Do You Blog About Peer-Reviewed Research?

If so, you'll be interested in today's announcement from BPR3 (Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting):

We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news article or press release.

Within a month, these blog posts will also be aggregated here, so everyone can go to one place to locate the most serious, thoughtful analysis and commentary on the web.

But we encourage you to start using the icons now. They're gorgeous, and they clearly alert readers to the posts that bloggers have thought the most about, and worked the hardest to create. Here they are [above], in six different versions.

Click here to get the code for the icons, here for the guidelines on how to use them, and here to see who's already using them. I've added the icon to a few of my old posts:

Although there are certainly plenty of examples of quality science reporting to be found in the media, so much of it seems to be based on press releases and, at best, abstracts. However, many science bloggers regularly--or at least occasionally--parse through the peer-reviewed literature to bring undiluted science to their readers. BPR3, spearheaded by Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily and others, seeks to add some order to these efforts by offering a standardized icon for bloggers to include in posts and by aggregating links to these posts in one location. It's a good idea, and it looks like a lot of effort and feedback has gone into making this happen, so if you blog about peer-reviewed research, I'd encourage you to participate as well.

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I have to say after almost two weeks of back and forth, it seems like Postgenomic is already doing what they're trying to do, and they've(or he's) got a slick service that you can use now. I don't understand why they're trying to reinvent the wheel when they could just get on the (fairly nice, actually) bandwagon.

I think the advantage of BRP3 is that it allows bloggers to self-identify blogging on peer-reviewed research with a standardized icon.