Dave and Co. are trying to figure out a way to institute a universal icon that everyone could use on top of their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary on a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal and contains a link to the paper itself (and not just a press release or media commentary).
What do you think? Leave your ideas, questions and responses in the comment thread there.
I like the idea! I just left a comment on Cognitive Daily with an idea that links the icon to a citation on a site aggregating the commentaries of others. It occurs to me that, as a reader of blogs, what I would find most useful is a way to find other commentaries by the same blogger, blog or in the same field.
Yes, sounds like an excellent idea. Chemical blogspace [1] and Postgenomic.com [2] contain many blogs that on a more than regular basis blog about serious (peer-reviewed) science [3], and there even is some markup to identify reviews of research articles [4], but an icon like this will make things more clear to the reader who just sees the web browser window. BTW, the other way around already exists: show on journal webpages which blog items comment on the articles [5] (the userscript can be downloaded from [6]).
1.http://cb.openmolecules.net/
2.http://www.postgenomic.com/
3.http://cb.openmolecules.net/papers.php?area=papers
4.http://chemicalblogspace.blogspot.com/2007/05/special-markup-howto-1.ht…
5.http://chemicalblogspace.blogspot.com/2007/03/jacs-toc-featuring-your-r…
6.http://blueobelisk.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Using_Javascript_and_…
Hi Bora, I think Euans idea, something like postgenomic markup is a good idea. A DOI is a good indicator of scientific content (e.g. a commentary on a paper)