We encourage discussion and commenting about all publications in all fields.

Accepts all types of comments about papers. Although many comments concern issues that are central to a paper’s conclusions, this is not an obligation. Comments about minor issues and details should be interpreted as such, although attention to detail is often important in science. We may draw the line at issues that have no significant bearing on the science, its interpretation or its presentation.

Although we understand that frustration can easily build up, unnecessarily strong language just makes you and the site appear unreasonable, reducing the effectiveness of your comment and handing people a pretext to ignore your comment specifically and the site generally. Remember—your readers understand.

We encourage you to post links to external information relevant to articles or discussion about them. These might include other articles that confirm or contradict the reported results, blog posts and newspaper articles. However, we discourage and may limit indiscriminate bulk linking campaigns.

In order to keep discussion factual, of high quality and polite as well as to minimize legal risks for everybody, we reserve the right to remove or edit comments that do not conform to these guidelines. Please help us by reporting any comments you believe do not respect our guidelines (a button is provided on each comment).

Anonymous comments and those from “greylisted” accounts only appear on the site after moderation, which can take up to a week.

We offers you a permanent right of reply. We encourage you to respond on the site. There are special facilities for indicating author responses. We believe that honest, careful and competent authors should provide “after sales service” for their publications, by clarifying any points that readers find unclear.

Many questions can be resolved by showing your original data. We encourage you to do so. An increasing number of journals require you to give access to your data or even to publish it directly, so there is now nothing unusual in making your data public. Although some authors still prefer only to show their data to journal editors, in our experience an opaque editorial statement is much less convincing than sharing the data publicly. Low-volume image and tabular data can be posted directly on the site (although tables may be tedious to format). Larger data sets are better submitted to a specialist provider (such as Dryad http://datadryad.org/ or figshare https://figshare.com/) and then linked from a comment.