PREreview

Catalyzing change in peer review through equity, openness, and collaboration.

In a nutshell

At PREreview we strive to provide systematically disadvantaged researchers better ways to build skills to engage in scholarly peer review and have their voice heard. Our work is a direct response to the flawed way scientific research is evaluated. Behind closed doors, a handful of unpaid reviewers—selected opaquely and mainly through personal connections—use subjective criteria to decide the fate of a research article. This arcane process is slow and disadvantages researchers from historically underrepresented groups.

We envision a future in which every researcher is empowered with the skills to recognize and challenge bias, and is welcomed into a peer review culture where constructive feedback is expected and rewarded. We build training programs, host events and hold space for debate-based learning, and build open infrastructure to host open rapid and long-form reviews of preprints.

Goals and intentions

Lack of comments to preprints; lack of transparency and diversity in peer review; lack of formal peer review training; lack of wide adoption of preprints.

Project status

Active

Types of outputs

Preprints

Review process

Review requested by

Non-authors
Reviewer selected by

Self-nominated
Public interaction

Yes
Author response

No
Decision

Other scale or rating

Review policy

Review coverage

Complete paper
Reviewer identity known to

Editor or service
Competing interests

Not included

Social Networks

Gallery

Review features

Manuscript hosting

No
Notes

On the free and open source PREreview platform, users register with an ORCID iD and either using their public or pseudonymous persona can:

- Request a review on a preprint
- Fill out and submit a rapid review—12 yes/no/not sure/n.a. questions designed to capture the essence of the preprint
- Compose a long-form review on a preprint, alone or in collaboration with other reviewers
- Comment on others’ reviews
- Endorse others’ reviews via Plaudit
- Flag others’ reviews as violating our Code of Conduct
- Engage with existing or even start their own communities

Anyone who lands on the page can:

- Search for preprints that have reviews or requests for reviews on our site
- Read and sort through aggregated rapid reviews next to the preprint
- Read and sort through long-form reviews next to the preprint

NOTE: PREreview is not a preprint server, but fetches the metadata and pdf (when openly licensed) of a preprint for which a user wants to submit a review or a request for review from Google Scholar. Our goal is to provide a way for any preprint from any existing preprint server to be reviewed by any community member willing to be constructive.
Review of code or data

No
Eligible reviewers/editors

Anyone with an Orcid iD and willing to abide by our Code of Conduct https://content.prereview.org/coc
Tags or badges

Yes
Criteria for inclusion

The badges can be given to reviewers. For now we only have badges for users who have gone through our Open Reviewers mentoring and training program (https://content.prereview.org/programs).