Every scientific journal nowadays has a web-listing with a lot of useful links added to each abstract page, like citing and related articles. This features are among commodities for almost any web-publishing service.  Many news websites or other political or economic magazines allow, or even actively solicit, comments from their readers on their websites. This feature is (deliberately) absent for scientific publications.

I am wondering, why? I discussed this issue with a few senior researchers and a publisher. They were all against allowing web-comments. That describes why it has not yet happened, but I am not yet convinced that it is impossible. Here, I list a few of their reasons and some thought of my own.

Quality and Credibility: One major concern about web-comments is their quality. The level of discussion must be kept high, unless a good comment will be hidden among thousands of mere “opinions” of “professional comment writers” who comment on everything. Even on very popular blogs, more than fifty comments is often not followed anymore.

Read more... (535 words, estimated 2:08 minutes reading time)