Admin

We started the biOverlay experiment with the goal of testing detailed, portable comments for preprints. One hope was that authors would have access to portable reviews that could be taken to journals. We would then be able to link journal editors with reviewers to help speed papers through the review process with the fewest wasted reviews (i.e., those that are written for journals where a manuscript is ultimately rejected). Our promise to associate editors was that they’d have the opportunity to ask their peers for detailed thoughts on what they found to be the most interesting papers of the moment. »

We’ve gotten a number of requests from people who would like to stay up to date with biOverlay posts via social media. We now post updates to twitter and facebook pages automatically, though there may at times be some delay. Our RSS feed or our website provide the fastest way to discover new posts. If you’d like us to push new post notifications via some other media, please reach out and let us know what we can do to make biOverlay easier to follow. »

I’m excited to be able to announce the impending arrival of biOverlay, which is similar to an overlay journal for the natural sciences. Like academic journals, we perform peer review of scientific literature. However, our overlay doesn’t publish papers. Authors do not know that papers are selected and sent out for review, and journals should not consider manuscripts that we selected for biOverlay as published. Because our process directly mirrors academic peer review other than the stage of submission, one could imagine that our assessments may be useful to journals when they select which papers to send out for review. »