Recently, HEAL has added new functionality to its website allowing an innovative form of peer review and cataloging. These changes allow registered HEAL users to participate in an “Open Peer Review” process and “user tagging” of material. Users are encouraged to appraise submissions using the same quality indicators that hand-picked peer reviewers used in the past:

• Preparation and content quality
• Effectiveness of the material
• Presentation and ease of use
• Significance

This process is monitored by a moderator who may edit inappropriate comments where necessary. Open Peer Review is increasingly used by online journals to create a forum for comment.

Before making material available for Open Peer Review, editor staff will scan submissions to ensure it is within HEAL’s collection scope and does not violate copyright laws and patient confidentiality.

Working closely with the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE), we are transitioning to Open Peer Review for a number of reasons:

1. A more democratic review process that encourages active involvement of a community of users.
2. A continuous quality assurance mechanism that may identify obsolete material submitted in the past.
3. Improvement of the turn-around time between submission and publication
4. Large volume of submissions
5. Substantial cost savings

How To Get Involved

• You can review any HEAL resource by clicking on the "Write a Review" link on the resource page.

More information

• Contact Sebastian Uijtdehaage, PhD at bas@mednet.ucla.edu.