Open Online Journal Clubs

If your Journal Club (JC) is running well, quality constructive criticism is bound to arise from its members. Should that stay within your research group? Should it go to the authors of the paper? Should it be available for other scholars in the field to consider?

It’s easy to find research on JCs….

Swift how to make JCs interesting
JCs old tricks and fresh approaches

And research on open review/post-publication review…..

Polka - publish peer reviews
Kriegeskorte - Open Evaluation

But there is very little written about how to make JC deliberations more open, such that insight generated by the JC members can be benefit a wider audience, for longer periods of time.

Consider two possible platforms for more open JC analysis dissemination, a Twitter-based approach, and a hypothes.is-based approach………

1) Twitter-based JC

urojc paper

In this paper, the authors highlight key features of their Twitter-based JC.

Key features of urojc

Note the 48-hour duration, which mitigates time zone issues, but isn’t meant to be a long- lived asynchronous learning activity. The prize wasn’t mentioned in the article, but one could envision a small gift certificate going to the “best tweet” for each JC period.

The authors analyze twitter activity surrounding the JC posts.

twitter activity for JC

Each JC had roughly 40 participants and amassed ~150,000 impressions.

There was also a great Medium article by Swapnil Hiremath outlining a routine for setting up a Twitter-based JC.

To summarize from that article, you need:

  1. A Twitter account specific to the journal club, and an agreed upon hashtag # to brand the JC
  2. Willing and active moderators with access to the Twitter account
  3. To choose a compelling article, preferably open-access, to prevent any barriers to participation
  4. People to spread the word about the journal club, preferably those with a large professional following
  5. To announce a time-frame for commentary. Similar to the above, this Medium article suggests 48 hours.
  6. To invite the article authors to participate, if possible. Indeed this seems ideal!!!
  7. Possibly a blog page, where the best tweet insights are collated and have a longer-term residence on the web.

It should be noted that the International Urology (#urojc) Twitter based journal club has been defunct for a long time period……the last posted start dates/times were back in 2017. Sustainability will be addressed at the end of this post……

urojc advert

2) hypothes.is-based JCs

There is a good precedent for this with the Marginal Syllabus project, which has been discussed previously on this website. Compared to the Twitter-based approach, hypothes.is could be seen as a bit more enduring, in that the commentary is directly appended to the source document. Having commentary directly linked to the source document should also eliminate some communication overhead, in that one doesn’t need to explain what one is commenting on as it is directly highlighted (even more important when one considers tweet length limitations).

For hypothes.is-based JCs, you need:

  1. To choose a paper and publicize the URL of that paper
  2. Get participants to install the hypothes.is annotation web browser plug-in
  3. Agree on a rough timeframe. In my course-based paper annotations, students typically have around 1 week, which is longer than the prior twitter-based approaches.
  4. Perhaps a summarizing annotation at the start or end of the paper which could function as a conclusion by the JC organizers

Anyone with a hypothes.is plug in could return and annotate at will. If the paper is re-visited one year later by another research group, they could begin annotating again, and build on the pre-existing body of annotations.

Similar to the Twitter-based approach. I also think it’s good to share curated annotation content with the author, or invite the author in on the annotation JC event.

Sustainability

The Urology Twitter JC appears to have run from 2012 to 2017.

The Marginal Syllabus project appears to have run from 2016 to 2020.

Biomedical scientists might remember the PubMed Commons initiative to encourage article commentary. It started as a pilot project in 2013 and ran until early 2018. The NCBI deemed that the low level of participation did not warrant further support – there were only comments made on 6000 of the 28 million articles indexed in PubMed at the time of the discontinuation.

The above is not meant to discredit the open JC and open article commentary initiatives, but to point out that sustainability is challenging. The initiatives run according to interest and participation levels. The JC is as worthwhile as the quality of the dialogue that is generated. This applies to in-person synchronous approaches, as well as the asynchronous online approaches.

Hypothes.is doesn’t market itself as a JC focused product, and neither does Perusall. However, faculty have utilized Perusall for JCs – see discussion transcript here between Eric Mazur, Laura Weingartner, and Staci Saner (and link to podcast – episode 7 of social learning amplified).

Conclusion

If your JC brings valuable insight – consider sharing it!!! Your critical commentary can enjoy a longer life with an online annotation platform.