Sir

As described in your News story “Online methods share insider tricks” (Nature 441, 678; 2006), the ability to share detailed technical advances and modifications of existing laboratory protocols is a benefit of web-based publishing. However, there are potential problems with using a wiki-style mechanism for publication of practical procedures. If an original protocol can be edited by any user, without a checking and editing mechanism, then there is the potential for website owners to be seen to promote incorrect and potentially hazardous procedures.

The OpenWetWare site described in your News story is an excellent example of a more 'managed' wiki-style site, but there are other ways of providing dynamic, interactive technical information online. An example that has been operating for several years in the chemistry community is Synthetic pages LLP (http://www.syntheticpages.org), on whose behalf I am writing. This provides a forum for the dissemination of practical synthetic chemistry procedures online in a different format to a wiki.

Users are encouraged to submit details such as reproducibility, scale of reaction, unsuccessful attempts and modifications to procedures. The submissions are then reviewed by the editors using a 'light-touch' process. Ultimately, more than 95% are published. Original submissions cannot be directly edited by users, but attributed comments and modifications are encouraged and added at the end of the page. Registered users can hyperlink between pages using the 'comments' facility or within their submission of a new page, so people can see the protocol evolve and see which users have been involved in this process, enabling decisions on how best to use the information.

All the pages on the site can be browsed or searched free of charge and without any form of registration, but users who wish to contribute must register. The site contains pages from all over the world. It has more than 3,600 users and more than 10,000 unique search visits per month.

Although different from a wiki, the format offers a dynamic, interactive style of web-based publishing which could be more valuable to the community because of its managed style, and because the editorial approach enhances the safety and overall value of a submission and subsequent modifications or comments. It is a format that could be extended to many other areas of experimental research, such as biology, engineering, medicine and others.