Last week, our Product team had in-person co-work sessions after participating on a panel about geographical and technology-fostered diversity in peer review at the Council of Science Editors Annual Meeting.

As part of our work week, we tackled some pick-up tasks meant to improve the general clarity and usability of PREreview.org. For example, we added a spotlight banner to advertise new features and upcoming events and we incorporated keyword search to our PREreviews browse page. More improvements are underway that will help make parts of the site clearer, especially for newcomers. Also, we have a much-awaited update to review requests coming. Stay tuned for more details next week!

What’s next?

We’re continuing work on our matchmaking experiment to improve the relevancy of the requested preprints it suggests that you read and review.

Besides, we’re soon hosting our next round of community design sprints about teaching and learning with PREreview. You might join this round of sprints to share about the kinds of resources you need to teach open peer review, to comment about what would make PREreview.org easier for you to use as a teacher or learner, or to reflect on the kinds of features you think we should develop for classroom use of our platform.

We’ll run this co-design session twice to make participation more accessible for a wider group of community members. Each call will last about 90 minutes.

You only need to join one call. Click on a link to register below:

• Call 1 - Tuesday, 19 May 2026 - 13:00 UTC - Register here
• Call 2 - Wednesday, 20 May 2026 - 16:00 UTC - Register here

Wherever possible in the world, we offer each community member participating in user research a modest honorarium of $30 USD.

🙌 We’d be delighted if you could join us!

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.

Join us later this month to help optimize our platform for instructional use. If you’re engaged with open science and regularly support colleagues, undergrads, early career researchers, journal club members, or other review practitioners, these co-design sessions are for you!

Open preprint review is invaluable in helping authors improve their work and share it as effectively as possible. It’s also a powerful tool for early career researchers to train their critical-thinking and writing skills, to learn how to perform rigorous, ethical peer review, and to improve how they plan, undertake, document, and communicate their own research.

As part of our mission at PREreview to make open peer review more accessible, inclusive, and helpful, we’re excited to announce that our next community design sprint will be all about ways of improving our platform for these kinds of instructional use.

In the past, we have developed features like “structured review” workflows to model the kinds of questions we hope our reviewers will answer. We also share multiple review guides and training materials on our website and through Zenodo. While these efforts are meant to make reviewing on PREreview as scaffolded and welcoming as possible, we think we can do more to help coaches, educators, and mentors teaching early career researchers, undergrads, and grad students the hows and whys of open peer review.

Toward that end, we’re hosting this next set of community design sprints in May to discover what teachers and learners need from PREreview to make it more useful for instructional use across different educational settings. What are we doing well right now? What could we improve? What’s missing that would make PREreview a better pedagogical resource in your classroom, lab, or program?

If you’re deeply engaged with open science and regularly support colleagues, grad students, undergrads, journal or review club members, early career researchers (such as post-docs or fellows), or other expert practitioners’ review activities, then this design sprint is for you.

To make sure that as many people as possible can participate, we’ll facilitate two design sprints at different times on different weekdays. You only need to attend one call to share your input. You can register for either session below:

• Call 1 - 19 May 2026, 13:00 UTC
• Call 2 - 20 May, 2026, 16:00 UTC

We offer a modest honorarium to any participant who contributes significantly to a call. Please do not record or use AI if you join a call. We invite and celebrate human interaction and feedback. We hope you can join us!

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.

For this feature article, Carlos shared his main takeaways from the 2026 Champions Program and his understanding of open peer review as a means for community-building and mutual learning.

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

I decided to apply because my academic and editorial work has increasingly led me to reflect on how peer review could become more transparent, inclusive, and constructive. As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Physical Education (Maringá), as a board member of the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors (ABEC), and through my involvement with the Brazilian Reproducibility Network (RBR), I have been closely engaged with debates on research assessment, editorial quality, and Open Science.

The program seemed to offer a valuable opportunity not only to deepen my understanding of open peer review, but also to explore practical ways of fostering these discussions within my own academic and editorial communities in Brazil.

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

My experience was very positive and definitely met my expectations. I appreciated how the program combined conceptual reflection with practical guidance in a very supportive and collaborative environment. It was not only about understanding open peer review in theory, but also about thinking carefully about how to discuss and implement it in real communities.

My favorite moments were the exchanges with participants from different backgrounds, because they reinforced the idea that peer review is not just a technical procedure, but also a social and educational practice. The most challenging part was balancing the training with my regular responsibilities as a journal editor, researcher, and organizer in other Open Science initiatives. Still, it was a very worthwhile experience.

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 activity, I took part in a webinar on Open Peer Review organized by the Brazilian Reproducibility Network (RBR) with approximately 50 participants. The event created an important opportunity to discuss the challenges and possibilities of open peer review within the broader context of Open Science.

This activity was especially meaningful to me because it brought together different dimensions of my work: my role as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Physical Education, my participation in ABEC, and my involvement in RBR. The discussion showed that there is genuine interest in rethinking peer review not only as an editorial procedure, but also as part of a broader research culture centered on transparency, accountability, and participation.

One of my main takeaways was that these conversations become especially productive when they bring together editors, researchers, and students. Each group contributes a different perspective, and together they help make peer review a more open and discussable part of scholarly life.

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

In my opinion, open peer review can have three major impacts. First, it strengthens transparency and accountability by making evaluation processes more visible and understandable. Secondly, it can broaden participation in scholarly communication by opening more space for dialogue across different career stages and positions. Lastly, and most importantly to me, it has a strong pedagogical impact.

Open peer review offers a very stimulating opportunity for students and early-career researchers to understand how science actually works in terms of evaluation, discussion, and circulation. Instead of seeing peer review as a distant or hidden procedure, they can begin to understand it as a formative process through which arguments are examined, criteria are negotiated, and knowledge is collectively improved.

From my perspective as a journal editor and as someone involved in ABEC and RBR, this pedagogical dimension is especially promising because it helps frame peer review not only as a selection process, but also as a learning and community-building one.

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

I would definitely recommend participating in the PREreview Champions program. I think it is especially valuable for journal editors, graduate students, early-career researchers, Open Science advocates, and people involved in research integrity or scholarly communication initiatives.

I would particularly recommend it to those who want to go beyond understanding open peer review conceptually, to bring these ideas into their own institutions, journals, associations, or research communities. For anyone interested in building more transparent, inclusive, and dialogical forms of scholarly communication, it is a very meaningful experience.

Before we close...

I would like to emphasize that participating in the PREreview Champions program reinforced my view that peer review can be much more than a filtering mechanism. It can also be a collaborative, educational, and community-oriented practice. That perspective resonates strongly with my work as editor of the Journal of Physical Education (Maringá) and with my broader involvement in ABEC and the Brazilian Reproducibility Network.

The program also reminded me that transforming scholarly communication does not depend only on major structural reforms. It also depends on creating spaces, conversations, and local initiatives through which researchers, editors, and students can engage differently with the culture of evaluation. For me, that is one of the most valuable contributions of PREreview: it helps connect the principles of Open Science to concrete forms of collective action.

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.

Hello and welcome to this product weeknote from the team at PREreview!

What’s new at PREreview?

As part of ongoing efforts to improve the results of our upcoming matchmaking feature, we’re continuing to collect feedback on this matchmaking experiment. Please take a moment to check it out! All you need are a handful of DOIs from preprints and/or published articles you’ve enjoyed reading or reviewing. Copy and paste them into the form, and the system will return suggested preprints for review from the requests we’ve received from our community members. If you find something you especially like—or something that doesn’t seem to work so well for you—please let us know at help@prereview.org

We’ve also made it easier than before to track your requests for review on the site. Once you’re logged in, click on “Menu” to find a list of “My review requests” under the “My account” section. Now, when you click on one of your requests, you’ll be taken to a split view of the requested preprint and a tally of reviews written for it, if any have been published yet.

Finally, we’re tackling some work to improve the way we gather and present reviewers’ names on reviews after a recent change made by ORCID impacted how special characters are displayed.

What’s next?

We have a pair of community calls coming up in the next few months—one design sprint on instructional use and one informational session on localization and translation work. Be sure to follow our socials and subscribe to the newsletter (all linked below) to register once the calls are announced.

Our next step in improving the way requests work is to add an optional field for sharing your preferred email address with us. That way we can automate a notification to send back to you whenever a review is written for the requested preprint.  We hope to have this part of the request-a-review feature up soon.

We’ve begun conversations to build COAR Notify Protocol integrations with new partners, too. These strategic collaborations to expand COAR Notify adoption will help build a more interconnected, decentralized, and robust scholarly communications ecosystem.

Help us out

Please share your feedback about PREreview.org with us! You can schedule a call with Chad Sansing, our Head of Product, to let us know what you think. Click here to sign up for a chat. If you can’t find a time that works for you, please email Chad to arrange a call. When possible, we provide honoraria for interviewees.

Alternatively, you can:

Stay connected

If you have anything else 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.

For this feature article, we spoke with Alan about his experience with the 2026 Champions Program and his reflections on open peer review practices.

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

I was interested in the Champions program for several reasons. Although I had been learning about and researching open science for over four years, I hadn’t had much opportunity to engage with open peer review, so I thought the Champions program would allow me to learn more about this practice.

I only started doing peer reviews for a couple of digital humanities conferences last year and I found it to be a very gratifying experience, as it made me feel as though I were part of the scholarly community in my field. Although my first experience of being a reviewer was positive, I wanted to receive training in how to provide constructive feedback, and the Champions programme was a great way of gaining more experience and advice on writing reviews.

Another reason I applied to the program was to meet like-minded people who practice open science in their everyday work through preprints, open peer review, and more. There is a strong sense of community among the PREreview team and the other participants of the Champions program. It is great to be part of a community where openness is the norm and everyone recognizes the benefits of various aspects of open science.

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

The training sessions were a great way to start my day. I am in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, so I was joining the sessions in the early morning when almost everyone else had already started work in other time zones. I liked that the training focused not only on how to use the PREreview platform or how to write constructive feedback, but also on discussions about power and social inequities in science. While I am used to these discussions in the social sciences and humanities, I appreciated that we were addressing these issues in a space with several STEM researchers.

I believe it is important to recognize how these inequities in science influence what science is produced, how it is done, and who gets to be a reviewer with the power to determine what constitutes high-quality science in a given field. The training also encouraged us to identify our own biases when reviewing papers, and to avoid letting these biases influence our reviews.

My only regret regarding the training was that I was not very familiar with the topic of the preprint that we reviewed during one of the Live Reviews. Therefore, I could not provide as much feedback as I would have liked. Nevertheless, it was valuable to hear the comments of others on the preprint and learn from them.

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 an online preprint Live Review on March 16, 2026 in collaboration with the Open Science Community of Victoria. Sixteen people participated in the Zoom session and we had a great discussion about a preprint titled “Symbolic Capital and Inequality in Scholarly Communication: A Bibliometric Study of Editorial Boards”.

Our participants were at different stages in their careers and came from a variety of roles. These included undergraduate students, librarians, faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and journal editors. Some participants told me that they enjoyed having the opportunity to reflect on a paper and discuss it with colleagues. These comments, along with my experience of leading the review, reminded me how enjoyable it can be to discuss a paper on an interesting topic with others. It was clear that the discussion participants cared about the topic of inequality in scholarly communication, and it was encouraging to see that some of them were considering how they could apply the insights from the paper to their own work as editors or researchers.

In your opinion, what are the impacts of open peer review practices on the scholarly communications landscape?

I believe that open peer review can increase transparency and trust in science by allowing readers to trace the entire process that a paper underwent before publication. The public nature of open peer reviews encourages more detailed and thoughtful reviews. Making reviews public also allows researchers to receive credit and recognition for all their reviewing work, which can take several hours per article.

Open peer reviews can also be a valuable pedagogical resource to teach graduate students how the journal publication process works and how to evaluate a research paper. Additionally, access to reviews of a journal of interest can help prepare a manuscript for submission by providing insight into what reviewers expect. This can help students to identify the (sometimes invisible) criteria used to evaluate papers in their field.

Finally, as someone who studies scholarly communication, open peer review provides an opportunity to analyze how knowledge is produced and legitimized. I have seen datasets compiling open peer reviews, and they are an interesting data source that opens the black box of peer review and allows researchers to analyze different aspects of it, including the underlying power relations.

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

Absolutely! I think it is a great program for graduate students and early-career researchers to expand their network and gain more confidence and skills in reviewing papers. The program could also benefit journal editors who are considering implementing open peer review and want to learn more about its advantages and how to implement it.

Looking ahead to…

I write for the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory, a blog that tracks trends in open social scholarship. As part of my work for the Champions program, I will have a post about open peer review published on the site in the next few months. Additionally, we also publish content on other topics that may interest the PREreview community, such as open access, multilingualism, and open science policies. We invite you to take a look!

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.

Lively conversations, renewed motivation, and stimulating challenges for this turning season. Let’s dive in together.

Building alternative pathways: PREreview joins the PRC Alliance

PREreview joined a working group convened by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and ASAPbio to shape a new PRC Alliance—a membership association designed to accelerate adoption of the Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) model across scholarly publishing.

PRC is a publishing model that separates research sharing from its evaluation: researchers first publish their work as preprints (and associated research objects), communities review it openly, and journals or platforms curate it. This approach makes research assessment more transparent, decentralized, and community-driven.

We’re excited about this model because it elevates early sharing, embeds review across the research lifecycle, and re-centers researchers’ agency. Built on shared standards and interoperability, it helps create a more connected, collaborative ecosystem for research.

PREreview.org already has several components that enable anyone with an ORCID record to do post-publication review of preprints and datasets. Here is an example of how PREreview can fit in a PRC workflow in practice, with all steps connected via COAR Notify:

📧 Interested in chatting with us about how we can connect with your research communication system or infrastructure? Send us an email to community@prereview.org.

Test our experimental preprint matchmaking feature!

How do you find a preprint to review on PREreview.org? Do you come with a DOI in mind, browse feedback requests, or use another approach? However you do it, we’d love your input on ways to better help you discover manuscripts to review that match your expertise and interests.

We recently soft-launched an experimental matchmaking feature which connects PREreviewers with preprints relevant to them. To begin, you paste in the DOIs or URLs of research objects like preprints and published articles related to your expertise or the topics you care about. With that information, the system gives you suggestions of preprints you may want to read and review.

Contact us at help@prereview.org if you want to share your feedback or schedule a 1:1 user research interview with our product team.

A team effort: Why and how to do open collaborative peer review

On March 5th, we co-hosted a lively Community Call with ASAPbio to explore the power of collaborative peer review and learn from our PREreview Club leads’ first-hand experience.

This decentralised approach improves the quality of manuscript evaluations through independent assessments sharing, group discussions, and consensus building, benefiting both the reviewers and the scientific community as a whole. Participants’ stories also prove the flexibility of collaborative review to fit different settings and workflows—from online global gatherings to in-person, university-based journal clubs!

Curious about how collaborative review works and how to get involved in a PREreview Club?

Meet 2026 PREreview Champions cohort

After completing a training on ethical and collaborative open peer review, seventeen wonderful people have become our new Champions, and are off to multiply PREreview’s mission and vision in their scholarly networks and local communities. Get to know them here and join us in celebrating their accomplishments.

We invite you to follow our social media updates to see the exciting things PREreview Champions are up to this year!

Catch us at the Council of Science Editors’ Annual Meeting

How could diversifying reviewer pools and fostering bias awareness reshape the research assessment landscape? On May 4th, PREreview staff members Chad Sansing and Chris Wilkinson, together with PREreview Champion alum Kylie Yui Dan (UMaryland) and others, will be discussing these topics during the 2026 CSE Annual Meeting in Durham, NC.

If you’re attending the event, come engage with our team at the “Confronting Bias Where It Is: Fostering Diversity Across the Physical Geographies and Digital Platforms of Peer Review” session!

Events

Upcoming events

• April 24, 2026 - 9:00 GMT — Open Research, Trust in Science and the ‘Transparency Paradox’. Register
• June 3-5, 2026 — FORCE11 2026 Conference, in Singapore. Theme: “To Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptions”. Registration is open until May 24.

Recent events

• April 7, 2026 — Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research (ICOR) meeting: “Aligning Research Curation and Open Assessment”. Learn more (Recording will be available soon).
• March 31, 2026 — “ORCID: Empowering Researchers in Open Science” webinar, hosted by the Review and Curate Network. Paolo P. Gujilde (Lyrasis) shared expert insights on visibility, attribution, and interoperability through ORCID. Recording available.
• March 5, 2026 — ASAPbio Community Call: "A Team Effort: Why and How to do Open Collaborative Peer Review". Recording and slides.

Highlights from the Slack Community

• What we are reading:

A Guide to Preprinting for Early Career Researchers

Rethinking Open Science Through Dependency Theory, by Batool Almarzouq

Faster science, penalties in evaluation, and concerns on quality and impact: Researchers’ use and perceptions of preprints

Charting New Paths: The Promise of Alternative Publishing Practices

• The PREreview Advisory Committee welcomes three new members this year!
• Review and Curate Network presented their new podcast series on Open Science principles.
• PLOS launched their new Open Science Indicators dashboard.
• Signals, an independent, publisher-neutral startup building the next generation of research analysis, is hiring a Data Analyst, a Support and Operations Specialist, a Customer Success Specialist, and a Full Stack Engineer. Learn more and apply.
• Dryad, an open data publishing platform and community, is hiring a Partnership Development Manager (Remote). Learn more and apply.
• Valency Systems, a small, dynamic team of engineers, scientists, and researchers building a hub for synthetic research, is hiring a summer intern in Open Science Tools (10-12 weeks in Berkeley, CA, US). Learn more and apply.
• ORCID’s Global Participation Fund (GPF) is designed to improve equity of access to ORCID and increase the visibility of researchers and research institutions globally, particularly in the Global South. Learn more about the GPF’s two grant programs and apply before May 1, 2026.
• La Red Latinoamericana para la Ciencia Abierta (LA Referencia) está buscando Especialista en metadatos y Profesionales de soporte técnico. Convocatorias abiertas hasta el 17 de abril.

If you are looking for your new 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.

2026 Quarter 1 Meeting: March 3, 2026 - 16:30 to 18:00 UTC

Attendees

Daniela Saderi, Christopher Marcum, Aurelia Munene, Monica Granados, Malvika Sharan, Kristen Ratan, Sam Hindle, Kirstie Whitaker, Lamis Elkheir

Agenda

I. Welcomes and goodbyes: New AC members, and celebrate Kristen’s departure from the AC after 6 years of service - Thank you, Kristen!

II. Overview of PREreview governance and the role of the Advisory Committee
a. Advisory Committee Handbook and Charter discussed

b. Governance and decision-making at PREreview presented and discussed. Public Slide deck: PREreview. (2026, March 31). Governance and Decision-Making at PREreview. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19355617

c. Discussed vacancy for the Treasurer role and the possibility of having a Finance Committee of several AC members

III. Review of strategic plan activities and finance overview
a. PREreview 3Y Strategic Plan document and deck discussed
1) AC discussed how PREreview measures impact and implements feedback from the community, in relation to shaping KRs and strategic plan.

b. Finances and funding opportunities overview

We just soft-launched our experimental matchmaking feature which connects PREreviewers with preprints relevant to their research interests. To begin, you paste in the DOIs or URLs of research objects like preprints and published articles. Then, we give you suggestions about other preprints we think you’d like based on the topics of the works you shared with us.

You are invited to try out our matchmaking experiment and share any feedback you have with us by emailing help@prereview.org. We’d love to know if the recommendations you get back are of interest to you. Would you read them? Would you review them?

Alongside that project, we’re improving the way requests work on PREreview.org. This will allow us to display your public request-a-review history along with your public review history on your profile page. You’ll also be able to sign up for notifications when a review is published about a preprint you requested for review.

We’ve also added support for reviewing datasets from SciELO Data and have begun translating our dataset review workflow into Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish. Help us out by proofreading the translated strings of text in our collaborative Crowdin project!

What’s next?

We’re planning a community design sprint about how we can better support teaching and learning with PREreview.org in May. Keep up with our social media channels and newsletter to learn more about these events in the near future.

We’re also foreseeing an informational session for anyone who’d like to volunteer to contribute to our next round of localization and translation work in Arabic and French.

Help us out

Let us know how we can keep improving our work! To share your feedback about PREreview.org, please book a chat with Chad Sansing, our Head of Product. Click here to sign up for a chat. If you can’t find a time that works for you, please email Chad to arrange a call. When possible, we provide honoraria for interviewees.

Alternatively, you can:

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.

For PREreview, community input is the most reliable compass. In February, we shared our strategic goals with you in a community call designed to listen deeply, learn together, and imagine what’s possible. Here’s what emerged.

On February 11 we gathered together to present the PREreview 2026-2029 Strategic Plan to our community, learn which areas of focus engage them most, and invite their participation in. Eighteen people from different countries and professional backgrounds joined the call to help shape our work for the next three years.

💡 If you haven’t done so already, you can read our Strategic Plan in English, Latin American Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese and drop your thoughts too.

What we learned from you

To break the ice, we first asked the Community Call participants what they thought PREreview does as an organization. Here’s a visual summary of what they said:

Then, we prompted participants to write on a notes document, type down in the Zoom chat, and/or vocalize their thoughts on several aspects of our work. We grouped the answers into common themes (in italic):

1. New features, initiatives, or programs you could imagine PREreview undertaking

Expand multilingualism beyond translation: recognition for reviewing in languages other than English; develop a structured multilingual review pathway.

Decentralize governance: Regional nodes/hubs adapting resources to local culture & seeking partnerships with regional preprint/dataset servers.

Lower barriers for participation: Video tutorials for authors, reviewers, and editors in multiple languages; harness social media as a space to review research; scholarships/financial aid for community members from underrepresented regions in the Open Science realm to attend conferences.

Community building & networking: Annual virtual symposium on open peer review innovations;

Institutional collaborations for a systemic shift: Promoting PREreview’s work and vision in university settings; partnering with universities to advance Open Science practices.

2. What are we doing right now that we should keep doing?

Experimenting with modular peer review: Move beyond only reviewing the final manuscript.

Peer review training: Live Reviews as a learning opportunity; train-the-trainer programs like the Champions Program to make cultural changes faster.

Safeguarding shared spaces: Offering bot-free online meetings; clear and respectful guidelines for recording meetings; providing diverse modes of participating and sharing ideas.

Supporting grassroots multipliers: Promoting the creation of new Clubs in different regions and languages.

3. Things that do not fit with your understanding of our Strategic Plan and we should avoid doing

Aligning too much to the current journal system and (not) being careful with partnerships.

4. What’s missing?

Leverage of open source software: Make tools and resources available in platforms like Etherpad or HedgeDoc.

Considering the various roles preprints play in the scholarly publishing ecosystem: Incorporate a “should I review this?” step in the workflow to assess whether the authors have actually published the preprint with the goal of further developing the research.

Style/accessibility guidelines for preprint authors: To make the manuscripts easier to read and review (text justification, page & line number, page size).

Stay connected

If you have feedback on our Strategic Plan, drop us an email at community@prereview.org.

You can follow PREreview updates 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.

Thank you for dropping by to check out the latest product weeknote from PREreview.org!

What’s new at PREreview?

This week, we are continuing user research and early prototyping of our matchmaking feature. We are figuring out ways to share recommendations for reviewing requested preprints with community members like you based on your interests and review history.

We are also improving review requests so that you can keep track of your requests through your profile, and receive notifications when a review has been published about a preprint you requested.

Additionally, we are working behind the scenes to update a few things here and there on the backend that will make things, like our publication workflows and stats dashboard, work better.

What’s next?

We’ll be analyzing and planning new work in response to our recent community design sprints on gratitude and recognition signals on PREreview.org.

We’ll also be planning an informational session to invite community members to join our next round of localization and translation work in Arabic and French. If this sounds of interest to you, stay tuned for further details!

Help us out

We’d love your feedback on PREreview.org and our latest work! To share, please schedule a call with Chad Sansing, our Head of Product. Click here to sign up for a chat. If you can’t find a time that works for you, please email Chad to arrange a call. When possible, we provide honoraria for interviewees.

Alternatively, you can:

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.

In this guest blog piece Jennifer Miller, former FORCE11 Board VP and co-lead of their PREreview Club, regards the collaborative review club as a catalyst for connections throughout a global community with shared interest in metascience.

The FORCE11 PREreview Club was launched following PREreview's workshop at the FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI) last summer. Since then, it has been my pleasure to co-lead this club, along with Akuma Ifeanyichukwu. Now, we are preparing to do our fourth review in March, where we will incorporate the shared learnings we have built up into our workflows.

The best part of leading the Club has been the people, who have stepped up in so many ways, including helping to prepare for reviews, providing facilitation, and synthesizing reviews, as well as drafting guidance for each review role and extending grace to each other as we try new things. Club members have shared some of their perspectives in this FORCE11 blog post. We've also been fortunate to have a PREreview Champion, Rosario Rogel Salazar, among our founding members. This has led to three additional members (Xiuxi Jade Li and Alan Colín Arce, along with Akuma) joining the latest cohort of Champions. I can't wait to see how their deeper immersion in the PREreview Community helps to extend the base that we're building on.

Within FORCE11, our goal for the Club is community engagement. FORCE11 is known for its events, such as conferences and workshops. The PREreview Club is a way for people to stay engaged with FORCE11 between events and to develop deeper online connections throughout a global community with shared interests in metascience.

PREreview provides thoughtfully prepared materials, and their workshop at FSCI helped a core group of founding members learn the open reviewing process. PREreview has effectively leveraged the features of Google Workspace to create a structured process for collaborative writing. I'm hoping to see that evolve into a process that makes use of free, open-source software (FOSS). As I volunteer my time to introduce people to open knowledge practices, I often find myself also introducing them to software and features that are new to them. I prefer for that work—which bridges teaching and marketing—to focus on FOSS rather than commercial software.

What's next

The experience of starting the FORCE11 PREreview Club has been so positive that I'm also helping to start a club within the Translate Science community. The Translate Science PREreview Club will be reviewing preprints on an ad hoc basis related to multilingual open science. We're not sure exactly what that will mean and are open to exploring it from multiple perspectives! Translate Science has always emphasized FOSS in our operations, so we’ll be exploring options for using it in research reviews, too.

Ideas so far range from conducting reviews of preprints in translatology to hosting reviews in languages other than English, to reviewing translations of survey instruments. Anyone interested in staying in the loop as we plan for our first review to take place in May can sign up here.

Stay connected

If you have something to share or want to learn more about how to engage with PREreview Clubs, 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.

The PREreview Champions Program is designed to equip community members with the resources, skills, and support to facilitate the adaptation and adoption of open and equitable peer review practices within their local communities. The program runs on an annual basis and was piloted in 2024.

We've learned a lot from our past Champions, many of whom are now PREreview experts, and we've adapted the training, processes, and resources to incorporate those learnings. From the 2026 iteration onwards, we have implemented a mentorship component to the program. This means PREreview Champion Alums have the opportunity to stay engaged by working with us on supporting their mentees through the process of designing, building, and facilitating Champions’ final engagement project(s).

This year, we received 39 applications from 24 countries, which you can see visualized in the map below. Read more about the program’s goals, expectations, and benefits, while staying tuned for the next cohort’s applications opening in the Champions Program page.

Location of 2026 Champions Applications

What motivated our Champions to apply?

As our team read through those applications, we were humbled by the echoed commitment to fostering equity, accessibility and diversity in scholarship:

“I want to be a PREreview Champion because I strongly believe in research that is collaborative and accessible to all, and not restricted by geography, privilege, or career stage."

"I want to be a PREreview Champion because I am deeply committed to advancing a culture of openness, equity, and constructive feedback in research, especially within communities where formal peer review skills and open scholarship practices are still limited. Over the years, I have seen how early-career researchers, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, hesitate to engage with preprints or open peer review due to inadequate level of training, confidence, or mentorship.”

Many shared their motivation to broaden the participation in research assessment, to include the voices of often overlooked groups and stakeholders:

“PREreview made me feel like I belonged in a space I didn’t think I had access to. Now I want to help others feel that same shift.  Especially people who think they’re ‘not academic enough’ to contribute. I believe in open, human conversations around research, and in making space for lived experience, not just technical expertise.”

“I hope to inspire and mentor young Africans, especially women who may have not seen many female reviewers as role models, to not shy away from joining this inclusive community.”

And others were invested in community-building and knowledge-sharing:

“What I admire about PREreview is that it is not only making peer reviews open; it is also trying to build a community of reviewers who care about their disciplines and the researchers behind the preprints.”

“Being part of the PREreview Slack community has shown me how enthusiastic, supportive, and mission-driven this community is. I truly value the collaborative spirit and would be elated to contribute meaningfully to it.”

“Ultimately, my goal is to build a culture of shared learning where feedback improves both the quality of research and the confidence of early career scientists to publish and engage openly.”

Meet our 2026 Champions Cohort!

Stay connected

You can follow us on Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube to see the incredible things our Champions are up to. Keep up with all the latest news at PREreview by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Slack community.

2025 Quarter 4 Meeting: December 10, 2025 - 17:00 UTC

Attendees

Monica Granados, Samantha Hindle, Christopher Marcum,  Aurelia Munene, Daniela Saderi

Regrets

Kristen Ratan

Agenda

I. PREreview updates

a. New Communications and Engagement Officer

b. Update on current runway and latest financial report

c. Updates on recent PREreview events and activities:

• Thriving Together meeting in San Diego, CA
• CZI Open Science Meeting and openRxiv meeting in San Diego, CA
• SACNAS NDiSTEM Open Reviewers Workshop in Columbus, OH
• Staff Retreat in Toronto, CA
• Standards Meeting hosted by openRxiv and CSF in San Diego, CA
• Publish-Review-Curate COAR Notify Meeting in Cambridge, UK

d. Updates on ongoing fundraising and partnerships efforts

e. Update on dataset review - launched mid October

II. 3Y Strategic Plan and Organizational Membership Model

a. AC Discussed  and gave feedback

III. AC handbook status and new AC members recruitment

a. Discussed finalization of the AC handbook

b. Discussed recruitment of 3 new members

PREreview is excited to welcome three new fantastic members to our Advisory Committee. Please join us in welcoming Drs. Kirstie Whitaker, Lamis Yahia Mohamed Elkheir, and Malvika Sharan! We are also grateful to have been working for six years alongside Kristen Ratan who is now leaving the Committee.

PREreview is a nonprofit, fiscally sponsored by Code for Science & Society (501(c)(3)), and operates as a self-managed organization grounded in equity and shared accountability. Within this model, the Advisory Committee plays a key governance role. It advises and supports the Executive Director, provides checks and balances, and offers strategic, staffing, and financial guidance to advance our mission.

Advisory Committee members also serve as ambassadors and advocates, strengthening our impact and helping ensure we remain accountable to our community.

Today, we welcome three incredible new members to our team and, with deep gratitude, say farewell to Kristen, who has served on our Advisory Committee for the past six years.

Daniela Saderi, PREreview Executive Director and Co-founder, says:

“I’m delighted to welcome Malvika, Lamis, and Kirstie to our Advisory Committee. I’m also sad to say goodbye to Kristen after six great years of contribution to our organization. What makes PREreview such a special place is the people who are part of it. Each one of these incredible women has inspired, guided, and challenged me to do better at different moments in my career. Their leadership has already and will continue to help us grow as individuals, as an organization, and as a community.

Meet the three new Advisory Committee members

Dr. Kirstie Whitaker is the Executive Director at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, where she supports the delivery of innovative open source software and infrastructure to benefit science and society, including through the Jupyter and Scientific Python ecosystems. She is the founder of The Turing Way, a community co-created Jupyter Book that enables leaders and practitioners to deliver open, collaborative, reproducible and inclusive data-intensive research.

Prior to joining the Berkeley Institute for Data Science in January 2025, Kirstie led the Tools, Practices and Systems research program at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. She completed her Ph.D. at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley in 2012, where she held a Fulbright Scholarship and was a Mozilla Open Science Fellow in 2016/17. Kirstie advocates for equity, inclusion and justice as mechanisms to deliver the most impactful, ethical and efficient data science research and innovation.

About joining PREreview's Advisory Committee Kirstie says,

“It is a privilege to be part of PREreview's movement to dream and co-create a trusted, interoperable, human-centered ecosystem that meaningfully improves how we advance knowledge generation and exchange around the world.”

Dr. Lamis Yahia Mohamed Elkheir is an open science leader and academic whose work focuses on shaping how open research practices are understood, adopted, and sustained across African research communities. She brings over a decade of experience working within universities and research networks, combining teaching, programme leadership, and community engagement to support more open, collaborative, and context-aware approaches to research.

As Director of Training & Resource Development at the African Reproducibility Network (AREN) and Lecturer at the University of Khartoum, Lamis works at the intersection of global open science initiatives and local institutional realities. She designs and leads training programmes that centre the needs of early-career and underrepresented researchers. In addition, she serves as Co-Chair of Working Group 2 within the Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI), where she co-leads international efforts to map and analyse open science monitoring frameworks and indicators. Across her work, she is particularly committed to ensuring that researchers in diverse and often resource-constrained contexts have both the voice and the agency to participate meaningfully in shaping research culture and evaluation.

About becoming part of PREreview's Advisory Committee Lamis says,

“I joined PREreview’s Advisory Committee because of its clear commitment to equity and inclusion in peer review. PREreview creates space for early-career and underrepresented researchers to be heard, recognised, and valued as contributors to scholarly evaluation, helping shift long-standing power imbalances in how research is reviewed.”

Dr. Malvika Sharan is the Senior Director of Data Science at the newly established Office of Data Science at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Previously, she held research and leadership roles at The Alan Turing Institute and European Molecular Biology Laboratory, where she led and scaled data science and bioinformatics community initiatives, notably The Turing Way and EMBL’s Bio-IT.

An open source/science advocate, Malvika co-founded Open Life Science (OLS), an international training, mentoring and capacity building organisation, and recently established RCM Cooperative to mobilise and connect Research Community Managers from across organisations. She has advised initiatives like NASA Open Science, the Society of RSE, Open Bioinformatics Foundation and Data Science Without Borders.

Malvika is a Mozilla Open Leaders Fellow, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, and was named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (2024). A lifelong learner, Malvika is dedicated to improving open research, community building, collaboration, governance, and ethical practices in data science and AI.

About this new endeavour as member of PREreview's Advisory Committee Malvika says,

“I am honored to join the PREreview Advisory Committee and contribute to building the foundations of strong, ethical science, grounded in inclusive research and transparent peer review. PREreview’s commitment to openness and knowledge equity closely reflects how I have worked to build and support research communities throughout my career.”

Kirstie, Lamis, and Malvika join an existing Advisory Committee composed of Christopher Marcum (Chair), Samantha Hindle (Secretary), Monica Granados (Co-chair), and Aurelia Munene. Read more about them in our People page.

Thank you, Kristen!

Kristen Ratan joined PREreview’s Advisory Committee in 2020, when PREreview was still a young organization led by its co-founders. She brought deep experience in scholarly publishing and the open science movement, helping us situate our vision within a broader global shift in research communication.

Kristen played a pivotal role in shaping what became a key partnership between PREreview and eLife—work that ultimately received support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Through this collaboration, we also met Chris Wilkinson, then at eLife and now our Head of Technology, and laid the groundwork for ongoing connections between our teams and communities.

We are profoundly grateful for Kristen’s contributions. Her departure from the Advisory Committee is not a goodbye, but an evolution in how we continue to work together. A gifted facilitator and convener, Kristen remains a powerful force in bringing together initiatives like PREreview around a shared vision for the future of scholarly publishing.

Thank you, Kristen.

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 this special guest blog piece, Katie Corker, Executive Director at ASAPbio, outlines ASAPbio Crowd Review Program’s innovative approach to research assessment and how it makes the most of PREreview.org to foster community-driven preprint review.

Leveraging the strengths of teamwork, diverse perspectives, and expertise, peer review is moving beyond the confines of journal publishing and into the open. In teams of researchers called crowds, it’s easier than ever to provide open, collaborative evaluation of research. ASAPbio’s Crowd Preprint Review Program is an international, community-driven initiative that enables a more transparent and interactive review process. Now in its fifth iteration, the program’s activities are kicking off in March.

This year, two crowds, each consisting of three co-leads and about 60 members, will collaborate to provide peer review and feedback on preprints. Every month, crowd leads select a preprint for review. Crowd members are given two weeks to asynchronously mark up the paper and provide comments. Crowd leads then synthesize the comments into one combined review. The final review is posted on PREreview.org, allowing both the preprint authors and the wider community to benefit from the comments.

The impetus behind the program is twofold. First, ASAPbio believes in the value of innovation and experimentation to improve scholarly publishing. Open evaluation of preprints provides a perfect opportunity to try things out and experiment outside of the confines of traditional journal peer review workflows. Plus, leveraging strength in numbers and diversity of expertise allows our crowds to efficiently provide rich feedback to peers, without the need for each crowd member to do a comprehensive review. Second, the program allows us to provide a structured reviewing experience for researchers -such as people early in their career or those working in low-resource settings- who might not otherwise be invited to participate in the peer review process. The program allows us to capitalize on the valuable expertise of these contributors, returning that value to the community.

Posting our reviews to PREreview.org, as part of their PREreview Clubs initiative, has several benefits for the program. First, the platform is well-integrated with key partners. All crowd members who opt in receive credit for their review and will have it publicly visible on their ORCID profiles. The reviews themselves are viewable on the PREreview platform, but also indexed by partners like Sciety and displayed alongside preprints on servers like bioRxiv. This makes it easier for readers to discover reviews. Second, based on their preferences, reviewers can be named (linking to their ORCID profile), pseudonymous, or fully anonymous. The PREreview platform seamlessly handles these differing researcher needs. Lastly, the user experience of the PREreview platform is top-notch. In just a few minutes, crowd leads can easily upload a review and add all contributing crowd members.

Since 2021, ASAPbio Crowds have provided reviews of 122 papers, with the median paper being reviewed by between five and nine crowd members. Last year’s crowds reviewed papers on Cell Biology, Immunology, Microbiology, and Meta-Research. In an evaluation of the program released last year, crowd members reported that they appreciated the opportunity to develop their reviewing skills and enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with peers. They also appreciated the user-friendly tools and workflow offered.

This year’s crowds will focus on Cell Biology and Meta-Research. Reviewing will start in the first week of March 2026 and continue on a monthly basis through August 2026. New crowd members can join at any time, but are especially welcome now as the program is kicking off. To join, simply visit our program page and fill out the form. Previous reviewing experience is not necessary, and training is provided. Another way to get involved is to start your own preprint review crowd. Our easy toolkit provides guidance for getting started.

Learn more in ASAPbio’s “A Team Effort: Why and How to do Open Collaborative Peer Review” Community Call

We invite you to please join us on March 5, 2026 for an ASAPbio Community Call, where we will discuss the ins and outs of doing open peer review as part of a team.

ASAPbio and PREreview staff will come together and talk about:

• Peer review crowds and clubs,
• Benefits of collaborative peer review for reviewers and study authors,
• How to start your own peer review crowd or club,
• How to use the PREreview platform for open preprint review.

📌 If you want to learn more about PREreview Clubs, join an existing Club, or are interested in starting your own, you can read more on our website.

Stay connected

If you have something to share, 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.