You may start seeing these little icons showing up on your favorite science blogs. So, what's the deal?
Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily has been marking posts that discuss published articles in detail for quite a while now, but there was mroe general interest in having a service to tag and vet such articles. So, Dave and some other people have launched BPR3.org, Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting, and produced these little icons.
The idea is that these icons will be used to mark posts reporting on peer-reviewed publications, and discussing them in detail. Not just throwing in a casual link to an article, or quoting the abstract, but talking about the meat of the article itself. The official guidelines are here. They eventually plan to have a custom aggregator that will collect those articles on the BPR3 site.
I don't post a great deal of this sort of stuff, but I'll try to use the icons when I do. (I'm going to be generous, and say that the arxiv counts as "peer-reviewed" for these purposes...) And if you're a blogger and write about scientific research, check out their goals and guidelines, and see if it works for you.
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It seems to me a significant part of the purpose for the icons is to help readers know what is peer-reviewed research and what isn't. To apply such a tag to arXiv.org articles seems to directly defeat that purpose??
I have to agree; much of what appears in the arXiv is not peer-reviewed.[*] What you seem to be saying is that you'll use this symbol, but it won't mean what the rest of us think it means (or what the BPR3 people intend it to mean)... which does defeat the purpose.
[*] Of course, different parts of the arXiv differ in how and whether they indicate peer-reviewed status; things posted to astro-ph usually have some hint (e.g., "accepted by X" or "to appear in X" versus "submitted to X" or "to appear in proceedings of conference Y"), while almost nothing in hep-th does. So there can be something quite interesting in the arXiv, and you can't tell if it's really peer-reviewed or not. But, hey, just don't use the "Peer-Reviewed Research" button when you talk about those articles.
The question of what status to accord the arxiv is ultimately one of thos e"spirit vs. letter" kind of issues. The basic idea behind BPR3, as I understand it, is to identify and celebrate blogging that engages with ongoing research in a detailed manner-- posts that talk about real articles describing real research, not just news releases and journalistic summaries of the research.
In that light, it seems to me, the important factor is not the availability of the article in dead-tree format, but rather the substantive engagement with the research. And in some areas of physics-- particularly high energy physics-- the time for that sort of post is when the paper is posted to the arxiv, not months later when it appears in the actual journal. There have been a number of times when I've blogged something about a high-energy paper in PRL only to get comments of the form "Oh, that. That was discussed to death back in June. It's old news."
In practical terms, this won't end up mattering very much, as I don't work in one of the fields that does business mostly through the arxiv, and I don't do a lot of detailed technical blogging, so the chances of me doing a detailed technical post about an arxiv article are pretty slim. Given that people can and do cite arxiv papers as references in published work, though, I think the use of the BPR3 icon would be appropriate for such a post.
(It's deeply odd to find myself on this side of this argument...)
It's not an issue of dead-tree format, really; it's an issue of "Has this work been accepted by some kind of peer-review process?" There are, after all, peer-review online journals which never produce dead-tree editions.
And waiting for the official "publication date" isn't really an issue, either, since it's perfectly possible to post something to the arXiv once you get, e.g., an email from the editor telling you it's accepted. This gets the paper on the arXiv at least six months prior to "publication" (or more, depending on how slow the journal is).
I just took the BPR3 guidelines, e.g.
as implying something more than just "posted to arXiv.org", which really only meets the "archived" standard. (And, looking at Dave Munger's replies in the comments to "Guidelines" blog post, that seems to be the case: a certain medical review series is provisionally acceptable because it meets 4 of the 5 standards, "but we can always reassess in the future.")
Sure, people cite arXiv papers. They also cite conference proceedings, works "in preparation", and "personal communications"; that doesn't mean those things are automatically on the same level as peer-reviewed publications.
Maybe we need a version of the logo with a question mark attached ("could be peer-reviewed, but the authors don't tell us")...
In the end, I think arguing about this is likely to be no more productive than the average Wikipedian notability debate, and about as interesting.
My feeling is that categorically ruling out discussions of arxiv-only articles would eliminate a large number of potentially interesting blogging from the BPR3 project-- there's a moderately large community of string theory bloggers who post detailed discussions of recent results (you can find them from Jacques Distler's blog), and they're nearly always talking about stuff that's recently on the arxiv, and not yet in an official journal. It might be a moot point, as I'm not sure they'd want to take part, but ruling them out because the arxiv isn't sufficiently peer-reviewed seems counterproductive to me.
For myself, it's almost certainly moot, as I post very few things suitable for BPR3 in the first place, and very few things based on arxiv-only papers, and the intersection of those two sets is, at present, approximately two posts in better than five years of blogging. It's not likely to come up again, especially after this thread.