This week we updated our AI policy, currently living inside our Code of Conduct. We’ve shared new criteria for declaring the use of AI on a PREreview. We know that we’ll need to continue updating this policy in response to community members’ behavior and the state of open review; this is a next step in developing that policy further. You can read more about our stance on this topic here.

Additionally, we’ve added an “AI-Supported Review” label to all published PREreviews with an affirmative AI declaration (implemented retroactively). While we’ve used the CC 0 license and a note at the bottom of each review to let readers know if the author declared the use of AI, we wanted to add a signpost closer to the top of each review to make it more obvious if a reviewer used any AI models to come up with ideas for the feedback provided in a review.

To help readers understand exactly how AI has been used to generate parts of a review, an optional text box will now open inside the AI-declaration step of our review publishing workflow. This optional field invites you to share exactly how you used AI to generate parts of your review when you declare its use. This opportunity to provide further context and explanation will now appear in both the preprint and dataset review workflows.

On another note, we are busy at work migrating website content from our old CMS to a new one. This will make it easier for us to update and translate content on PREreview.org, as well as to embed more multimedia content across the site. Once this content migration is complete, we’ll begin refreshing the entire site to make it easier to find and use the content you need.

Speaking of translation, this week we also switched on the Modern Standard Arabic (ARB) translation for PREreview.org. We’re excited for this new addition to our multilingual offerings on the website. Many thanks to our community language leads for their help with our ongoing localization and translation work! We hope to add more languages in 2027. Follow along with our Product Weeknotes and PREreview Newsletter to learn more about our next round of localization and translation work in the new year.

What’s next?

We just returned from our annual whole-team retreat and we have all kinds of exciting ideas for the future of PREreview.org. We’ll have a testable version of our matchmaking feature on our sandbox soon. Then we’ll get to work on the website refresh, some more PREreview Clubs optimizations, and some developing ideas about how to make our review workflows tailored for different reviewers’ needs.

Stay connected

If you have something to share, drop us an email at help@prereview.org.

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

We are adapting our policy in response to the emerging AI-scape, with a curiosity bound by our commitment to PREreview’s core values.

At PREreview, we are deeply committed to celebrating our shared humanity. We are also deeply committed to our core values, including accessibility, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and openness, and to learning to do better when we fail.

We are navigating the emerging AI-scape with a curiosity bound by these commitments.

Recently, we’ve found it necessary to revisit and expand our AI policy (currently living in our Code of Conduct) in response to different kinds of community member behavior while authoring reviews assisted by AI. Sometimes we find a review that seems to have been authored with AI, even though it’s not declared; other times we notice that reviewers are publishing multiple reviews very quickly while declaring their use of AI appropriately. Given the variety of these emergent cases, we want to maintain an AI policy that makes it clear when someone has used AI without being punitive. We expect our policy to evolve even more over time, and we’re committed to sharing these changes—and our thinking about them—as openly and as often as possible with you.

First, we believe and expect that all reviews should be authored by people.

When this is not the case, anyone publishing a review on PREreview.org must declare the use of AI if they use it to help generate new ideas or overarching organizational structures for a review, but reviewers should never feed an entire research object to AI and ask it to produce a review for them to subsequently publish on PREreview.org.

It’s important that preprint authors, journal editors, and other community members reading our reviews know whether or not a review was written by a person or a machine so that they can apply their own measures of authenticity and trust to those reviews.

To make it especially clear when someone has published a review declaring the use of AI, we will take the following steps to differentiate it from a wholly human-composed review:

• The review will carry a new “AI-supported review” label near the top of the published review on PREreview.org. This is meant to alert readers to the use of AI ahead of their consideration of the review.
• The review will be licensed CC0, or under the public domain, since we cannot accurately attribute something AI “writes” using uncredited and uncompensated training materials taken without consent from other humans.
• The review will not be added to its creator’s ORCID record, as we cannot accurately credit them as the author of the review once AI is used to generate its content.
• The review will carry the usual affirmation of the use of AI under the main body of its text, where this kind of declaration and the declaration of any competing interests already appear.

Second, we understand that bias is an inherent part of the current scholarly publication ecosystem. The kinds of bias that show up in this space include, but are certainly not limited to, geographical, linguistic, ethnic, and racial bias.

Therefore, we do not currently require reviewers on PREreview.org to declare the use of AI tools for copyediting or grammar checks, as we do not want such declarations to bias preprint authors, journal editors, or other community members against reviewers publishing in English when that is not their preferred language. While this policy may change, reviewers on PREreview do not need to declare the use of AI for checking grammar, spelling, and style in a sentence or polishing, for example, the transitions between complicated clauses or sentences.

In cases where we at PREreview believe generative AI has been used without it being declared (for example, when an author or group of authors publishes multiple, lengthy reviews with the same structure within a short time frame), we will investigate further as with any CoC violation and act on our findings accordingly.

We also believe that you should never feed an entire preprint or dataset to an AI model and ask it to do your review for you, regardless of the prompts you use. This creates the risk of adding that text to the AI model’s training corpus without the human author's consent or any recognition for them. It also generates review text that may have been similarly stolen from human authors without giving them credit or compensation.

Ultimately, we value the people engaged with open peer review the most. If an author wants an AI review, they can prompt one for themselves. Our AI declaration is meant to make sure people understand who has authored a review, not to enable the non-stop publication or spamming of AI reviews.

To summarize:

If you use AI in a PREreview, you must declare its use whenever you:

• Ask an AI model to review a preprint, dataset, another kind of modular research output, or any part thereof for you in any way whatsoever.
• Ask an AI model to structure an entire review for you in any way whatsoever.
• Use an AI model to review a preprint, dataset, another kind of modular research output, or any part thereof for you if you lack domain knowledge or other forms of expertise and experience in its research area.
• Use AI to rapidly review numerous preprints, datasets, other modular research outputs, or any parts thereof, whether they are requested or not.
• Use AI to clean up or translate language across all of your reviews. Please feel warmly welcome to publish your feedback in a language you feel comfortable composing in, instead of “outsourcing” your review production to AI.

You do not need to declare the use of AI if you:

• Did not use AI to come up with new ideas or to compose, structure, polish, or translate the entirety of your review.
• Use an AI service to clean up or polish a few sentences of complex information occasionally in your review, while preserving human agency to critically decide over the obtained outputs.

Please remember that while using AI does not necessarily violate our Code of Conduct, failing to declare its use is a violation. If PREreview suspects AI has been used in a review that doesn’t declare its use, staff will initiate a Code of Conduct investigation and take action to address any violation they find likely to have occurred.

While we don’t want to contribute to the institutional and systemic biases already present in scholarly research and communication, we think it’s essential to preserve and recognize the human connection, expertise, mutual learning, and skills that go into all kinds of communication, including academic, research, or scholarly communication. We think it’s important that we, as readers, understand when a review is human-authored or machine-authored, regardless of the quality of the review. Furthermore, we want to celebrate, reward, and show gratitude for people and the labor they contribute to bettering research for the benefit of all.

It’s also important to acknowledge that PREreview uses some AI tooling too. For example, we use some AI-assisted translations with human approvals for our localization and translation work, and we use AI to summarize and share details about published reviews and requests for review on our community Slack. We’re also using AI while developing our upcoming matchmaking features to help reviewers find relevant research to review.

AI can support us in moving more quickly on these kinds of tasks than our small team could alone. We focus on using AI in clearly-bounded and reasoned ways that connect people with people and people with content that is most relevant to them. Ultimately, PREreview’s use of AI will always prioritize human agency, community stewardship, and collective benefit from knowledge evaluation and dissemination.

Finally, remember: our AI policy is evolving and may continue to change - even frequently. We will continue to navigate those changes alongside you with as much accessibility, clarity, inclusivity, openness, reason, and transparency as we can.

If you have a question about using AI for any reason in a review, please let us know at help@prereview.org so we can work through any doubts you have before you publish your review.

Stay connected

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

Building a more decentralized, interoperable, and inclusive future for scholarly communication takes more than any one organization. That's why we're joining forces.

On October 28, 2026, the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) Alliance officially launched, bringing together more than 40 organizations and stakeholders committed to advancing a more transparent, decentralized, and researcher-centered model for scholarly communication.

PREreview is proud to be among its founding members, having actively participated in the working group that helped shape the Alliance and its direction. For us, this isn't about embracing a new vision. It's about joining forces to realize one that has guided our work from the very beginning.

A vision we've been building toward since day one

PREreview was born out of a belief that scholarly communication and research evaluation could, and should, work differently.

We envision a future where research is shared openly and early, where evaluation is not controlled by a select few, and where people with diverse expertise and lived experiences can meaningfully help shape scientific knowledge in the public interest.

A future where the infrastructure supporting scholarly communication is decentralized, interoperable, accessible, adaptable, and multilingual, allowing different communities to participate on their own terms while remaining connected to a broader ecosystem.

This vision is closely aligned with the Publish-Review-Curate model, which separates the dissemination of research from its subsequent evaluation and curation. By allowing these processes to happen independently, the PRC model creates opportunities for different actors to timely contribute, collaborate, and innovate without relying on a single publisher, platform, or gatekeeper.

And perhaps most excitingly, it enables connections between work already happening across the scholarly ecosystem.

Consider a research output, such as a preprint or dataset, shared openly through a repository. It can receive constructive feedback through an open review platform like PREreview, with authors having the possibility to respond and improve their work—all in the open, all linked, all citable. From there, different communities, journals, and publishing initiatives, including Diamond Open Access venues, can build on those contributions to curate, validate, and disseminate knowledge in ways that serve their communities. Open protocols like COAR Notify and other interoperable infrastructure can help connect these processes, allowing contributions to travel across platforms rather than remain confined within them.

This is just one possible pathway, not a prescribed sequence. The beauty of a decentralized ecosystem is that different pathways can emerge and coexist, responding to the needs of different research communities.

Different approaches, a shared future

The PRC Alliance is a new opportunity to bring people and organizations together around this vision. But we also recognize that many others have been working toward similar goals, sometimes using different language, frameworks, and approaches.

We see important connections, for example, with the Diamond Open Access community and its efforts to build community-governed, equitable, and non-commercial scholarly publishing infrastructure. These efforts may emphasize different aspects of scholarly communication, but they share many of the same aspirations: reducing dependence on commercial gatekeepers, strengthening community agency, and making the dissemination and evaluation of knowledge more equitable.

As PREreview's Executive Director and Co-Founder, Daniela Saderi, puts it:

"We cannot afford to let different names, approaches, or seemingly insurmountable challenges divide us when so much of what we are working toward is shared. Our differences can be opportunities, not obstacles. They invite us to ask new questions, learn from one another, and imagine possibilities that none of us could see or realize alone. That's the kind of collaboration we need to transform scholarly communication."

This is what excites us most about the PRC Alliance: not simply the opportunity to promote a particular model, but the possibility of building bridges between existing efforts, aligning around shared values, and making room for new ideas and collaborations to emerge.

And while joining an alliance is an important step, membership alone does not drive change. What matters is what we choose to do together.

Building a truly decentralized and inclusive scholarly ecosystem will require more than technical interoperability. It will require trust, openness to different perspectives, a willingness to share responsibility, and intentional efforts to ensure that new models don't simply reproduce the same power structures we are trying to change.

We see the PRC Alliance, a joint initiative led by COAR and ASAPbio, as an opportunity to put these commitments into practice, alongside other initiatives and communities working toward complementary goals.

Be part of building this future

The future of scholarly communication will be shaped not only by the organizations developing its infrastructure, but by the people who choose to participate in it.

There are many ways to connect with PREreview and contribute to this shared vision:

• Researchers and communities: Share your expertise by publishing open reviews of preprints and datasets, individually or collaboratively through PREreview.
• Preprint and data repositories: Explore interoperable workflows that connect authors seeking feedback with communities of reviewers, including through COAR Notify and emerging matchmaking capabilities.
• Journals and publishing initiatives: Collaborate with us to connect open reviews, author responses, and curation processes, making research evaluation more transparent, discoverable, and reusable.

And whether or not you identify your work with the PRC model, if you're working toward a more open, equitable, and community-driven scholarly ecosystem, we want to connect with you.

Consider joining the PRC Alliance, visit PREreview.org, or reach out to our team to explore opportunities to collaborate.

We don't need everyone to build the same thing. We need to build things that work together, and to share responsibility for the future we're creating.

AI use disclosure: ChatGPT (OpenAI) was used to support the organization, flow, and refinement of this article. The ideas, perspectives, and final editorial decisions are those of the author.

Stay connected

You can follow PREreview on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

This newsletter issue features a wealth of past and present opportunities to team up, tackle systemic challenges together, and motorize change in research culture. From the impacts of our global Review-a-thon to our upcoming events, read on to find out more!

DORA & PREreview invite you in for a discussion around the weight of peer-review contributions in research assessment

Peer review is essential to how research is evaluated and improved, yet this work remains invisible and largely irrelevant for research assessment. As new forms of open, community-led, and collaborative peer review create more opportunities for people to contribute, an important question emerges: are the systems through which researchers are assessed and rewarded evolving with them?

On October 7, PREreview and DORA are convening the “Beyond Visibility: How Do We Make Peer Review Truly Valued?” event to address this important question. Roundtable participants—including you!—will bring in their diverse perspectives to explore opportunities and barriers for making peer-review contributions not only visible and citable, but meaningfully recognized and valued in research assessment systems.

The conversation will be initiated by Giovanna Lima (DORA, co-moderator and convener), Vanessa Fairhurst (PREreview, co-moderator and convener), Daniela Saderi (PREreview, roundtable participant and convener), Bernd Pulverer (EMBO, roundtable participant), Anna Hatch (HHMI, roundtable participant), Pablo Ranea Robles (Ramón y Cajal Fellow, Universidad de Granada, roundtable participant), and Laura Ación (MetaDocencia / Universidad de Buenos Aires-CONICET, roundtable participant). Then, they will open the floor to everyone in the room.

Join us for the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) Alliance launch event

The scholarly publishing system is under growing pressure. Researchers face increasing demands to publish, peer review is strained and often invisible, and valuable scholarly contributions beyond traditional articles remain difficult to recognize and reward.

To discuss this issue—and consider its solutions—join us on October 28th for "Publish, Review, Curate (PRC): a better future for scholarly publishing," a webinar exploring an alternative vision for research communication that places openness, transparency, timeliness, community participation, and scholarly judgment at its core. The conversation will have PREreview’s Executive Director and Co-founder Daniela Saderi from the “Review” perspective.

The webinar will conclude with the launch of the PRC Alliance, a group of like-minded organisations—including PREreview—aiming to strengthen coordination across the growing PRC community, enhance the model’s visibility, and collaborate in supporting innovative PRC pilots.

✍️ If you’re interested in joining the PRC Alliance, either as an Implementer or Supporter, please fill in the membership form on the website.

PREreview’s First Review-a-thon: Impact & Learnings

This year's Peer Review Week (September 14-18) theme moved beyond identifying challenges and toward shared understanding and practical approaches. At PREreview, we believe part of the solution to the pitfalls in current evaluation systems lies in creating spaces where people can learn together, exchange expertise, and improve research through open dialogue.

That’s why we took the opportunity to organize a Review-a-thon: a global event where newly-formed and existing PREreview Clubs synchronously carried out open reviews of preprints and datasets as a team. Twenty-five PREreview Clubs from at least 12 countries in 5 regions registered to participate in the initiative. We hope this is the very first of an annual community event, gathering more and more people around open peer review each time.

While the Clubs’ activity reports keep coming through, please make sure to visit the Review-a-thon website to read their collaborative reviews, see the faces behind the work, and hear the participants’ reflections on reviewing together.

PREreview in Dialogue

Rethinking Peer Review Capacity: Do We Need More Reviewers? | Daniela Saderi for the ACSE Interview Series

Peer Review Week 2026 conversations revolved around how the community can respond to the increasing pressures peer review systems are under. So what if building peer-review capacity isn’t simply about finding more reviewers, but about creating better pathways into peer review?

In an interview for the Asian Council of Science Editors PRW series, Daniela drew on PREreview’s work to empower underrepresented perspectives in science to participate in research evaluation, and stressed the importance of power sharing for a more resilient ecosystem.

Daniela Saderi at Science Summit 2026

On September 18, 2026, Daniela represented PREreview’s perspective in the “Building Global Student Research Capacity Through Open Science Networks” virtual session, convened by Pika Team founders under the Science Summit 2026.

The session examined how open science can move beyond expanding access to scientific knowledge toward expanding access to scientific participation, particularly for younger students. The discussion highlighted peer-to-peer learning, open educational resources, locally adapted training, research infrastructure, early exposure to peer review, professional scientific networks, and community-based mentorship as complementary approaches.

Carlos Herold Junior at radio program from the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil)

Hora da Ciência is a science and technology radio program from the University of São Paulo, aired on a weekly basis and also available on Spotify. On August 27, PREreview Champion Carlos Herold Junior was invited to talk about the Review-a-thon, a global initiative led by PREreview to promote open, collaborative peer review of research outputs. During the interview, Carlos also highlighted the importance of encouraging linguistic and community perspectives diversity in peer review.

🔊 You can listen to Carlos’ segment from minute 42:27 of the program (in Portuguese).

Events

Upcoming events

• October 9 to December 11, 2026 — “Seminario latinoamericano. De la soberanía epistémica a la inteligencia artificial: el paradigma de la comunicación científica hacia el bien común”. Modalidad híbrida. Conoce el programa completo e inscríbete sin cargo.
• October 13, 2026 - 16:00 to 17:00 UTC — “Open Preprints: Licensing and Other Practical Policy Tools for Research Funders, Librarians, and Institutions” webinar, by Creative Commons. The panel includes Dr. Monica Granados, PREreview Co-Founder and Advisory Committee Co-Chair. Learn more and register.
• October 14, 2026 - 12:00 to 15:30 UTC — “Ally Skills” workshop, offered by OLS. Virtual training session to equip individuals working in research and research-adjacent roles with practical skills to explore concepts of power and privileges, and concrete ways to step up for others in a meaningful and effective way. More info and registration.
• October 23, 2026 - 13:00 to 21:00 UTC — 2026 GW Ethics in Publishing Conference. Hybrid event discussing creative and systemic solutions to promote integrity in the profession and practice of publishing. Check out the full program and register.
• November 11-13, 2026 | Medellín, Colombia — LatinR: Conferencia Latinoamericana sobre Uso de R en Investigación y Desarrollo (presencial). Más información e inscripciones.

Recent events

• September 28-30, 2026 — FORRT “AI in Metascience Online Conference”. More than 35 talks & workshops discussing how AI is changing the way research is done, checked and understood. Abstracts for all talks are available in the conference program, and where speakers opt in, their talks are published on the FORRT YouTube channel.
• September 2, 2026 — “Guidelines for the Governance of Indigenous Peoples’ Data in Scholarly Publishing” webinar. Recording available.

Highlights from our Slack Community

• What we are reading:

-Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Daniela Saderi of PREreview, by Alice Meadows
- When Data Meets Review: Reflections on PREreview’s First Open Dataset Review, by Rosario Rogel-Salazar, Xiuqi Li, and Güleda Doğan
- From interdependent movements to shared action: Connecting publishing and assessment reforms, by Ludo Waltman et al.
- Does Open Peer Review Correlate With Better Altmetric Attention Performance?An Empirical Analysis Based on Nature Communications, by Xiaotian Wei et al.
- Community Peer Review: How Preprints Enable Open Scholarly Discussion, by Sam Rye
-The right to know: open knowledge ecosystems and AI, by UNESCO
-Recommendations for Revising the Open Access Classification System in OpenAlex, by Juan Pablo Alperin et al.

• Invest in Open Infrastructure is looking for a Director of Business Development (remote, full-time position). Read the role description and apply by October 12, 2026.
• eLife is driving a community-led process to explore, shape and co-create open-source tools to support open science research in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). Contribute to the first, exploratory step of the project by taking this survey.
• The OpenAlex Community Advisory Board's working group has proposed replacing the gold/green/hybrid/bronze/closed Open Access labels with three separate dimensions: access, location, and licence. They’d like to know if the problem resonates, if the three-dimension direction makes sense, and what would you need from them to adopt it. Please fill out the “vibe-check” form by November 13, 2026. About six questions, five minutes, any language.

If you are looking for your next career step, check out the openings in our #jobs-and-opportunities channel, and share any of your own.

You can also find lots of preprint authors requesting feedback on their work in our #request-a-review channel.

Stay connected

If you have something to share, drop us an email at community@prereview.org.

You can follow PREreview on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

In the final issue of this series, Daniel shares his understanding of open peer review as a space for learning and confidence-building where students and ECRs are welcome to take part in, rather than put on the sidelines.

Why did you decide to apply for the PREreview Champions program?

Before applying, I had already reviewed manuscripts through the traditional journal-organized system, and had also published a review through PREreview. So I had seen the review process from both sides of the table: the closed, anonymous version, and the open, acknowledged one. That contrast is what pulled me in. Traditional peer review had taught me how to evaluate a manuscript, but it hadn't given me many chances to think about who actually gets to review, and who gets left out of the conversation altogether.

PREreview's open model answered a question I'd been sitting with for a while: peer review shouldn't be a closed room that only a small, established group has access to. I wanted to understand that model properly, and then bring it back to students and early-career researchers in my own network, most of whom had never been shown how review works, let alone invited to take part in it.

Applying for the Champions Program felt less like a leap, and more like a natural next step: a way to formalize something I already believed in, and turn it into something I could actively teach others.

How was your experience during the training part of the program?

The training went well beyond what I expected walking in. What stood out most was being introduced to PREreview's own methodology and approach to structuring a review, moving from the theory of open peer review into a practical, repeatable way of actually doing it. It reframed peer review for me as a skill that can be taught step by step, rather than something reviewers are simply expected to already have.

Sitting in on a Live Review session is what turned the training from an idea into a concrete framework. Watching a preprint get read and discussed openly, in real time, with the reasoning visible to everyone in the room, is something I've since made a point of trying to recreate in the sessions I lead. Every part of the training exceeded what I came in expecting, and the Live Review piece in particular is the one I will keep coming back to.

To complete the program, Champions have to organize and deliver their own engagement activities in their local communities. Tell us a bit about yours

I co-led two activities with other fellow Champions, and took a different seat at the table each time.

On June 20, 2026, we ran “Democratizing Peer Review: Empowering Early-Career Researchers through Open and Collaborative Science”, a webinar targeted to early-career researchers, students, and science enthusiasts across the wider African research community. My role there was mostly behind the scenes, moderating the session and coordinating the group, and it turned out to be its own kind of learning. Thirty people attended the call and, according to the post-event survey, their confidence in writing constructive reviewer comments had climbed from an average of 2.77 to 4.29 out of 5. Additionally, confidence in submitting to a preprint server went from 2.15 to 3.43, with all respondents saying they would recommend the session to a colleague. Watching that shift happen from the coordination side taught me something about myself I hadn't fully named before: program management is a skill I already carry into my career, and this activity is where I actually saw it in action.

On 25 July 2026, I took a front stage role for the event “Empowering Undergraduate and Postgraduate Students as Agents of Change in Peer Review,” opening the session myself with a talk on why peer review needs new voices, what a preprint is, and the practical PREreview tools, Clubs, and Live Reviews that help a student write their first review with confidence. By the end of it, the sense that early-career researchers and students are qualified to take part in peer review had risen from 3.0 to 3.6 out of 5 in the post-event survey. The workshop was rated 4.4 out of 5 on average, and everyone who responded said they would recommend it.

The recording from the June 20 session, and both the recording and learning materials from July 25 are available online.

What impacts do you think open peer review practices have on the scholarly communications landscape in your country and region?

For a long time, the biggest thing holding many early-career researchers back from contributing to scholarly research in Nigeria wasn't a lack of ideas. It was fear: fear of rejection, and a quieter worry that their work simply wasn't “scholarly enough” to survive the kind of anonymous, high-stakes scrutiny traditional review is often built around. Open peer review chips away at that fear because the process becomes something people can watch, learn from, and eventually take part in themselves, rather than a closed room they're waiting to be let into.

I think that shift could open real avenues across Nigeria and the wider region: researchers who currently sit on the sidelines, worried about being harshly judged, coming to see open, constructive review as a way in rather than a gate to fear. It also changes how people relate to rejection itself; a review that explains its reasoning openly is easier to learn from than a verdict delivered in silence. None of that happens overnight, but every session we've run so far suggests the appetite for it is already there, especially among students and postgraduates who've simply never been shown that this door is open to them.

Would you recommend participating in the PREreview Champions program to others?

Yes, without hesitation, and I'd especially point it to students, postgraduates, and early-career researchers across Africa who are still finding their footing in scholarly publishing. What I'd emphasize to them is PREreview's structured, modular approach to review: breaking the process down into steps that can actually be taught and practiced, instead of assuming that reviewing is a skill you're supposed to already have. That's the part of the program that turns curiosity into confidence.

I'd also recommend it to anyone thinking about research communication more broadly, not just reviewers-in-training, because the Champions program teaches you as much about building community and running an engagement activity as it does about peer review itself. Coming from Nigeria and working alongside Champions from Sierra Leone in this cohort, I've seen how much value there is in comparing notes on what does and doesn't land in different settings. It's a program that rewards showing up as a beginner and leaving as someone who can teach others.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share?

The Champions program paired me with a mentor whose guidance made a real difference in how I moved through it, from shaping the engagement activities to thinking through what comes next. I won't go into all of that here, but I'd be doing that mentorship a disservice not to mention it at all.

What I'm most looking forward to now is staying close to Live Review sessions, since that's where the learning I described earlier actually turns into practice, and continuing to contribute to PREreview's community activities more broadly, whether that's future Champions cohorts, Clubs, or simply showing up to review preprints myself. Facilitating two sessions this year showed me there's real appetite for this kind of work across Africa, and I want to keep building on that momentum rather than treating it as a one-off program requirement. If anything, this is just the starting point.

Stay connected

If you have something to share or want to learn more about the Champions Program, drop us an email at community@prereview.org.

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter, and joining our Slack community.

In this feature, Shitondo stresses out the importance of concentrating Open Science advocacy efforts in low-resource settings and educational institutions for a broader adoption of its principles and practices.

Why did you decide to apply for the PREreview Champions program?

Having been involved in the open science space for over a year at the time of my application, I saw the PREreview Champions Program as an opportunity to learn and develop skills that would strengthen my ability to advocate for and promote open science, particularly within my local context.

Open science serves to make the scientific process more equitable and transparent. Regardless of their background, researchers can make their findings more findable and accessible while contributing to the scientific process through preprint sharing and review. However, this alone is not sufficient. If we are to see open science widely adopted in line with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, more advocacy is needed, particularly in low-resource settings.

How was your experience during the training part of the program?

My experience during the training was nothing short of awesome. I particularly appreciated how inclusive, respectful, and considerate the PREreview team and fellow Champions were. These were also some of the core principles emphasized throughout the program. My favorite moments were the catch-up calls, as they provided an opportunity to connect and engage with other Champions beyond the formal training sessions. I did not have any least favorite moments.

The level of engagement from both the Champions and the PREreview team was impressive, and I can comfortably say that the training met most of my expectations. I use the word “most” intentionally because I had also expected the training to cover some of the basics of open science and its underlying principles before moving into peer-review practices. I believe this could be particularly helpful for participants who are new to the open science space.

To complete the program, Champions have to organize and deliver their own engagement activities in their local communities. Tell us a bit about yours

I organized a virtual Open Research Symposium targeting undergraduate medical students at the University of Zambia. The symposium was held under the theme “Building an Open Research Culture Among the Next Generation of Scientists”, and it was also open to other undergraduate students in the health sciences, postgraduate students, and early-career researchers. The program comprised three sessions: (1) a webinar on Open Science and its Role in Research; (2) a webinar on How Students Can Contribute to Open Science; and (3) a hands-on workshop involving a live preprint review session.

We had over 140 people registering for the symposium. However, attendance varied across the sessions, with approximately 40–50 participants joining the first session, 17 joining the second, and 16 participating in the last one. The preprint review resulting from the Live Review session is available on PREreview, and the recording of the webinar about pathways for students engagement with open science can be downloaded here—using the passcode &@KP4fm#. The feedback we received was very positive, and a good number of participants subsequently joined the Review and Curate Network (RCN) community.

One of my main takeaways was the importance of effective communication and participant engagement when organizing virtual events. Although participants commended the initiative, attendance was one of the main challenges we encountered. Following a post-event review, we attributed much of this to the lack of a WhatsApp group, which could have allowed for quicker and more direct communication. Many participants missed reminders that were sent through email.

Overall, the experience taught me the importance of not only offering good content but also having an effective communication and engagement strategy to ensure that registrants actually participate.

What impacts do you think open peer review practices have on the scholarly communications landscape in your country and region?

Open peer review practices could encourage greater sharing of preprints, making research more visible and accessible. Many researchers experience long delays before their work is published because of the lengthy traditional journal peer-review process. Preprints can provide an opportunity for researchers to share their findings earlier while receiving feedback from the wider research community.

Secondly, open peer review could provide timely feedback that helps improve the quality of manuscripts before they are submitted to journals, potentially increasing their chances of acceptance.

Lastly, participating in open peer review can expand researchers' knowledge and strengthen their critical analysis skills, particularly when reviewing alongside people with different areas of expertise and experience. Open peer review is therefore not only about reviewing research, it is also a learning process.

Ultimately, these benefits could promote greater responsibility and accountability in scientific inquiry and communication while contributing to greater rigour and credibility in research.

Would you recommend participating in the PREreview Champions program to others?

Yes, I would definitely recommend the PREreview Champions Program to others. I believe there is a lot of work that needs to be done to promote open science, particularly within educational institutions.

In this regard, I would especially recommend the program to lecturers, researchers, and librarians, as they are directly involved in shaping research practices and have significant potential to influence policy and practice within their institutions. However, I would encourage anyone who has an interest in and commitment to promoting equitable and transparent scholarly communication to participate in the program.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share?

I currently work with the Review and Curate Network (RCN), where we promote open science in the Global South through preprint reviews and capacity-building programs, including webinars on research and open science practices.

As part of our activities, we conduct quarterly preprint reviews and publish them on the PREreview platform. We also have a podcast series where we invite people from different backgrounds to share their perspectives and insights on various aspects of open science.

There are several other programs and initiatives that we are currently organizing, and the network is open to anyone who would like to learn, contribute, or participate in promoting open science. People can connect with us through our social media platforms, including Facebook and LinkedIn, to learn more about our activities and upcoming initiatives.

Stay connected

If you have something to share or want to learn more about the Champions Program, drop us an email at community@prereview.org.

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter, and joining our Slack community.

This week we’re excited to share our second matchmaking experiment with all of you. You can now visit https://matchmaking-survey.prereview.org/ to try it out for yourself.

This version of our matchmaking work, which is still under development (with ongoing feedback from community members like you), “reads” the published works in your ORCID profile. Then it uses an algorithm we’re testing to suggest new preprints for review based on your research interests. Those preprints come from many servers we support. The final matchmaking product will consider even more preprints, including those with requests for review on PREreview.org.

We’d love to have your help improving this work. If you’re able to check it please do. You’ll be able to rate the relevancy of each preprint we suggest. All feedback is welcome. We need to know which suggestions are good fits and which ones are not. If you have more comments to share or any questions about the experiment itself, you can always email us at help@prereview.org.

We’re also onboarding a whole bunch of new PREreview Clubs ahead of our Review-a-thon. If you’d like to participate, you can check out this list of Clubs open to new members and join one ahead of the event, which runs during Peer Review Week (14-18 September, 2026).

What’s next?

Last week, we turned on our African French translation of the website. In the next few weeks, we’ll also add Modern Standard Arabic to PREreview.org. As a reminder, you can help review our translations and suggest even better ones by creating a Crowdin account, joining the PREreview project there, and reviewing the translated strings (or blocks of text) in the language you’d like to help support, including Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish, African French, and (soon!) Modern Standard Arabic. You can work through the Crowdin web interface or try suggesting changes on translate.prereview.org which offers a visual editor of the site.

💌 Many thanks to all of our language leads and other community volunteers making contributions and suggestions to improve our multilingual work at PREreview!

Stay connected

If you have something to share, drop us an email at help@prereview.org.

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

This week we’ve reached another multilingual milestone by adding African French to the site. This is the third language added to our website as part of our work to become increasingly multilingual over time. African French joins Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish, and US English on PREreview.org. We are grateful to all the community members who collaborated with us in the translation and localization of our platform and contents.

We also sent out invitations to PREreview Champions and Club leads to give us feedback on our second matchmaking experiment. This new approach uses an algorithm we developed in partnership with a data scientist from eLife to test how relevant our recommendations are. We’ll share a broader invitation for all community members to try it out after we’ve adjusted things a bit further based on Champions and Clubs leads’ input.

What’s next?

Within the next few weeks, we plan to add Modern Standard Arabic to PREreview.org as another multilingual option for community members.

During that time we’ll continue gathering feedback on our new matchmaking experiment, onboarding new Clubs ahead of our upcoming Review-a-thon, and planning for our upcoming PREreview team retreat in October.

Stay connected

If you have feedback about PREreview.org to share, drop us an email at help@prereview.org.

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

In this piece, Mabel weighs on the opportunities Open Peer Review presents to early-career researchers and scholars from resource-constrained settings, while considering the conditions needed to foster its adoption.

Why did you decide to apply for the PREreview Champions program?

I applied for the Champions program because I was increasingly interested in how research can become more open, collaborative, and accessible, particularly for early-career researchers. I was already developing an interest in research and scholarly communication, but I wanted to understand open peer review beyond simply knowing what it meant. I wanted to learn how researchers could actively participate in the review process, contribute constructively to scientific discussions, and help make research communication more inclusive.

I was also particularly drawn to the community aspect of the program. Coming from Nigeria, I see how differences in access to mentorship, research networks, publishing opportunities, and scholarly resources can shape who gets heard in science. I saw PREreview Champions as an opportunity not only to develop my own skills but also to take what I learned back to my community.

Ultimately, I applied because I wanted to move from being interested in open science to becoming someone who actively contributes to it.

How was your experience during the training part of the program?

The training experience exceeded my expectations. I came into the program interested in Open Science and peer review, but the training gave me a much broader understanding of the principles, history, and practical realities behind them. I particularly appreciated learning how different components of Open Science connect and why openness in research communication matters.

One of my favorite aspects was the opportunity to learn collaboratively with other Champions. It was valuable to hear perspectives from people working in different contexts and to think together about how we could translate what we were learning into meaningful activities within our own communities.

Another highlight was moving from theory to practice. The programme encouraged us to think beyond simply understanding open peer review, and actually consider how we could facilitate conversations, engage researchers, and create opportunities for others to participate.

If I had to identify a less-favorite part, it would probably be the challenge of balancing the programme activities with my other academic and professional commitments. However, that also taught me an important lesson about planning and communicating consistently within a team.

To complete the program, Champions have to organize and deliver their own engagement activities in their local communities. Tell us a bit about yours

Our engagement activity was a virtual webinar and practical preprint review session titled “Democratizing Peer Review: Empowering Early-Career Researchers through Open and Collaborative Science.” It was designed primarily for early-career researchers, students, and others interested in research and scholarly communication within the wider African research community.

The session introduced 26 participants to the history and principles of open peer review, the role of preprints, bias in peer review, and the practical process of engaging with preprints. We also incorporated a live preprint review component so participants could move from learning about open peer review to experiencing it in practice.

The feedback we got through the post-event survey was very encouraging. Confidence in writing constructive reviewer comments increased from 2.77/5 to 4.29/5, while confidence in submitting to a preprint server increased from 2.15/5 to 3.43/5. Every survey respondent said they would recommend the workshop to a colleague.

My biggest takeaway was that there is significant interest in open peer review, but many early-career researchers simply need exposure, mentorship, and a safe environment to participate.

What impacts do you think open peer review practices can have on the scholarly communications landscape in your country and region?

I think open peer review could contribute significantly to making scholarly communication more transparent, inclusive, and participatory in Nigeria and across Africa. Traditional research and publishing systems can sometimes feel difficult to navigate, particularly for early-career researchers who may have limited access to experienced mentors and established research networks.

Open peer review creates an opportunity to make the review process more visible and to help researchers develop reviewing skills earlier in their careers. It can also encourage constructive scientific dialogue rather than positioning peer review purely as a gatekeeping mechanism.

For researchers in resource-constrained settings, open practices can also support greater visibility and participation in global research conversations. Preprints, collaborative review, and recognition for review contributions can create additional pathways for researchers to share their work and contribute to the work of others.

However, I believe adoption will require awareness-building and capacity development. Researchers need practical guidance on how these models work, how to review responsibly, and how to navigate concerns around bias, ethics, and research quality. That is why community-based initiatives and mentorship are particularly important.

Would you recommend participating in the PREreview Champions program to others?

Absolutely. I would particularly recommend the PREreview Champions program to early-career researchers, students, researchers who are interested in scholarly communication, and anyone curious about Open Science but unsure about how to begin engaging with it.

One thing I appreciated about the program is that you do not have to arrive as an expert. It provides an environment where you can learn, ask questions, collaborate with others, and gradually develop the confidence to engage with open peer review.

I would especially encourage researchers from underrepresented or resource-constrained research communities to consider opportunities like this. Open Science can feel like a complex global conversation, but programmes such as PREreview Champions create opportunities to bring that conversation into local communities and adapt it to their realities.

For me, the greatest value was not only learning about open peer review but also being challenged to become an active contributor. You leave with knowledge, a community, and the opportunity to turn what you have learned into something that benefits others.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share?

One of my biggest reflections from this experience is that Open Science becomes much more meaningful when people are given opportunities to participate, rather than simply being told about its principles. The PREreview Champions program gave me the opportunity to move from learning about open peer review to facilitating conversations around it within my community.

I would like to continue building on that experience by supporting more practical engagement with preprints and open peer review. I am particularly interested in facilitating Live Review sessions where early-career researchers can learn by doing, and I am also exploring the process of preparing and sharing research as a preprint.

More broadly, I hope to continue working at the intersection of biomedical research, health innovation, and evidence-informed practice, while advocating for approaches that make scientific knowledge more accessible and collaborative.

If there is one message I would leave with other early-career researchers, it is this: you do not have to wait until you are a senior researcher to contribute to the research ecosystem. There are meaningful ways to participate, learn, review, collaborate, and help others learn alongside you.

Stay connected

If you have something to share or want to learn more about the Champions Program, drop us an email at community@prereview.org.

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

In the past couple of months, PREreview’s team and community members have been actively championing open research evaluation, while cultivating new relationships around the globe. Dive in, and help us ripple further.

Last Days to Register for our Review-a-thon with your Club!

To celebrate 2026 Peer Review Week (September 14-18), PREreview is organizing a Review-a-thon: a global event where newly-formed and existing PREreview Clubs synchronously carry out collaborative reviews of preprints and datasets. Our goal is to showcase how human, community-driven peer review can help drive change in the research evaluation culture.

Participating Clubs that organize and carry out at least one collaborative review during Peer Review Week, and publish the resulting PREreview(s)—co-authored by two or more people—within the following two weeks will be entered into a raffle for a 500 USD fund to support their future group activities.

Registration for the Review-a-thon is open through August 31, 2026. We especially want to encourage participation from communities that review in languages other than English, groups reviewing datasets and data papers, as well as clubs specializing in social sciences and humanities. Gather your lab, classroom, journal club, department, or scholarly community to give constructive feedback on a research output as a team!

💌 Please let us know if you have any questions at community@prereview.org, and check out the FAQs section on the website. Feel free to extend the invite to colleagues and reshare it on social media.

PREreview in Dialogue

Pia Tavella at the IV Encuentro de la Red Chilena de Revistas Científicas de Acceso Abierto

The Red Chilena de Revistas Científicas de Acceso Abierto (Chilean Network for Open Access Journals) convenes more than 200 scientific journals managed by 15 public universities to strengthen shared capacities and professionalize the editorial teams. On the 10th and 11th of August, journal editors, librarians, university administrators, and researchers gathered at the network’s fourth annual meeting held in Santiago de Chile to share their reflections and experiences in scholarly communications. The event agenda spanned from academic integrity, new technologies applied to editorial workflows and data privacy, to trends in open science, scientometrics and open peer review.

Pia Tavella, PREreview’s Communications and Engagement Officer, gave both a talk on Open Peer Review models and a more interactive workshop about pathways for early-career researchers and journal editors to engage with PREreview. The meeting was a unique opportunity to exchange knowledge on the challenges and initiatives shaping scholarly communications, and to build relationships with the open access ecosystem in Latin America.

Daniela Saderi at September 2026 OpenCon Librarian Community Call

OpenCon supports a dynamic, diverse, and growing community that works year-round to advance Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data. On September 8, 2026, they’re holding a Community Call aimed at folks working at the intersection of libraries and Open.

In this session, PREreview Executive Director and Co-founder Daniela Saderi will explore how open review models can expand participation, create new opportunities for learning and dialogue, and strengthen trust in research. The talk will also address the role librarians can play as educators, connectors, and stewards of open scholarly infrastructure in helping shape a future where knowledge is held in trust by the many, rather than controlled by the few.

OpenCon Community Calls are not recorded to support a safer environment for honest discussion. While the September 2026 OpenCon Librarian Community Call is only open for library staff to register, the notes will be made public.

Rosario Rogel Salazar at open peer review workshop organized by Red de Politólogas

Red de Politólogas is an international network that brings together one of the largest communities of female political scientists in the world. Their mission is to strengthen the visibility, leadership, and professional development of women in political science, an historically male-dominated field. The network has several members with leadership roles in specialized scientific journals who advocate for more gender diversity in editorial boards.

On August 21st, 2026, PREreview Champion Rosario Rogel Salazar is delivering a members-only workshop on open peer review for scientific journals. The activity is collaboratively organized by the Red de Politólogas together with Revista Argentina de Ciencia Política, Revista Mexicana de Derecho Electoral, Revista de Ciencia Política (Santiago), Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Iconos, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, Brazilian Political Sciences Review, Revista SAAP, Revista Electrónica del Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas y Sociales "Ambrosio Gioja", and PREreview.

PREreview Champions in Action!

For the past couple of months, 2026 PREreview Champions have been spreading out the word about open peer review across their local communities and building opportunities for others to engage with the Open Science movement.

In June:

• 2026 PREreview Champions Daniel Adediran, Morlai Sesay and Mabel B. Omoniwa organized the "Democratizing Peer Review: Empowering Early-Career Researchers through Open and Collaborative Science" webinar, joined by 2024 PREreview Champion Seun Olufemi as an invited speaker.

In July:

• Shitondo Yahila organized an Open Research Symposium with support from The University of Zambia Medical Students Association. The event was targeted at undergraduate healthcare students and early-career researchers. A total of 80+ people participated in three different sessions, including a Live Review!
• Daniel Adediran, Morlai Sesay and Deborah Mariama Kamara hosted a webinar on "Empowering Undergraduate and Postgraduate Students as Agents of Change in Peer Review Across All Communities".
• Alan Colin Arce published an insights report for the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory under the title “Perceptions, Impact, and the State of Open Peer Review”. Available in English and French.

Modular Peer Review Working Group: Learnings and Next Steps

Research is an iterative process: questions evolve, methods change, and analyses get refined. What if peer review could arrive at those moments where it has the greatest potential to improve the work, rather than centering only on the final output?

That concept was core to the Modular Peer Review Working Group endeavour between January and July, 2026. Convened by the Continuous Science Foundation & PREreview, more than 60 researchers, infrastructure builders, publishers, and community members generated practical, testable ideas for integrating useful and timely feedback across the research lifecycle.

PREreview deeply thanks everyone who participated and contributed their thoughts to the Modular Peer Review Working Group. The final report captures not only the foundations we built together, but is also an open invitation for others in the scholarly communications ecosystem to help shape what comes next. Please reach out to share your questions, feedback, and collaboration proposals to expand on this work.

Events

Upcoming events

• August 26, 2026 - 13:00 UTC — “Metadata for All with Wikidata” free webinar. Speakers will address FAIR open data principles, strategies to mitigate systemic information gaps, and the value of public access to reference datasets for elevating marginalized demographics and promoting scholarly dissemination. More info and registration.
• September 8, 2026 - 19:00 UTC — “Are You That White Ally? Recognizing & Interrupting White Narcissism in NPs” free-of-charge strategy session by Healing Equity United. More info and registration.
• September 14-18, 2026 — Peer Review Week events & activities from around the globe.
• September 15, 2026 - 12:00 UTC — RCM Cooperative is launching a monthly meetup series, open to anyone working in or around research community management. Learn more and register.

Recent events

• August 12, 2026 — “Metadata health check: A tour of the Crossref Participation Reports tool”, about how to assess your metadata quality, understand why complete metadata matters, and identify ways to improve the completeness and quality of your Crossref metadata. Recording available.
• June 2, 2026 — CHORUS Forum: Future of Preprints. Speakers: Katie Corker (ASAPbio), Dawn Melley (IEEE), Ben Mudrak (American Chemical Society/ChemRxiv), Kelly Cohen (Optica Publishing Group), and Samantha Hindle (bioRxiv & medRxiv). Recording available
• June 2-4, 2026 — European Association of Science Editors (EASE) Summer Symposium 2026. Recordings of the free sessions are available.

Highlights from our Slack Community

• What we are reading:

-Community Peer Review for Resistance and Resilience, by Christopher Steven Marcum & Daniela Saderi (PREreview)
-Science Doesn’t Need Better Journals. It Needs Better Incentives, by JP Flores & Hannah Frank
-How to Support Preprint Sharing: Six Levers to Advance Equitable Research Access, a policy paper published by INASP
-Equity in Open Access Means Thinking Beyond Fees, by Johan Rooryck
-The Future of Peer Review: A system-wide perspective, the report of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) project conducted from 2023-2026
-Towards open assessment: rethinking peer review in the context of open science, a report by the Circé Network in Canada

• The OSPARK Bootcamp (20 September - 12 November, 2026) is a hands-on programme designed to help Open Research ambassadors build practical outreach and marketing skills. The bootcamp combines a 6-week online course with a 2-day in-person workshop in Zurich (Switzerland), giving participants the tools, feedback, and community to develop a communication strategy for their own initiative. Participation is free, with a limited number of travel stipends available. Apply by August 23, 2026.
• openRxiv is looking for an Engineering Manager who combines hands-on technical depth with people-first management, all while championing openRxiv’s mission of accelerating open, accessible science. Remote, full-time position, based in the U.S. or some international countries. Apply here.
• Translate Science, una comunidad unida en torno a su interés por la ciencia abierta multilingüe, está organizando una revisión en vivo en español para participar del Review-a-thon! La sesión está programada para el 16 de septiembre, de 14:00 a 15:30 UTC. Visita el sitio web para conocer más sobre su Club de PREreview y sumarte a su lista de correos.

If you are looking for your next career step, check out the openings in our #jobs-and-opportunities channel, and share any of your own.

You can also find lots of preprint authors requesting feedback on their work in our #request-a-review channel.

Stay connected

If you have something to share, drop us an email at community@prereview.org.

You can follow PREreview on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

Celebrate Peer Review Week by reviewing together! Sign up with your existing PREreview Club, or start a new one and register for the Review-a-thon by August 31, 2026. You can win a prize for your future collaborative reviewing activities.

To celebrate 2026 Peer Review Week, we’re organizing a Review-a-thon: a global event where newly-formed and existing PREreview Clubs synchronously carry out collaborative reviews of preprints and datasets. Our goal is to engage 50 clubs in this collective effort. Together, we want to showcase how human, community-driven peer review can help drive change in the research evaluation culture.

Participating Clubs who organize and carry out at least one collaborative review during the week of September 14-18, 2026, and publish their PREreview(s)—co-authored by two or more people—within the following two weeks will be entered into a raffle for a 500 USD fund to support further collaborative review activities.

Registration for the Review-a-thon is now open through August 31st. We especially want to encourage participation from communities that review in languages other than English, groups reviewing datasets and data papers, as well as clubs specializing in social sciences and humanities. Gather your lab, classroom, journal club, department, or scholarly community to give constructive feedback on a research output as a team!

Three pathways for participating in the Review-a-thon

1. You are part of an existing PREreview Club and you’ve all decided to jump in. Go ahead and fill out the registration form! One sign-up per club, please
2. You want to join an existing PREreview Club and get them onboard for the celebration. Check out the list of Clubs open to new members and contact the one that interests you the most
3. You want to create a Club from scratch together with your colleagues and show up for the game. Learn how PREreview Clubs work and how to create a new one

All Club members participating in the Review-a-thon are asked to follow PREreview’s Code of Conduct. To enter the raffle, Club leads will have to report the publication of at least one collaborative review, and share post-event short reflections and, optionally, a photo of the experience.

Whether you and your fellow club members are eager to join us for the Review-a-thon, or you are a pioneer who wants to seize this opportunity to start a new reviewing Club, please visit the Review-a-thon site for all the details:

Stay connected

If you have any questions, drop us an email at community@prereview.org.

To stay updated on PREreview events like this one, follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

We’re continuing work on our matchmaking feature. Following up from our first experiment, we’ll be sharing a new survey soon with community members who have participated in our user research so far. This will help us further improve the relevancy of the suggestions we make to PREreviewers about which requested preprints they might want to review next.

This week we also added a new optimization to our review workflow for PREreview Clubs. If you are a club lead, you can now let us know from within the review workflow itself that we should attach that review to your club.

What’s next?

Next, we’ll add another clubs optimization to the review workflow that will allow reviewers to ask for a review to be added to a club. This request will then go to a club lead for approval before we add the review to their club. This optimization came out of our recent community design sprint on teaching and learning with PREreview. We hope that this feature will help instructors use PREreview Clubs in the classroom, as members of clubs tied to particular courses will soon be able to submit their reviews to a club as if they were submitting an assignment for class.

We’ll be continuing our matchmaking work, too, and getting ready to adopt and migrate to a new CMS later this year.

Stay connected

If you have feedback about PREreview.org to share, drop us an email at help@prereview.org.

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

You can now opt in to notifications about your requested reviews on PREreview.org! The next time you make a new request for review on the site, you should get a one-time prompt to enable email notifications whenever a PREreview is published about a preprint you requested for review. Try it out and let us know how it goes!

We’re also taking the next steps to choose and migrate to a new CMS to make our website more searchable, dynamic, and user-friendly. We’ll share more ahead of the big move once we’re ready to migrate.

What’s next?

Using feedback from PREreviewers like you, we’re busy developing our matchmaking experiment further into a new feature on the site. This week, we’re working to determine the best approach to using what reviewers could share with us about their research interests (more generally) to complement the existing process of making recommendations based on specific preprints reviewers have read.

We’re continuing to support community language leads for our next phase of multilingual work, too.

Stay connected

If you have feedback about PREreview.org to share, drop us an email at help@prereview.org.

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

This week at PREreview we spent most of our time tidying up our review workflows. We started adding email verification to our request workflow to make it possible for PREreviewers to opt-in to notifications about reviews published in response to requests from within the workflow itself. We also found and fixed a bug preventing PREreviewers from using the “back” button to revise PREreviews before publication.

What’s next?

We’re continuing to explore how best we can improve the relevancy of the results from our matchmaking experiment ahead of further development and an eventual release to our production site.

We’re also onboarding community language leads for our next phase of multilingual work to bring African French and Modern Standard Arabic to PREreview.org. Stay tuned for guidance on how to collaborate with them soon.

Stay connected

If you have feedback about PREreview.org to share, drop us an email at help@prereview.org.

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can also keep up with all the latest news by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

In this feature piece, Jade sheds light on the many potentials of open peer review, and envisions its intersection with open data to improve research evaluation and communication.

Why did you decide to apply for the PREreview Champions program?

I applied to the PREreview Champions program because I believe that open peer review can be a catalyst for a more transparent, reproducible, and community-centered scholarly ecosystem.

Over the years, I have had multiple conversations with friends and colleagues about how traditional journal-organized peer review can feel out of reach for many early-career researchers, with invitations typically going to more established scholars. Spaces like the ASAPbio Meta-Research Crowd and the FORCE11 PREreview Club have shown me a different model, one that is more collaborative, transparent, and intentionally designed to help people learn. Participating in these programs allowed me to review alongside others: seeing how different researchers approached the same manuscript broadened my understanding of rigor, constructive critique, and what it means to contribute to scholarly dialogue.

Becoming a PREreview Champion felt like a natural next step. I wanted to deepen my understanding of open and collaborative peer review and help introduce more researchers to these opportunities.

How was your experience during the training part of the program?

I really enjoyed the training sessions. It was great meeting the entire PREreview team and learning more about the thinking behind the organization’s work. As someone who talks to researchers about scholarly communication, I found it valuable to gain a deeper understanding of how PREreview fits within the broader movement towards more open and community-centered forms of scholarly communication and research evaluation.

I also appreciated the discussions around biases in peer review. The training acknowledges that bias is a normal part of being human and working within our current academic system. Rather than denying their existence and assuming we can be purely objective when reviewing a manuscript, we can try to recognize our biases and develop strategies to review more thoughtfully and fairly. I also appreciated how the PREreview team modeled intentional and inclusive language in discussing these topics, creating a learning environment that felt both welcoming and intellectually rigorous.

Another highlight was learning from my fellow Champions. We came from different countries, institutions, disciplines, and career stages. Hearing how peer review and scholarly communication were experienced in those different contexts made for some really thoughtful conversations.

To complete the program, Champions have to organize and deliver their own engagement activities in their local communities. Tell us a bit about yours

For my engagement activities, I designed and led two sessions as part of the UCSB Library’s Data to Discovery series: one focused on preprints and another on open peer review. The Data to Discovery series consists of 30-minute virtual workshops held every two weeks that introduce practical topics related to research data and open scholarship. For our Spring 2026 quarter, we decided to focus on sharing research openly, and discussions of preprints and open peer review were natural fits.

When planning these sessions, I intentionally avoided trying to cover everything. Instead, I focused on questions early-career researchers often ask: Should I post a preprint? What does open peer review look like in practice? How can someone get involved?

The response from participants was incredibly encouraging. Participants consistently described the session as relevant for their work and expressed interest in learning more. For me, that was one of the most rewarding outcomes. Preprints and open peer review can sometimes feel like niche topics within scholarly communication, so it was exciting to see researchers engage with these ideas and think about how they might apply them in their own contexts.

The experience also reinforced my appreciation for short-format programming. Thirty minutes is not enough time to provide a comprehensive overview, but it can be enough to spark curiosity, lower barriers to entry, and help someone take a first step toward deeper engagement.

What impacts do you think open peer review practices have on the scholarly communications landscape?

I think one important, sometimes overlooked, impact of open peer review is its role in reviewer training. I joined an ASAPbio Crowd Preprint Review Club during my postdoc, and it helped me build my confidence as I pivoted to the field of open science and meta-research. Reviewing alongside others allowed me to see different approaches to evaluating a manuscript and helped demystify a process that can feel intimidating early in one’s career.

Open review reports also become part of the scholarly conversation rather than remaining hidden behind editorial systems. When reviews are public, readers can see how different researchers interpret the data, what questions were raised, and where disagreements arose. In some ways, this makes science look more like what it actually is: an iterative process in which knowledge is refined through discussion and critique.

Perhaps most importantly, open and collaborative peer review lowers the barrier for communities to participate. Something as simple as transforming an existing journal club into a preprint review club can create new opportunities for early-career researchers to engage with peer review, learn from each other, and contribute to the scholarly record in ways beyond journal publications.

Would you recommend participating in the PREreview Champions program to others?

100%! One reason I found the PREreview Champions program so valuable is that it encouraged me to think beyond the mechanics of research and consider the system that shapes how research is communicated and evaluated. During my scientific training, I spent a lot of time learning how to conduct experiments, analyze data, and communicate results. I rarely had the opportunity to discuss questions such as: Why does peer review work the way it does? Who gets to participate? How might these systems evolve?

The Champions program created space for these conversations and provided practical guidance on engaging with researchers and. Anyone curious about preprints, peer review, or the future of scholarly communication would likely find the experience rewarding, just like I did.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share?

One other factor that initially drew me to the Champions program this year was PREreview’s partnership with Dryad to support dataset review. Part of my work in the Research Data Services department of the UCSB Library involves supporting researchers in sharing their datasets in Dryad. I was curious about how peer review of datasets might complement the curation and quality-control process already provided by data repositories.

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in a collaborative dataset review through the FORECE11 PREreview Club, co-led by Dr. Jennifer Miller and fellow PREreview Champion Akuma Ifeanyichukwu. Our review is the first dataset review posted on PREreview.  Moreover, the experience challenged me to think more deeply about what makes a dataset reusable and how researchers evaluate evidence that is not packaged in research articles.

I find this area particularly exciting because it expands our understanding of what counts as scholarly contributions. Combining open data with open peer review strengthens transparency across the research lifecycle; it also helps elevate datasets as research outputs worthy of discussion, critique, and recognition in their own right.

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