Tags track growth in open access (and a dig at Philica)

An interesting observation: Tags Indicate That Open Access Is Flourishing. Comparing the growth in Connotea tags for "Internet" to the growth in tags for "Open access", the growth in tags for "Open access" is significantly higher.

On the topic of tags, Matt Cockerill on the BMC Blog discusses the tags used to tag BioMed Central articles on CiteULike. BioMed Central is working with CiteULike and is keen to capture the power of "Web 2.0".

So, Philica. The above observation by James Till on Philica seems much more suitable for a blog than an academic journal. Philica has yet to prove itself to be a serious academic journal - much of the content seems to be trivial or pseudoscience, e.g. this, or this, or this.

Philica brings the much touted idea of community peer review to fruition, leaving peer review entirely to the readers. It has what I believe to be two fatal flaws. Firstly, it has absolutely no editorial selectivity and the requirement that authors be based at an academic institution has proven to be no barrier to junk being submitted. Not many researchers have the time to spend critiquing palpable nonsense. Secondly, it has no mechanism to solicit reviews from experts - only those who stumble across Philica will read the articles, and they probably won't feel at all obliged or inclined to review. Peer review survives because editors deliberately select those they believe are best placed to comment, and sometimes hound them for a review - remove a selection process, and it would collapse.

I'm not the only one to be skeptical about Philica. It's a great idea (I sketched out a similar idea last year and bored my colleagues with it at the pub), but it's not working.