Increasingly wondering what publishers do for science and research

It seems that researchers are increasingly using Open Acesss (OA) platforms like Arxiv or Nature Precedings to disseminate their work. Authors often submit their pre-print manuscript version to these sites or to in-house depositories, for example Enlighten at the University of Glasgow. Researchers are at least encouraged to do this by funding bodies and research institutions.
This often means that the article is in circulation before the publisher's nicely formatted version (see for example, Rod's Elsevier Grand Challenge Paper) and begs the question "What do the publishers do for research and the scientific process?".
Ten years ago, it was easy to see the role that publishers had, they disseminated your work by convincing libraries and individuals to subscribe to their journals. In this way, your research had a chance to be seen on a few library shelves across the world after a few months of format checking and page layout with the publisher. But now, the worldwide web does that for you and does it immediately!
O.K., publishers do play an important role in the review process. They make sure they get a famous and qualified editorial board who select good papers for review and choose good reviewers for the job. This increases the impact of the journal and so feeds back into the status of the journal and the publishers. But increasingly, this seems to be the only thing that publishers are providing and could be done by other institutions like universities.
It seems that publishers have caught onto the fact that things are changing fast and they need to do something about it. One solution is to enrich the readers experience of a paper if he reads it on the publishers website as opposed to the pre-print pdf version in these OA archives. This, I think, was the idea behind the Elsevier Grand Challenge and perhaps behind the PLoS Hub for Biodiversity . There is no doubt that we are in need of better ways of finding research and data with the ever increasing number of publications to keep up with.

A way to improve the commenting system on publications

I was chatting to Rod a few days ago about his visit to CalAcademy for a Plos markup meeting and our disucssion strayed onto the commenting system of publications like Plos and the Biomed Central Journals. I was saying to him that I had left a few comments both as an individual and as a member of the molecular ecology discussion group in the department (not that I can remember the journal or the narture of the comments anymore) and that I had never received a response or feedback from the authors of the manuscript. Additionally, it isn't possible for me to get a list of the comments that I have left. Rod suggested that really what these sites needed was a way
to credit readers and commentors of the articles in a similar way to Disqus. Disqus is great, because all the comments you make on a range of different blogs and sites can all be accessed at Disqus, you can manage them yourself, edit them and delete them. You are in control of what
you have written. You can also see all the responses to your comments. Additionally, you get credits from fellow commentors for the comments and ideas that you put forward. It would be great if you could have the same level of control over the comments you leave on manuscripts at Plos and Biomed Central.
So I wrote a quick email to the guys over at Biomed Central:

Hi,
I was wondering whether there was a central page I could go to,
to see the comments I have left on manuscripts along with the responses to
those comments. If this doesn't exist, I think it should. Creating a system
of commenting like disqus might encourage more people to comment on articles.
It enables the commentor to keep track of their comments, receive feedback, get rated and thus gives an incentive to comment. You could just enable disqus on your site.

Kind regards,
Joseph Hughes


I got this in reply:

Dear Joseph Hughes
Thank you for contacting BioMed Central.
Readers' Comments are available to view on the right-hand menu of all published articles:
The link below will take you to an example article where a comment has been left, you can access the article by clicking the associated link in the right-hand menu:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/2
If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me.

Best wishes
David Roman


Either I was unclear or they just don't get it! In any case, I am very pessimistic about the system of commenting getting any better in the near future.