In response to this item and its follow-on discussion, Alf Eaton shows how you can, in fact, discover the (open access) scientific commentary surrounding an (open access) scientific article. Outstanding!

Here’s the interactive version of the service. You can feed it an URL, a DOI, or a PubMed id, and it fetches conversations about that item from Postgenomic, PubMed, Connotea, and Scopus.

I took the liberty of converting this service into a bookmarklet which I’ve labeled sc (scientific conversations). It’s the analog to my standard dc bookmarklet (del.icio.us conversations) and bc bookmarklet (bloglines conversations).

WordPress won’t let me post javascript: URLs so I can’t post the installable versions of these bookmarkets, but here they are in textual form:

sc: javascript:location.href=’http://scintilla.nature.com/conversations?uri=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

dc: javascript:location.href=’http://del.icio.us/url?v=2&url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

bc: javascript:location.href=’http://bloglines.com/search?q=Bcite:’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

If you make a new bookmarket, edit its properties, and copy one of these javascript: thingies into the URL or Location box, you’ll be good to go.

So, this is great! Now if I’m visiting a PLoS Medicine article I can just click dc, bc, and sc to assess how both the general-interest and scientific communities are reacting to it.

Thanks Alf!