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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 discoveries.

== How OmniJournal Works ==

There are two forms of content on OmniJournal: '''Original article submissions''' and '''peer-reviews of pre-prints/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 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 as a result of global collaboration. The image below outlines this process.

[[File:How-OmniJournal-Works3.jpg|713px]]

== 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.
 
<span class="article-lg-text">OmniJournal is fast.</span> 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 an organized single page.

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<span class="article-lg-text">OmniJournal is collaborative.</span> 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.

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<span class="article-lg-text">OmniJournal is transparent.</span> 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, 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 control to reduce scientific bias.

== Design ==

Anyone is allowed to add and edit content on OmniJournal immediately after creating an account.

Any scientific publication, pre-print or news release reporting a scientific discovery can be validated on OmniJournal by creating a page linking the publication or news release. 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.'''

== System Administrators ==

<span class="name">James Todaro, MD</span>
[[File:James-todaro.jpg]]

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 multiple publications including the first widely disseminated paper on chloroquine in treatment of COVID-19 in ''An Effective Treatment for Coronavirus (COVID-19)'', and most recently the first detailed exposé on Surgisphere in ''A Study Out of Thin Air'' that resulted in retraction of the Lancet study on hydroxychloroquine.

<span class="name">Steve Sperandeo</span>
[[File:Steve-sperandeo.jpg]]

Steve has over 15 years of experience as a software engineer and architect. He is particularly interested in using data science and technology to advance science and improve people's and animals' well-being. While bias cannot be completely removed from science, Steve endeavours to mitigate bias through creative applications of technology that unleash the power of collective human knowledge from all backgrounds.