Anonymity and real names both have their place and their effects. In practice, I think starting without restrictions, that is, allowing anonymous interactions and no moderation and some some spam blockage, and then tightening as needed is the best way to go. Each service, each community needs to get a feel for what works.

My personal bias is that real names are the most useful way to go, especially in science discourse. The comments above, made in response to this post, are indeed peer review, which in no way “needs” to be anonymous. The baggage of print publishing has set up expectations of how to conduct science discourse. I think they are outdated and invalid in the new Social Web.

I blab on about it here:
http://www.molecularist.com/lifeblog/2009/05/talk-the-future-of-science-publishing.html

But, not to be missed (and I’ve been meaning to post about it), from PhD Comics:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1178

“When researchers consider the issue of the anonymity of research participants, concern may be most likely to focus on how it can be maintained, particularly when under pressure from authorities to divulge identities” (Grinyer A. (2001) Ethical dilemmas in non-clinical health research, Nursing Ethics, 8 (2), pp.123-132.).

The cultural fermentation that goes on at 4chan is absolutely awesome. The only way they’d be in danger is is the recording industry has its way and makes us all have persistent identities attached to every packet we send. Probably the best way to define my position is to say that I support only voluntary use of real names. Absent extrordinarily intrusive authentication systems, your identity is your content, not whatever you type in the name field, anyways.

However, it seems like having names or identities attached to comments in the scientific community will be the way to go most of the time. Why no adopt a technology like Open ID for the science community? Users do not need to keep registering at each site. They get one log in that works for multiple sites and webmasters in the community would adopt the technology. This would also allow for some interesting aggregation (mashup) applications.

I tend towards wanting participants of online discussions not to be completely anonymous. In terms of scientific papers, the published ‘comment and reply’ format certainly includes the commenter’s full contact information. And, at least in my field, there are several instances of heated and constructive debate within this format. I don’t know of any published ‘comment and reply’ that has an anonymous commenter (again, within my field).

Maybe I haven’t experienced enough online discussion as others, but the reasons that genereg argues for maintaining the ability to be anonymous (namely, that it results in the “most open and democratic discussions”) might be true for a lot of online forums, but I’m not convinced that’s the case for science. My experience has shown the opposite … the venues that allow full anonymity (i.e., no nickname, no pseudonym, no linkage to other content/comments) result in a ‘wild west’ situation requiring conscientious and time-consuming moderation. But, again … my experience is perhaps limited.

But, at the same time, genereg brings up how peer review is sometimes (or can be) anonymous — I haven’t really thought of how that might fit in. As others have said, that is during the review process though, not comments that come after publication. As I noted above, why would commenters need to be anonymous? If they saw the presentation of that same paper at a meeting and wanted to make a public comment, it would be … well public. If they don’t want to make a public comment, then they just tell their colleagues why they think it’s wrong or whatever. Most of us like to have our ducks in a row, so to speak, before publicly commenting on such things. To me, it should be the same online (especially online in a more ‘official’ venue like a journal comment thread).

Anyway … very interesting and important discussion to be having since we are in the midst of shaping all of this.

note: I’m jumping in here and have not followed every specific comment from each person that led to this post and am mostly interested in the generalities anyway — I apologize if my lack of context is obvious; feel free to delete my comment if it adds nothing to discussion (but I simply have no inclination/time to dig back into the lineage, sorry).

As you know, comments in the internet are different from the standard scientific debates. We still have to learn how this works. What we know for sure is how discussions in the Internet work in general. What we know from the internet forums and related experiences, is that the most democratic and open discussions happen when people have the option not to disclose their names. This of cause requires some moderation, but that is a minor issue. This is how internet works traditionally. In many forums and large internet communities such as the LiveJournal, there are options for both anonymous and non-anonymous comments. People choose to disclose or not to disclose their names, but that is always optional. These are the internet traditions. The so-called social networks, where everything is non-anonymous is a new flow in the internet history — several projects have tried to use social networks for scientific collaborations, but up to now this is mostly in the test stage, and it is not clear whether scientists will like this or not. We have already witnessed several unsuccessful projects of this type, but this does not mean that one day one of them will work. The FriendFeed room, where this discussion has started is probably the best place of this type.

In addition to the internet traditions of anonymity, in Science, there is a well-established tradition that the peer-review is anonymous. It just cannot be conducted the other way. There are no alternative solutions to this currently. I am not sure whether you are aware of the idea of online commenting, but basically one of the ideas (the one which is behind the journal discussed in our original thread) is that the major part of discussion starts _after_ the article has been published. In this case, some elements of the anonymous peer-review have to be somehow substituted by the mechanisms suited for the online commenting. It is very difficult to propose something, which would completely substitute for the optional possibility of anonymous comments. There are several problems associated with the requirement to register in order to comment, ranging from simple technical difficulties to more complex sociological problems, some of which were mentioned above. Hope, this clarifies a little bit the discussion. I will be very busy in the next days and will not be able to answer soon.

– Best regards