Thumbs Up For Post-Pub Review in Poll; Dissenters Fault “Gotcha” Mentality

Post-Pub ReviewI recently started a poll on this blog asking for people’s views of post-publication (post-pub) review.

Post-pub review includes a wide range of formats of reviews of scientific publications that occurs, as the name suggests, happens after the paper in question is published. In contrast, of course, peer review of papers happens before publication.

Post-pub review is becoming increasingly common today in science, but it is so new that there is a range of views on it. I wanted to sample people’s views of it at this time.

I also included follow up polls asking why the respondents were either positively or negatively inclined to post-pub review.

Post-Pub Review

The results for far with more than 150 votes cast in the main poll are overwhelmingly positive.

Approximately two out of three respondents indicated a positive or very positive view of post-pub review.

Only 23% of voters indicated a negative view.

About 12-13% were on the fence.

For folks with the strongest views on post-pub review those indicating “very positive” out-numbered the “very negative” by a striking 7-fold margin.

Post-Pub Review

When I asked why people were positively inclined toward post-pub review there was a range of views, but the largest vote getter was “facilitates rapid, more open discussion”.

Some people indicated that if given the choice they would have voted “all of the above”.

When I polled as to why those who were negatively inclined toward post-pub review felt that way, the vast majority of respondents chose “generally too negative with “gotcha” mentality” at 64%.

I am generally a supporter of post-pub review and I do on occasion review published papers on this blog (you can see a summary of the papers I have reviewed or written about after they were published here with links to the reviews).

This doesn’t mean that post-pub review is perfect and it does at times focus on negative aspects of papers, but overall it serves an important role in science and it does make possible more open, rapid discussion of papers and science.

One of the