On October 29-30, 2024, COAR organised a strategic meeting to discuss how to accelerate the adoption of the Publish, Review, Curate model of scholarly publishing. The meeting was part of the COAR Notify Project and was hosted by the CCSD (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) in Lyon, France.
Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) is an innovative model of scholarly publishing that involves the review, validation, and editorial commentary of a preprint. It introduces much greater openness and transparency across the publishing ecosystem by making the entire scholarly record – manuscripts, reviews, and commentaries – openly available. It is a researcher-driven model that can be implemented in low-cost environments and is part of the Diamond Open Access ecosystem. In comparison to traditional publishing, PRC offers tremendous flexibility. It can accommodate a wide variety of editorial workflows, types of peer review, and research outputs, as demonstrated by several flavours of PRC that are already operational – from overlay journals that more closely mirror a typical journal publication, to approaches that are adopting very innovative practices. See Peer Community In, Episcience, eLife, PREreview, and Psicológica, for examples.
Spotlight on Peer Community In
PCI is a a free recommendation process for scientific preprints based on peer reviews and a journal. Following submission by authors, a thematic PCI will evaluate a preprint based on rigorous peer review. After evaluation, the PCI may “endorse” the preprint and post the peer reviews, to make them complete, reliable and citable.
PRC challenges the status quo of scholarly publishing, which is based on selectivity, with binary and opaque accept or reject decisions. That said, the current conditions are extremely favourable for PRC initiatives to become more widely adopted. According to a recent study by cOAlition S there is a growing level of acceptance by researchers of preprint sharing and open peer reviews. These findings are reinforced by the experience of other research organisations such as HHMI, with nearly half of their 2023 papers appearing first as a preprint. There is also an increasingly friendly policy environment, with more funders encouraging preprint sharing and some, like the Gates Foundation, requiring it. This is coupled with significant momentum behind research assessment reform, moving the community away from traditional measures based on the publishing venue, rather than the real quality and impact of the article. The COAR Notify protocol, which allows PRC services and preprint repositories to exchange messages in a standardised way, will greatly help PRC scale more quickly and easily.
In a climate where the scholarly community is increasingly looking for alternatives to the predominant commercial system that is expensive, opaque, and slow, the Publish, Review, Curate approach offers a very promising option.
Even with this positive outlook, there are a number of relevant actions that can be taken to help accelerate the adoption of PRC. While not all these activities are within the purview of COAR, as a next step, we plan to work with a loose coalition of PRC supporters to progress them in the coming years.
Priority actions
Infrastructure – Develop easy to use, open source and hosted platforms for review and curation services
Standards – Develop and promote good practices and standards for metadata, formatting, and labelling of PRC artefacts
Funding – Redirect funding away from the commercial sector towards community-based PRC services and platforms
Policy – Work with funders to help them understand PRC and ensure these publishing models are not excluded from research assessment processes
Advocacy – Present a compelling narrative, case studies, and emerging evidence about the PRC model
Community – Build active and engaged research communities around PRC initiatives that drive researcher participation and help to increase the visibility of the initiative