The Scientific Activist

If so, you'll be interested in today's announcement from BPR3 (Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting):

We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news article or press release.

Within a month, these blog posts will also be aggregated here, so everyone can go to one place to locate the most serious, thoughtful analysis and commentary on the web.

But we encourage you to start using the icons now. They're gorgeous, and they clearly alert readers to the posts that bloggers have thought the most about, and worked the hardest to create. Here they are [above], in six different versions.

Click here to get the code for the icons, here for the guidelines on how to use them, and here to see who's already using them. I've added the icon to a few of my old posts:

• Animal Rights Activists Hijack the Brains of Three Respectable Scientists! (28 August 2007)
• Study Finds Alcohol and Tobacco More Harmful than Marijuana, LSD, or Ecstasy (23 March 2007)
• Matrix Protease Activity in Tumor Cell Invasion (19 December 2006)
• They Probably Won't Taste as Good as Cotton Candy... (29 November 2006)
• Social Insects: More KGB than Brady Bunch (16 November 2006)
• The Stabilization of Blood Vessels by Protease Inhibitors (16 October 2006)
• Amphibian Disease Heats Up (8 August 2006)
• Genetic Engineering's Next Challenge - The Smiley Face (28 July 2006)
• Psychedelic Psilocybin Psychology (14 July 2006)
• NMR Goes Natural, Baby! (30 June 2006)
• Organic People Chemistry (16 June 2006)

Although there are certainly plenty of examples of quality science reporting to be found in the media, so much of it seems to be based on press releases and, at best, abstracts. However, many science bloggers regularly--or at least occasionally--parse through the peer-reviewed literature to bring undiluted science to their readers. BPR3, spearheaded by Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily and others, seeks to add some order to these efforts by offering a standardized icon for bloggers to include in posts and by aggregating links to these posts in one location. It's a good idea, and it looks like a lot of effort and feedback has gone into making this happen, so if you blog about peer-reviewed research, I'd encourage you to participate as well.