eLife, a non-profit organisation created by funders and led by researchers, has announced a collaboration with the Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium (NCRC). NCRC is a publicly available resource from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, US, that rapidly curates and reviews emerging scientific evidence about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
The need for an efficient system to help readers navigate new results has become clear following the significant growth in research outputs relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Both eLife and the NCRC have been working separately on solutions that involve bringing expert peer review and curation to new papers. While eLife evaluates preprints in all areas of biology and medicine as part of its Preprint Review service, the NCRC focuses specifically on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research published either as preprints or in scientific journals. The faculty, fellows, alumni and students behind the Compendium select research for public health action and assign teams of experts to review and summarise the key findings of the papers.
eLife is now working with the NCRC to integrate the Compendium into Sciety, a new platform developed by a team within eLife. Sciety is a growing network where the latest biomedical and life science preprints are transparently evaluated and curated by communities of experts in one convenient place. eLife will set up a dedicated section for the NCRC on Sciety that displays feeds of articles curated by the Compendium’s community and links to a summary of each article hosted on Sciety. These summaries include information such as the article title, DOI link, abstract, version history and evaluations by other communities. Readers can use the NCRC’s dedicated section as a landing page to find the Compendium’s preprint reviews and keep up to date with its latest evaluations. These reviews will be included on Sciety in the same way as those carried out by other communities that review preprints, such as eLife, Peer Community In, PREreview and Review Commons.
Sciety forms part of eLife’s long-term vision for a system of curation around preprints that replaces journal titles as the primary trust indicator of a paper’s perceived quality and impact.
The NCRC’s addition to Sciety is one aspect of its broader collaboration with eLife, in which eLife will support the running of the Compendium’s website to ensure its readers have continued access to its full collection of reviews. Additionally, eLife will support the team behind the NCRC to ensure that its efforts to peer review important new COVID-19 research can continue. The two initiatives will also work together on developing a new peer review management system and other technical solutions to make the NCRC’s review and other workflows as efficient as possible.
Click here to read the original press release.
