PETER DOSHI walked across the campus of Johns Hopkins University in a rumpled polo shirt and stonewashed jeans, a backpack slung over one shoulder. An unremarkable presence on a campus filled with backpack-toters, he is 32, and not sure where he’ll be working come August, when his postdoctoral fellowship ends. And yet, even without a medical degree, he is one of the most influential voices in medical research today.
During a Senate Committee on Finance hearing Tuesday, health experts urged lawmakers to look beyond efforts to increase health care transparency -- such as making online health care pricing data more widely available -- to control the increasing cost of health care services, Kaiser Health News' "Capsules" reports.
ASK a researcher what annoys him most about scientific publishing, and slowness will come near the top of the list of gripes. It takes nearly six months, on average, for a manuscript to wend its way from submission to publication. Worse, before a paper is accepted by a journal, it is often rejected by one or more others. The reason need not be a fatal flaw in the research; sometimes the work is simply not splashy enough for outlets high up in the pecking order. But in the process, each journal’s editors send the paper for peer review—appraisal by experts in the relevant field—in much the way that each prospective purchaser of a house commissions his own survey. And, unlike those multiple, parallel surveys, the reviewers do not even get paid for their efforts.