It was February 2019 when we gathered a group of researchers, publishers, policy makers, and designers in London to brainstorm ideas on how to design a platform that would allow scientists to rapidly review outbreak-related preprints. Little did we know that a "killer epidemic" of such magnitude would have broken out across the world only a few months ahead.
The first version of the open source Outbreak Science Rapid PREreview platform was released in January 2020.
Today we are calling for all of you to help us make it better! Here is how.
Briefly after, the COVID-19 pandemic started and suddenly the number of preprints published on preprint servers took off like never before (check out these GitHub visualizations of the number of preprints on COVID-19 since January). Now more than ever we need to mobilize communities of researchers to work collaboratively and help each other vet this massive amount of research output. This is a great opportunity to prove that together, we can do more — in open source and open science!
We are working with a group of Open Access publishers on an initiative to encourage researchers to rapidly review COVID-19 preprints and on workflows that can seamlessly link community preprint reviews to editorial reviewing processes. We would love to engage the open-source community in this work.
WE NEED YOUR HELP!
- When: Summer 2020 (Late July - Early August)
- What: The goal of the Sprint is to work on improving the OSrPRE platform, in particular, views and feeds of the prereview content (preprints, prereview requests, preprint reviews - aka prereviews, etc) to enable more engagement on topic specific content, e.g., COVID-19 (and other outbreaks) as well as other general improvements.
- Where: On the PREreview GitHub and Slack (#prereview-software)
- How: Visit our sprint page to view our contribution guidelines and to see a list of starting issues! Recommended issues are tagged for PREreview Mozilla Sprint and some may additionally be tagged to indicate issues that are good entry points for those new to the project. We have resources to provide bounties for issues through IssueHunt. Check the sprint page for more details. Join us in Slack (#prereview-software) for assistance, to discuss the project, and to get to know the team!
We look forward to working together! If you have any questions don't hesitate to email us at contact@prereview.org or ask on Slack.
We thank you for considering joining us and Mozilla for supporting these events!
