Dr. Alexander Voukelatos

Brief Biography:

Alexander has been working in social and behavioural health research and evaluation in the government sector for close to 15 years. In this time he has conducted research in HIV/AIDS, scalds in children, domestic violence, road safety, safe cycling, falls in older people and social determinants of health.

Alexander has degrees is science, psychology and epidemiology. He received a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Sydney investigating the effectiveness of Tai Chi in reducing the risk of falling on older people.

Academic positions:

n/a

Research interests:

Research interestes include: social determinants of health; Injury Prevention; Falls in older people; interpersonal violence; applying appropriate biostatistical techniques in evaluating health promotion programs

What I think of the idea behind WebmedCentral:

I hope that the idea of post publication peer review takes off primarily for the sake of scientific transparency. There have been several instances were me and my colleagues have been frustrated in our efforts to publish results because one or two peer reviewers either did not understand the techniques we were using or did not agree with how we interpreted the data. Even though reviewers are meant to be onjective in reviewing a manuscript this is hard to achieve, and I suspect more often than not is used advoacate for existing paradigms, stifling debate. Post publication review can overcome this by having the actual audience judge the quality of the publication for themselves. Indeed perhaps in time, if each reader can provide a 'score' for the manuscript, it will truly reflect a peer reviewed process. It is very importnant that readers are made to become more active in theri reading. When a paper is reviewed as publishable by their peers its is easy as a reader to trust the judgement of the peer reviewers and more or less accept the findings and conclusions. However, if a reader knows that a paper has not been reviewed then they are forced to takle a more active and critical approach to reading the article. One point of contention I would like to raise is the quality of the written manuscript. One thing that the current peer-review process does is that it edits manuscripts into 'proper' English. I have reviewed many manuscripts were the English used made the manuscript hard to read. Their should at the least be some pre-publication process for editing manuscripts into 'good' English, leaving the technical review to post publication. Great Idea. Lets hope others can see the potential in this