eMJA Online peer review trial

eMJA The Medical Journal of Australia

eMJA Online Peer Review Trial

[This document relates to the first eMJA Internet peer review study, which was completed in May 1997.]

Examination of an open peer review process by electronic publication

A joint project of The University of Sydney Library and the Medical Journal of Australia.

Trial objectives

1. Using electronic publishing on the Internet, to develop a new model of peer review that allows:

Open scrutiny of articles and the peer review process itself, by electronically publishing articles with reviewers' comments
Faster publication of research by electronic delivery without prejudice to print publication, which is regarded as the "gold standard" of academic publication.

2. To compare the effectiveness of the new model with conventional peer review.

Outline of methods

Research articles that have been accepted for publication in print in the MJA, together with comments provided by the peer reviewers, will be published here first, at the eMJA web site.

Readers on the Internet will be able to review the articles and commentary and post their own comments to the eMJA. These comments will be filtered editorially to remove irrelevant material, then passed on to the authors and peer reviewers as feedback.

Selected comments may be electronically published with the papers and reviews as additional commentary; authors will be able to respond or revise their paper in response to comments.

After a period on the Internet, papers will be removed from the eMJA review list and published in print in the MJA.

During this trial, quantitative data will be collected via the computer system and qualitative assessments will be sought from authors, reviewers, editorial staff and an external Project Review Group. We will be looking to see whether the trial leads to further improvements in the quality of papers and whether open scrutiny of peer review processes has an effect on the quality of peer review.

An effect of the trial is that participating authors will be published electronically several weeks or even months before they could normally expect to appear in print.

This trial has been funded by the Electronic Publishing Working Group of the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee. To find out more about the project, you can read the original trial proposal.