PREreview works to bring more equity and transparency to scholarly peer review by supporting and empowering communities of researchers, particularly those at early stages of their career (ECRs) and who have been historically excluded, to review preprints in a process that is rewarding to them.
We are proud to release our 2023 Annual Report.
The year 2023 stands out as a transformative period for us, defined by three pivotal elements: reflection, radical listening, and rebuilding. With two new passionate individuals joining our team, we knew we needed time to re-evaluate and re-align our work around our shared values. We also knew we needed to press pause on some initiatives and product features to reassess their scope with input and feedback from our community.
We built our annual strategic approach to advance our mission around three key objectives:
- Establish processes for community input into programming, product, and governance. Towards this objective, we dedicated ourselves to actively seeking diverse perspectives and understanding the needs and aspirations of those we serve. Through community sprints, surveys, and one-on-one interactions, we embraced the richness of varied voices, fostering a culture where every opinion is valued. Towards the end of the year, we began a consultation process with Dr. Kari Jordan and Tara Robertson that will carry over to 2024 to help us strengthen our governance and decision-making processes.
- Increase global engagement with PREreview. Toward this goal, we set up a new bi-monthly newsletter, enhanced our social media presence, and created a new Community Slack workspace. In 2023 we also expanded our engagement efforts in providing training in conducting constructive and socially conscious peer review, running a combined 12 Open Reviewer and Open Grant Reviewer workshops training over 250 reviewers in collaboration with 8 partner organizations. Our free community workshops and new equitable pricing model for training will hopefully enable us to reach even more communities of researchers around the globe in 2024.
- Integrate PREreview workflows within the open publishing ecosystem. Toward this goal, we collaborated with Current Research in Neurobiology (CRNEUR) to pilot a new community-based review method and will write up the results early next year. Our re-launched PREreview Clubs have got off to a flying start on publishing open, collaborative preprint peer reviews. We also recently launched our request-a-review feature using COAR Notify to connect preprint authors posting with bioRxiv and SciELO Preprints with our PREreview community members. We are excited to continue this work in 2024 and share more about our progress soon.
In our first-ever Annual Report, you can find more about what PREreview has done since its formal inception in 2018, our main 2023 achievements, and our team.
We express our profound gratitude to all those who have actively participated in, contributed to, and engaged with our initiatives throughout this year. Your involvement has been instrumental in shaping and advancing our mission.
Looking ahead into 2024, we will continue to create opportunities for community engagement and growth by empowering a cohort of 20 Champions to create, adapt, and share resources and tools for community-led, socially-conscious review within their own communities. We will also conduct research to optimize our offerings for specific audiences like instructors, students, and patients. Finally, we will work to craft a robust sustainability strategy to ensure our organization's longevity and impact. We aspire to develop a model that facilitates distributed support, drawing from multiple stakeholders and diverse lines of engagement. This strategy not only enhances our financial resilience but also fosters a more interconnected and resilient community of supporters.
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You can follow us on Mastodon, X (formally Twitter), BlueSky, Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community
Interested in supporting us?
PREreview is a sponsored project of Code for Science & Society. Code for Science and Society is a registered US 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law in the US. Tax ID 81-3791683
