From the Editors:

AMD Paper Commentaries

Once upon a time, scientific knowledge was defined as that which a scientific community viewed as meeting epistemic, social, and ethical norms or criteria of reliable and valid knowledge.  The original purpose of scientific letters and journals was to provide a means for members of the community to publish their findings, express their perspectives on the findings, and foster debate.  

This is still true, but the one-way communications from authors to readers that are the dominant form in most scientific journals inhibit this process of feedback, critique, and debate among scientific community members.

With the goal of fostering more dialogue within our scientific community, we are launching a new feature of AMD called "AMD Commentaries," which will give readers and authors opportunities to have public conversations about scholarly issues.  We invite AMD readers to collaborate in the process of knowledge production by submitting comments about published papers in AMD.  Possibilities for commentaries include:

• celebrating and augmenting scholarly discoveries,
• reanalyzing data and coding schemes,
• providing alternative interpretations of research findings,
• critiquing the standards and values reflected in an article, and
• identifying and encouraging new lines of inquiry or possible future research

Those commentaries that AMD editors judge to advance scientific knowledge will be published as an important scholarly contribution that others might read and cite.  We think that AMD Commentaries will be a small but important step for advancing scientific knowledge as it was originally conceived by our scientific community.

To submit a comment for possible publication in AMD, readers can click the "Submit Comment" button that is adjacent to each published article online.  Submitted comments will first be filtered for inappropriate language and content. Then submissions will go to the article's Editor, who will review the scholarly content to ensure that its publication is worthwhile.

To launch the "AMD Commentaries" feature of AMD, the Editorial Team will start inviting two- to-three-page commentaries from recognized experts or teachers of doctoral courses on the topic.  These commentaries and subsequent responses from the authors or other readers will be moderated by the AMD Editorial Team.  A "Commentary Alert" will notify subscribers about the arrival of new commentaries on papers.