Advancing the culture of peer review with preprints

Avissar-Whiting, Michele; Belliard, Frederique; Brand, Amy; Brown, Katherine; Clément-Stoneham, Géraldine; Dawson, Stephanie; Dey, G.K.; Ecer, Daniel; Edmunds, Scott; Fischer, Tara D.; Farley, Ashley; Franko, Maryrose; Fraser, James S.; Funk, Kathryn; Ganier, Clarisse; Harrison, Melissa; Hatch, Anna; Hazlett, Haley F.; Hindle, Samantha; Hook, Daniel W.; Hurst, Phil; Kamoun, Sophien; Kiley, Robert; Lacy, Michael M.; LaFlamme, Marcel; Lawrence, Rebecca; Lemberger, Thomas; Lumb, Elliott; MacCallum, Catriona; Marcum, Christopher Steven; Marinello, Gabriele; Mendonça, Alex; Neves, Kleber; Pattinson, Damian; Puebla, Iratxe; Rittman, Martyn; Royle, Stephen; Saderi, Daniela; Grainger, Robert M.; Shearer, Kathleen; Spiro, John E.; Stern, Bodo; Taraborelli, Dario; Vale, Ron; Vásquez, Claudia; Waltman, Ludo; Watt, Fiona M.; Weinberg, Zara Y.; Williams, Mark Richard James

doi:10.31219/osf.io/cht8p

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…This allows various preprint review initiatives to experiment with new forms of feedback. As the number of such initiatives grows, it becomes increasingly important to connect preprints with existing reviews that are often scattered across different platforms [55].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enabling preprint discovery, evaluation, and analysis with Europe PMC

Levchenko,

Parkin,

McEntyre

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Preprints provide an indispensable tool for rapid and open communication of early research findings. Preprints can also be revised and improved based on scientific commentary uncoupled from journal-organised peer review. The uptake of preprints in the life sciences has increased significantly in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when immediate access to research findings became crucial to address the global health emergency. With ongoing expansion of new preprint servers, improving discoverability of preprints is a necessary step to facilitate wider sharing of the science reported in preprints. To address the challenges of preprint visibility and reuse, Europe PMC, an open database of life science literature, began indexing preprint abstracts and metadata from several platforms in July 2018. Since then, Europe PMC has continued to increase coverage through addition of new servers, and expanded its preprint initiative to include the full text of preprints related to COVID-19 in July 2020 and then the full text of preprints supported by the Europe PMC funder consortium in April 2022. The preprint collection can be searched via the website and programmatically, with abstracts and the open access full text of COVID-19 and Europe PMC funder preprint subsets available for bulk download in a standard machine-readable JATS XML format. This enables automated information extraction for large-scale analyses of the preprint corpus, accelerating scientific research of the preprint literature itself. This publication describes steps taken to build trust, improve discoverability, and support reuse of life science preprints in Europe PMC. Here we discuss the benefits of indexing preprints alongside peer-reviewed publications, and challenges associated with this process

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enabling preprint discovery, evaluation, and analysis with Europe PMC

Levchenko,

Parkin,

McEntyre

et al. 2024

Preprint

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“…However, they are still in an early stage of development. A workshop on Recognizing Preprint Peer Review brought together various stakeholders from the scholarly communication system ( Avissar-Whiting et al, 2023 ). This resulted in the formulation of a call to action, urging stakeholders to embrace preprint reviewing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The experiences of COVID-19 preprint authors: a survey of researchers about publishing and receiving feedback on their work during the pandemic

Rzayeva,

Henriques,

Pinfield

et al. 2023

PeerJ

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The COVID-19 pandemic caused a rise in preprinting, triggered by the need for open and rapid dissemination of research outputs. We surveyed authors of COVID-19 preprints to learn about their experiences with preprinting their work and also with publishing their work in a peer-reviewed journal. Our research had the following objectives: 1. to learn about authors’ experiences with preprinting, their motivations, and future intentions; 2. to consider preprints in terms of their effectiveness in enabling authors to receive feedback on their work; 3. to compare the impact of feedback on preprints with the impact of comments of editors and reviewers on papers submitted to journals. In our survey, 78% of the new adopters of preprinting reported the intention to also preprint their future work. The boost in preprinting may therefore have a structural effect that will last after the pandemic, although future developments will also depend on other factors, including the broader growth in the adoption of open science practices. A total of 53% of the respondents reported that they had received feedback on their preprints. However, more than half of the feedback was received through “closed” channels–privately to the authors. This means that preprinting was a useful way to receive feedback on research, but the value of feedback could be increased further by facilitating and promoting “open” channels for preprint feedback. Almost a quarter of the feedback received by respondents consisted of detailed comments, showing the potential of preprint feedback to provide valuable comments on research. Respondents also reported that, compared to preprint feedback, journal peer review was more likely to lead to major changes to their work, suggesting that journal peer review provides significant added value compared to feedback received on preprints.

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“…We have opted not to use the term 'peer' when discussing platforms for the review of preprints, adopting instead the designation 'preprint review services', distinguishing them from 'journal-based peer review'. This better reflects the diversity of review approaches facilitated by preprint review servicesfrom the spontaneous posting of feedback by individuals to community-driven review platformsand considering that feedback on preprints is not bound by the conventions often associated with journalbased peer reviewin fact, a variety of forms of preprint feedback are evident, ranging from minimal 'ratings' and informal approaches to in-depth formal peer review (Avissar-Whiting et al, 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Preprint review services: Disrupting the scholarly communication landscape?

Henriques,

Rzayeva,

Pinfield

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Preprinting has gained considerable momentum, and in some fields it has turned into a well-established way to share new scientific findings. The possibility to organise quality control and peer review for preprints is also increasingly highlighted, leading to the development of preprint review services. We report a descriptive study of preprint review services with the aim of developing a systematic understanding of the main characteristics of these services, evaluating how they manage preprint review, and positioning them in the broader scholarly communication landscape. Our study shows that preprint review services have the potential to turn peer review into a more transparent and rewarding experience and to improve publishing and peer review workflows. We are witnessing the growth of a mixed system in which preprint servers, preprint review services and journals operate mostly in complementary ways. In the longer term, however, preprint review services may disrupt the scholarly communication landscape in a more radical way.

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Advancing the culture of peer review with preprints

Cited by 7 publications

References 14 publications

Enabling preprint discovery, evaluation, and analysis with Europe PMC

Enabling preprint discovery, evaluation, and analysis with Europe PMC

The experiences of COVID-19 preprint authors: a survey of researchers about publishing and receiving feedback on their work during the pandemic

Preprint review services: Disrupting the scholarly communication landscape?

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