I know an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don’t know why she swallowed the fly
Perhaps she’ll die.

In my opinion, the most amazing thing about flies is that when they are determined they can keep up. You are walking along and the fly is buzzing around your head, and no matter how quickly you walk it manages to match your pace. For the most part, though, the flies that I see are resting. They are gorging on pollen, poo or pudding, or just resting on a leaf or a wall.

I am not sure where the phrase “I’d like to be a fly on the wall” comes from, but it describes our desire to know what goes on in situations where we are not present. This desire is surprisingly strong: there is always someone who listens at keyholes in an Agatha Christie mystery, and sufficient numbers of people watch “Big Brother” on TV for them to make series after series.

I have been wondering for quite a long time really, why more people don’t comment on papers in for example Nature Protocols and Nature Precedings. I have proposed theories and hypotheses, and read other very similar theories and hypotheses, but today I am going to propose another one (new for me, but almost definitely not new in the absolute sense):

People are waiting, like flies on the wall, to see what everyone else is going to do.

So, with that in mind let me show you some examples of commenting-on-articles in action.

Examples from Nature Protocols:
Preparation of organotypic hippocampal slice cultures: interface method
Production of neuron-preferential lentiviral vectors

Examples from Nature Precedings:
Open Notebook Science Using Blogs and Wikis
Molecular Static and Dynamic Analyses reveal Flaw in Murine Model used by US FDA to Detect Drug Carcinogenicity