Introducing OmniJournal
Peer-review by everyone
OmniJournal is an open collaboration focused on the review of scientific publications and discoveries in real-time. Content is continually created and edited by anyone with the shared goal of expediently validating or rejecting medical and scientific articles.
This project was inspired by the collaboration of independent physicians, researchers and data scientists worldwide to uncover a fraudulent, high-impact study published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet in May 2020. This investigative feat was accomplished in days resulting in formal retraction by The Lancet in less than two weeks.
Many of the world’s most prestigious scientists and organizations were deceived by this fraudulent study, including the World Health Organization, Dr. Fauci, Richard Horton (editor-in-chief of The Lancet), Eric Topol (editor-in-chief of Medscape) and others. In a decentralized effort, the collective human knowledge expediently arrived at the truth, recognizing the fatal data inconsistencies entirely missed by Lancet’s peer-review process and the aforementioned “experts.” This is incredibly powerful.
The collective human knowledge has not been harnessed in the peer-review process in science and medicine. While science and medicine in the modern age is a collaborative effort, the peer-review process remains a “black-box” with reviewers working in secrecy and isolation. As the world has witnessed these past few months, the result is misinformation, distrust and mistakes from even the most respected organizations.
In the search of truth during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen the explosion of investigative research on social media platforms, particularly Twitter. While this helps facilitate collaboration, it is very much unorganized collaboration with intelligent dialogue often lost in a sea of comments difficult to retrieve just a few days later.
We created OmniJournal to give every researcher worldwide a platform to collaborate with others to uncover the good, the bad and the ugly in scientific and medical publications. Users collaborate to critically review each scientific or medical article on a single shared page where anyone can contribute or edit content.
How OmniJournal Works
There are two forms of content on OmniJournal: Original articles and peer-review pages on preprints/published articles
· Original article pages can only be created by the authors of the content in compliance with copyright laws. These are protected pages that cannot be edited.
· Peer-review pages can be created and edited by anyone. The goal is for every scientific or medical article to have an individual page on OmniJournal that consists of a detailed peer-review resulting from global collaboration.
Peer-review in the information age
The traditional peer-review process for medical and scientific discoveries is slow, non-collaborative and nontransparent. These truths have become self-evident during the COVID-19 pandemic.
OmniJournal is fast. Journals can take months to peer-review manuscripts without any guarantee of publication. Upon rejection, authors must then start the submission process again in another journal. Without real-time feedback, this process is inefficient and delays public dissemination of critical information relating to medical and scientific discovery.
Preprints are increasingly becoming the preferred method of bypassing this time-consuming process. To date, however, there is not a suitable platform for the peer-review of preprint articles.
On OmniJournal, preprints and published articles can be scrutinized in real-time by anyone in a single organized page.
OmniJournal is collaborative. Scientific discovery is most successful when done in collaboration. Traditional peer-review, however, occurs in isolation. Expert reviewers are not permitted to collaborate with colleagues and are confined to reviewing article submissions in secrecy. The result is wasted effort by reviewers who may spend considerable amounts of time discovering identical issues. The peer-review process is further weakened because reviewing experts with varying skill sets cannot build off each other’s discoveries.
A collaborative effort can result in a far more rigorous peer-review process. For example, an expert in the subject matter may be surprised or suspicious of a particular finding, but may not have the command of statistical analysis to validate these suspicions. On OmniJournal, a subject matter expert could point out a suspicious finding, which would then guide a statistician to validate a particular data set.
OmniJournal allows experts to build off each other’s knowledge base in real-time to validate scientific papers.
OmniJournal is transparent. Traditional peer-review is notoriously a “black box” whereby the public along with scientists and physicians, are largely expected to trust journals to act in the best interest of science. This trust is called into question though. Multiple current and former editors-in-chief of high-impact journals (e.g. The Lancet and NEJM) have openly stated that journals are increasingly beholden to pharmaceutical companies, who provide the vast majority of funding to journal organizations in the form of advertising or sponsorships.
Editors-in-chief are wholly in control of the publication and are also beholden to interested for-profit corporations. Moreover, editors-in-chief are subject to their own political or scientific biases, which may suppress certain scientific discoveries while amplifying others. Both journals and editors-in-chief are centralized points of control that are subject to biases and external influences.
OmniJournal decentralizes this control to reduce scientific bias.
Design
Anyone is allowed to contribute and edit content on OmniJournal immediately after creating an account.
Any scientific publication or preprint reporting a scientific discovery can be validated on OmniJournal by creating a page linking the publication. The entry is to include the relevant publication details that identify the original article.
Minimum suggested content for each page includes a brief Summary of the paper’s findings along with Major Issues (e.g. methodology concerns, insufficient data, flaws in statistical analysis), Minor Issues (e.g. references, ambiguous sentences), Impact (e.g. implications of findings) and References. When applicable, there will be an Authors’ Response where verified authors can non-anonymously address raised concerns or questions.
The result is a collaborative peer-review of scientific articles in an easily digestible and recognizable format.
Participate
OmniJournal only works if YOU participate. If you have comments or criticisms of any scientific or medical article, please visit https://omnij.org. Create an account in seconds and begin contributing to the peer-review process of the future to ensure published science and medicine meets only the highest standards. Lives literally depend on it.
Team
James M. Todaro, MD
Dr. Todaro received his medical degree from Columbia University, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in NY, followed by completion of residency in ophthalmology. He continues to lead investigative research in COVID-19 at a global scale, with publications including the first widely disseminated paper on chloroquine in treatment of COVID-19 in An Effective Treatment for Coronavirus (COVID-19), and the first detailed exposé on Surgisphere in A Study Out of Thin Air that led to the retraction of the Lancet study on hydroxychloroquine.
Contact Us
Looking to get involved or partner with us? Please email us at info@omnij.org. Alternatively, James Todaro can also be reached on Twitter @JamesTodaroMD.
