ORAU Finds New Uses for PeerNet Application
ORAU’s PeerNet system is well established among our customers as the standard for automated peer reviews. But recently, our employees found fresh ways to use PeerNet to meet new needs of their customers.
Review of Meeting Abstracts / Presentations
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of FreedomCAR—a governmental research initiative that is developing the technologies necessary to provide petroleum independence from harmful emissions for cars and trucks—asked ORAU for suggestions on a more effective way to choose which technical posters and presentations to include at its Diesel Engine Emissions Reduction (DEER) conference.
ORAU responded to the request by revising the PeerNet system with several new steps:
- Developing an e-mail-based call for abstracts and a submittal process to receive the abstracts
- Creating a consistent file-naming and organization system
- Instructing the reviewers, most of whom were new to PeerNet, on how to access and rate the merit of the abstracts (The DEER review was distinctly different from the classic PeerNet review in that it did not lead up to a funding decision.)
ORAU received and processed 120 abstracts for the conference. The customer was pleased with the end result: a documented process for choosing the conference agenda presented at DEER 2005, which drew almost 700 participants.
ORAU was excited that this new use of PeerNet exposed the application to a broad range of potential customers in government and industry. The FreedomCAR customer decided to use PeerNet for its next conference.
Integrating a Rebuttal Process into PeerNet
DOE’s Office of Fusion Energy Science determines, through a peer review process, which institutions and organizations are worthy of research funding based on proposals submitted by principal investigators (i.e., researchers). While realizing it would take time and a substantial amount of money, this DOE office requested that ORAU create a new system giving principal investigators the ability to respond to reviewer comments on their proposals.
Although PeerNet did not previously have this rebuttal capability, ORAU made it happen quickly and cost-effectively by integrating the process into the current application. Only minimal staff hours were charged to DOE for this task. ORAU also took extensive quality control steps to ensure the confidentiality of all involved.
The next step has been to allow for a second rebuttal, where the reviewer could then respond to the principal investigator’s comments.