Cross-publisher initiative promises to speed peer review

BioMed Central has announced an initiative that allows authors to bring their reviewers' reports to any of the subject-specific journals in BioMed Central's BMC-series if their manuscript is rejected by eLife.

This builds on a practice that BioMed Central has already had in place on some of its titles for several years. 'By transferring referee reports alongside manuscripts when they are declined by these selective journals, we hope to provide authors with a simple solution to avoid the vortex of endless review,' explained Simon Harold, executive editor for the BMC-series journals, in a post on the publisher's blog.

The publisher has also extended the portable peer-review scheme across the entire BioMed Central portfolio of journals and says that it is working on a number of other projects aimed at making the peer-review process more efficient.