September is well underway, and over here in the UK, where your PREreview newsletter author, Vanessa, lives, the change of the season is in the air.
Wherever you are in the world, may this month bring you balance, renewal, and connection. In this edition, we’ve gathered the latest updates, upcoming events, and community insights to share with you.
Celebrating our first localization and translation milestone!
We are grateful to the team from A Simple Translation and community members like you, as we completed our initial round of localizing and translating PREreview.org into Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish!
As part of this vital project, a brand new language picker now occupies the upper right corner of PREreview.org. You can click on it to switch between United States English, Brazilian Portuguese, and Latin American Spanish versions of the site. Nearly all of our website content is now available in those 3 languages, and several resources - some newly translated, some previously translated by community members - are now available in those 3 languages, as well.
Help us choose our next language(s) for translation work
We have been reviewing community member feedback, the anonymous and aggregated data about our website traffic, and team discussions to begin prioritizing languages for our next round of localization and translation.
We'd love to have your help with this. Please complete this brief survey to help us decide which languages to work on next.
We will use your feedback from this survey and the data we've collected before to make decisions about the localization and translation projects we take on later this year and in 2026.
From Surviving to Thriving
Open science is built on collaboration and transparency, but too often the organisations building this infrastructure operate in silos.
To move from simply surviving to truly thriving, five leading open science organisations—The Carpentries, OLS, rOpenSci, pyOpenSci, and PREreview—are convening to chart a collective path forward. This gathering will focus on:
- Shared financial sustainability: Developing collective, value-aligned models for funding and resource generation.
- Collaborative engagement strategies: Designing systems that strengthen and connect our communities across roles, regions, and lived experiences.
- Equity-centered design: Ensuring accessibility, usability, and meaningful participation for all involved.
We are grateful to The Navigation Fund for supporting this work, and invite you to review the full proposal.
PREreview response to the NIH NOT-OD-25-138 Request for Information
PREreview responded to the NIH NOT-OD-25-138 Request for Information on publication costs, peer review, and publishing best practices.
Transformative change won’t come from simply shifting who pays fees—it will come from grassroots action and top-down reform of what we value and reward.
We invited NIH to consider:
Mandating that NIH-funded outputs are shared as openly licensed preprints
Recognizing community-driven open preprint reviews in fulfilling NIH’s peer review requirements
- Investing in open, journal-independent infrastructure and training for researchers to participate in constructive, inclusive review
- Rewarding open peer review contributions in CVs, biosketches, and funding decisions
- Fostering partnerships and technical integrations between publishers and open preprint review platforms
Together, these steps can contribute to accelerating knowledge sharing, reducing costs, and building a more open, equitable, and sustainable research ecosystem for all.
Community spotlight
The VeriMe Cooperative is a new organization seeking to improve how researchers and those who work in related areas offer, prove, or verify their identity in various circumstances or places where such proof could be required. The organization is co-founded by the founding Executive Director of ORCID, Laure Haak, and others. They are running a short survey to understand your thoughts. There are also planned focus groups for deeper engagement. These have been divided into three geographical zones: Americas, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, & Africa), and Asia Pacific. Find out how to participate here.
Highlights from the Slack Community
- Daniela shared INASP’s recent policy paper on “Open Access Policy Options for Development Research Funders”.
- Jonny shared a video from his new non-profit Rippling Ideas on ‘How to get involved with preprints’. See the full playlist and subscribe for more. They have also just released a call for expression of interest in joining the inaugural board. Find out more here.
- Giuliano shared an article that he found very insightful on ‘Why are indexers unable to see that peer review can be more than a thumbs up or a thumbs down?’
- Jennifer asks are you interested in collaborating with others in FORCE11 to publish open peer reviews of pre-prints of research in metascience and scholarly communication? Then check out this blog post for how to get involved.
- Jonny wrote a blog on a range of trust signals to replace the current system, you can read the blog here.
- Vanessa would like to know which social media platforms you use. You can share your preferred platforms here to help us know if we should expand our social media presence.
- Daniela shared this great article on how Scholarly Publishing Won’t Be Saved by Incremental Change
- There are a number of job vacancies open in our #jobs-and-opportunities channel, and if you have any of your own to share, you can also do this there.
If you are interested in joining the conversation, sign up to join us on Slack!
Events
Upcoming events
- Oct 13 - Who Has a Voice in Open Science - Preprints.org webinar - virtual - register
- Oct 17/18 - From Surviving to Thriving Meeting - in person
- Oct 18-23 - CZI Open Science Meeting - in person
- Oct 24 - openRxiv meeting - in person
- Oct 29-Nov 2 - 2025 NDiSTEM SACNAS Conference - in person - Daniela Saderi and Janaynne Carvalho do Amaral will co-facilitate an Open Reviewers Workshop
Recent events
- Jul 22-24 - FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) 2025 - E05: PREreview Open Reviewers Workshop - online
- Jul 25 - PREreview x JMIR Publications Live Review - online - published review
- Aug 14 - ‘Reviewing Preprints with PREreview and SciELO’ hosted by ABEC Brazil - online - recording (in Portuguese)
- Aug 29 - PREreview x JMIR Publications Live Review - online - published review
- Sep 11-13 - Pubmet 2025 Conference - Zagreb, Croatia - in-person - Vanessa’s presentation slides here.
- Sep 18 - PREreview x JMIR Publications Live Review - online - review coming soon
- Sep 19 - PREreview Champions x eLife Ambassadors - online - review coming soon
Image Credits: masharinka, ELCREATIVE, amethyststudio, VeriMe, Slack, nikastock
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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