Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2024 Feb 29;22(2):e3002502.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002502. eCollection 2024 Feb.

Recommendations for accelerating open preprint peer review to improve the culture of science

Michele Avissar-Whiting  1 , Frédérique Belliard  2 , Stefano M Bertozzi  3 , Amy Brand  4 , Katherine Brown  5 , Géraldine Clément-Stoneham  6 , Stephanie Dawson  7 , Gautam Dey  8 , Daniel Ecer  9 , Scott C Edmunds  10 , Ashley Farley  11 , Tara D Fischer  12 , Maryrose Franko  13 , James S Fraser  14 , Kathryn Funk  15 , Clarisse Ganier  16 , Melissa Harrison  17 , Anna Hatch  1 , Haley Hazlett  18 , Samantha Hindle  19 , Daniel W Hook  20 , Phil Hurst  21 , Sophien Kamoun  22 , Robert Kiley  23 , Michael M Lacy  24 , Marcel LaFlamme  25 , Rebecca Lawrence  26 , Thomas Lemberger  27 , Maria Leptin  28 , Elliott Lumb  29 , Catriona J MacCallum  30 , Christopher Steven Marcum  31 , Gabriele Marinello  32 , Alex Mendonça  33 , Sara Monaco  34 , Kleber Neves  35 , Damian Pattinson  36 , Jessica K Polka  37 , Iratxe Puebla  38 , Martyn Rittman  39 , Stephen J Royle  40 , Daniela Saderi  19 , Richard Sever  41 , Kathleen Shearer  42 , John E Spiro  43 , Bodo Stern  1 , Dario Taraborelli  44 , Ron Vale  45 , Claudia G Vasquez  46 , Ludo Waltman  47 , Fiona M Watt  48 , Zara Y Weinberg  49 , Mark Williams  9
Affiliations

Recommendations for accelerating open preprint peer review to improve the culture of science

Michele Avissar-Whiting et al. PLoS Biol. .

Abstract

Peer review is an important part of the scientific process, but traditional peer review at journals is coming under increased scrutiny for its inefficiency and lack of transparency. As preprints become more widely used and accepted, they raise the possibility of rethinking the peer-review process. Preprints are enabling new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial than traditional journal peer review, and to thus fundamentally shift the culture of peer review toward constructive collaboration. In this Consensus View, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to accelerate the growing momentum of preprint sharing and provide recommendations to empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

FB: I am the coordinator of TU Delft OPEN Publishing, a diamond open access university press, which supports open peer-review and preprints. SMB: I am the Editor in Chief of Rapid Reviews: Infectious Disease, a preprint review platform. AB: The MIT Press publishes RRC19 and RRID. KB: I am Executive Editor of the journal Development, published by The Company of Biologists. Several of our journals are affiliate journals for Review Commons. I oversee preLights, the Company’s preprint highlighting service. GC-S: I am an employee of the Medical Research Council-UKRI which has provided funding for ASAPbio, an organisation that promotes the use of preprints in the life sciences and preprint review initiatives. SD: I am CEO of ScienceOpen, an interactive discovery environment with publishing services based on open peer review of preprints and global peer review functionalities that can be applied to preprints from any repository. GD: ASAPbio Board of Directors, Review Commons Advisory Board, bioRxiv Affiliate. DE: I am a Data Scientist at Sciety/eLife, helping to bring preprint related data together and trying to make sense of it. SCE: I run journals carrying out open peer review and promoting use of preprints. MF: I am Executive Director of the Health Research Alliance, and on the Board of the Center for Open Science, which hosts OSF Preprints. KF: I am a Supervisory Technical Information Specialist and the Program Manager for PubMed Central at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. PMC selectively archives and indexes preprint records. MH: I manage Europe PMC, which indexes preprints and links preprint peer reviews to them. HH: I am the Program Manager of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which shares resources about and promotes the use of preprints in responsible research evaluation. SH: I am a co-founder of PREreview, and employed as the Content Manager of bioRxiv and medRxiv. DWH: I am an employee of Digital Science, which owns and operates Altmetric (which gathers attention about academic outputs including preprints), Dimensions (which indexes preprints), Elements (which tracks scholarly outputs including preprints for research institutions), Figshare (which hosts and provides preprint services) and Ripeta (which is used to assess trustmarkers in scholarly outputs including preprints); at the time of the conference, At the time of writing I was also a member of the ORCID board. SK: I consult for the biotech and plant breeding industries, e.g. BASF, Limagrain, Rijk Zwaan. I’m a member of the Two Blades Foundation Science Advisory Board. I’m a cofounder of Resurrect Bio. I serve on the Editorial Board of PLOS Biology. I’m an affiliate of bioRxiv. My other professional activities and research funding are listed on my CV, which is available online Curriculum vitae: Sophien Kamoun FRS. RK: I am Head of Strategy, cOAlition S. MML: I am an employee of ASCB managing a preprint curation service. ML: I am an employee of PLOS, which promotes the use of preprints across scientific fields and participates in the preprint review initiative Review Commons. RL: I am Managing Director of F1000, which operates a preprint combined with peer-review publishing model for researchers and funders / institutions / societies. TL: I am leading the development of the preprint peer review service Review Commons and I am Deputy Head of Scientific Publications at EMBO. ML: I am President of the European Research Council. EL: I am the founder and CEO of PeerRef, a journal-independent peer review platform. CJM: I am Director of Open Science at Hindawi which is now owned by Wiley. Wiley owns its own preprinting platform (Authorea) CSM: I am contributing in my personal capacity during my personal time. I am an open science advocate and policy wonk. GM: I am a co-founder and CEO of Qeios, an Open Science publishing platform that enables the open peer review of preprints. AM: I am an employee of SciELO, which promotes the use of preprints across scientific fields and has its own preprint server. SM: Managing Editor of Review Commons, a preprints peer-review platform KN: ASAPbio Board of Directors DP: I am Director of eLife, which promotes a preprint review publication model. JKP: I am an employee of ASAPbio, which promotes the use of preprints in the life sciences and preprint review initiatives. IP: At the time of the drafting of the manuscript, I was an employee of ASAPbio, which promotes the use of preprints in the life sciences and preprint review initiatives. SJR: I am a Director of The Company of Biologists, which publishes journals and also runs a preprint highlighting service “preLights”. I am a bioRxiv Affiliate. DS: I am the Director of an open, journal-independent preprint review platform, PREreview. RS: Co-Founder bioRxiv, Co-Founder medRxiv, Employed as Assistant Director at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. KS: I am the Executive Director of COAR and a co-PI of the COAR Notify Initiative, which is developing a standard, interoperable approach to link research outputs with resources from external peer review services. JES: I am an employee of the Simons Foundation, which has provided funding for ASAPbio, an organization that promotes the use of preprints in the life sciences and preprint review initiatives. BS: HHMI Chief of Strategic Initiatives. DT: Science Program Officer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The CZI Open Science program supports bioRxiv, medRxiv, ASAPbio, as well as several projects related to preprint curation and open peer review. RV: I am a co-founder of ASAPbio, which promotes the use of preprints in the life sciences and preprint review initiatives. I am co-founder of Review Commons, a journal-independent peer review platform. LW: I am involved in setting up a preprint review platform. FW: I am EMBO Director. I am on the advisory boards of bioRxiv and MedRxiv and several journals. MW: I am the Product Manager for Sciety, a platform for discovering and highlighting reviewed preprints. Other authors: None declared.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Estimating the growth of preprint review over time.
Preprints evaluated per month on Sciety, excluding reviews conducted by automated tools (ScreenIT) and reviews by journals posted after publication of the journal version (source data available [20]). This chart includes data from the following services, regardless of which server the preprints they evaluate have been posted to: eLife, Review Commons, Arcadia Science, preLights, Rapid Reviews, PREreview, NCRC, Peer Community In (Evolutionary Biology, Ecology, Zoology, Animal Science, Neuroscience, Paleontology, Archaeology), PeerRef, Biophysics Colab, ASAPbio (and ASAPbio-SciELO) crowd review, Life Science Editors (including Foundation), and The Unjournal. Data have been collected and provided by Sciety. Reviews posted to comment sections of preprint servers are not included, and depending on the policies of individual services, some of the evaluations included in this chart may not meet our definition of preprint review.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Csiszar A. Peer review: Troubled from the start. Nature. 2016;532:306–308. doi: 10.1038/532306a - DOI - PubMed
    1. Moxham N, Fyfe A. THE ROYAL SOCIETY AND THE PREHISTORY OF PEER REVIEW, 1665–1965. Hist J. 2018;61:863–889. doi: 10.1017/S0018246X17000334 - DOI
    1. Sense about Science, Elsevier. Quality, Trust and Peer Review. 2019 [cited 2023 Mar 28]. Available from: https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/resource-library/trust-in....
    1. Mulligan A, Hall L, Raphael E. Peer review in a changing world: An international study measuring the attitudes of researchers. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol. 2013;64:132–161. doi: 10.1002/asi.22798 - DOI
    1. Dance A. Stop the peer-review treadmill. I want to get off. Nature. 2023;614:581–583. doi: 10.1038/d41586-023-00403-8 - DOI - PubMed