The Need for a More Efficient System for Researchers

Since 1972, the Biostatistics Center (BSC) at the Milken Institute School of Public Health (SPH) of the George Washington University (GWU) has led the way in practice-changing clinical trials and biostatistical methodology research.

Coordinating numerous studies at the same time and working with a large number of researchers globally, the Center needed better content management and a more formalized review and editing process in one place. The current system was proving not feasible for the long-term, slowing reviews down while missing necessary security measures and tracking capabilities.

Having considered other solutions such as Alfresco, Confluence, EMC, eRoom, SharePoint, and even a custom homegrown solution, the team chose Liferay to build out a research portal that also serves as a full-fledged manuscript development system for creating, reviewing, approving, and publishing studies. The new system on Liferay meets the varying and complex needs of the Center, where time-to-publish is of paramount and sometimes ethical importance in the case of federally-funded clinical trials.

A New, Streamlined, and Security-Forward System

With Liferay as their platform, the team at BSC uses features including message boards, Kaleo workflow, asset publishers, and web content display templates to accurately review manuscript proposals, submit feedback and evaluations on manuscripts in progress, and approve manuscripts for publication. Statistics from the Liferay databases are used to track the progress of these manuscripts from proposal through analyses, writing, and review, to journal submission.

To see how the center has further used Liferay to increase productivity, read the full case study.