In this guest blog piece Jennifer Miller, former FORCE11 Board VP and co-lead of their PREreview Club, regards the collaborative review club as a catalyst for connections throughout a global community with shared interest in metascience.
The FORCE11 PREreview Club was launched following PREreview's workshop at the FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI) last summer. Since then, it has been my pleasure to co-lead this club, along with Akuma Ifeanyichukwu. Now, we are preparing to do our fourth review in March, where we will incorporate the shared learnings we have built up into our workflows.
The best part of leading the Club has been the people, who have stepped up in so many ways, including helping to prepare for reviews, providing facilitation, and synthesizing reviews, as well as drafting guidance for each review role and extending grace to each other as we try new things. Club members have shared some of their perspectives in this FORCE11 blog post. We've also been fortunate to have a PREreview Champion, Rosario Rogel Salazar, among our founding members. This has led to three additional members (Xiuxi Jade Li and Alan Colín Arce, along with Akuma) joining the latest cohort of Champions. I can't wait to see how their deeper immersion in the PREreview Community helps to extend the base that we're building on.
Within FORCE11, our goal for the Club is community engagement. FORCE11 is known for its events, such as conferences and workshops. The PREreview Club is a way for people to stay engaged with FORCE11 between events and to develop deeper online connections throughout a global community with shared interests in metascience.
PREreview provides thoughtfully prepared materials, and their workshop at FSCI helped a core group of founding members learn the open reviewing process. PREreview has effectively leveraged the features of Google Workspace to create a structured process for collaborative writing. I'm hoping to see that evolve into a process that makes use of free, open-source software (FOSS). As I volunteer my time to introduce people to open knowledge practices, I often find myself also introducing them to software and features that are new to them. I prefer for that work—which bridges teaching and marketing—to focus on FOSS rather than commercial software.
What's next
The experience of starting the FORCE11 PREreview Club has been so positive that I'm also helping to start a club within the Translate Science community. The Translate Science PREreview Club will be reviewing preprints on an ad hoc basis related to multilingual open science. We're not sure exactly what that will mean and are open to exploring it from multiple perspectives! Translate Science has always emphasized FOSS in our operations, so we’ll be exploring options for using it in research reviews, too.
Ideas so far range from conducting reviews of preprints in translatology to hosting reviews in languages other than English, to reviewing translations of survey instruments. Anyone interested in staying in the loop as we plan for our first review to take place in May can sign up here.
Stay connected
If you have something to share or want to learn more about how to engage with PREreview Clubs, drop us an email at community@prereview.org.
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