As anyone who has submitted work to a medical journal knows, publishing an academic manuscript is tough. Most medical journals are locked behind online paywalls; typically the review process for an article can takes months, even years, and cost hundreds of dollars. Furthermore, PubMed Central, the Internet’s largest free database of medical journal articles, has content gaps in certain areas.
Enter Curēus, an open-source online medical journal based in Palo Alto that launched this week and is founded by Dr. John R. Adler, Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford Medical School. Coincidentally, Dr. Adler is also the inventor of Cyberknife and was the founder/CEO of publicly traded Accuray Inc. According to the Curēus website:
Leveraging the power of an online, crowd-sourced community platform, Curēus promotes medical research by offering tools that better serve and highlight the people who create it, resulting in better research, faster publication and easier access for everyone…We make it easier and faster to publish your work – it’s always free and you retain the copyright. What’s more, the Curēus platform is designed to provide a place for physicians to build their digital CV anchored with their posters and papers.
In addition to not retaining copyrights over your submission, it is free to publish and read articles on Curēus. Furthermore, every published paper is scored by a broad cross-section of users and accumulates a proprietary score, which they refer to as a “Scholarly Impact Quotient” (SIQ) to measure a paper’s true scientific impact.
Additionally, earlier this fall Curēus hosted an online poster competition sponsored by Varian Medical Systems that featured hundreds of entries by medical students and physicians around the world.
Curēus continues a trend of peer-reviewed open access journals such as PLoS One and is a powerful addition to the academic medical community.
Link: Curēus
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