In today’s fast-paced world, new discoveries are emerging at ever-increasing rates. Yet many scholarly journals continue to have delays of 12–24 months from submission of article to publication. Moreover, public trust in science and scholarship is in decline in many countries, undermining fact-based decision making and the perceived value of higher education in general.
For scholarly publishing to remain relevant, we must adopt a more efficient and transparent publishing system; one that ensures rapid access to research outcomes and that provides open and transparent access to articles and their peer reviews.
Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) is an emerging innovative publishing model that offers meaningful solutions to these challenges
About publish, review, curate
PRC 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.
Decoupling of publishing functions is what enables innovation
The real power of the PRC approach is the decentralization of publishing functions, which fosters innovation at any stage of the workflow without disrupting the others. This flexibility opens the door to new peer review initiatives, such as evaluating research data or code, as well as exploring alternative methods for reviewing and endorsing content. The decentralized nature of the PRC model also makes it highly adaptable, allowing for the publication of diverse outputs, topics, languages, and contributions from researchers worldwide.
How COAR Notify helps
Because of the distributed nature of the services and platforms participating in PRC, a key requirement for it to work efficiently is ‘interoperability’ between the preprint repositories and external peer review and/or evaluation services. In 2021, COAR launched the Notify Project to develop a standard, interoperable mechanism for linking preprints with peer reviews. The COAR Notify Protocol is now in stable release and is being used by a growing number of PRC implementers.
Read about how the Publish, Review, Curate model is transforming scholarly communications with the help of COAR Notify.
Benefits of PRC
Related resources
In January 2026, COAR and ASAPbio launched an Interim Working Group to define the conditions for the launch of a PRC Alliance Visit the website
Overlay journal specifications | A set of functional requirements for developers of overlay journal software
