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The National Institutes of Health announced last week that it will close comments on articles in the PubMed database.
The PubMed Commons was started five years ago to encourage discussion of research. But low levels of engagement did “not warrant continued investment in the project,” the NIH said.
Nature reported that around 7,500 comments had been made on PubMed Commons since its launch, a small figure compared to the 54,000 comments made on PubPeer, a research discussion platform that launched around the same time.
On Twitter, many researchers expressed disappointment at the closure, saying the comments made were valuable to the scientific record. Several suggested that researchers had been unwilling to comment on articles through PubMed Commons, as they were not able to do so anonymously. PubPeer accepts anonymous comments.
