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Publish, Review, Curate Publishing

What is publish, review, curate?

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.

Read our article about how the Publish, Review, Curate model is transforming scholarly communications with the help of COAR Notify.

Benefits of PRC

  1. Rapid dissemination of research results compared with the long submission to publishing times of traditional publishing
  2. Creates transparency across the entire publishing process, especially in terms of peer reviews)
  3. Is horizontally scalable and highly flexible. Works across disciplines, research outputs, and supports multiple workflows
  4. Costs are distributed across services, and therefore editorial activities can be run for quite a low cost
  5. Is based mostly on community-owned infrastructure and is in the hands of the research community.
  6. Creates resilience because of the distributed nature of the infrastructures
  7. Is not a binary approach. Multiple communities can endorse or review the same item

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.

In October 2024, COAR organized a two day meeting focusing on the benefits and challenges of this publishing model as well as discussions about how we can accelerate its adoption and acceptance more broadly. The outcome of that meeting identified several priority actions for the community in the coming months and years. Although not all these actions are within the purview of COAR, they will help to guide COAR’s work in this area.

Priority actions to accelerate PRC

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

Overlay Journals

An overlay journal is one approach to PRC. It is an open access, quality-assured journal whose articles are held in one or more repositories. An overlay journal does not host the articles on the journal’s website but links back to the relevant article in an open repository or preprint server.

Overlay journals take advantage of the growing momentum for preprint sharing while leveraging the distributed nature of the web. They represent an innovative and cost effective alternative to traditional journals. The COAR Notify Initiative has developed a standard protocol that enables overlay journals to interact with any compatible repository and preprint server.

In 2025, COAR is contracting the development of an open source overlay journal platform. This will make it easier for editors and platforms to adopt the overlay approach to publishing.

If you are interested in starting an overlay journal, DARIAH Open has a number of helpful guidance and information resources available on their website.

Case study: Psicológica Overlay Journal Workflow

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