This newsletter issue features a wealth of past and present opportunities to team up, tackle systemic challenges together, and motorize change in research culture. From the impacts of our global Review-a-thon to our upcoming events, read on to find out more!
DORA & PREreview invite you in for a discussion around the weight of peer-review contributions in research assessment
Peer review is essential to how research is evaluated and improved, yet this work remains invisible and largely irrelevant for research assessment. As new forms of open, community-led, and collaborative peer review create more opportunities for people to contribute, an important question emerges: are the systems through which researchers are assessed and rewarded evolving with them?
On October 7, PREreview and DORA are convening the “Beyond Visibility: How Do We Make Peer Review Truly Valued?” event to address this important question. Roundtable participants—including you!—will bring in their diverse perspectives to explore opportunities and barriers for making peer-review contributions not only visible and citable, but meaningfully recognized and valued in research assessment systems.
The conversation will be initiated by Giovanna Lima (DORA, co-moderator and convener), Vanessa Fairhurst (PREreview, co-moderator and convener), Daniela Saderi (PREreview, roundtable participant and convener), Bernd Pulverer (EMBO, roundtable participant), Anna Hatch (HHMI, roundtable participant), Pablo Ranea Robles (Ramón y Cajal Fellow, Universidad de Granada, roundtable participant), and Laura Ación (MetaDocencia / Universidad de Buenos Aires-CONICET, roundtable participant). Then, they will open the floor to everyone in the room.
Join us for the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) Alliance launch event
The scholarly publishing system is under growing pressure. Researchers face increasing demands to publish, peer review is strained and often invisible, and valuable scholarly contributions beyond traditional articles remain difficult to recognize and reward.
To discuss this issue—and consider its solutions—join us on October 28th for "Publish, Review, Curate (PRC): a better future for scholarly publishing," a webinar exploring an alternative vision for research communication that places openness, transparency, timeliness, community participation, and scholarly judgment at its core. The conversation will have PREreview’s Executive Director and Co-founder Daniela Saderi from the “Review” perspective.
The webinar will conclude with the launch of the PRC Alliance, a group of like-minded organisations—including PREreview—aiming to strengthen coordination across the growing PRC community, enhance the model’s visibility, and collaborate in supporting innovative PRC pilots.
✍️ If you’re interested in joining the PRC Alliance, either as an Implementer or Supporter, please fill in the membership form on the website.
PREreview’s First Review-a-thon: Impact & Learnings
This year's Peer Review Week (September 14-18) theme moved beyond identifying challenges and toward shared understanding and practical approaches. At PREreview, we believe part of the solution to the pitfalls in current evaluation systems lies in creating spaces where people can learn together, exchange expertise, and improve research through open dialogue.
That’s why we took the opportunity to organize a Review-a-thon: a global event where newly-formed and existing PREreview Clubs synchronously carried out open reviews of preprints and datasets as a team. Twenty-five PREreview Clubs from at least 12 countries in 5 regions registered to participate in the initiative. We hope this is the very first of an annual community event, gathering more and more people around open peer review each time.
While the Clubs’ activity reports keep coming through, please make sure to visit the Review-a-thon website to read their collaborative reviews, see the faces behind the work, and hear the participants’ reflections on reviewing together.
PREreview in Dialogue
Rethinking Peer Review Capacity: Do We Need More Reviewers? | Daniela Saderi for the ACSE Interview Series
Peer Review Week 2026 conversations revolved around how the community can respond to the increasing pressures peer review systems are under. So what if building peer-review capacity isn’t simply about finding more reviewers, but about creating better pathways into peer review?
In an interview for the Asian Council of Science Editors PRW series, Daniela drew on PREreview’s work to empower underrepresented perspectives in science to participate in research evaluation, and stressed the importance of power sharing for a more resilient ecosystem.
Daniela Saderi at Science Summit 2026
On September 18, 2026, Daniela represented PREreview’s perspective in the “Building Global Student Research Capacity Through Open Science Networks” virtual session, convened by Pika Team founders under the Science Summit 2026.
The session examined how open science can move beyond expanding access to scientific knowledge toward expanding access to scientific participation, particularly for younger students. The discussion highlighted peer-to-peer learning, open educational resources, locally adapted training, research infrastructure, early exposure to peer review, professional scientific networks, and community-based mentorship as complementary approaches.
Carlos Herold Junior at radio program from the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil)
Hora da Ciência is a science and technology radio program from the University of São Paulo, aired on a weekly basis and also available on Spotify. On August 27, PREreview Champion Carlos Herold Junior was invited to talk about the Review-a-thon, a global initiative led by PREreview to promote open, collaborative peer review of research outputs. During the interview, Carlos also highlighted the importance of encouraging linguistic and community perspectives diversity in peer review.
🔊 You can listen to Carlos’ segment from minute 42:27 of the program (in Portuguese).
Events
Upcoming events
- October 9 to December 11, 2026 — “Seminario latinoamericano. De la soberanía epistémica a la inteligencia artificial: el paradigma de la comunicación científica hacia el bien común”. Modalidad híbrida. Conoce el programa completo e inscríbete sin cargo.
- October 13, 2026 - 16:00 to 17:00 UTC — “Open Preprints: Licensing and Other Practical Policy Tools for Research Funders, Librarians, and Institutions” webinar, by Creative Commons. The panel includes Dr. Monica Granados, PREreview Co-Founder and Advisory Committee Co-Chair. Learn more and register.
- October 14, 2026 - 12:00 to 15:30 UTC — “Ally Skills” workshop, offered by OLS. Virtual training session to equip individuals working in research and research-adjacent roles with practical skills to explore concepts of power and privileges, and concrete ways to step up for others in a meaningful and effective way. More info and registration.
- October 23, 2026 - 13:00 to 21:00 UTC — 2026 GW Ethics in Publishing Conference. Hybrid event discussing creative and systemic solutions to promote integrity in the profession and practice of publishing. Check out the full program and register.
- November 11-13, 2026 | Medellín, Colombia — LatinR: Conferencia Latinoamericana sobre Uso de R en Investigación y Desarrollo (presencial). Más información e inscripciones.
Recent events
- September 28-30, 2026 — FORRT “AI in Metascience Online Conference”. More than 35 talks & workshops discussing how AI is changing the way research is done, checked and understood. Abstracts for all talks are available in the conference program, and where speakers opt in, their talks are published on the FORRT YouTube channel.
- September 2, 2026 — “Guidelines for the Governance of Indigenous Peoples’ Data in Scholarly Publishing” webinar. Recording available.
Highlights from our Slack Community
- What we are reading:
-Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Daniela Saderi of PREreview, by Alice Meadows
- When Data Meets Review: Reflections on PREreview’s First Open Dataset Review, by Rosario Rogel-Salazar, Xiuqi Li, and Güleda Doğan
- From interdependent movements to shared action: Connecting publishing and assessment reforms, by Ludo Waltman et al.
- Does Open Peer Review Correlate With Better Altmetric Attention Performance?An Empirical Analysis Based on Nature Communications, by Xiaotian Wei et al.
- Community Peer Review: How Preprints Enable Open Scholarly Discussion, by Sam Rye
-The right to know: open knowledge ecosystems and AI, by UNESCO
-Recommendations for Revising the Open Access Classification System in OpenAlex, by Juan Pablo Alperin et al.
- Invest in Open Infrastructure is looking for a Director of Business Development (remote, full-time position). Read the role description and apply by October 12, 2026.
- eLife is driving a community-led process to explore, shape and co-create open-source tools to support open science research in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). Contribute to the first, exploratory step of the project by taking this survey.
- The OpenAlex Community Advisory Board's working group has proposed replacing the gold/green/hybrid/bronze/closed Open Access labels with three separate dimensions: access, location, and licence. They’d like to know if the problem resonates, if the three-dimension direction makes sense, and what would you need from them to adopt it. Please fill out the “vibe-check” form by November 13, 2026. About six questions, five minutes, any language.
If you are looking for your next career step, check out the openings in our #jobs-and-opportunities channel, and share any of your own.
You can also find lots of preprint authors requesting feedback on their work in our #request-a-review channel.
Stay connected
If you have something to share, drop us an email at community@prereview.org.
You can follow PREreview on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.
