I am an advocate of anything open (open source, open media, open standards, open access, etc). I was happy when the scientific journal Nature announced that it will use an open peer review model. But Wall Street Journal reports that Nature has given up on this approach. The reason? Lack of participation. it is sad that scientific community is not supportive of such an “open effort”.
But Nature, which is published by a unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., said in an editorial in Thursday’s issue that it was ending the experiment due to lack of participation. The journal found that in the competitive world of scientific publishing, the vast majority of authors were unwilling to post their papers and few scientists were willing to criticize their peers’ work publicly by posting comments on Nature’s Web site.
