RSC Publishing has announced that its acting managing director, Dr. James Milne, has responded to the UK Parliament's Science and Technology Committee report on peer review.
The report is said to clearly highlight and confirm the essential role of pre-publication peer review, a view shared and supported by the RSC. According to Dr. Milne, the suggested experimentation with post publication peer review to supplement pre-publication review is an area the RSC regularly evaluates, with linking from articles to most social networking sites.
The report highlights the need for work to be scientifically sound and reproducible, suggesting this should be the gold standard for all referees and editors to aim for. While the RSC supports this as a baseline requirement, Dr. Milne said that there is a need to include assessment of additional factors such as novelty, application and ethical integrity too, which remains vital in identifying and publishing the highest quality research.
The RSC recently launched a new journal - RSC Advances - with the goals of assessing papers against the baseline standards suggested. The journal will publish high quality papers that are judged to be scientifically sound, from across the breadth of the chemical sciences. It is claimed to be the first online 'subject repository style journal' for this field, with strong submissions to date.
The RSC, through its free chemical database ChemSpider, is open to support the goal of making data associated with publically funded research freely available. Researchers can be encouraged to deposit chemical structures in this database that already holds more than 26 million compounds. The RSC supports this free chemical structure database as a service to the community.
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