Commenting on PubMed: A Successful Pilot
From the post:
We are pleased to announce that PubMed Commons is here to stay! After developing and piloting the core commenting system for PubMed, a pilot of journal clubs was added. And we have completed a major internal evaluation of the use of the Commons. We aim to publish that soon, so stay tuned to this blog or Twitter for news on that.
PubMed Commons provides a forum for scientific discourse that is integrated with PubMed, a major database of citations to the biomedical literature. Any author of a publication in PubMed is eligible to join and post comments to any citation.
More than 9,500 authors have joined PubMed Commons – and they have posted over 4,000 comments to more than 3,300 publications, mostly on recent publications. Commenting has plateaued, so the volume is low. But the value of comments has remained high. And comments often attract a lot of attention.
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Completely contrary behavior that media outlets have found for comments. Time To Rebrand Comments [The Rise of Editors?].
From Andrew Losowsky’s post:
It’s time to stop using the c-word. “The comment section” has moved in people’s minds from being an empty box on a website into a viper-filled pit of hell. We need to start again. We need to do better.
This change is necessary because most publishers haven’t understood the value of their communities and so have starved them of resources. We all know what happened next: Trolls and abusers delighted in placing the worst of their words beneath the mastheads of respectable journalism, and overwhelmed the conversation. “Don’t read the comments” became a mantra.
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A “viper-filled pit of hell,” isn’t what the PubMed Commons Team encountered.
What’s the difference?
I haven’t even thought out an A/B test but some differences on the surface are:
- In order to comment, you have to be an author listed in PubMed or be invited by an author in PubMed.
- You need an My NCBI account in addition to the invitation.
- Comments can be moderated.
Some news outlets may reject qualification to comment, lack of anonymity and moderation in exchange for the creation of high-quality comments and communities around subject areas.
But, then not everyone want to be Fox News. Yes?