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Graduate students take note: 'crowd-sourcing' is the new way to get grunt work done. In a project to evaluate the usefulness of online comments on scientific publications, the NPG


web-publishing department turned to — who else — Internet surfers. NPG web-software developer Euan Adie is heading up the project, which takes data borrowed with permission from _PLoS ONE_,


one of the first journals to allow online commenting on its papers when it launched in December 2006. By categorizing the comments left by readers of all _PLoS ONE_ papers published up until


August 2008, the team hopes to gain an idea of how to make online commenting more effective (http://tinyurl.com/bu4xmh). A monumental task for Adie alone, he asked for help: “If you can


read and understand a scientific abstract then we need you to help make the publishing world more science 2.0 friendly. Thirty seconds, five minutes, half an hour — whatever you can spare.”


His experiment was a success — 1,411 comments were categorized by 818 users to generate 10,516 data points within 10 days. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION VISIT NAUTILUS FOR REGULAR NEWS RELEVANT TO


_NATURE_ AUTHORS → HTTP://BLOGS.NATURE.COM/NAUTILUS AND SEE PEER-TO-PEER FOR NEWS FOR PEER REVIEWERS AND ABOUT PEER REVIEW → HTTP://BLOGS.NATURE.COM/PEER-TO-PEER . RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS


Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE From the Blogosphere. _Nature_ 457, 933 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/7232933c Download citation * Published: 18 February 2009


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