ABSTRACT
On August 17, 2009, Carmen Drahl began a story in Chemical & Engineering
News (C&EN) with the following passage:
On July 21, the Journal of the American Chemical Society published new
papers online. That was nothing out of the ordinary. But within 24 hours,
something extraordinary happened. Chemists from around the world
converged online, at an organic chemistry blog, to discuss one of those
manuscripts, repeat its experiments, and examine its conclusions. The story
is a particularly vivid example of how the Web is changing communication
in science and should encourage more chemists to tune in to online dis-
cussions. (p. 47)
The incident Dahl describes is the online reaction to a peer reviewed article
in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), “Reductive and
Transition-Metal-Free: Oxidation of Secondary Alcohols by Sodium Hydride,”
by Wang, Zhang, and Wang (2009). The chemical reaction reported in the article
was extraordinary-even unbelievable-to many chemists, prompting a
worldwide informal peer review that demonstrated how powerful online
communications have become in the scientific community. Leveraging the speed
and connectivity of blogging, scientists-most notably Paul Docherty, who
liveblogged the experiment in his Totally Synthetic blog-challenged X. Wang et
al.’s findings in a flurry of discussion and reporting over a period of just a few
days. This controversy demonstrates that even publications in the
most prestigious journals are vulnerable to the near-instant access and scrutiny
afforded by the Internet. This chapter will explore the connection between
Web 2.0 technologies and the demise of X. Wang et al.’s article, tracing the
manuscript progression from initial online publication on the JACS website to
its eventual withdrawal from the journal. The Docherty case shows that digital
technologies increasingly blur the line between manuscript and published work,
resulting in a disruption of the established peer review and reception process
that has traditionally been central to scientific discourse.
