eLife and PREreview have announced their continued partnership to engage more diverse communities of researchers in peer review.
The organizations formally teamed up last year following their collaborations on a number of initiatives. Their recent work has involved training courses for early-career reviewers and scaling the PREreview Open Reviewers programme to reach more research communities globally. In a joint project with AfricArXiv, Eider Africa and TCC Africa, eLife and PREreview co-created a peer-review training programme, called Open Peer Reviewers in Africa, inviting more researchers in this region to openly review preprints.
Now, as eLife moves towards a new ‘publish, review, curate’ model that puts preprints first, the organizations will increase their efforts to involve more early-career researchers, and researchers from communities that are traditionally marginalised within the peer-review process, in the public review of preprints. Their work will involve further integrating PREreview into Sciety – an application developed by a team within eLife to bring open evaluation and curation together in one place – and opening up new opportunities for more researchers to participate in public review.
Since 2019, PREreview hosts and maintains an open platform for research community-led preprint review. On the website, any researcher with an ORCID iD can request and share reviews to any preprint with a digital object identifier (DOI). In this partnership, eLife will support PREreview with the development of a more responsive and robust website that will leverage existing open infrastructure, thereby enhancing PREreview’s integration capabilities within the open preprint evaluation ecosystem. In further facilitating PREreview’s presence on Sciety, the teams will ensure that its preprint reviews are more visible on the application and will work on new functionalities to help PREreview and other organizations engage with the ‘publish, review, curate’ model.
Following the experience of co-developing the Open Peer Reviewers in Africa workshop with partners based in Africa – which involves a ‘train the trainer’ model to ensure the scalability and maximize the impact of the course – eLife and PREreview aim to partner with other like-minded organizations leading change within their research communities, to adapt and offer the programme to more communities of researchers around the globe. Together, they are working towards a future where researchers can engage in open preprint review in a process that is safe and rewarding to them.
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