A Wikipedia-style approach to peer review hasn't worked for Nature, which is abandoning the idea, according to an artile in The Wall Street Journal.
The idea was for the authors of papers to post them online for comment before publication. However;
Of the 1,369 short-listed papers submitted during the trial, which ran for around four months, only the authors of 71 were willing to post their work online, Nature said. The papers that were put online only received 92 technical comments, according to the journal, which said that scientists seemed unwilling to comment candidly on others' papers, given that comments weren't anonymous.
The journal concluded that "most of them are too busy, and lack sufficient career incentive, to venture onto a venue such as Nature's Web site and post public, critical assessments of their peers' work."
