Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting

There is a movement afoot to encourage and support “serious” blogging in science. Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting [BPR3] is a group of scientists who have made a step in this direction by releasing a set of icons that scientists are invited to include in their blog posts when “they’re making a serious post about peer-reviewed research.”
BPR3 is an initial effort to encourage scientists to identify their commentary on peer-reviewed research articles — whether the article is online or in print — with an icon. The next step, according to BPR3’s web site, is “to use bpr3.org to aggregate all the posts discussing peer-reviewed research from across the disciplines.” If this effort succeeds it could well open up new doors to scholarly debate and discussion.
Why does this matter? Well, as was first brought to my attention at the ASIS&T panel discussion on Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication, there is a great deal of communication, debate, and discussion of scientific research within the blogosphere. However, unlike letters to the editor in peer-reviewed journals, there is no standard method to capture, collect, or forum for evaluating the opinions of blogging scientists. To the extent that research — and discussion of research — moves into the public sphere, there is a great opportunity for the scientific community to add to and discuss research as it happens.