Give until it hurts.

The Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology of India needs the services of its readers who are experienced with publishing. One big rate-limiting step of our publication releasing its bi-monthly issues on time is the process of peer review. In the last 20 years that I have worked my way up the ladder, the darkest secret of delayed volumes has been the indifference of the peer reviewers and inordinately delayed submissions. If we need to compete with the best in global academia, then we will need to have selfless, hard-working, and sincere volunteers for the Journal’s peer review process who can write to me directly with their field of expertise. Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers). It constitutes a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards of quality, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, peer review is often used to determine an academic paper’s suitability for publication. Pragmatically, peer review refers to the work done during the screening of submitted manuscripts. This process encourages authors to meet the accepted standards of their discipline and reduces the dissemination of irrelevant findings, unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations, and personal views. Publications that have not undergone peer review are likely to be regarded with suspicion by academic scholars and professionals. At a journal, the task of picking reviewers typically falls to an editor. Recruiting referees is a political art, because referees, and often editors, are usually not paid, and reviewing takes time away from the referee’s main activities, such as his or her own research. I want to turn this process of selection into one of experts giving their time to bring better research to our medical fraternity and to the country. In earlier periods, editors of journals often made publication decisions without seeking outside input. For example, Albert Einstein’s revolutionary ‘‘Annus Mirabilis’’ papers in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physik were peerreviewed by the journal’s editor-in-chief, Max Planck, and its co-editor, Wilhelm Wien, both future Nobel prize winners and together experts on the topics of these papers. The first recorded editorial pre-publication peer-review process was at The Royal Society in 1665 by the founding editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg [1–3]. The first peer-reviewed publication might have been the Medical Essays and Observations published by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1731. The present-day peer-review system evolved from this eighteenth-century process [4]. Philosophical Transactions from its outset did not publish all the material it received; the Council of the Society reviewed the contributions Oldenburg received before approving a selection of them for publication. Albeit primitive, this is the first recorded instance of ‘‘peer review’’. Allahbadia G. (&) Rotunda—The Center for Human Reproduction, 36 Turner Road, #101, 1st Floor B Wing, Bandra (W), Mumbai 400 050, India e-mail: [email protected] The Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology of India (March–April 2014) 64(2):79–81 DOI 10.1007/s13224-014-0530-7