RSC responds to science and technology committee report on peer review

Dr James Milne, acting managing director RSC Publishing, today responded to parliament's science and technology committee report on peer review.

"The report clearly highlights and confirms the essential role of pre-publication peer review, a view shared and supported by the RSC. 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, there is a need to include assessment of additional factors such as novelty, application and ethical integrity too, which remain 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. RSC Advances will publish high quality papers that are judged to be scientifically sound, from across the breadth of the chemical sciences. This is the first online 'subject repository style journal' for this field, with strong submissions to date.  

"The RSC, through our 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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