Sir, we read with interest Faggion's opinion on peer-review.1 There is little evidence to prove that the pre-publication peer-review fulfils its role and there is plenty of evidence that it does not.2 Post-publication peer-review has been suggested as an alternative but it is hampered by inadequate participation of the scientific community,3 although there are portals that have been successful in using such platforms.4 However, the new models have not dented the traditional system of publishing. In 2013, there were 1.8 million peer-reviewed articles published at a rate of one article every 18 seconds leading to an enormous strain on peer-review.5 The median time from publication to acceptance is 100 days with journals with lowest and highest impact factors taking the longest time for review.6 Papers are often rejected by several journals (often higher on ranking) before getting accepted in a journal (often lower on ranking). We propose a system that might address this wastage of futile reviews.

With a general electronic portal exclusively for the purpose of peer-review, manuscripts would be assigned a peer-review score that could be matched to journal impact factors as a guide to authors. Authors would then submit their peer-reviewed papers along with the peer-review score to journals. Editors would only need to match the suitability of the submitted manuscripts in the context of the journal readership instead of soliciting reviews. This would retain the usefulness of the traditional system of pre-publication peer-review while speeding up the entire process by avoiding multiple reviews of the same paper. Authors would still be able to revise their manuscript in order to improve on the peer-review score. Journals would need to register with such a portal. Peer-review prior to publication would be retained but the editorial decision on the suitability of manuscripts would be after and not before peer-review which will have already taken place. In order to discourage submission of scientifically weak manuscripts, a fee could be levied on the authors for availing the facility. The fee could also fund the reviewers for their time and effort.