About the Consortium

The Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium has been formed to reduce the time and effort involved in the peer review of original neuroscience research reports. It is an alliance of neuroscience journals that have agreed to accept manuscript reviews from other Consortium journals. By reducing the number of times that a manuscript is reviewed, the Consortium will reduce the load on reviewers and editors and speed the publication of research results. The Consortium is open to any self-identified neuroscience journal that is indexed by MEDLINE.

The impetus for the Consortium came from journal editors who saw that many solid manuscripts were being rejected because of space limitations or because the articles were not appropriate for their journals. Authors then resubmit their rejected article to another journal, which must engage another set of peer reviewers. In some cases, the same reviewers are called upon again to provide comments. Overall, the current system is inefficient and wastes reviewer time, a scarce resource. Moreover, it generates extra work for editors, who must spend more time soliciting reviews from an overworked pool of reviewers. It affects the quality of peer review because the best-qualified reviewers are less available to review manuscripts because of the number of reviews they are providing. Authors and readers also pay a price because the publication of research results is delayed by weeks or months as additional reviews are sought.

If reviews obtained by one journal could be re-used by another, a considerable amount of work could be avoided and publication delays could be reduced. The potential for significantly enhancing the speed and quality of manuscript reviewing motivated discussions at the PubMed Plus Conference, a meeting of scientists, journal editors and members of the science publishing community, organized by the Society for Neuroscience in June 2007. Members of a working group, consisting of journal editors and publishers, proposed the creation of the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium, an idea that was endorsed by the other participants at the meeting. The Society for Neuroscience Council then empaneled the members of the original workgroup as the Task Force for Neuroscience Publishing with the charge of supervising the formation and initial operation of the Consortium during the one year trial period.

Members of the Task Force for Neuroscience Publishing

• Clif Saper, Chair; J Comp Neurol
• John Maunsell, Cochair; J Neurosci
• Giorgio Ascoli, Neuroinformatics
• Jan Bjaalie, INCF
• Paul Carton, Elsevier Science 
• Peter Fox, Hum Brain Mapp
• Pablo Fernicola, Microsoft
• Robert Harington, Wiley-Blackwell’s
• Steve Lisberger, Neurosci [IBRO]
• Eve Marder, J Neurophys
• Margaret Reich, American Physiological Society
  
• Michael A. Rogawski, Neuropharm
• Gary Westbrook, J Neurosci
  

Jan Bjaalie, who is the Director of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) and was a participant in the PubMed Plus Conference, offered to place the official website for the Consortium under INCF administration. INCF is an internationally funded neuroscience organization; based at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, whose role it is to facilitate informatic approaches to neuroscience research. As the Consortium was designed to include all major neuroscience journals worldwide that wish to participate, this neutral venue seemed ideal for hosting the site.

The goal of the Consortium is to enable journals to forward reviews with minimal changes to existing review procedures. To that end, the forwarding of reviews is handled directly by the editorial offices of the Consortium journals, with no central controlling body. Accepting members into the Consortium and providing information about it are the primary functions of the Task Force.