« Peer review for academic blogs | Main | Peer review for traditional Chinese medicine? »

Bookmark in Connotea

Public peer-review for stem-cell grants

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle (31 March) outlines the process by which awards were given by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state's new $3 billion stem cell research programme. Public peer-review is a central component. According to the Chronicle, a panel of out-of-state experts ranked the proposals in private meetings, and the identities of the also-rans were not revealed. But the names of the successful applicants, and surprisingly candid summaries of the panel's reviews, were made public on the stem cell agency's web site. As the Chronicle put it: "the summaries offer a rare glimpse into the traditionally cloistered world of scientific peer review." So far as I am aware, this is not so much rare as unprecedented.
The full Chronicle article can be seen here.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on April 04, 2007
Categories: Policy and Public | | Comments (0)

Post a comment

Comments will be reviewed by the blog editors before being published, mainly to ensure that spam and irrelevant material (such as product advertisements) are not published . Please keep your comment brief. Excessively long or offensively phrased entries will be edited. Remember this blog is for feedback and discussion of matters concerning scientific authorship or peer-review - not for drawing attention to your research.

If you want to know if a NPG journal would be interested in your research, you will need to contact the journal's editorial office, which can be done via the authors & referees website.

We strongly encourage you to use your real, full name. E-mail addresses are required in case we need to discuss your comment with you directly. We won't publish your e-mail address unless you request it.

Please enter the numbers you see below - this helps us to avoid spam. If you are having trouble with this system, you can send your comment by e-mail to 'referees at nature.com'.

please enter code

Search