This week we added an anonymous survey to our matchmaking experiment in case you have feedback you’d like to share with us on that channel.

We also took care of a number of behind-the-scenes pieces of work, including improving our dataset review workflow after suggestions we received on the first dataset Live Review ever conducted, setting up documentation for our next round of localization and translation work, updating several pages on the website, and reviewing feedback from our latest community design sprint on teaching and learning about open peer review with PREreview.

What’s next?

Next week, we’re hosting an informational call and demo about how community members like you can use Crowdin to contribute to our ongoing multilingual work on the site. The incoming languages for localization and translation are Arabic (AR) and African French (FR 002).

You can join us at 14:00 UTC on 2 June 2026 to learn more by clicking on the button below:

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 article, Akuma underscored the positive effect of the PREreview Champions Program on his confidence as a reviewer and facilitator, and on his commitment to open science, ethical scholarship, and inclusive research practices.

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

I first learned about the PREreview Champions program through an email shared by Dr. Jennifer Miller, who leads the FORCE11 PREreview Club and encouraged me to participate. As a co-lead of this Club alongside Jennifer, I saw in the program an opportunity to strengthen my skills in open peer review facilitation while also contributing to a growing international community committed to improving research evaluation practices. I was particularly interested in learning how structured and constructive preprint reviews can enhance scientific dialogue, accelerate knowledge dissemination, and build researcher confidence. The program also offered a valuable platform for networking, mentorship, and capacity-building in open science advocacy.

I decided to apply for the program because I strongly believe in advancing equitable, transparent, and collaborative scholarly communication practices. My interest in open science and research integrity aligns closely with PREreview’s mission to democratise peer review and create inclusive opportunities for researchers, particularly early-career scholars and those from underrepresented regions.

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

My experience was highly enriching and intellectually engaging. The training exceeded my expectations in many ways by combining practical peer-review guidance with broader discussions of openness, inclusivity, research culture, and scholarly communication ethics. I appreciated how the sessions created a welcoming environment where participants from diverse disciplinary and geographic backgrounds could openly exchange perspectives and experiences.

One of my favourite aspects of the training was the collaborative review exercises, which allowed participants to critically evaluate preprints while receiving constructive feedback from peers and facilitators. These activities helped improve my confidence in providing balanced, respectful, and evidence-informed reviews. I also valued the emphasis on inclusivity and reducing barriers in peer review participation, especially for researchers from Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). The least favourite aspect was the challenge of coordinating across multiple time zones, which occasionally affected the convenience of participation. Nevertheless, the overall experience was highly rewarding and professionally impactful.

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

As part of the PREreview Champions engagement activities, I co-led multiple PREreview Club sessions, where eminent professors, researchers, non-academicians, and postgraduate students conducted open peer review and preprint evaluation. The primary goal of the events was to encourage transparent peer review, constructive scholarly feedback, and strengthen participants’ confidence in critically appraising articles. The sessions were conducted virtually, with participants drawn from academic, research institutions, among others; particularly early and seasoned career researchers interested in research integrity and open science practices. Attendance was encouraging, with active participation throughout the discussions and collaborative review exercises. Oral feedback from participants was largely positive, as many appreciated the practical nature and opportunity to engage in peer review within a supportive environment.

A major takeaway from each session was the recognition that many early-career researchers are interested in open peer review but often lack information or mentorship opportunities. The PREreview club sessions reinforced the importance of community-driven learning spaces in promoting transparency, accountability, and inclusivity in scholarly communication.

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

In my opinion, open peer review practices have the potential to significantly transform the scholarly communication system by improving transparency, accountability, collaboration, and trust in research evaluation processes. Traditional peer review systems are often criticised for being opaque, exclusionary, and sometimes susceptible to bias or gatekeeping. Open peer review increases visibility into the review process by encouraging constructive dialogue among reviewers and the broader society. This can improve the quality of reviews, promote scholarly accountability, and create opportunities for learning and mentorship, especially for early-career researchers.

Furthermore, open review practices support faster dissemination and refinement of scientific knowledge through preprints and community feedback. For researchers in LMICs, open peer review may also help reduce barriers to participation in global scholarly discussions by creating more inclusive and accessible platforms for engagement (like the PREreview club). However, successful implementation requires careful attention to reviewer protection, ethical conduct, respectful communication, and institutional recognition of peer review contributions.

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

Yes, I would strongly recommend participation in the PREreview Champions program, particularly for early-career researchers, graduate students, research mentors, and individuals interested in open science, research integrity, and scholarly communication reform. The program provides a supportive, collaborative learning environment where participants can develop practical peer review skills while engaging with broader conversations about transparency, inclusivity, and equity in research systems.

I believe the program is especially valuable for researchers from LMICs and underrepresented academic communities, where formal peer review training opportunities may be limited. PREreview Champions program helps participants build confidence in critically evaluating scientific work and contributing constructively to academic discourse. Additionally, the networking opportunities and international collaborations and mentorship (office hours, first Mondays on each month) fostered through the program can be highly beneficial for professional growth and interdisciplinary learning. I would say the program equips participants not only with technical review skills, but also with a deeper understanding of how open, community-centred peer review practices can strengthen the global research ecosystem.

One last takeaway?

Participating in the PREreview Champions program has been an inspiring experience that reinforced my commitment to open science, ethical scholarship, and inclusive research practices. One important realization from this journey is that meaningful transformation in scholarly communication requires collective participation, mentorship, and accessible training opportunities for researchers across all regions and career stages.

I am particularly encouraged by the growing global conversations around transparency, community-led peer review, and equitable knowledge production. Beyond PREreview, I remain actively involved in initiatives related to research ethics, AI ethics, public health research, and equitable digital health systems, particularly within LMIC contexts. I also hope to continue contributing to community-based peer review engagement activities that empower researchers to participate confidently and responsibly in scholarly evaluation processes. I believe programs like PREreview Champions are helping shape a more inclusive and collaborative future for academic publishing, and I look forward to supporting similar initiatives that promote openness, integrity, and shared learning in research communities worldwide.

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.

You may have noticed a new spotlight banner atop PREreview.org on your last visit. This is our new space to share upcoming events, releases, and resources. Check back frequently, as we’ll be highlighting all kinds of upcoming opportunities to get involved with PREreview and its community.

As we anticipated in our last weeknote, we added email notifications to requests on PREreview. Now, you can opt-in to receiving notifications by email whenever a PREreview is published for one of your requested preprints. We’re very excited to close the loop with this update! Watch this step-by-step video to learn how to start tracking your requested PREreviews today.

We’re also busy updating a few small pieces of our dataset review workflow ahead of a Live Review with FORCE11 Club later this week. This work ought to bring the preprint and dataset review workflows into full parity regarding steps like adding multiple authors, and declaring the use of generative AI.

Finally, we’ve noticed a few instances where the labels OpenAlex generates for our reviews and requests are slightly off. We’ll be gathering and sharing feedback with their team to help them continue improving their taxonomy of research labels.

What’s next?

In addition to advancing our matchmaking experiment (check it out here and send us any feedback you have), we’re getting set for another round of multilingual work. We’d love to welcome in more community members to review new content in Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, as well as to help us with our next round of localization and translation into Arabic and French.

We will host an information session on June 2, at 14:00 UTC, for all community members interested in learning how to use Crowdin to contribute. Click on the button to register for the call!

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 year we'll be working with PREreview Champions, community members, and staff to add Arabic and French localizations and translations across PREreview.org. Join us on June 2 at 14:00 UTC to learn how to support this project!

We’re helping build a multilingual open science ecosystem

In 2025, we took our first steps towards building a more multilingual platform for open peer review by localizing and translating PREreview.org into Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish with the help of A Simple Translation and volunteer community members like you. We used an instance of Crowdin to share “strings,” or lines of text, for translation, and then worked with A Simple Translation, PREreview Champions, other community members, and staff to review and approve machine translations before we published them.

That work helped PREreviewers publish nearly 100 reviews in Brazilian Portuguese or Spanish last year, and we are super excited to continue moving forward in this community-backed direction. To that end, in 2026, we'll be working with PREreview Champions, community members, and staff once again to add Arabic and French localizations and translations across PREreview. We'll follow a similar process of extracting strings and generating machine translations before we make sure that real humans have reviewed and approved each line of text on the site, in our workflows, and in many of our shared resources about open peer review.

We decided to focus on Arabic and French this year in response to community members' feedback, and aggregated and anonymized data we have about traffic on PREreview from different countries and regions around the world. Sometime late in 2026, we'll begin deciding which languages to work in 2027, and we'll be sure to follow the same process of gathering and considering community members' feedback and website traffic before making a decision.

If you’d like to support our work in Arabic and French, you can attend our next localization and translation info session on 2 June 2026 at 14:00 UTC. During the call, we'll show everyone how you can move between languages on PREreview.org, then we'll demo how to use Crowdin to contribute reviews and approvals to our work in Arabic and French. Finally, we'll gather feedback from all our participants about specific cultural and regional forms of Arabic and French that we should pay special attention to, as we did for Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish.

Click on the button to register for the call!

🙌 We hope you can join us to advance localization and translation work on PREreview.org as we try to build an increasingly multilingual site for community members around the world.

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.

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.