Why the FUCK Would You Blog on a Journal’s Website?

We want this to be the place you come to talk about science. Like all good media companies, scientific journals are increasingly opening up their formats to interaction with their user-base (see Cell, Science, Nature and PLoS to start). The Pasigraph, however, feels we’re all laboring under a self-defeating premise.  Academic journals, more so than many other publishing formats, are restrictive and editorial in nature (read: subject to the peer review process). Blog communities can provide an important counter-balance to all mainstream media, and the academic publishing community is in need of just as much detached criticism as are Time, NBC and the New York Times. But, the essential aspect of meta-critique in this realm is that speculative commentary has to come from sources outside the major players and stake holders.

In short, come here to complain about an editorial rejection that you’re convinced is unfair, highlight that manuscript you know should be published in a better journal, and castigate suspect articles taking up precious pages that could change your career.  We’re alt-media here, and we’re going to tell you about it.  In our first, mind-numbingly hypocritical posts, we’re going to link out to all the comment threads we append to journal articles on mainstream academic publishing sites.  We plan to subvert the truncated peer review that “stove-pipes” shitty articles into a journal, and we generally just want to cause a mess for everyone.  After we get kicked off a few sites for distemperate comments, we’ll move the complaints here and let you decide and add your critiques of those articles, and your critiques of our critiques. Watch this space.