When a paper is challenged on PubPeer, is a journal paying attention? A new feature recently unveiled by the site makes it easier to find out. The Journal Dashboards allow journals to see what people are saying about the papers they published, and allows readers to know which journals are particularly responsive to community feedback. We spoke with co-founder Brandon Stell to get more information.
Retraction Watch: Can you briefly describe the Journal dashboards and how they work?
The dashboards are a collection of features that we created to make it easier for journal editors to track and react to comments on their journal. The dashboards allow journals to create teams whose members receive immediate alerts to new PubPeer comments. They will also be able to access other information such as statistics of commenting trends across the journal. Specialized searches will also be available. At the moment the dashboards are available to journal editors only but we hope to offer a similar service for institutions in the near future.
RW: What prompted PubPeer to create the Journal dashboards?
Journals have contacted us over the years to request a mechanism to more efficiently find comments from PubPeer users. As we started building that for them we wondered if they might interact a bit more with the PubPeer community if we gave them access to more information and better tools. Also, from our perspective, there are journals–JCI and EMBO come to mind immediately–that seem to take problems with their articles much more seriously than some other journals. We have been looking for different ways to make that more apparent to everyone and the dashboards allow us to do it by showing which editors care enough about the community’s reaction to their articles to subscribe to alerts. We will show that with badges next to the journals that subscribe to dashboards.
