BPR3

I’ll quickly mention BPR3, which looks like it could be an interesting site. It’s an extension of an idea used at Cognitive Daily. The plan is to create a recognisable icon for use at any blog when blogging about peer-reviewed research. The BPR3, Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting, website will also probably aggregate these blog posts.

There’s already discussion on site. One recurring worry at BPR3 and Cognitive Daily is that there’s plenty of good research which doesn’t come through the traditional journal channels. However, the aim is not to ring-fence reporting on peer-reviewed research, simply to highlight it. Despite being wary of some peer-reviewed articles that’s something I could support. I don’t know if publication by press-release is increasing, or whether I’m just noticing it more, but it aids stories which the news media think is important rather than something I perhaps would choose important. An example of this would be the Smith and Burke paper on teaching Archaeological Theory. It’s certainly worthy of attention, but I can’t see a media outlet pushing it.

A particularly interesting aspect of the BPR3 project is that while it’s instigated by science bloggers, they’re looking to accept material from across all sorts of academic disciplines. This raises questions about what peer-review means and if a single template can be applied. For instance one commentator has argued that there should be a link to a DOI so the paper can be consulted. This simply isn’t feasible for many Humanities journals because they’re still not online – and even if they are they don’t always use DOI to identify a paper. Nonetheless I would say that linking to a DOI is a good idea should one exist.

BPR3 is potentially a Very Good Thing. It won’t turn blogs into monotone commentary on officially approved research, because bloggers cannot help but blog about kittens, personality tests and amusing videos, but if it helps make commentary on interesting articles more visible then it could become the basis of very useful search engine.