Open access publisher Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation has announced that it will partner with Rubriq, complementing its own peer review process for its journals on QScience.com with the latter's groundbreaking scorecard, a standardised, independent peer review tool developed to speed publication and improve trust in the peer review process. Rubriq is a for-benefit organisation offering peer review and journal matching services.
While Rubriq will provide an independent peer review of submitted research, the editors-in-chief of each journal will retain control over what papers ultimately are accepted or rejected, based on both the evaluation of Rubriq reviewers and the particular scope of the journal in question. There are more than 15 journals available through QScience.com, from specialised-topic journals to the multidisciplinary journal QScience Connect.
Although Rubriq will supplement the existing review process for more traditionally-structured journals, it completely will replace the peer review management process for QScience Connect, where editors will make decisions based solely on feedback provided in the Rubriq scorecard.
Although Rubriq was designed to help individual authors make critical changes to their manuscript before submission and choose the best journal for their work, this relationship demonstrates how journals can also use Rubriq to improve the publishing process. Outsourcing can enable journals to better manage the costs, quality, and transparency of the peer review process.
The foundation of the Rubriq system is a web-based network that can handle large volumes of manuscript submissions. Using its proprietary software, Rubriq matches and assigns submissions to the appropriate peer reviewers, who utilise the patent-pending scorecard rubric to provide standardised, structured reviews. Rubriq staff also provides journal recommendations, using the reviews and software to match submitted papers to appropriate journals by keywords, as well as the impact and quality of the papers as assessed by the reviewers.
