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

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

What’s next?

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

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

Stay connected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay connected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREreview in Dialogue

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

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

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

Daniela Saderi at September 2026 OpenCon Librarian Community Call

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREreview Champions in Action!

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

In June:

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

In July:

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

Modular Peer Review Working Group: Learnings and Next Steps

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

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

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

Events

Upcoming events

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

Recent events

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

Highlights from our Slack Community

• What we are reading:

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

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

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

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

Stay connected

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three pathways for participating in the Review-a-thon

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

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

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

Stay connected

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

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

Stay connected

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

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

Stay connected

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

Stay connected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay connected

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

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

This week we improved several parts of PREreview.org:

• To make it easier to find information about how our platform works, we moved our recently revised “How to use” page from the footer of the website to our main menu (and moved our “Partners” page to the footer to make room).
• We added support for African French (FR 002) to our Crowdin project ahead of our next phase of localization and translation work.
• We started figuring out how to support right-to-left languages on the website so we can include Modern Standard Arabic (ARB) in that same round of upcoming multilingual work.
• We added support for the JMIR Preprints server.
• We added helper text for FAIR and CARE principles to our dataset review workflow.

What’s next?

In addition to moving our matchmaking experiment and multilingual work ahead, we’ll continue analyzing feedback from our community design sprint about teaching and learning with PREreview. We’re excited to explore what kinds of features or programs we might develop to support instructional use of the platform.

We’ll start our search for a new content management system (CMS) soon, as well. Our goal is to prepare for a refresh of the website that better integrates its platform side (think review and request workflows) with its content side (think blog and resources).

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.

Halfway through the year, a lot is in motion at PREreview platform and beyond. From building a more multilingual site to gathering in community around preprint and dataset review, we’re heading there side-by-side.

Register for our next collaborative preprint discussion

All open peer reviewers are invited to take part in our next community Live Review on June 25, 2026, at 15:00 UTC. We will get together to provide respectful and constructive feedback to this preprint:

“Safety Monitoring of Multiple Health Outcomes Following 2023–2024 COVID-19 Vaccination among Medicare Beneficiaries Aged 65 Years and Older in the United States” by Joann F. Gruber, Michelle Ondari, Carla E. Zelaya, Chunyi Xia, Fengdi Zhang, Jessica R. Hervol, Jin Ye, Meng Chen, Yutong Qin, Mao Hu, Yoganand Chillarige, Richard A. Forshee & Steven A. Anderson.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.03.25319975

The Live Review session will be hosted by two facilitators from the PREreview team, and will be joined by Dr. Christopher Steven Marcum (PREreview Advisory Committee Chair) in the role of invited expert, and researchers from around the world.

PREreview in dialogue

Daniela Saderi at Career Development Lab for displaced scholars

The Scholar Rescue Fund, the Global Young Academy, and the NAS New Voices fellowship are collaborating to offer a career development workshop for researchers who have been displaced or forced to leave their countries because of conflict, censorship, persecution, or violations of human rights. The initiative’s objective is to help them navigate the landscape in the US and Canada as they make their transitions—either staying in academia or leaving for non-academic roles.

On Day 1 of the workshop, PREreview Executive Director Dr. Daniela Saderi will deliver a plenary talk where she'll explore the promise and challenges of Open Science and the role it can play in building a more equitable and resilient research ecosystem.

At PREreview, we believe the Open Science movement should challenge existing power imbalances and address the ways systems of oppression shape how research is produced, shared, and evaluated. At a time when researchers around the world are navigating increasing uncertainty, restrictions, and threats to academic freedom, the values of Open Knowledge matter more than ever. Building a more open research ecosystem is not only about access, but also about ensuring that everyone is free to contribute their expertise, participate in meaningful dialogue, and help shape a more just and equitable future for all.

Interview for the Review and Curate Network podcast

In the latest episode of the “Open Science: Building Inclusive and Equitable Research Ecosystems in Africa” podcast series, Daniela (PREreview) and TOLULOPE OGUNNIYI explored how early-career researchers can leverage preprints as tools for learning, collaboration, research visibility, and capacity building within the global open science community.

Listen to the full interview here and share your thoughts in the comment section! Additional resources and useful links mentioned during the conversation are available in the description.

Fostering more multilingual conversations at PREreview

In line with our commitment to lowering barriers for meaningful and broad engagement with preprint review, this year we’re expanding the translation and localization of PREreview.org into Modern Standard Arabic (ARB) and African French (FR 002).

This initiative, as all we do at PREreview, is advancing in close, trusting collaboration with our community members from around the world. After an informative session hosted on June 2 where we shared the timeline for this round of translations and did a demo on using Crowdin, we’re now set up to kickoff the work.

If you’d like to help make PREreview.org a more multilingual space for scholarly communications, you can join our Crowdin project and start contributing to the language of your preference. From mid-June through August, we’ll be adding translated strings of text from PREreview’s platform onto Crowdin for community review.

💡 PRO TIP: You can also try out editing translated text within a visual context here: http://translate.prereview.org

First ever dataset review published on PREreview.org!

Last week, the FORCE11 PREreview Club published the first review using PREreview's new workflow for reviewing datasets. It was the result of a collaborative Live Review, where 11 people had a lively and thoughtful discussion on a dataset containing article-level data for 2,680 Science papers published between 2021 and 2024, deposited on Dryad. We invite you to read and engage with their dataset PREreview to keep the conversation going!

This occasion is a huge milestone in our journey to make community evaluation of diverse research outputs a common practice, and we expect many more dataset PREreviews to come. If you feel motivated by the FORCE11 Club’s experience, you can watch this tutorial on how to use the dataset review workflow and try it out yourself.

Platform news

Opt-in to email notifications for your requested PREreviews!

After community members’ suggestions, we recently added email notifications to requests. Now you can opt-in to receiving an email whenever a PREreview is published for one of your requested preprints. All you need to do is log in, go to “My details” on the menu bar, and enable “Requested review notifications”.

📬 Start tracking your PREreview requests and enjoy reading community feedback in real time!

Share your feedback on our matchmaking experiment

Have you tried our matchmaking experiment yet? 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 since late 2023 onwards.

Events

Upcoming events

• June 9, 2026 - 17:00 UTC — “What Mutual Aid Gets Right: Practices Nonprofits Need Now” free-of-charge strategy session. More info and registration.
• June 29, 2026 - 16:00 UTC — ICOR Meeting: “Want to Make Science Work Better? Let’s Talk About How”. The spotlight will be on the work of ‘Designing a new research communication paradigm,’ an Action Collaborative that emerged from the NASEM Roundtable for Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship. Learn more and register.
• July 21, 2026 - 16:00 UTC — ASAPbio Community Call: “How PLOS is Redefining Publishing to Go Beyond Articles and APCs” by Veronique Kiermer, Chief Scientific Officer at PLOS. Register

Recent events

• April, 2026 — “Enhancing Scientific Integrity: Progress and Opportunities in the Social and Behavioral Sciences - A Workshop”, by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Recording and materials are available.

Highlights from our Slack Community

• What we are reading:

Licensing Best Practices for Sharing Scientific Data, by Creative Commons
Doing Science in the Age of AI, when the system isn’t built for you, by Seun Olufemi (2024 PREreview Champion)
The Matthew effect in AI summary, by Jefferson Pooley
You can just review things: A digital ethnography of informal peer review, by Jay Patel & Joel Chan

• Denice W. Ross and Christopher S. Marcum (PREreview Advisory Committee Chair) created “The Federal Data Field Guide”, an accessible resource to help navigate various types of US federal data for research purposes.
• Registration for the LMU Open Science Summer School 2026 is open until July 6! Although the program takes place in Munich, public lectures can be attended via Zoom (registration open anytime). Recordings of the lectures, slides, and workshops materials will be accessible in a repository.
• OpenRxiv introduced a new feature that allows changing the license on an existing bioRxiv/medRxiv preprint to be less restrictive.
• Translate Science, a community of interest around multilingual open science, is calling on like-minded folks to join their PREreview Club! No specific academic background or experience is required. Sign up here.

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.

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.