As the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (NPRC) ends its first year, it is worth looking back to see how the experiment has worked.
NPRC was conceived in the summer of 2007 at a meeting of editors and publishers of neuroscience journals. One of the working groups addressed whether it was possible to construct a system for permitting authors whose manuscript received supportive reviews at one journal but was not accepted (perhaps because it was not within the scope of the first journal, or not sufficiently novel to merit publication in a general journal and therefore better for a specialty journal) to send a revised manuscript together with its first round of reviews to a new journal for the second round. This would speed up the review process and reduce the work for reviewers and editors.
The working group not only designed a framework for transferring reviews among journals, but also implemented it as the NPRC. By the fall of 2007, more than a dozen major journals had signed onto the NPRC, sufficient to launch the experiment in January, 2008. As of the autumn of 2008, 33 journals belong to the Consortium (Table 1). For details about the NPRC, you can go to its website at nprc.incf.org. You will find information for Authors, Reviewers, Editors, and Publishers there, as well as the information on how journals can join the Consortium.
The editors of Consortium journals were recently polled to determine how the NPRC has been working. They responded that during the first nine months about 1-2% of manuscripts that they received had been forwarded from another Consortium journal. A similar number had been sent out from each journal to other participants. In most cases, the papers had been expedited, because the editors at the second journal felt the previous reviews, and the authors' response to them, were sufficiently positive to permit re-review by one or both of the original referees. In those cases when the editor at the second journal felt that they needed to get new reviews, the review time at the second journal was about what it would have been if the paper had been submitted there by ordinary means.
So, the savings in time and labor are considerable for most of the papers that are transferred between journals via the NPRC. Why then are so few authors using this option?