PubMed Commons closes its doors to comments

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced on 1 February that it will discontinue PubMed Commons, a tool that allows scientists to comment on articles indexed in the agency's popular PubMed database of biomedical literature. The agency said low levels of engagement and the growth of alternate venues for public discussion of published papers contributed to its decision to close PubMed Commons after five years.

Those who want to hold forth on the merits or shortcomings of published papers — or who simply want to add links to related papers or blog posts — have until 15 February to make their mark. After that, they can post comments on an increasing number of individual journal websites. Or they can use PubPeer, a platform that launched around the same time as PubMed Commons but, unlike the NIH tool, allows commenters to remain anonymous (see ‘Little-used commons?’).

“We gave it a fair shot,” says Jerry Sheehan, deputy director of the NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Maryland. “It just wasn’t turning into a major point of discussion for the research community.”

Advocates for the platform were quick to express their dismay, however. “It’s a terrible blow to responsible post-publication peer review,” says Jim Coyne, a health psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who helped beta-test PubMed Commons in 2013.

Alexander Tsai, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says that the other venues that allow commenting won’t help him. He used PubMed Commons to post a correction to his own 2014 meta-analysis¹ of rates of depression among people with HIV after editors at the journal that published his paper did not respond to emails. To this day, the errors in the paper have not been fixed. Once comments on PubMed disappear, readers who find Tsai’s paper through the NIH portal will have no way of knowing there’s a problem. “It does concern me,” Tsai says.