Discover how PREreview aligns with the Publish, Review, Curate Model
At PREreview, we are committed to radically transforming the who, when, and how of scholarly peer review. We envision a future where all researchers and experts are equipped with the skills to identify and combat bias, and are welcomed into a peer-review culture that values and rewards openly-shared, timely, and constructive feedback.
The future we strive for involves PREreview collaborating with other projects and organizations that develop resources, as well as social and technological infrastructure, prioritizing community over commercialization.
In this brief blog post, we want to highlight a few key characteristics that make PREreview the hub for community-driven peer review of preprints. Additionally, we want to extend a call to action, inviting organizations and groups that share our vision to join forces with us. By investing in collaboration, we can explore the many ways to work together and move closer to achieving our shared goals.
How does PREreview fit within the Publish, Review, Curate model?
In their recently published brief describing the Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) model of scholarly publishing, Corker et al., highlight a few key characteristics for each step of the PRC model. Below we share how those characteristics are already in place at PREreview.
- Uniquely and persistently identified review of a research artifact. PREreviews receive a digital object identifier (DOI) via DataCite and are published on Zenodo. The DOI of the PREreview is linked to the DOI of the preprint that was reviewed.
- Preferably indexed in a searchable database. PREreviews are searchable on our website with filtering options (e.g., search by title and author, language, and field via OpenAlex), on Zenodo and Sciety.
- Freely accessible and openly licensed. PREreviews are free to publish, free to read, and free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 International licensing.
- Described by rich interoperable metadata. PREreview’s associated metadata includes the content type “peer review”, language, link to the preprint being reviewed, OpenAlex preprint topic, subfield, field and domain, and ORCID iDs.
- Maintained under a preservation policy. PREreviews published via Zenodo will be preserved according to Zenodo's longevity policy described here. They will be retained throughout Zenodo’s lifetime, which, at minimum, includes the next 20 years of experimental programming at CERN.
- Linked by relational metadata to the artifact being reviewed. Yes. We also use COAR Notify to enable authors who submit their preprints to bioRxiv and SciELO Preprints to request feedback from the PREreview community.
- Reviewer COIs declared and/or checked. PREreview users are invited to declare their conflict of interests (COIs) before publication of each PREreview regardless of their choice of identity (public/ORCID-related or pseudonym). Failure to declare COIs is a PREreview Code of Conduct violation that can lead to that user being permanently banned from the PREreview platform and our community spaces, and their review removed from our records.
- Reviewer identity disclosed and/or verified. PREreview users may publish under public profiles linked to their ORCID iDs, or using unique pseudonyms assigned to them by PREreview at the time of account creation. The connections between those pseudonyms and public profiles are never publicly disclosed. Only PREreview has access on its backend to those connections, and PREreview only reviews those connections in cases where a Code of Conduct report needs to be investigated. Furthermore, PREreview is a trusted ORCID member organization, meaning that users who publish their review with their public/ORCID-related profile can give ORCID permission to automatically add their PREreview contributions to their ORCID profiles.
Our friends and colleagues at Sciety have also just released a post in which they showcase how Sciety supports and champions our communities and many others,acting as a directory of organizations committed to public review and curation (the ‘R’ and ‘C’ of PRC). Check it out!
Call to action
If you're a researcher or expert working outside of academia and are looking for ways to contribute to open preprint reviews but aren’t sure where to begin, head over to our Resources page and/or explore preprints that are seeking feedback.
If you have constructive feedback to offer but feel unsure about how to structure your review, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered! Simply paste the preprint's DOI, log in, and select the Structured Review option to guide you through the process. Follow these easy steps to get started.
If you're looking to build your review profile within a community, explore the existing PREreview Clubs and join one that aligns with your interests. And if you can’t find one that fits, consider starting your own!
If you are an organization or group working in this space and are not yet collaborating with us, please reach out and we’ll be happy to talk and discuss ways we can be stronger together!
Stay connected
Check out PREreview on BlueSky, Mastodon, Twitter, and LinkedIn and join the conversation over in our PREreview Community Slack!
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