eLife has announced that it is supporting PREreview to pilot an interactive peer-review mentoring program that empowers early-career researchers to contribute to scholarly review.
PREreview Open Reviewers is designed by the team behind PREreview.org, a platform for the crowdsourcing of preprint reviews, to support early-career researchers to build their profile as socially conscious, constructive peer-reviewers. To bring focus on barriers in scientific participation, the program will facilitate discussions with both mentors and mentees about how intersecting systems of oppression, such as racism, sexism and colonialism, manifest within the global scientific enterprise. Mentees will be guided by their mentors in writing and posting preprint reviews that will be published with a digital object identifier. Additionally, they will have the opportunity to network with peers from across the world, and with journal editors and more senior researchers in their field.
eLife aims to transform research communication through improvements to science publishing, technology and research culture. The organisation invests in research culture in a variety of ways that involve working closely with early-career researchers. These include establishing standards for diversity and inclusion across the organisation and increasing the involvement of early-career researchers on the journal’s editorial board and reviewer pool.
In a similar vein, PREreview seeks to bring more diversity to scholarly peer-review by supporting and empowering communities of researchers, particularly those at early stages of their career and historically underrepresented in scholarship, to review preprints in a process that is rewarding to them.
PREreview Open Reviewers started in October 2020, and will continue to the end of June 2021. The pilot defines four ‘Stages of Engagement’, where early-career researchers enter as review trainees in stage one, become advanced trainees and advanced reviewers in stages two and three, and gain the experience they need in peer-review to become review mentors in stage four. The program can be entered by a researcher at any stage depending on their experience with writing manuscript reviews.
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