In recent years, the perception has grown that conflicts of interest are having a detrimental effect on medical science as it influences health policy and clinical practice, leading medical journals to enforce self-declaration of potential biases in the attempt to counteract or compensate for the problem. Conflict of interest (CoI) declarations have traditionally been considered inappropriate i...

All papers published in this volume of IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering have been peer reviewed through processes administered by the Editors. Reviews were conducted expert referees to professional scientific standards expected a proceedings journal Publishing.

Peer review is so much a part of the fabric of scholarly inquiry that it is often taken for granted. I have written many essays over the years that are directly or indirectly related to peer review. These include several on authorshipl-~ and editing, ~ faculty evaluation, ~ identifying Nobel-class science through citation analysis~-~—and even a few on various aspects of refereeing itself. l~lz ...

THE USE OF PEERS TO ASSESS THE work of fellow scientists goes back at least 200 years. It is usually assumed to raise the quality of the end product and to provide a mechanism for rational, fair, and objective decision making. Despite the fact that peer review has such a long history and is so well established, research into its effects is a recent phenomenon. However, the body of original rese...

This proposal discusses details about Peer-VM which is a peer-to-peer (P2P) networking system allowing users to share the virtual machines (VM) in a P2P fashion for the purpose of Grid Computing. Peer-VM allows for the on demand addition of the virtual machines to the resource pool of existing Grid Computing systems like In-VIGO [9]. This proposal presents the Peer-VM architecture and discusses...

Physicians working in hospitals face challenges when it comes to understanding and meeting the medical, legal, and ethical subjects outlined in the hospital bylaws. Hospital staff physicians and the hospital administration both aspire for high quality medical care and the assurance of patient safety. Unfortunately, when quality concerns surface, there can be reasonable differences of opinion as...