Cureus and Donate Life America Launch Publishing Competition Aimed at Optimizing Organ Donation and Transplantation

Competition Inventories Best Practices Nationwide In Effort to Save Lives

San Francisco (PRWEB) May 24, 2016

The Cureus Journal of Medical Science and Donate Life America, with sponsorship from Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, announced today the start of a publishing competition aimed at optimizing organ donation and utilization rates to ultimately help the more than 120,000 people awaiting a lifesaving organ transplant.

Though organ transplantation is widely recognized as one of the most remarkable success stories in medical history, many challenges still exist in organ donation and utilization. Every day an average of 22 people die from a lack of available organs. Every 10 minutes another name is added to the transplant waiting list. Meanwhile, in 2014 alone, more than 3,500 organs recovered for transplantation were discarded without being transplanted due to patient risk adversity, heuristic decision-making and other factors.

"There is significant disparity in organ donation and utilization rates across the country and addressing this inequity requires a collaborative approach," said Richard Gilroy, M.D., Medical Director of Hepatology and Liver Transplant at Intermountain Healthcare, and head of the peer-review panel for the competition. "This unique publishing competition will help us to understand best practices, and communicate those results across related constituencies nationwide so we can work together to help more patients. We must stop burying the great opportunities that exist to save lives."

U.S. based authors are invited to contribute their original research to the competition for publication in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science, a peer-reviewed online medical journal that provides free and open access to data to encourage knowledge sharing and cross-discipline awareness. All materials published as part of this competition will also be indexed in PubMed Central.

Winners will be selected by their peers using a crowdsourced score that measures the study's quality, presentation and importance – a secondary peer-review feature unique to Cureus. This rating, called Scholarly Impact Quotient (SIQ), allows clinicians and researchers to quickly assess and rank article quality in a manner similar to that of Amazon® and Yelp® community reviews.

"Inviting the best and the brightest minds, in an environment of friendly competition, allows peers to read, review and rate their research and increases information sharing," said John R. Adler, M.D., founder and chief executive officer of Cureus. "We're proud to partner on this important initiative that brings multiple disciplines together around a common goal – improving organ donation and utilization rates to help save lives."

"We're excited to partner with Novartis and Cureus on this effort to address the current challenges in organ donation and transplantation to ensure people receive the lifesaving organs they need," said David Fleming, President and CEO of Donate Life America. "We are confident that this competition will generate innovative solutions to increasing donor registrations and as a result, save more lives."

Competition entry and article submission is entirely free. Article submissions will be accepted starting today, May 24, through August 2, 2016 at 8:00 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. PT. Winners will be announced on Tuesday, October 11, 2016.

Two monetary prizes will be awarded to the published articles that receive the highest Cureus SIQ score: $5,000 USD for the winning article focused on organ donation improvement strategies and $5,000 USD for the winning article focused on organ utilization improvement strategies.

Non-authors can also contribute by referring the publishing program to relevant colleagues. The first to refer the winning article author will receive $1,000 USD for their efforts.

To learn more, please visit http://www.cureus.com/competitions/organ-optimization

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/05/prweb13435586.htm