I agree we should perhaps vote.

Personally, I think we strongly neuter the power of preprints by not hosting our own commenting; it seems to be one of the key things the community wants and needs, and it's something we've sort of been selling. And you
know my feelings about anonymity...😉

Professor Christopher Aiden-Lee Jackson
Statoil Professor of Basin Analysis

Basins Research Group (BRG ( http://www.basinsresearchgroup.com/index.html ))

Department of Earth Science & Engineering
Imperial College
Prince Consort Road
London
SW7 2BP

England

Email: [email protected]
Phone: +44(0)207 59 47450
Webpage: www.imperial.ac.uk/people/c.jackson ( http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/c.jackson )

Twitter: @seis_matters

Co-founder of EarthArXiv ( https://eartharxiv.org/ ), a preprint server for the Earth Sciences

Indeed, I tend to agree. arXiv is an example.

But then.... no biased moderator blocking response.. "because .. the moderator feels the paper must be improved by review". This, in turn, of course implies other mischief is possible...

So,... keeping an open eye and mind. Kicking out biased & misbehaving participants could be the remedy. E.g.:

Misbehaving as in... personal attacks frustrating scientific careers of the disputed proponents.
Biased as in .. unable to give reasonable scientific counter argument. But assembling "experts" who all say no.

Then, in addition, always keep the door open for rehabilitation..! We are but human. Trolling out of anger and frustration yesterday is not by definition being a Troll once and for all... or is it ?

Linking with the other line "How should people identify themselves when giving feeback/review to EarthArXiv preprints?" I agree with @victorvenema that we should now go step-by-step to find a consensus to the contrasted views about online comments. I propose a possible step-by-step voting process to solve the case (see attached .pdf). Questions are in black and decisions in blue. Please note that if comments are allowed we will in any case need to decide what we do when comments are inappropriate and what is 'inappropriate' (dashed arrows in red). Does this chain of question also apply to postprints ? What majority do we need to decide ? What proportion of the community needs to vote ? Is it solved by a timely deadline ? I guess we need to open a new Loomio line about how do we vote ... Cheers to all. Stéphanie

Agree with @sgirardclos that those are the questions.

Would suggest to start with the first question. I made a poll on the question whether we want to have comments. https://www.loomio.org/p/7m2KbkCB/comments-below-eartharxiv-manuscripts

13 to 1, even if it is Christmas time, it looks like we do not have to wait until the end of the poll. On to the discussion on how to do comments well.

Important would be to be able to give feedback to the authors. Currently there is no option to contact the author who uploaded the manuscript. Thus if someone forgot to mention their email in the manuscript it would currently be hard to contact the author.

Best wishes for the New Year. Thanks Victor for the discussion and presentation of the results.

Let's ask ourselves: what's "done well".

Let's also set up a schedule of moderators. We have 19 Pro. So if each Pro does a month of moderation we will be a year and half wiser. ..

I propose: if there are comments on paper X run them past a moderator. Find IT ways to get that going. The moderator can reject or accept the comment via a button.

If I would have my turn, i.e. my month, then I would only look at the way "things are said". E.g. one time a ... "this is wrong" is ok but in need of an explanation. If not given... then reject. If second time only ...a merely "this is wrong"... the guy is blocked on my watch. Abusive language ... blocked, etc.

Learning by doing.

Point 1 IT necessities: a bit of text run through the moderator. Text size of comments is limited. Three buttons, accept, reject, block. Only once a day please (batch processing).

Point 2 procedure necessity: a moderator "discussion" at each change of the watch. Biasses are signalled, changes suggested..... etc

Possible changes in moderator schedule because of illness. That kind of stuff.

Well. Why is all that, or similar, an extremely bad idea ?

This needs a bit of clarification : "Text size of comments is limited. Three buttons, accept, reject, block. Only once a day please (batch processing)."
Are you saying that commentators should only be commenting once per day, or that the IT "black box" should only send one email per day to a moderator? The latter would be achievable, but fairly difficult, particularly if a moderator is covering several "sections" of the service (I see some murky database shenanigans to keep track of which comments have been moderated). There would also, predictably, be a case of someone submitting a comment 3 minutes after the daily mail gets sent out, then 23 hours later complaining that their comment was being "suppressed".
Possible changes in moderator schedule because of illness. That kind of stuff.
TBH, we've dealt with that at work for years by having "functional" email accounts. In this context, for example "[email protected]" , "[email protected]" ...
The outgoing moderator passes the login details for the account to the incoming moderator. Someone has keys to the login credentials to cover the event of sudden illnesses, assassination by bus, etc. as a back up. The contents of the email account then provide the context information for the incoming moderator.

Time for me to head to the station!

Now we are getting to the details of commenting, might I suggest that one or two of the main protagonosts with a passion for optimising this for EarthArXiv, consider remotely(?) attending the Hypothesis meeting taking place on January 25th in NYC. They have invited several preprint services to take part, to learn from one another about how commenting might work. If you're interested, please let us/me know and we can forward on the details!