TheBeege
commented
8 years ago I like this. I was thinking about this while reading the article you linked.
I feel like a Google Docs-style interface would be ideal: an author has their current version of the article up on the site and can highlight areas where they want comments or have questions. Potential reviewers could also comment and make suggestions themselves. We could even automagically credit contributors.
Additionally/Alternatively, we could have something like Github issues for articles, in the situation where authors have general questions that don't necessarily have corresponding text, yet. Thoughts?
One of the things that came up in my interviews with researchers was the topic of getting feedback on a pre-pubs, replications, and null results(PRNs). A feature that I feel would be really strong would be the authors of the PRNs submitting requests for feedback on their papers. Authors on other sites like research gate, quora, and stackoverload already submit questions on issues that they're having trouble with. I think it would be beneficial for authors to be able to submit an article of work and get feedback on that. I think that a system where they could submit the article and be able to choose different categories of feedback that they would like to request would help out. (Okay, I just realized that we should create some personas so that we can develop target users to build features to).
For instance, Christine is a researcher working on a novel project and is having trouble finding the supporting literature to support his argument about control mechanisms in the robot command module. This person could request for help in the background and or existing literature section of his paper. Another example would be Ben who is an researcher who completed a class project investigating the relationship between personality attributes and a behavioral intervention, but isn't too strong on the statistics and analysis section. This person could flag their help request, which would include a preliminary draft of their paper, as needing assistance in the results section.