This is an interesting concept, but I'm wondering if it covers a lot
of the same ground as my organization, ResearchBlogging.org. We
collect blog posts discussing peer-reviewed journal articles. We have
over 600 member bloggers and have collected reviews of thousands of
peer-reviewed journal articles.

We have the GUI that many of the commenters here have called for, and
perhaps more importantly, we integrate our system into blogs.

The big problem with peer review is that it's a pain to get anyone to
do it. Few people want to review the work of others; what they want to
do is get credit for their own work. We get around that issue by
allowing people to take ownership of their reviews. You maintain your
own blog, and when you review the work of others, it's all collected
in one place. It's easy to point to the blog as an example of your own
scholarship.

But if Google wants to create a standardized system for collecting
these reviews, whether on blog posts or elsewhere, you may want to
work with the folks who have already created a system for doing just
that.

But there may be no need for a new system; we follow the COinS
specification which is supported by the National Information Standards
Organization, a widely-respected group which sets national (and
international) standards for organizing information. It may be that
your group could expand our system beyond blogs, or we could work
together to ensure that we're not crossing purposes.

Let me know if there's any way I can help.

Thanks for pointing this out. I hadn't heard of ResearchBlogging.org. If we
could possibly unify our efforts, I'm definitely in favor of that. I am far
more interested in seeing these ideas succeed than seeing any particular
implementation succeed. My initial impression is that your site seeks to
provide serveral useful and practical services to improve the way
researchers interact. Our project, on the other hand, seeks to create
automatically crawlable links between reviews and papers. Our goals seem to
be orthogonal, so I think we can at worst co-exist, and at best help each
other out.

As I understand it, COinS is a standard way to present citations in HTML. I
generally like to use standards where applicable, but a standard for citing
papers doesn't help us link reviews to papers. Further, we require crawlable
links to actual reviews and papers, not the name of a journal that can offer
to sell them. Hyperlinks perfectly meet our requirements without any extra
dead weight, so COinS is just not suitable for our needs.

We think that the difficulty of soliciting reviews is evidence of how broken
the current system has become due to the excessive influence of centralized
journals. In our idealistic universe, papers and reviews would all be linked
together to represent the work of the scientific community. People would
write reviews for the same reason they write papers--it's something that
needs to be done to advance the science. When you write a review, it will be
out there in the open with your name on it to make it clear that you are a
big part of the effort to advance the science. We think this is the proper
motivation, and it will not only solve the problem of insufficient reviews,
it will also improve the reviews themselves. Further, it will encourage an
on-going review process, instead of the get-one-review-and-carry-it-for-life
system that we currently have.

It's to our advantage to keep our design minimalistic by not trying to solve
problems that are better left to someone else. Our system needs to be
independant of any systems that provides centralized storage, or
requirements to perform reviews, etc., because we would like to operate
across/within all of them. In other words, it would support our cause if you
would support linking reviews to papers. I'm not quite sure how we could
help support your cause right now, but we're open to suggestions.

-Mike