Happy New Year! Welcome to the January 2024 edition of the PREreview newsletter. 2023 has been a year of reflection, radical listening, and rebuilding. So much was achieved and so much more we plan to do in 2024 in collaboration with YOU. Read on to find out more and how to get involved.
PREreview 2023 Annual Report
As we embark on a fresh year, we're thrilled to share our first-ever Annual Report! In it you can find more about what PREreview has done since its formal inception in 2018, our main 2023 achievements, and our team.
2023 stands out as a transformative period for us, we knew we needed time to re-evaluate and re-align our work around our shared values. We also knew we needed to press pause on some initiatives and product features to reassess their scope with input and feedback from our community.
Looking ahead into 2024, we will continue to create opportunities for community engagement and growth, conduct research to optimize our offerings for specific audiences like instructors, students, and patients, and we will work to craft a robust sustainability strategy to ensure our organization's longevity and impact.
We express our profound gratitude to all those who have actively participated in, contributed to, and engaged with our initiatives throughout this year. Your involvement has been instrumental in shaping and advancing our mission.
We are thrilled to share the launch of our new request-a-review feature!
Powered by the COAR Notify Protocol, and built-in collaboration with eLife and Sciety, this new feature will help you improve your research ahead of wider distribution or publication.
bioRxiv and SciELO Preprints have joined PREreview as our first collaborators in this work to bring this request-a-review feature to life. That means that the next time you submit a preprint to either repository, you’ll be able to request reviews from the PREreview community with the click of a button.
“The COAR Notify protocol has been designed to allow platforms to communicate and easily link research outputs in repositories with resources from external review services,” says Kathleen Shearer, COAR Executive Director. “We are extremely excited to see it in action with our early adopters, PREreview, SciELO Preprints, and bioRxiv.”
“One goal of bioRxiv is to help authors get feedback on papers and enable a broader spectrum of researchers to provide it,” said bioRxiv Co-Founder Richard Sever, “the partnership with PREreview is a great step towards this.”
“We’ve been offering the option to our authors to request reviews from PREreview for almost two years and it’s been a great success in promoting preprint reviews,” said SciELO Preprints Coordinator Alex Mendonça. “This new phase using the COAR Notify protocol will take requesting preprint reviews into new heights which we are very excited about.”
PREreview Champions program - application deadline this Friday, Jan 5
PREreview Champions represent PREreview on a global level, helping us to bring more equity and transparency to scholarly peer review by supporting researchers within their local communities to review preprints in a way that is rewarding to them.
Our first cohort of 20 Champions will be provided with a PREreview Open Reviewers training comprising of four workshops over six weeks on the the 6th, 13th, and 27th of February and the 12th of March. We ask our Champions to complete at least one engagement activity after the conclusion of the program. This could include, but is not limited to: helping us to translate resources, co-organizing Open Reviewers training workshops, leading a new PREreview Club, acting as mentors, engaging preprint authors, or representing PREreview at events.
If this sounds like something you would be interested in then read more on our blog and submit your application by this Friday, 5 Jan! Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application no later than Friday 19th January 2024.
Highlights from the Slack Community
- Check out the #request-a-review channel to see if you can provide valuable feedback to preprint authors.
- Chad would like to know what kinds of features and collaborations are you looking forward to or hoping for on PREreview.org in 2024?
- Check out the #request-a-review channel to see if you can provide valuable feedback to preprint authors.
- Daniela shared this announcement from the Foundation for Physical Therapy Research that as one of the actions to fulfil their commitment to the open and equitable funding model program, the foundation will require the PREreview Open Grant Reviewers video series as training for their scientific review committee, research committee, and staff.
- Lonni shared how he had mentioned PREreview in his most recent manuscript (in French)
- Vanessa news of the upcoming Champions Program and a link to the updated PREreview Resources Page with a call for recommendations of other resources.
- Monica shared information about how Crossref is connecting preprints with journal article versions.
- Vanessa updated the community events and conferences sheet and welcomes any additions to this for 2024.
Recent events
- 8-10 November - Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing - hybrid, Tromsø, Norway - conference materials
- 1 Dec - Live Review with JMIR Publications - online - PREreview published
- 7 Dec - Live Review with Current Research in Neurobiology (CRNEUR) - online 9 Dec - Reviewer Zero - Prefiguring Peer Review workshop - in-person, Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Image Credits: syahrir maulana, doodlerco, Puckung, and Uniconlabs
Support Open, Free Community-driven Preprint Review Infrastructure
We are guided by our mission and propelled by our vision for an open, community-driven scholarly communication future where everyone is empowered to contribute to constructive evaluation of research outputs. If you too share these values, help us by supporting our work!
PREreview is a sponsored project of Code for Science & Society. Code for Science and Society is a registered US 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law in the US. Tax ID 81-3791683
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