On 2014 Feb 03, George McNamara commented:

Prof. Couchman's editorial for this issue included this paragraph on PubMed Commons:

"However, undaunted, PubMed Commons has been launched, at least in trial format (as of October 2013). This allows anyone with an account to add comments to any article that is lodged with PubMed. This therefore includes JHC content. It will be interesting to see how this feature evolves. Naturally, the aim is constructive discourse and the rules make clear what constitutes unacceptable activity, which may be removed. The question is whether added comments will be useful or subject to misuse and, indeed, if this commentary is “peer” reviewed. Will comments be applied to papers by contributors with real expertise in the area? In addition, will authors of papers that are listed in PubMed check regularly to see who is attaching comments and respond? I have to confess that I am not sure this will be a high priority for me."

John and readers - I have used PubMed Commons to comment on several papers, including updates on some of my own. At this point, evolution is not needed here - use is!

With respect to the reproducibility in the title, it is the responsibility of the authors to provide full and correct details on what they did to generate the data, and calculate the statistics, that went into their work. It is unrealistic for peer reviewers to go through the manuscript or data to look for bad data or bad judgement. These are things the authors should deal with as they are doing their experiments, presenting/discussing their data in their lab meetings, at department seminars, retreats, poster sessions (would help if scientists visited posters at poster sessions), before the work is packaged into a manuscript.

I also recommend that all journals should encourage - even demand - that all the data that underlies a peer reviewed manuscript be available as Open Data in a public repository(ies). Having all the data available lets anyone check it out. GenBank has been "standard of care" for DNA sequence data for years.

For another recent editorial on this topic, see M. McNutt 2014 Reproducibility. Science 343(6168):229. doi: 10.1126/science.1250475. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24436391

On 2014 Feb 03, George McNamara commented:

Prof. Couchman's editorial for this issue included this paragraph on PubMed Commons:

"However, undaunted, PubMed Commons has been launched, at least in trial format (as of October 2013). This allows anyone with an account to add comments to any article that is lodged with PubMed. This therefore includes JHC content. It will be interesting to see how this feature evolves. Naturally, the aim is constructive discourse and the rules make clear what constitutes unacceptable activity, which may be removed. The question is whether added comments will be useful or subject to misuse and, indeed, if this commentary is “peer” reviewed. Will comments be applied to papers by contributors with real expertise in the area? In addition, will authors of papers that are listed in PubMed check regularly to see who is attaching comments and respond? I have to confess that I am not sure this will be a high priority for me."

John and readers - I have used PubMed Commons to comment on several papers, including updates on some of my own. At this point, evolution is not needed here - use is!

With respect to the reproducibility in the title, it is the responsibility of the authors to provide full and correct details on what they did to generate the data, and calculate the statistics, that went into their work. It is unrealistic for peer reviewers to go through the manuscript or data to look for bad data or bad judgement. These are things the authors should deal with as they are doing their experiments, presenting/discussing their data in their lab meetings, at department seminars, retreats, poster sessions (would help if scientists visited posters at poster sessions), before the work is packaged into a manuscript.

I also recommend that all journals should encourage - even demand - that all the data that underlies a peer reviewed manuscript be available as Open Data in a public repository(ies). Having all the data available lets anyone check it out. GenBank has been "standard of care" for DNA sequence data for years.

For another recent editorial on this topic, see M. McNutt 2014 Reproducibility. Science 343(6168):229. doi: 10.1126/science.1250475. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24436391