PREreview

Open preprint reviews. For all researchers. Provide and receive constructive feedback on preprints from an international community of your peers.

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, 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, Public
Competing interests

Checked

Social Networks

Video

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 structured review with helpful prompts that gets its own free DOI
- Compose a full review on a preprint with our without help from as template that gets its own free DOI
- Start or join a collaborative review club
- Report Code of Conduct violations
- Engage with existing or even start their own communities
- Subscribe to our newsletter and social media
- Join our Slack community
- Review important information about our organization and how to use the webpage
- Connect their public review activity with their ORCID ID so PREreview can write that activity to the peer review section of their ORCID profile for credit and recognition
Anyone who lands on the page can calso:
- Search for preprints by title, author, OpenAlex field, and languager (English, Portuguese, and Spanish)
- Search for review requests by title, author, OpenAlex field, and languager (English, Portuguese, and Spanish)
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 bioRxiv, SciELO Preprints, our Slack community, or our website. 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

We tag PREreviews and requests for reviews with fields and subfields from OpenAlex, as well as by language (English, Portuguese, and Spanish).

Transparency

Results

Number of scholarly outputs commented on

100-1,000
Metrics

We track a variety of engagement, output, and impact metrics such as aggregated, anonymized information about the career stage and geographical location of user research participants and review authors, the number of reviews and requests we have, and where and how PREreview and its outputs show up elsewhere in the research communications ecosystem.
Results summary

As of June 2024, thousands of registrants have written or collaborated on hundreds of PREreviews and submitted hundreds of requests for review. We have completed dozens of open reviewer trainings and we support over 20 preprint servers. We will share a public data dashboard later in 2024.
Source of data

Internal metrics.

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