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.

Preprints enable new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial. In December 2022, 80 researchers and representatives of funders, institutions, preprint servers, journals, indexers, and review services were invited to gather online and at the Janelia Research Campus for a workshop on Recognizing Preprint Peer Review. Sponsored by HHMI, ASAPbio, and EMBO, this meeting aimed to catalyze community consensus and support for preprint peer review and to create model funder, institutional, and journal policies that recognize both preprints with reviews, and reviews of preprints. Here, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to help capture the growing momentum of preprint sharing and empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.

The global crisis sparked collaboration between publishers and service providers to successfully address an immediate problem and demonstrated the possibility for future partnerships.Encouraging experts to join a reviewer pool and quickly review the preprint and journal submissions, we were able to publish COVID-19 research more quickly.The initiative confirmed little author uptake of inter-publisher journal transfer option.The collaboration showed wide consensus on open science practices which will ensure faster and more reliable research findings.

While peer review plays a central role in the evaluation and publication of research findings, there are a number of known challenges related to inefficiencies and lack of diversity in the peer review process at system level. Preprint review activities have received increasing attention in recent years and may provide avenues for addressing some of the current challenges in journal peer review. At a workshop during the Researcher to Reader conference in February 2021, we explored how preprint review activities could be made more complementary with journal review and leveraged to increase diversity in peer review. We summarize the discussions at the workshop covering the benefits and challenges of preprint review for different stakeholders, what a journal-compatible preprint review looks like, and the barriers and potential solutions to make preprint review more complementary with journal review.

Journals, funders and scholars must work together to create an infrastructure to study peer review. Journals, funders and scholars must work together to create an infrastructure to study peer review.

While recent surveys show that most stakeholders recognise the importance of peer review to the publication process, there is a lack of systematic research on the topic. In a period of hyper-competition for resources, with perverse incentives that lead to academic capitalism and a “publish or perish” mentality, the lack of robust and cumulative research on approaches, models and practices of peer review can slow down efforts towards fostering research integrity and the credibility of scholarly communication. A major challenge in studying peer review systematically is the lack of available data. While data sharing in scientific research has made relevant progress in certain fields, the lack of infrastructures to promote the sharing of peer review data among publishers, journals and academic scholars, the challenges posed by privacy and data protection legislation, and the perceived lack of incentives for publishers, learned societies and journals to share data, have all hampered efforts in this important domain. While public authorities, learned societies and publishers may face different priorities, incentives and obstacles regarding data sharing, the time has come to call to action all stakeholders who play a part in this field. In this paper, we argue that an infrastructure for data sharing is needed to stimulate independent, collaborative, public research on peer review and we suggest measures and initiatives to set up a collaborative effort towards this goal.

Publishing peer review materials alongside research articles promises to make the peer review process more transparent as well as making it easier to recognise these contributions and give credit to peer reviewers. Traditionally, the peer review reports, editors letters and author responses are only shared between the small number of people in those roles prior to publication, but there is a growing interest in making some or all of these materials available. A small number of journals have been publishing peer review materials for some time, others have begun this practice more recently, and significantly more are now considering how they might begin. This article outlines the outcomes from a recent workshop among journals with experience in publishing peer review materials, in which the specific operation of these workflows, and the challenges, were discussed. Here, we provide a draft as to how to represent these materials in the JATS and Crossref data models to facilitate the coordination and discoverability of peer review materials, and seek feedback on these initial recommendations.

Publishing peer review materials alongside research articles promises to make the peer review process more transparent as well as making it easier to recognise these contributions and give credit to peer reviewers. Traditionally, the peer review reports, editors letters and author responses are only shared between the small number of people in those roles prior to publication, but there is a growing interest in making some or all of these materials available. A small number of journals have been publishing peer review materials for some time, others have begun this practice more recently, and significantly more are now considering how they might begin. This article outlines the outcomes from a recent workshop among journals with experience in publishing peer review materials, in which the specific operation of these workflows, and the challenges, were discussed. Here, we provide a draft as to how to represent these materials in the JATS and Crossref data models to facilitate the coordination and discoverability of peer review materials, and seek feedback on these initial recommendations.

Restricted accessMoreSectionsView Full TextView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Hurst Phil 2010Trailblazing—350 years of Royal Society publishingNotes Rec. R. Soc.6485–89http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2009.0077SectionRestricted accessReportsTrailblazing—350 years of Royal Society publishing Phil Hurst Phil Hurst [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Phil Hurst Phil Hurst [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:13 January 2010https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2009.0077 Previous ArticleNext Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetailsCited by Hook D and Porter S (2021) Scaling Scientometrics: Dimensions on Google BigQuery as an Infrastructure for Large-Scale Analysis, Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 10.3389/frma.2021.656233, 6 This Issue20 March 2010Volume 64Issue 1 Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2009.0077Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0035-9149Online ISSN:1743-0178History: Published online13/01/2010Published in print20/03/2010 License:© 2010 The Royal Society Citations and impact PDF Download

The winner of the first-ever Notes and Records Essay Award was publicly announced at a reception at the Royal Society on 21st May. The winner is Daniel Mitchell, for his essay entitled ‘Reflecting nature: chemistry and comprehensibility in Gabriel Lippmann's “physical” method of photographing

An experiment in online peer review was carried out by the Royal Society, on the journal Proceedings: Biological Sciences. Authors were asked to provide Acrobat PDF files and uploaded them using a web interface. Referees were provided with a URL that gave access to the paper and entered their report into an online form. Almost 50% of the authors contacted used the online method and referees greeted the method with enthusiasm. Editorial staff found the online system easier than expected and were keen to continue its use.