Peer review and public voting

The entries will be assessed by two groups in parallel: a panel of scientific experts and you, the public.

In order to explore some of the issues surrounding the open science debate and to experiment with new strategies for the open access community, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and Hermes 2012 have decided to use two different methods to select the winning entry.

Initially, the entries were digitally filtered. Because of the overwhelming number of entries in the competition, we've applied some simple filtering to make sure that the judges only have to evaluate the entries  that are likely to contain a winning answer. More detailed information on how we did this is available at "In detail: the digital filtering process".

A crack team of chemists who work at the Royal Society of Chemistry will be assessing the entries according to whether they are scientifically sound, imaginative and creative.

The team is made up of Publishing Editors, whose day-to-day job is to assess whether chemistry papers submitted to the RSC's journals are of the world class standards we pride ourselves on publishing, and Communications and Education Specialists, who find exciting and engaging ways to bring chemistry into the public eye and into the classroom.

All the entries that make it through this first round will be sent to a panel of expert chemists and physicists, and these experts will whittle the entries down to a few potential winners. From these few, a winner will be chosen...

How you can get involved

A public peer review system is also being used in parallel, so you can choose which one you think is the best. By clicking on the "vote now!" button anyone can take part in voting for their favourite competition entry.

The public voting site is based on a genetic algorithm: when you go to the site you'll be presented with two entries and asked to say which you prefer. The entries that get voted for frequently make it through to the next round, while those that don't eventually drop out of the pool. The next two entries will then pop up and, again, you can choose which of the two you like more.