A graphic representing requests for reviews moving from bioRxiv and SciELO Preprints to PREreview through the COAR Notify Protocol

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new request-a-review feature on PREreview.org! 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.”

How does it work?

Using the COAR Notify Protocol, we’ve set up “inboxes” on each of our services that connect with one another. The inbox on SciELO Preprints are set up to broadcast requests for review from authors who submit preprints to those servers. Our inbox at PREreview is set up to receive those requests and then to publish them to the #request-a-review channel of our PREreview community Slack.

A list of channels on the PREreview community Slack with #request-a-review circled in red and highlighted by a red arrow
The #request-a-review channel on the PREreview community Slack

You can click on the “Write a PREreview” button next to any request in Slack to launch PREreview.org and begin authoring your PREreview right away.

An example of a published request on the PREreview community Slack with the "Write a PREreview" button circled in red and highlighted by a red arrow
A published request for review on the PREreview community Slack

While we can’t guarantee a review will be written, sharing your request this way puts it in front of the largest possible audience of active PREreviewers.

What’s next?

This is just the start of the new request-a-review feature on PREreview. We are so excited by the possibilities that the COAR Notify Protocol brings to our community and platform.

As we continue developing this feature further in 2024 and beyond, we plan to:

  • Connect with more preprint servers to make sure their authors can use the request-a-review feature to improve their research.
  • Notify authors when a review is published in response to their requests.
  • Create more specific connections between requests and interest-based channels on the PREreview community Slack that share common topics (like neuroscience or psychology).
  • Create more roles for people who want to request reviews of preprint research. For example, we’d love to help editors request reviews from the PREreview community and to help other audiences like scientific storytellers and patient groups both review preprints and ask for help reviewing new research that’s important to them.

How can I get started with the request-a-review feature?

If you are a preprint author, check out the request-a-review feature the next time you submit a preprint on bioRxiv or SciELO Preprints. If you frequently contribute to a different server, please let its organizers know about this work and the COAR Notify Protocol. We’d love to work with more servers as we go!

Here is how the request-a-review feature appears on bioRxiv:

A screenshot of the request-a-review interface on bioRxiv with PREreview selected as the peer review service for a request
Choose PREreview as a peer review service for your preprint on bioRxiv

And here is how it appears on SciELO Preprints:

A screenshot of the Review Offer Preferences options on SciELO Preprints with PREreview selected as a recipient of those requests
Add PREreview to your Review Offer Preferences on SciELO Preprints

If you frequently contribute to a different server, please let its organizers know about this work and the COAR Notify Protocol. We’d love to work with more servers as we go! Email us at help@prereview.org to get involved.

If you are an editor, keep up with the latest PREreview news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community. We will convene community members, including editors, in 2024 to help us understand the best next steps we can take with this feature. The newsletter and our Slack community are great places to keep up to date with the community design sprints and focus groups we facilitate.

If you are a PREreviewer or someone interested in joining PREreview (all you need is an ORCID iD to get started), log-in or sign-up on PREreview.org. Once you’ve logged in, join our Slack community and visit the #request-a-review channel to learn about the latest author requests coming in from bioRxiv and SciELO Preprints through our COAR Notify Protocol inbox.

You can also review how we implemented our COAR Notify Protocol work by visiting this GitHub repo. Let us know if you have any questions or would like to collaborate with us on another integration by writing help@prereview.org.

Stay connected

Our brand new #request-a-review feature will only get better with time. Keep up with all the latest news about the feature and the rest of our work by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

We’re excited to collaborate with COAR, bioRxiv, SciELO Preprints, and all of you! We are also extremely grateful for the generous funding support from Arcadia, which is supporting the development and implementation of COAR Notify and from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative for supporting PREreview.

About the author(s)

Chad Sansing lives and works in central Virginia. When he’s not gaming, reading, walking, or spending time with family, you can find him working on PREreview.org alongside trusty officemate and chief canine officer, Sleepy the Dog.

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