Sebastian has started posting article reviews on his website, and invites us (Teary - our theoretical ecology tea mailing list) to do likewise. He uses a rather nifty Jabref converter to display the reviews created as bibtex entries, using the format indicated below.
These reviews are cross-posted from the reviews he (and associates) submit to Faculty of 1000, a commercial, subscription-based service. While this gives F1000 some publicity directly from his own site, it also means individuals can access these reviews freely. Of course as the author of the reviews, he can share them as he chooses, while by giving the reviews a wider readership they can also be of more value/impact to the community. Probably not what F1000 had in mind though. Feel free to share thoughts on this practice in the comments below.
I wonder what might be done if this practice became more common, and how easy it would be to create a simple aggregator of such content, together with information about the reviewer. This of course has some similarities with ResearchBlogging.org, but with a different flavor following the more prescribed format of F1000 together with a rating. Of course the reality of online discussion of research is far more diverse than any such convention, making general aggregation difficult.
What might be more intriguing is if (when?) any of these start making wider use of semantic markup tools that would make them easier to discover, parse, and aggregate.
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