Peer Review: ALTERNATIVE

[Keith Robison]

William Tivol (tivol at news.wadsworth.org) wrote:
: Keith Robison (robison at lipid.harvard.edu) wrote:

: [snip]
: : Another growing mechanism to increase the volume of feedback
: : on articles is the on-line letters section ...

: Dear Keith,
: 	How about the possibility of setting up ad hoc chat groups if the
: on-line feedback reaches a certain level?  Has this been done; do you think
: it is a good idea?

Well, I think bionet.journals.notes might catch such stuff; there
was also an attempt on bionet.microbiology to have a regular journal
club (I haven't been over there lately, don't know it's status).

What it mostly takes is someone initiating the discussion by posting
to a relevant group, and being patient about many such postings
going unanswered (I attempted a few times on sci.bio.evolution,
which is a very high-quality, moderated newsgroup).

Just one last note on this topic.  Science magazine's on-line site
has had places to put feedback on selected articles (for example,
Maynard Olsen's "let's sequence the human genome ASAP" opinion
piece).  

Keith Robison
Harvard University
Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology
Department of Genetics 

robison at mito.harvard.edu