Nature’s Nascent blog has a call for volunteers to help evaluate abstracts and comments on PLoS ONE, the Public Library of Science:
I agree with Deepak’s assessment:
Is the commenting on PLoS ONE at a level that we hoped it would be? Not quite. Is it as bad as some might like to believe? Not quite.
… in the best possible way. Considering how alien the concept of commenting on a paper online is to most scientists PLoS should be pleased with their efforts.By categorizing comments we should be able to better understand what kind of comments get left and responded to and hopefully we can get a better idea of how they should be encouraged and presented. I’ll make the results publicly available once they’ve all been processed.
If you think you can speak science and have a few minutes to spare, go to PLoS ONE’s comment categorization page at http://ploscomments.appspot.com/ and lend a hand. Future generations of researchers (and the current one, too) will thank you.