Peer Review

The scientific journal Nature has announced that it is dropping the exciting open-editing experiment it has pursued for several months because of the lack of participation - the vast majority of authors being unwilling to post their papers, and few scientists were willing to criticize the work of their colleagues by posting their comments on Nature's website.
www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/full/444971b.html

My attention was drawn to this by a post on Richard Charkin's blog which discusses the issue, and reprints an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal, suggesting that it is the competitive nature of scientific research and discourse that is at the root of the problem .