Big changes are coming your way on PREreview.org in 2023! We are so excited to share our plans with you. Over the next few months, we’ll be implementing a series of updates to make our preprint review platform more helpful, inclusive, and welcoming than ever. We’re so grateful for the support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in improving PREreview.org for our community and look forward to working with eLife on this journey.

If you work in open scholarship, and especially if you’re an early-career researcher or researcher working in a historically marginalized community in scholarship, we’d love to tell you more about these plans and get your feedback on how we can improve them even more. You can reach out to our Product Manager, Chad Sansing, to schedule an interview (for which compensation is available), or you can join one of our open community calls by registering through one of the links below. You only need to attend 1 call to learn more, be heard, and share your feedback.

You can also subscribe to our newsletter here to keep up with the latest news:

Subscribe now!

We’ve overhauled how you can publish a Full PREreview

As a first step to help make PREreview.org more helpful, inclusive, and welcoming than ever, we’ve overhauled the Full PREreview workflow in response to user feedback to make it as barrier-free as possible. The next time you start a new review, you’ll notice several changes:

  • You can now choose between writing a review on PREreview.org or pasting in a review you’ve already written elsewhere.
  • You can now choose between your public and anonymous authoring profiles inside the full review workflow.
  • You can now get help starting your review with helpful tips and a review template baked into the full review workflow.
  • You can now take advantage of a more full-featured text editor on PREreview.org to help format the reviews you write there.
  • You can now more easily indicate whether or not you have a competing interest with the preprint you’re reviewing inside the Full PREreview workflow.

When you finish your review, you’ll have the chance to review it and make changes before you submit. Once you hit the publish button, your review will go to Zenodo and receive its own DOI that PREreview.org, curation sites like Sciety, and its original preprint server can display your feedback and credit you for it.

What’s next?

To continue our work to make PREreview.org as helpful, inclusive, and welcoming as possible, we’re planning several projects in 2023. Our overarching goal is to help our community deliver excellent, high quality, and trustworthy feedback to preprint authors in a timely fashion.

We want to make it as barrier-free as possible to discover helpful communities, preprints, and reviews on PREreview.org. Towards that end, we’re planning to overhaul these features in early 2023 with feedback from users like you. We’re looking forward to:

  • Improving our user experience and user interface, including the request-a-review experience.
  • Clearer guidance, processes, and scoring tools for our rapid review workflow.
  • More easily discoverable and manageable communities and live-streamed preprint journal clubs.
  • Better filters and other search tools to help you find the communities, preprints, reviewers, and reviews that are most active and relevant to you.

As we improve these features, you may notice that we’ve paused or removed some of them from the PREreview.org website until we release their new-and-improved versions back into production. If you ever have a question about your favorite feature and upcoming plans for it, please let us know by reaching out to our Product Manager, Chad Sansing, or by joining a community call. Remember, you can register for the call that works best for you by clicking 1 of the links below:

Stay connected

Thank you so much for contributing to PREreview.org and better open scholarship for all. We are so grateful for everything you do to emphasize the importance of open prereview in the academic publication process. We hope you can join us to share your feedback on all the updates we have planned in 2023 to help make PREreview.org more helpful, inclusive, and welcoming than ever. In the meantime, you can follow us on Mastodon (@prereview@mas.to), Twitter and LinkedIn and keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter.

Subscribe now!

About the author

Chad Sansing is the Product Manager at PREreview. Outside of meetings, stands, and user research interviews, you can find him gaming, reading, and hanging out with family, friends, and his constant companion, chief canine officer Sleepy the Dog.

The PREreview logo sits next to text that reads "PREreview is a platform, resource center and convener. We provide pathways for feedback to preprints to be done openly, rapidly, constructively, and by a global community of peers. Join us at prereview.org and @PREreview_!