Hi Chris,

For starters, I think PLoS ONE is a tremendously good idea, thanks for doing it. In the interview Richard presses you a bit on how you’ll get scientists to submit papers to PLoS ONE, but I was more curious about how you will build up a community of editors/reviewers/annotators? What is the incentive for scientists to take the time to provide this feedback?

I’ll provide my personal bias: I think there would probably be enough scientists who would be sufficiently excited by scientific debate about an article (starting with the authors!) that it might get things off the ground. However, it would likely make a huge difference if you could build a more formal incentive into the system. Something along the lines of Slashdot ‘Karma’ ratings (e.g., associated with my PLoS ONE persona would be some sort of rating of my comments/annotations). If this was rigorous enough, maybe you could even get funding agencies/universities to consider it when making decisions. Since there seems to be only one sort of currency in science right now (published papers), it is tough to encourage scientists to spend their time on anything else.

Also, if you build up this great interface for tagging, annotating, and discussing articles, have you considered opening it up to articles that are not published on PLoS ONE? This might be one way to “bootstrap” a community of editors before there is significant PLoS ONE content up on the site. You might have to start with only OA articles to allow the annotation tools to work, but that would still be a significant amount of substrate for people to get excited about commenting on.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks,
Jason Kelly

Disclaimer: I’m involved in OpenWetWare so am already very excited about how the internet influences the way science operates, but I think my optimism about PLoS ONE is representative of the average scientist anyway ;)