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Submission + - PubMed Commons opens up scientific articles to user comments (plos.org)

smegfault writes: In a new trial, PubMed Commons has been released. Until now, post-peer-publication results were restricted to letters to the editor of scientific journals; and even then some journals don't accept letters to the editor. With PubMed Commons, scientific peers can comment on PubMed-indexed articles without the interference of journal editors and peer reviewers. At the moment, eligible for participating are:

Recipients of NIH (US) or Wellcome Trust (UK) grants can go to the NCBI website and register. You need a MyNCBI account, but they are available to the general public. If you are not a NIH or Wellcome Trust grant recipient, you are still eligible to participate if you are listed as an author on any publication listed in PubMed, even a letter to the editor. But you will need to be invited by somebody already signed up for participation in PubMed Commons. So, if you have a qualifying publication, you can simply get a colleague with the grant to sign up and then invite you.

However, reports are in that anyone with a PubMed / NCBI account can sign up on the PubMed home page: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedcommons/join/

Comment Re:correlation (Score 1) 1121

They could have included a neutral (non-framed) condition, so 1) no text on package, 2) "atheist" on package, 3) (random text) on package. Or; since they're trying to confirm the hypothesis that this has something to do with religion, 3) (random text) on package and 4) "In God we trust" on package (or something similar).

Statistics seem fine to me (like person below me said).

Either way, I really like the blue shoes and the price looks good to, I might order me a pair and ask for them to put "KILL ALL CHRISTIANS" on the box.

Comment Sluggish organisations.... (Score 1) 712

The organisation I work for just migrated all staff computers to a new red-orange-green support system. This included complete re-installs of computers.... With clean installs XP. When asked why they didn't install W7 and not have to worry about upgrading all computers next year and inconvenience thousands of users again, they simply said "one step at a time".

Comment Relevance fading (Score 1) 489

A doctorate in literature made sense back in the days when there were people who were actually "famous literary reviewers" like F.R. Leavis. The only literature-based doctorate worth getting is a D.Lit (Hon), and even those are doled out like assault rifles at a Deep South US Supermarket.

All my previous study pals who got an MA in literature ended up jobless or somewhere completely outside of their field of study.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 599

What happens if someone crashed a plane into a working reactor? Probably a lot of damage but nothing very dangerous as power plants have been designed to withstand catastrophes like these (but strangely enough, not for floods taking down backup power like in Japan).

Comment Re:The other reason to charge for submission (Score 1) 128

Science is a human endeavor, and prone to all the failings that humans possess. Stuff does fall through the cracks because it isn't perfect. It just happens to be the best system we've got that, in general and over the course of years, stumbles along towards progress.

Noted and agreed.

If you have a better alternative, please don't keep it a secret.

Passive-aggressive much?

I'll also note that all the counterexamples you list were, eventually, found out through the scientific process and repudiated by their original publishers

Eventually, yes. How many are still out there unrepudiated....? It took The Lancet years to finally retract Wakefield's criminally fraudulent paper. I know some of my colleagues that have tried to get papers down for several reasons, but most attempts just bogged down in an epistolary war of attrition with editors lasting sometimes years.

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