Peer Review in Canada: Results from a Promising Experiment

The end point in the access to justice debate often focuses on expanding the availability of legal services for the poor. This article argues that true access to justice requires greater focus on the quality of legal services provided. It tells the story of the introduction of peer review in Canada as a quality assurance tool for evaluating the legal work of a group of criminal lawyers. The article chronicles the various obstacles encountered in making even a very limited form of peer review a reality in Canada, where historically there has been skepticism about the peer review process in the legal profession. A key challenge was negotiating a baseline understanding of competence and quality. In doing so, the authors adapted the evaluative criteria used for peer review in England, Wales, and Scotland to develop a process-driven set of criteria. The authors conclude that peer review is a viable quality assurance tool for legal aid lawyers in Canada

Peer Review in Canada: Results from a Promising Experiment

The end point in the access to justice debate often focuses on expanding the availability of legal services for the poor. This article argues that true access to justice requires greater focus on the quality of legal services provided. It tells the story of the introduction of peer review in Canada as a quality assurance tool for evaluating the legal work of a group of criminal lawyers. The article chronicles the various obstacles encountered in making even a very limited form of peer review a reality in Canada, where historically there has been skepticism about the peer review process in the legal profession. A key challenge was negotiating a baseline understanding of competence and quality. In doing so, the authors adapted the evaluative criteria used for peer review in England, Wales, and Scotland to develop a process-driven set of criteria. The authors conclude that peer review is a viable quality assurance tool for legal aid lawyers in Canada

Sometimes the impact factor outshines the H index

Journal impact factor (which reflects a particular journal's quality) and H index (which reflects the number and quality of an author's publications) are two measures of research quality. It has been argued that the H index outperforms the impact factor for evaluation purposes. Using articles first-authored or last-authored by board members of Retrovirology, we show here that the reverse is true when the future success of an article is to be predicted. The H index proved unsuitable for this specific task because, surprisingly, an article's odds of becoming a 'hit' appear independent of the pre-eminence of its author. We discuss implications for the peer-review process

Rewarding peer reviewers: a problem of adverse selection?

As a solution to the worsening peer reviewer shortage, many scientific journals now offer non-monetary rewards as an incentive to researchers to register to review. Marco Seeber and Monica Zaharie report on research studying the efficacy of non-monetary rewards in attracting peer reviewers, exploring whether acceptance varies according to the nature of the offer of the reward or the researcher’s gender, rank, or productivity. While it is often taken for granted that offering a reward will spur a particular behaviour, this is not necessarily true for an undertaking such as peer review, where efforts are often also driven by ethical commitment and other more intrinsic motivations

Open for Trouble: Amending Washington\u27s Open Public Meetings Act to Preserve University Patent Rights

Times have changed. Science is no longer “a perfect working model of democracy,” so transparent that it does not need supervision by outsiders. Instead, science is now regulated at the federal and state level. At the federal level, laws and regulations require peer review meetings for research at state public universities to ensure compliance with federal funding mandates. At the state level, the Washington Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA) requires that peer review meetings at state universities be open to the public. When a scientist presents during one of these peer review meetings, the state university may lose patent rights because the presentation may contain intellectual property information that, once made public, forfeits patentability. This is certainly true for foreign patent rights and, in more limited circumstances, also true for rights under United States patent law. Though OPMA has exemptions that allow for closed sessions to discuss sensitive information, these exemptions do not encompass patent rights. This scheme conflicts not only with foreign and federal patent law goals, but also with the Washington Public Records Act (PRA). This Comment argues that OPMA should be amended to preserve a state university’s patent rights, consistent with patent law goals and the PRA

Is Acupuncture An Effective Treatment For Alleviating Fibromyalgia?

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this selective EBM review is to determine whether or not acupuncture is an effective treatment for alleviating fibromyalgia. STUDY DESIGN: Systematic review of three randomized controlled trials published in 2014, 2016, and 2017. DATA SOURCES: Data sources for this review were articles published in peer-reviewed journals using PubMed Database. OUTCOME(S) MEASURED: The outcome measured was the patients decrease in pain intensity through the use of the visual analog scale. RESULTS: Stival et al. (2014) found that the change in pain for patients who received true acupuncture to be statistically significant with a p-value of 0.0001. Ugurle et al. (2017) also found that the group who received true acupuncture to have a statistically significant p-value of \u3c 0.001. Vas et al. (2016) found that participants who received true acupuncture over the course of the study also had a significant p-value of \u3c0.01. CONCLUSIONS: The results of these three trials were all promising, but further research is warranted to assess the long-term benefits of using acupuncture for alleviating fibromyalgia