Open and Shut?

Lately it seems I have had way too much opportunity to wax philosophic about the way made forward by the Highway of Light. And again, with the implementation of PloS ONE, there appear the opportunity to speak. Any program which bring the knowledge gained and makes it available to the street for me make a whole lot of sense. With each passing day my crew gets excited all over again about some new which has come down the Highway.
And now, I wax a bit, then wain as today I, ‘Da Boss’, drew the short straw to clean up the shop so the crew catch the last of a 14’ day at the beach:
Each day as we walk the byways and
flash along the highways of light,
there are those who are left
standing, as the march to flight
goes by some to stop and wonder
at the enormous potential at what
has been created.
But others who are left, standing
in a rut at the side of the road,
a rut too soon to become an abyss.

So Then? What to do?

Have said before, too many times to count,
yet shall say again, as often as need be,
until there is clarity in the air:

The time has come to put a fence at the top of the cliff
instead of a net at the bottom:
Thus giving a chance to build a bridge over the abyss.

And I am reminded of a few lines from a very famous song, for PloS ONE is a movement if ever I saw one:

‘And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a
study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I’m
singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar
situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a
situation like that there’s only one thing you can do and that’s walk into
the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say “Shrink, You can get
anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.”. And walk out. You know, if
one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and
they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,
they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in
singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an
organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said
fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and
walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.’ – Arlo Guthrie
[©1966,1967 (Renewed) by Appleseed Music Inc. All Rights Reserved.]

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 ;)