PUBLONS

The article by Van Noorden (1) regarding Preston and co's Publons venture is, certainly, an interesting development and, in principle, a fair one. It will certainly re-open the crediting debate, especially in an era where Academy and research institutes are asked to be more accountable for research outputs and researchers' credit if they want to receive public funding.

Still, it is a debate riddled with controversy, and I expect 'big-guns' reviewers holding back and remaining anonymous for reasons similar to those given by Jobling and Mishra.

One aspect of Publons' future that begs to be tracked is whether the reviews that are eventually uploaded by recognizable reviewers will end up perpetuating the publication bias that hit the news recently (2)--ie, only those reviews of papers successfully published and, especially, those which required non-controversial amendments to start with, will be the most frequently uploaded onto the site.

---Jose Perezgonzalez (Massey University)---

(1) Richard Van Noorden. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2014.16102

(2) Mark Peplow. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15787