Why I have a problem with BPR3

January 24, 2008

The recent, formal, launch of BPR3.org was somewhat timely given my recent posts on the future of scientific publishing and Jon Udell’s post on the disconnect between peer-reviewed publications and blogs.

BPR3 is not a bad idea at all. In a way, it’s not that different from a microformat or hashtag. That is probably the source of my first disagreement, although I could be wrong here (correct me someone if I am). To the best of my knowledge, BPR3 does not use standard microformats or something like RDFa. I am getting increasingly convinced that we need to develop and follow a small set of internet data portability standards (e.g. the stack being promoted by dataportability.org). IMO, even scientific microformats should be developed and promoted in the context of the larger web, not some special scientific web.

However, here is the larger problem I have. From the About page

BPR3 allows readers to easily find blog posts about serious peer-reviewed research, instead of just news reports and press releases.

I am fine with the need to find blog posts about serious research, but given what we’ve been talking about recently, it’s equating serious with peer review that I have a problem with. It takes us back to the world we want to change. Serious science goes beyond peer-reviewed publications, and we shouldn’t be keeping the status quo, we should be smashing it. I am well aware that peer-reviewed literature is the gold standard and that’s fine, but the problems are with the implicit undertone of what serious research is all about. Are you telling me that Jean-Claude Bradley’s Usefulchem is not serious research until it goes through peer review in the classic sense?

YMMV

Further reading
The onslaught against scientific publication
Continuing the open science conversation

Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Open Science, Publishing, Science

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Comments

8 Responses to “Why I have a problem with BPR3”

Dave Munger on January 24th, 2008 9:27 am

While we don’t use microformats or hashtags, we do use the COinS metadata standard, which is quite widely applied. We’d certainly be interested in learning more about microformats and how they might be applied to our project. Feel free to comment on the BPR3 blog or to write a post here about how you feel we should use these additional standards.

I agree with you that Serious Peer Reviewed, but we had to start somewhere. I think it would be cool to add an open science / open laboratory module to researchblogging.org.
Egon Willighagen on January 24th, 2008 9:46 am

I had the impression that it applied to blog posts which *review* peer-reviewed science… but not so much are peer-reviewed in itself…

So, if I would do my reviewing of a published paper well (fairly discuss it, provide arguments etc), I am allowed to put up the BPR3 logo, which will trigger the aggregation on that new website of theirs…

This seems different from what I understand you just explained you thought it to be…

(Mmm… “the executions” is the CAPTCHA… is the system getting more radical?)
Jean-Claude Bradley on January 24th, 2008 9:51 am

Well different people will have different opinions about the “seriousness” or “value” or “validity” of our scientific information. What really counts is the opinion of people who want to make direct use of that information to do a reaction. And that is where the availability of the raw data comes in to convince the researcher.

It was good that we had a chance to discuss this issue a few times at the science blogging conference.
Deepak Singh on January 24th, 2008 10:30 am

Dave,

Didn’t know about the COinS support. That’s great. I also appreciate that we have to start somewhere and peer-reviewed research is an established place to start.

Here is why I sound somewhat negative, and it probably comes down to where I stand on the whole “framing science” debate as well. To me the web is all about discovery. Discovery is driven by links and by “findability”. By adopting web standards and linking to sources of good information, automatically, good information bubbles to the top. In other words, people are unlikely to find good information just because of the BPR3 icon, but rather because of how well it ranks on Google, etc. What would be good is to work with search engine providers and either the W3C or microformats folk to come up with some tags/semantic markup, that enables this findability.

My fear is that by labeling research and identifying sources of good information, we run the risk of elitism and that separate science web. I understand the motivation completely. Just not sure if we are taking the right approach to solving it. That I think comes from bloggers (sciencebloggers) understanding the web and using it properly. Put the right markup, add the right reviews, allow aggregators and memetrackers to find you and the good information will be available to people. At that point if the information has a BPR3 icon, that’s well and good, since that’s one symbol of credibility.

Hope I am making some sense.
Deepak Singh on January 24th, 2008 10:34 am

Egon

You are quite right. The BPR3 icon is a means to aggregate blog reviews of peer-reviewed research. As I said, I love little microformats like that in general. I just think that we should work with the general web community (perhaps BPR3 could become a larger standard over time) and that reviewing research should not be limited to peer-reviewed publications.
Rich Apodaca on January 24th, 2008 12:24 pm

Deepak, great find. I registered for the site and retrofitted one of my posts to work with BPR3 (below).

I think this service is a good idea, but noticed a pretty big opportunity to improve it.

Most of the papers I work with have DOIs. In fact, the availablility of a DOI says some important things about the publisher, and therefore the content of the article. The presence of a DOI may actually offer one way to separate the “gray literature” from the “traditional literature.”

BPR3 recognizes DOIs - very good.

Unfortunately, BPR3 doesn’t just scan your blog for DOIs - it requires you as a blogger to:

(1) log into the BPR3 website
(2) paste your DOI into a form
(3) press a button to generate a code
(4) copy the code
(5) go to your blog and insert the code

This may be the only way to make the system work - but it seems unlikely.

Much better would be a system that automatically scans an RSS feed for links to the domain dx.doi.org, extracts the article metadata based on the encoded DOI, and updates its database accordingly.

In other words, the ideal system, aside from an initial registration, shouldn’t require me to do anything I’m not already doing.
alf on January 24th, 2008 5:28 pm

Rich: I seem to be saying this a lot lately, but Postgenomic already does exactly what you’re talking about. The extra step that BPR3 adds is that you’re declaring you’re making a serious statement about a piece of peer-reviewed literature, rather than just linking to a paper.

As for how BPR3 should use standard microformats to markup blog posts, it’s as simple as this: http://hublog.hubmed.org/archives/001595.html (use rel-tag to identify BPR3, and rev=”review” on the link to the paper).
Pedro Beltrao on January 24th, 2008 6:59 pm

I’ll be repeating myself but what I don’t like about BPR3 has more to do with fragmentation of attention. It would be great to have a place like techmeme for science where a large fraction of science bloggers, scientists and maybe even journalists would read about the latest science news. The more aggregators there are the harder it will be to have a large network effect kicking in.