Cognitive Daily

BPR3.org goes live

Posted by Dave Munger on August 15, 2007
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If you haven’t checked out the BPR3 initative (Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting), now’s your chance to see everything that’s going on with BPR3 in one place: The new web site has just gone live.

Set your bookmarks to researchblogging.org for the latest news on our efforts to identify promote blogging about peer-reviewed research. I’ll probably still occasionally post here and link back to BPR3, but from here on out, that’s the site to visit for the latest news on the project.

There’s still a little dust in the corners as we build the site, and everything is pretty much plain-vanilla for now, but this will be the headquarters for what we hope will eventually become a portal for serious academic blogging from across the disciplines.

A little background information, from the site’s About page:

BPR3 came about because several academic bloggers in different fields saw the need to distinguish their “serious” writing from news, politics, family, bagpipes, and so on.

Sister Edith Bogue, Dave Munger, Mike Dunford, and John Wilkins got together with the idea of doing something about it.

But we need your help. We’d like to design an icon that academic bloggers can use to mark posts where they discuss and cite peer-reviewed research. It’s a trickier problem than you might think: just defining “peer review” itself is hard to do.

Coming up with an icon that fairly represents many different fields is also a challenge. Cognitive Daily already uses such an icon to discuss psychology research reports, but the icon is customized to his needs and his site’s design. In the coming weeks, we’ll be working with academic bloggers from many different disciplines to build an icon that will work for everyone.

Down the road, we’d like to use bpr3.org to aggregate all the posts discussing peer-reviewed research from across the disciplines.

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Comments

  1. #1 Jeremy Burman
    August 15, 2007

    This is such a great idea. At our blog — Advances in the History of Psychology — we mostly only talk about things that would be interesting to academics (and those with a fairly serious interest in academic psychology). Sure, we comment on the news and provide resources to students, but a lot of the time these postings are being driven by peer-reviewed research. I think that having a way to distinguish these materials from others more trivial will be good for our readers. (It will also help to distinguish the blog as a source of “serious” content, which may eventually be useful in job hunting and T&P meetings.)

    Here’s a question, though. How can we serve content to BPR3? It would be good if there were a way to automatically format postings to be pushed; a tag or category that adds the icon and pings the meta-site….

  2. #2 Jeremy Burman
    August 15, 2007

    I should mention too that all of the resources we post, in our annotated bibliographies, are only ever drawn from peer-reviewed research. Books and other reports are welcome too, of course, but are usually only posted as comments afterward.

  3. #3 pelf
    August 16, 2007

    OK, I know this sounds st*pid, but I’ve been reading those previous posts on BPR3 but I don’t quite get your idea behind it. Or perhaps somebody can explain “Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting” in simple English, with perhaps an example or two?

    And what does “Peer-Reviewed Research” encompass?

    Does it mean that I read a peer-reviewed journal and discuss it here, or something like that?

  4. #4 Dave Munger
    August 16, 2007

    I think Bora Zivcovic might have come up with the easiest-to-understand explanation of the concept:

    … a universal icon that everyone could use on top of their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary on a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal and contains a link to the paper itself (and not just a press release or media commentary).

  5. #5 pelf
    August 16, 2007

    Thanks, Dave, that’s so much easier :)

    So we’re now at a stage where we need people to design an icon (an image or button) that we will use if we were to blog about a peer-reviewed journal?

    I can’t design, but I wish you guys Good Luck. But I’ll be following the progress :)