Web quality control for lectures: Supercourse and Amazon.com.

Peer review has been at the corner stone of quality control of the biomedical journals in the past 300 years. With the emergency of the Internet, new models of quality control and peer review are emerging. However, such models are poorly investigated. We would argue that the popular system of quality control used in Amazon.com offers a way to ensure continuous quality improvement in the area of research communications on the Internet. Such system is providing an interesting alternative to the traditional peer review approaches used in the biomedical journals and challenges the traditional paradigms of scientific publishing. This idea is being explored in the context of Supercourse, a library of 2,350 prevention lectures, shared for free by faculty members from over 150 countries. Supercourse is successfully utilizing quality control approaches that are similar to Amazon.com model. Clearly, the existing approaches and emerging alternatives for quality control in scientific communications needs to be assessed scientifically. Rapid explosion of internet technologies could be leveraged to produce better, more cost effective systems for quality control in the biomedical publications and across all sciences.