![]() ![]() Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances 8, 9. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS) has two paths for submission of research articles, one standard and one less so, the famous contributed track where the submitting author has to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes 1, 2, wherein previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. ![]() Peter Aldhous reviewed in 2014 this inside track and those who use it more often. ![]() He describes the contributed track as follows: “ This unusual process allows authors to choose who will review their paper and how to respond to those reviewers’ comments“. There are two elements of transparency and accountability to counterbalance this conflict of interest of having an author acting as the editor of their own article: it is recorded on the paper that it is a contributed paper, and, the names of the referees (chosen by the author) are also published. It is interesting (maybe) to note that this ancient house of PNAS has a system there which is pretty similar to what has been recently proposed as a disruptive innovation in scientific publishing by Jan Velterop and implemented by ScienceOpen, i.e. The first one is that PRO at ScienceOpen is open to everyone, not just National Academy members. ![]()
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