Today, in about half an hour to be exact, we start a new round of our journal club. What's so remarkable about that, you ask? Well, we've started to blog the papers we discuss and the first post went online last night. In order to let people know which papers we discuss, we're automatically feeding each post into Twitter and Researchblogging.org.

Maybe, some day, there will be a service which links and aggregates all journal clubs for yet another way of post-publication peer-review. Maybe, some day, there will be paper recommendations for papers which have been discussed particularly often in such registered journal clubs. Maybe, some day, the key points of the discussion will be made available on the blog post afterwards.

The idea to have the presenter summarize the paper they will present arose from the desire to assure proper preparation of the presenter (in other words: prevent last minute reading of the paper only to then having to look up all the contents during the presentation). Once a summary is being written anyway, it's only little extra work to post it online.

I'm quite stoked that the university department which is running the blog platform (WordPress, by the way), the CeDiS, is working on implementing the necessary functionality to make their platform a journal club platform, i.e., allow for PDF storage, a calendar (with reminder) and a mailinglist function for scheduling presentations. Let's see what this will look like by the end of the year.

So be sure to subscribe to the whatever feed you prefer and stay on top of what our journal club discusses.