Post-publication (post-pub) peer review is one of the hottest topics in science today. Post-pub review means review of the scientific literature after papers come out. Post-pub review can take place on websites dedicated to it such as F1000 or PubPeer as well as on various blogs and even via comments on PubMed.
In our first poll, please indicate your view on post-pub review.
Then if you generally have a positive view of it, please indicate the main reason in the 2nd poll.
Or if you generally have a negative view of it, please indicate the main reason in the third poll.
If you don’t see your reason in either case please leave a comment.
In the “positive why?”, “all of the above” would be an attractive last option!
Very positive about the potential, serious cultural change needed as well though – discussed here in an editorial at PLOS Medicine: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/metrics/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001772
Reasons for my positive outlook include all of the points you mention here. But, as I couldn’t make multiple choices, I settled for the “publication error” bit. Let me add that I read law at university and was in finance for most of my working life; my knowledge of biology doesn’t go beyond high school biology of 1960’s! Stem cells were unheard of then.
Post-publication reviews on PubPeer or similar sites seems to work well for exposing fabrication/falsification/plagiarism (FFP) or other gross errors. Of course if the referees and editors did their jobs better this wouldn’t be necessary.
Pubpeer and the like don’t seem to be a useful forum for serious substantive discussions of published work, because of the fragmentation (many short comments, not really citeable) and anonymity.
It’s interesting that PubPeer has really taken off in some fields (e.g., biological science) but hasn’t really gotten any traction in other fields (e.g., my field, geophysics). It’s not clear to me why this is the case.