Faculty of a Million?
| 1 April, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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Apparently, the two self-proclaimed ‘top’ scientific journals, Nature and Science, have ended their hundreds of years-old feud and teamed up to launch a new journal, to be called either Scientific Nature or Natural Science, depending on the result of a text-message vote by the scientific community.
Sounds good? Well, not really. We’re a bit upset that they’re also creating a social networking site called ‘Faculty of a Million’, funded by a grant from Facebook, where scientists can vote papers for acceptance by pressing a “Like” thumbs-up button or reject the paper by pressing a “Dislike” button. Our company lawyer has just had an apoplectic fit.
And this seems to be a direct invasion of privacy:
readers will have the option of Skyping authors directly to share their thoughts and feelings about a paper simply by clicking that author’s name. As an added incentive, the first 100 new subscribers will get free genome scans.
It’s a nice cover though:
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April Fool!
Aw Patrick, you gave the game away!
Do you have more details on Faculty of a million? It would seem they’ve gone with a BETTER approach – opening the reviews up to millions of scientist where as F1000 seems like a closed community where only thousands participate.
Thanks for the great information on a new community – I’ll have to check out Natural Science and their new Faculty of a Million product. It sounds quite powerful as it will be powered by a much larger community than F1000. I’m going to forward the link to Faculty of a Million to my friends so they can join and participate. Thanks for the great news of an open paper review site. I love finding new places to get my information.
That’s right Brian–because it’s obvious that millions of people have more expert knowledge! Just like Wikipedia.