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During the development of our project, in most discussions and interviews, it became clear that you are not satisfied with the current peer review system. This is a problem that we would like to solve in Scientific Broadcasts.

But as we kept discussing and dug deeper, we found out that you are not frustrated with the Peer Review itself. What frustrates you is the amount of work asked from you before your manuscript gets reviewed.

Modern journals pretend that a submitted manuscript could be ready to be published without any changes. Hence, the ask you to submit a final, formatted manuscript with final figures and supplementary materials. To achieve that you need to spend days working with the text, formatting references, designing your figures, uploading heavy files.

But it never gets accepted as is.

They always ask you to change or correct something, and quite often this means that you will have to re-do everything again. A simple change of a number in your analysis means that you have to re-run everything, change the text and re-design the figures.

This is frustrating and unfair. We want to change that.

You also get frustrated about the time needed to have a decision. You might wait for weeks or months to receive an answer or a decision to your manuscript. You have to endure additional rounds of review even for trivial and straightforward issues. We want to change that as well.

We think outside the page. The current peer review system is a remnant of the old days.

In Scientific Broadcasts, all instances that require feedback will happen live, in online meetings.

For you it will be like presenting at a virtual conference.

You present your work and you get feedback from our Producers and Critics. All meetings will be recorded for transparency and archive puproses.  Forget about back-and-forth emails to solve misunderstandings and provide rebuttals to the comments of the reviewers. Everything gets discussed and resolved live, immediately and when the meeting is over you have the decision.

Editors and reviewers should be there to help you make make your work better, not to judge you or generate more stress and anxiety. We are in the storytelling business, so let's do it like storytellers do!

We prefer to evaluate your work during the entire process, but in each step a different aspect of your work needs to be evaluated using different criteria. We don't ask others to decide on your work; we ask them to contribute and share their opinion in those parts that you and we think that they require feedback.

We don't just send your videoscript to 2-3 anonymous reviewers. We prepare customized evaluations that are tailored to your work, designed to provide qualitative and quantitative data to allow us to reach an informed decision. We ask critics to simply sit back and just watch a video, and to complete a list of questions. If we need more in-depth feedback we will organize roundtable discussions with them and even face-to-face discussions with you and your team.

The Scientific Broadcasts Evaluation System comprises three different stages: the Greenlight, the Wrap, and Post-Production.

The purpose of this stage is to evaluate the quality of your research and its audiovisual content. We are looking research that presents novel and high-quality scientific information that needs to be told audio-visually. We only ask you to submit your pitch of your project (that could be something as simple as a recording of your presentation at a conference), which is then evaluated by our Studio or Channel. 

This is important. To get the Greenlight you do not have to produce the final work.  We review the potential audiovisual impact and quality, we identify the most important production challenges, and we evaluate the if your science is correct. This is done with internal screening of the Studio/Channel members.

We do not judge the topic or the research question. We are looking to confirm that the scientific part is correctly done, and to identify its audiovisual impact.

If we are happy with the results, we will give you the greenlight to start the production of your academic video. We will also sent you constructive feedback from the internal evaluation process, but the final decision is yours to see if you would like to adapt to any comments or concerns.

The purpose of this stage is to evaluate whether you have been able to produce a Rough Cut that accurately tells your story in the best and most impactful way. You will get an Assistant Producer (AP) to help you, give you guidance and solve any of the problems that might appear. In coordination with your AP you will organize internal and external screenings to evaluate your Rough Cut or parts of it. Again, the idea is to get qualitative and quantitative data to allow you to make decisions. 

You want to know if you have collected enough data? If you have analyzed them properly? To choose between different methods? To choose between alternative interpretations? This is the time and place to do that. Your AP will help to organize the screenings and prepare the customized questionnaires, as well as to analyze the evaluations.

Once you are certain that your job is complete, you put all your materials together into a Rough Cut and it's a wrap!

The purpose of this stage is to allow our Studios to prepare the Final Theatrical Version of your scicast and all the accompanying information for their final Release. To achieve that we will work hard with your produced Rough Cut and  all materials. During this stage we will organize more extensive screenings and subsequent group interviews, to decide on the final contents of your scicast.

Which are the parts that should make the Final Cut? Does the pdf equivalent accurately reflect the contents of the scicast? Are there parts that should be improved, and how? Of course, you will have to approve the Final Cut, and all the rest of the material will be available in different versions and accompanied information.