PLoS, Nature and the community backlash

PLoSJust a few days ago, an article by Declan Butler was published in Nature regarding PLoS‘ open-access publishing model. This article was not well accepted by various open access advocates and science bloggers in general.

Johnathan Eisen from The Tree of Life was the first (that I noticed) to responde to the article and then many others followed along the same line.

Shortly after, Timo Hannay posted a “take two” at Nature’s Nascent that seemed to settle things down.

What I find to be the most notorious aspect in this whole string of events is that there is quite a large community of science bloggers that are ready to offer their “peer-review” in situations such as these. Is this a good thing? I would like to believe so…

Anyhow, I’ve only mentioned a few of the reactions. You can find plenty more reactions over at Bora’s Blog Around the Clock.

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Posted by Ricardo Vidal

Ricardo Vidal is a graduate student in Biological Engineering at University of Algarve (Portugal) and is also currently the Community Developer at OpenWetWare.
He also maintains a personal blog called My Biotech Life.

I was just looking at the numbers of readers looking at these various posts. Compared to other events that seem to spark a lot of interest, this PLoS/open access discussion is drawing VERY little attention. Lots of people commenting, but not a lot of regular readers reading or looking.