PubPeer failed to convince a Michigan judge last week that they should be able to keep the identity of one of their commenters confidential. Here’s another installment of PubPeer Selections:
- “The American Chemical Society is truly embarrassing itself in publishing such a terrible study, which is being referred to by practitioning homeopaths to support their beliefs,” says Jim Woodgett in a comment mirrored from PubMed Commons about a paper in Langmuir.
- “Although our statistical results and conclusions were accurate as published, there were errors in the numbering of the axes for the open field plots,” write the first and last authors of a recent Cell paper. “We are in the process of correcting this via an erratum, and appreciate your bringing them to our attention.”
- “Thanks to Pubpeer, we have noticed an error in our published article,” write the authors of a 2001 paper. “We had already contacted with the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the editors have agreed to publish the corrected version of Figure 3A in our JBC article.”
- A Cell paper on CRISPR generates a detailed and constructive discussion.
- “Peers who bring up issues need to be accountable for their posts,” argues a commenter on a Cancer Research paper.
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I noticed an error in one of my manuscripts the other day. I notified the editor of the BMC journal, and it turned out I had the option of an erratum and a “comment” in the journal. I suppose the option of using a comment is there to increase turnaround, but my concern is whether or not such comments will follow the manuscript when people get manuscripts from PubMed or Google Scholar.
The option to leave a comment to correct an article should only be available for very minor issues, such as typos. I think this is also the official BMC policy.
An erratum in a BMC journal will be included on PubMed as a note associated with both the summary and the abstract. On Google Scholar, an erratum appears as a separate publication; I don’t see any obvious link from the original entry. Comments appear only on the journal website.
An editorial on the Olivier Voinnet papers being questioned at PubPeer has just been published by Leonid Schneider:
http://www.labtimes.org/editorial/e_594.lasso