European Journal of Nutrition & Food Safety, ISSN: 2347-5641,Vol.: 5, Issue.: 5 (Special issue)
High Coverage of Vitamin A Supplementation and Measles Vaccination during an Integrated Maternal and Child Health Week in Sierra Leone
Fatmata Fatima Sesay1*, Mary H. Hodges1, Habib I. Kamara1, Mohamed Turay1, Adam Wolf2, Thomas T. Samba3, Aminata Shamit Koroma4, Wogba Kamara5, Amadu Fall6, Pamella Mitula6, Ishata Conteh6, Nuhu Maksha7 and Amara Jambai8 1Helen Keller International, Freetown, Sierra Leone. 2Colombia University, New York, USA. 3Child Health and Expanded Program on Immunization, Ministry of Health and Sanitation, Freetown, Sierra Leone. 4Nutrition Program, Ministry of Health and Sanitation, Freetown, Sierra Leone. 5National HIV/AIDS Secretariat, Ministry of Health and Sanitation, Freetown, Sierra Leone. 6Country Office, Sierra Leone and Inter Country Support Team for West Africa, Freetown, Sierra Leone. 7United Nations Children’s Fund, Freetown, Sierra Leone. 8Directorate of Disease Prevention and Control, Ministry of Health and Sanitation, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
1. Up to 6th August 2012, all SDI journals followed strict double-blind review policy to ensure neutral evaluation. During this review process identity of both, the authors and reviewers are kept hidden to ensure the unbiased evaluation. More information is available at this link.
2. We have migrated to transparent and toughest ‘Advanced OPEN peer review’ system (Detailed general information is available at this link). The identity of the authors and reviewers will be revealed to each other during this review process. This transparent process will help to eradicate any possible malicious/purposeful interference by any person (publishing staff, reviewer, editor, author, etc) during peer review. As a result of this unique system, all reviewers will get their due recognition and respect, once their names are published in the papers (Example Link). If reviewers do not want to reveal their identities, we will honour that request. In that case, only the review reports will be published as ‘anonymous reviewer report’.
3. Additionally ‘Advanced OPEN peer review’ greatly helps in ‘continuity and advancement of science’. We firmly believe that all the files related to peer review of a manuscript are valuable and hold an important place in the continuity and advancement of science. If publishers publish the peer review reports along with published papers, this process can result in savings of thousands of hours of future authors during experiments, manuscript preparation, etc. by minimising the common errors after reading these previously published peer review reports. Therefore, as per our new official policy update, if the manuscript is published, all peer review reports will be available to the readers. All files (like the original manuscript, comments of the reviewers, revised manuscript, and editorial comment (if any)) related to the peer review, will be available in “Review history” link along with the published paper (Example Link).
4. Additionally, we believe that one of the main objectives of peer review system is ‘to improve the quality of a candidate manuscript’. Normally we try to publish the ‘average marks (out of 10)’ a manuscript received at initial peer review stage and at final publication stage to record its history of improvement during peer review. This process further increases the transparency. It is more important to record the ‘strength and weakness of a manuscript honestly’ than claiming that 'our peer review system is perfect’. Therefore, these transparent processes (i.e. publication of review history files and scores of a particular manuscript) additionally give a clear idea of the strength and weakness of a published paper to the readers. This process enhances the chances of proper use of the result of research (and or reduces the chances of misuse of the weakness of the findings of the paper). Thus this transparent process may prove to be highly beneficial for the society in the long run.
Specific Comment
This abstract was presented at “The Micronutrient Forum Global Conference – Bridging Discovery and Delivery”, 2-6 June 2014, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.