Last week, Dave Munger at Cog Daily started a discussion about creating a standard icon for science bloggers to use when reporting on peer-reviewed research. The discussion snow-balled into an idea, and now a new website, Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting, has been launched.

Still, we don't have an icon. This morning I emailed Dave Munger (full email copy posted at BPR3) thinking out loud about the icon and how it fits well with the EasyPg plugin. I've been letting this brew in mind all day, so here are some more thoughts about the icon and the BPR3 initiative.

• The icon should be square as that will allow easier resizing: the same icon can be used at various sizes including 16px by 16px to be used as the favicon of the BPR3 website. Also, it will fit better with the current trend for icons, like the square RSS icon. One exception: the 80x16px 'chicklets' icons/buttons that are also the current trend like the one below (forgive my lack of design skills). This little example shows what we can do: the left hand side of the chicklet can be the BPR3 icon, and we can have text on the right, like simply saying "BPR3". Example uses:
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  • For differentiating peer-review links, something like:

    ...Via CNN: a new paper talks about...

• The icon needs to be accessible, i.e., colour-blind friendly. I'm no expert in this area, so I'll leave it to others.
• Copyright: I think we need an enforceable licence, like a Creative Commons one. I suggest CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. As long as we have attribution, even if BPR3 fails, the idea will live on.
• The tag line/slogan: Right now it stands as "Report on Peer Reviewed Research". How about '(Yet) Another Peer Review'? We can even go all Web 2.0 on it and call it 'yapr'

The other idea of BPR3 is aggregation of blog posts discussing peer reviewed research. I have a few thoughts on this too:

• It should use HTML markup that can be easily embedded in blog posts. I suggest we use Pg's markup to maintain consistency and avoid creating two 'standards'. Unless, of course, there is something wrong with it, but I can't see any. We can also Technorati tags and pull the data live out of Technorati using their API.
• We should create plugins for the most popular blogging platforms. If we use Pg's markup, my EasyPg plugin would be ready to go. Otherwise, we need to create new plugins to promote usage.

What do you think? Post back here or, better, at BPR3.