So my previous post on peer review hit a nerve. Actually all of my posts on peer review hit a nerve and create massive traffic spikes and I’m still really unsure why. The strength of feeling around peer review seems out of all proportion to both its importance and indeed the extent to which people understand how it works in practice across different disciplines.

A thought sparked off by a comment from Maxine Clarke at Nature Networks where she posted a link to a post by David Crotty. The thing that got me thinking was Maxine’ statement: Alright, in isolation this doesn’t look like much, read through both David’s post and the comments, and then come back to Maxine’s,Â

As I mentioned a couple of weeks or so ago I’ve been playing around with Friendfeed. This is a ‘lifestreaming’ web service which allows you to aggregate ‘all’ of the content you are generating on the web into one place (see here for mine). This is interesting from my perspective because it maps well onto our ideas about generating multiple data streams from a research lab.

Another post prompted by an exchange of comments on Neil Saunder’s blog. The discussion here started about the somewhat arbitrary nature of what does and does not get counted as ‘worthy contributions’ in the research community.