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.