We are delighted to announce PREreview has received a three-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support research communities in adopting and advocating for open and equitable peer-review practices.
PREreview was founded in 2017 by practicing scientists who believed in the unique opportunity offered by preprints to challenge the status quo of knowledge dissemination and evaluation. Over the past six years, we’ve worked tirelessly to build the technical and social infrastructure to actively fuel a culture shift towards a kinder, more equitable and collaborative scholarly evaluation landscape that centers the needs and experiences of a diverse community of experts.
Over the past two years, we have expanded our team and significantly enhanced our ability to meaningfully engage with our value-aligned partners and community members as we work together towards this shared vision. Through a combination of collaborative sketching with design experts, community design sprints, and user research interviews, we honed in on the most impactful work we could tackle to make the PREreview platform better organized and more helpful than ever before for anyone authoring open preprint reviews online.
Over the next three years, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we will develop and implement outreach strategies to engage diverse audiences more effectively. By empowering more Champions to create, adapt, and share resources for community-led, socially-conscious review, we will foster greater community growth within local groups. Additionally, we will conduct targeted research to optimize our offerings for specific groups, including instructors, students, and patients.
We will also develop a robust sustainability strategy to ensure the longevity and impact of our organization. Our goal is to create a model that encourages distributed support from multiple stakeholders and diverse lines of engagement. This approach will not only enhance our financial resilience but also build a more interconnected and resilient community of value-aligned supporters who are ready to move together toward a shared vision.
This award comes at a pivotal moment in the open scholarship movement, in which more and more grassroots initiatives such as PREreview are matched with private and public institutional policy changes that favor (or even require) the adoption of open research practices, including preprints.
There is a growing recognition of the need to prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community—as emphasized by OA Week’s call to put “Community over Commercialization.”
Daniela Saderi, Co-founder and Executive Director of PREreview, says
"With this investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we are poised to demonstrate our commitment to making community-led preprint review a reality within a diverse, open, and equitable scholarly communication landscape. We are thankful for the support and honored to serve a growing community of open preprint reviewers.”
Stay connected
You can follow us on X (formally Twitter), Mastodon, BlueSky, and LinkedIn, and keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter.
Interested in supporting us?
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
