Pharma Blog Watch

PLoS Experiment (In the Pipeline)
In his blog, Derek Lowe writes about PLoS One, a new "international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication from the Public Library of Science (PLoS)," according to its website. "It is a fairly radical publishing move, establishing something that's part preprint server, part refereed journal and part user-ranked content site," he writes. "Papers can be submitted in just about any area of science, and will be checked to make sure that they're methodologically sound — that is, that their conclusions can reasonably be drawn from the evidence that they present."

"You can leave comments on any aspect of any paper, and as long as they're presented reasonably, they're in to stay," he continues. "The more comments/recommendations a paper gets, the more attention it will continue to draw. And (although they're not enabling this yet), there will be a ranking system, where readers can assign scores to each paper they've read, with visible aggregated ratings: science meets Slashdot."

"I think that this will be a critical-mass phenomenon — if enough papers get annotated and ranked, it'll become the norm. And if not, these features might wither on the vine, which would be a shame," he concludes. "Let the experiment begin!"