Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting

 
Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting is a fledgling organization that's going to try and impose some standards on the reporting of peer-reviewed papers by bloggers. Here's their mission statement at [BPR3.org].

Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting strives to identify serious academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research by developing an icon and an aggregation site where others can look to find the best academic blogging on the Net.

The idea is to list all blog posts about peer-reviewed scientific literature on one site (with an RSS feed) and to identify all such blogs with a copyrighted icon.

What's the point of that, you might ask? Well, it's because BPR3 wants to impose some sort of standards on the blogging community. Here's how Dave Munger describes it on the BPR3.org website.

Here’s how I imagine we might handle this issue:

• Credentialling of blog authors is probably a bad idea — some expert bloggers have good reasons for being anonymous, and there are many blogs run by graduate students, journalists, and others without PhDs that offer thoughtful commentary on peer-reviewed literature


• Instead, we could have bloggers register their blogs here. Then we will (eventually) have an aggregation system which will allow links to those blogs’ posts about peer-reviewed research to appear on this site.


• If a blog appears to be abusing the system, either by not meeting our definition of peer review, or not commenting thoughtfully on the article, then readers could alert us and we could remove them from the list of registered blogs. How exactly would that process work? We’re open for suggestions.


• A secondary process could be used to combat abuse of the icon itself (whether or not the blog is actually aggregated here). This would require BPR3 to maintain copyright of the icon, so that we could deny permission to use the icon to those who abuse it. Again, we’d love to hear suggestions about how that might work.

Any other ideas/suggestions? Let us know in the comments.

I write a lot of articles about peer-reviewed research so this is right up my alley. I've got to say right up front that I'm not very enthusiastic about the proposal. Any attempt to impose order on the blogging community is doomed from the start, in my opinion. Furthermore, I don't see any advantage for most bloggers. What's in it for them?

We already have a sort of system that mimics this "peer review" of blog articles. It's the various carnivals that are published every week (see my list in the sidebar). The idea is that the carnival moderator will pick the best of the blog articles that have appeared recently and collect them on a single site. You can judge for yourself whether this has been a remarkable success over the years. From my perspective the quality of the articles in most carnivals varies enormously and I've no reason to suspect that the same won't happen on the BPR3 site.

What does everyone here think? Is this an idea that's going to work?