an Outstanding “Open Science” Champion of Change  Before tomorrow May 14th. please take the time to go to the White House website and nominate your Champion of Change in the Open Science category. Once you are done, please ask your colleagues to also a nominate their champion of change in the Open science category at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/champions/nominate. Here is a list of people, organization or efforts that you could choose from.




Standalone peer review platforms:

annotatr: “citeulike+disqus mashup: a place for online journal clubs; Find abstracts and comment on them with your friends.”


Arxiliv: Reddit clone pulling in articles from ArXiv.




Faculty of 1000: “identifies and evaluates the most important articles in biology and medical research publications. Articles are selected by a peer-nominated global 'Faculty' of the world's leading scientists and clinicians”.




Haldane’s Sieve - “Discussing preprints in population and evolutionary ecology”




OpenPub: “We’re launching a website to host scientific preprints alongside open discussion and review. We’re throwing in a reputation system to boot, so authors and readers can better assess the usefulness of reviews and comments. And it’s all going to be done out in the open.”



PaperCritic: “ offers researchers a way of obtaining and providing feedback for each others [sic] work in a fully open and transparent environment.” Heavy Mendeley integration


PaperRater.org: “open review and collaborative reading of research papers”


Rate, tag, and comment papers as they appear on arXiv.

Rate, tag, and comment papers as they appear on arXiv.


Peer Evaluation: “Curate the peer review of your scholarly communications;  make your work visible to scholarly search engines; track the impact & reuse of what you share online; disseminate anywhere and collect all feedback here...” [may go below][This is an interesting question. I’ve used PE as one publication venue for an article that I’d like to get peer reviewed. I also use it just to get feedback on stuff already published in peer-reviewed journals and for stuff like blog posts. So, where does it belong?]


Peerage of Science: Closed to public, access to community via invitation or by submitting a manuscript. Sells access to reviews and evaluation data to publishers, free for scientists.


PubPeer: “a website where open peer review is not intimidating to users, while maintaining the rigor and anonymity of the closed review process currently used by the major journals.”  Centralized database on which all first and last authors of biomedical articles can comment on biomedical articles.  Promoting a post-publication conversation.


PubUp: “an open access online platform for researchers to discover & share journal articles that are worth reading, to discuss scientific ideas that are worth spreading, and to connect with people who share similar interests.            


Rubriq: Closed review, charges authors to submit manuscripts. “As an independent, for-benefit organization, Rubriq can provide rigorous reviews by the same qualified peers who review for journals, but with a standardized scorecard that can be used in any publishing model. Our system will enable faster, more consistent reviews, and will help match papers with the right journals”.


Sympoze: Private, blind, review with votes for reject or accept - ratio between these determines accept, reject, request revisions. Like a journal in some respects. Accepted papers go online (OA), print/ebook for sale. "By crowd-sourcing peer-review, referees need not worry about typing up a detailed referee report. Referees can read the paper and vote for acceptance or rejection and write one or two comments about the paper, instead of an entire report."


SciOR: “Online registry service promoting efficient and accountable open peer review, effective reviewer participation incentives and reputation metrics, and rapid dissemination of discovery in science”.


The Third Reviewer: “a forum for scientists to share opinions about recently published research.” Now defunct as best I can tell


TiNYARM: “TinyARM is a simple tool to share the papers you read with your colleagues. You can suggest papers to your friends and as an extra bonus, you can keep track of what you read, skimmed, planned to read, and got as suggestions.”


Publons: “...a public peer-review platform that enables academics to gain reputation for their reviews.”


Journal Lab: “ database of figure-by-figure comments on published life sciences and biomedical research. Grad students and post-docs contribute by sharing the insights about published data that regularly occur in lab meetings, lunchroom discussions, and journal clubs.”


Publishing portals built around post-publication review

I’ve added this list because these products often get thrown in with the ones above, since they both manage post-publication reviews. There’s a fundamental difference, though: these systems only support review of articles they host themselves. In this way, they’re much closer to traditional publishing, since they put dissemination, archiving, and certification all under one roof.


F1000 Research: “F1000 Research will offer immediate publication; open, post-publication peer review; open revisioning of work including ongoing updates; and encourage raw data deposition and publication....broad range of article formats and content types.”


WebMed Central: “...we publish a range of articles without any prepublication peer review in virtually every biomedical discipline...within 48 hours of submission. WMC encourages scientists and readers to submit their reviews on the published material freely.”

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