How far are we from a streamlined public peer-review process?

[shan564]

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I was listening to NPR today and they had a guest from NIH named Dr. Harold Varmus, who was talking about expanding PubMed Central to eventually include all NIH-sponsored research papers within a year after they're first published. This got me thinking... why is there a middleman in the first place? So, I wrote about it on my blog:

http://www.globallyrational.com/

It's the April 11 entry... I write on it every day, so just scroll down to April 11 if you're reading this a couple of days after I first posted it.

How far do you think we are from a process like that? Please feel free to leave a comment on the blog.

 

[DogFaceMedic]

Without reading your blog: summarize what you mean. Do you want all grants to be judged by the gov't?

 

[shan564]

Without reading your blog: summarize what you mean. Do you want all grants to be judged by the gov't?

No, PubMed Central is the place where NIH publishes a lot of journal articles for free access. It doesn't have anything to do with grants... it would encompass all kinds of research, including stuff that's funded by patents or by drug companies. Basically, I want to see a big library of peer-reviewed papers managed directly by NIH instead of having profit-oriented journals delaying the process. I explained the details in the post.

 

[BoSoxMack]

I'm not really sure what your asking still, but as of this month all published research funded by the government must be made public. This is to say that regardless of what journal your research is published in, if it was funded by the NIH in any capacity, it must also be available on pub med for open access. Congress passed this law last year I believe, and it goes into effect this month.

 

[sirrileydog]

Varmus is a well known lefty behind the PLOS movement. Three cheers for PLOS, but it's just one way to do things--not the only way.

Nice blog spam.

 

[shan564]

Yeah, that's what made me think about it, but it's not that simple. You still have to go through the following process:
1. Submit your paper
2. Paper gets accepted (or it gets rejected, so you go back to step 1 with a different journal), ~4-6 months.
3. Make recommended changes, ~1 month
4. Wait for the journal to get around to publishing it, ~6 months.
5. Paper is released to NIH, ~6-12 months according to the new NIH regulation you're talking about... and that's just for research that's sponsored by NIH.

Steps 4 and 5 could be eliminated if we had it all as one big public library.