hour into writing your next paper. Also remember that the vast majority of scientists work in the private sector at for-profit companies. Only a small minority work in the ivory tower of academia, and even there you've got heavy career pressure and institutional pressure to come up with profitable patents. Very few are likely to compromise these things for the sake of helping out a stranger. Tagging is a slightly different issue. If it was a good organizational system, it wold be worth doing for yourself, and the altruism of sharing your tags would be an added bonus. But tagging is a terrible and inefficient way to organize your material, which makes it harder to justify the altruism. As far as reader notifications, I've written a recent piece on how the long shelf-life and asynchronous timing of access to science papers has a negative effect on commenting. You can see it here . David; yes, I could have been clearer by specifying: commenting -on other people's articles without asking for help. And tagging: other people's work and articles without specific expectation of going back to them yourself. But on sites with strong controversy and some political fireworks behind the scenes, the comments (thorough and researched down through illiterate invective) flow like a river! I personally quickly gave up on tagging, and am bemused and mystified by the significance and delight some seem to find in "tag clouds", etc. [...] with everything we've seen for the last few years (see previous