Graduate students take note: 'crowd-sourcing' is the new way to get grunt work done. In a project to evaluate the usefulness of online comments on scientific publications, the NPG web-publishing department turned to — who else — Internet surfers.

NPG web-software developer Euan Adie is heading up the project, which takes data borrowed with permission from PLoS ONE, one of the first journals to allow online commenting on its papers when it launched in December 2006. By categorizing the comments left by readers of all PLoS ONE papers published up until August 2008, the team hopes to gain an idea of how to make online commenting more effective (http://tinyurl.com/bu4xmh).

A monumental task for Adie alone, he asked for help: “If you can read and understand a scientific abstract then we need you to help make the publishing world more science 2.0 friendly. Thirty seconds, five minutes, half an hour — whatever you can spare.” His experiment was a success — 1,411 comments were categorized by 818 users to generate 10,516 data points within 10 days.