The fresh start of a new year is a great time to nourish our social networks, weigh on the things left on the to-do list from last year, and dream big for the future. It is said that a good way to focus your energy during the year ahead is to pick a word reflecting a value, feeling, or goal. PREreview’s word for 2026 is… CONNECTION.
We are excited to begin this journey together!
Welcome Sol to the PREreview team!
The PREreview Team is very excited to welcome María Sol Ruiz, who joined us last month as a part-time Champions Fellow to support the coordination of this year’s Champions Program and other community-facing initiatives.
Join our upcoming Community Call
As you may already know, last month we published PREreview’s 2026-2029 Strategic Plan. The goals we have set for this period will guide our work towards building a world where truth is co-created, power is shared, and research is done with communities, not just about them. To create the future we envision for knowledge sharing and evaluation, your input is both needed and honored.
The Modular Peer Review Working Group has kicked off!
In collaboration with the Continuous Science Foundation, we are co-leading a Modular Peer Review Working Group to imagine how peer review can evolve in a modular publishing ecosystem, where datasets, code, methods, visuals, and other components are shared independently and iteratively.
The Working Group sessions launched in January, with a wide and global participation! From publishers and journal teams, librarians, researchers at different career stages, infrastructure and product/tool builders, funders, to open science community members and organizers, everyone brought in their perspectives on how to rethink and improve peer review.
PREreview platform updates
New gratitude and recognition design sprints
Please join us later this month for the community design sprints about developing new features for gratitude and recognition on PREreview.org.
Our goal is to create new ways to acknowledge and celebrate the work of all PREreviewers who contribute to modular and preprint review on the site. We would love to know more about what could make PREreview.org more valuable to you in terms of appreciation and reciprocity between community members, and between our reviewers and the authors of the research outputs they review.
We’ll run this call twice to make participation more accessible for a wider group of community members. Each call will last about 60 minutes. You only need to join one call. Click on the button to register!
- Gratitude and recognition community design sprint 1 - 24 February 2026 - 14:00 UTC
- Gratitude and recognition community design sprint 2 - 25 February 2026 - 17:00 UTC
Help us improve preprint matchmaking
Recently, the PREreview Product team has been working on a new approach to matchmaking that draws keywords from preprints you’ve already read to help us recommend new preprints to read. We are currently pulling those new recommendations from preprints that other community members have requested for review.
If you’d like to help us improve this new approach to matchmaking, let us know at help@prereview.org and we’ll invite you to a brief user research chat to learn more about what you’re already reading and reviewing.
Events
Upcoming events
- Feb 10, 2026 - 16:00 UTC — DataCite webinar during Love Data Week - 10 February at 16:00 UTC. The webinar will review how connections between DataCite and ORCID make it possible for data to be discovered, analyzed, and attributed. Register
- Feb 11, 2026 - 11:00 ET / 16:00 UTC — PREreview 3Y Strategic Plan: Community Call - Register
- Feb 12, 2026 - 12:00 ET — “Reimagining peer review through openness, equity, and collaboration” seminar, by PREreview’s Executive Director Daniela Saderi. Part of the Rigor and Reproducibility Seminar Series of the University of Florida. Register
- Feb 17, 2026 - 13:30 ET — “Diversification and Decentralization of Peer Review” session at NISO PLUS 2026 Conference, in Baltimore (MD), USA. PREreview Champion Alum Kylie Yui Dan will be presenting alongside PREreview co-founder and Advisory Committee Secretary Samantha Hindle (openRxiv), Tony Alves (HighWire Press) & David Reinstein (The Unjournal).
- 2026 Dataverse Community Meeting — Early bird registration closes on Feb 28 - 23:59 CET. The Meeting will be held on May 12-15 in Barcelona, Spain. This year’s theme, “Advancing Data and Dataverse: AI, Interoperability, and Sensitive Data”, highlights key areas of interest for data professionals and researchers.
- March 5, 2026 - 12:00 ET — ASAPbio Community Call: "A Team Effort: Why and How to do Open Collaborative Peer Review". ASAPbio and PREreview staff will discuss peer review crowds and clubs, including how the PREreview.org can be used for these activities. Register.
- March 27, 2026 — ATScience 2026, a full-day exploration of AT Protocol for science, education, and open knowledge. A side event to AtmosphereConf 2026, held in Vancouver, Canada. Register and learn more.
Recent events
- Jan 29, 2026 — “PREreview: Transforming Peer Review with Researchers, for Communities” - Data Umbrella webinar series. Recording available on YouTube.
Highlights from the Slack Community
- What we are reading:
- State of Preprints in the Life Sciences 2026, by Jonny Coates at Rippling Ideas. If you advocate for preprints, this is the most up to date data for preprint publication and usage, preprint review, and more!
- Beyond Open Access: Building Justice in Scholarly Communication, by Godwyns Onwuchekwa
- The Future of AI: 2026 Predictions from Mozilla Fellows Around the World
- How to lead a journal club you won’t be embarrassed by later - Open Call for rOpenSci Champions Program 2026-2027 (Spanish, Latin America focus) - Closes on Feb 20, 2026.
- Dryad is looking for a full-time remote data curator based in the US. “Data curators carefully evaluate submitted research metadata and data files, and assist with identifying workflow and process improvements, offering guidance to authors, and supporting team members.”
- The International Science Council (ISC) is looking for a Junior Science Officer who is passionate about translating science into action on the world’s most pressing issues. Based in Paris, France. Deadline for applications: March 9, 2026.
If you are looking for your new career step, check out the job vacancies open 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 us 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.
