When I initiated bionet.journals.note with the support of various publishing houses in 1994 I had high hopes. Unfortunately, I was unable to monitor and reject junk postings and, as can be viewed here, the quality and frequency of postings have deteriorated over the years. However, in case you are new to this area, please note that some of the aspired functions of bionet.journals.note can now be found in the pages of The Scholarly Kitchen, which is run by folk connected with the publishing industry, and is carefully monitored.
The publishing industry has also established COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), which, as its title suggests, also has the potential to serve some of the aspired functions of bionet.journals.note.
Another promising avenue was provided by PubMed Commons that was established by the NCBI (National Center for Biological Information at the NIH, USA) in 2013. This allowed post-publication peer-review by certified, non-anonymous, volunteers from the scientific community. Unfortunately, after 5 years of often quite excellent postings, recently this fell by the wayside. A promising replacement that is slowly evolving is PubPeer, which is privately funded, requires no certification, and allows anonymity.
Nevertheless, it would be nice if there were someone out there who might reinvigorate bionet.journals.note and establish a board of monitors, who might take turns in monitoring postings.
Donald R. Forsdyke,
Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences,
Queen's University, Canada
