The Good Paper Journal Club got off to a good start thanks to the active participation of a lot of people. I believe that an online discussion forum is a very good place to talk about interesting papers. But sometimes I feel restricted of what the Nature Network Forum software can do.

Adding a paper that we want to discuss should be easier. We already use Connotea (link to the tag here), but the process could be better integrated. Digg-style votes (I like/I don’t like), also used in FriendFeed would be an easy-to-implement feature – something that is already used in Best of Nature. One step further would be a web form to fill out the basic information needed for a journal club discussion: summary, strengths and weaknesses and some more specific items for the Good Paper Journal Club (title, abstract, language, overall structure, figures and tables).

Even better would be the integration of the full text of the manuscript. We already discussed the legal aspects of this, but there should be enough interesting papers where the copyright allows this. It would be a big help if we could annotate the text directly in the Forum (e.g. to highlight examples of good writing) and to show figures and tables. This feature would obviously need much more work, but it would make an interesting project for the Article 2.0 contest.