PREreview#

The PREreview logo.

PREreview’s mission is to bring more equity and openness to the scholarly peer review process, centering the needs and expectations of researchers who have been traditionally excluded from the process. Transformative change needs community coordinated efforts with both bottom-up and top-down input. We support NASA and other funding agencies’s commitment to fostering open and equitable scholarly practices, praising and valuing past and ongoing community-led efforts that are paving the way of change.

Our organizational goals closely align with 3 of the 4 Year of Open Science Goals, and here is how:

  • GOAL 2. Improve the transparency, integrity, and equity of reviews: We enable all researchers to decide when, where, and how they want to contribute constructive feedback to preprints. We develop and maintain an open-source, free, independent, and community-informed online platform for anyone to compose and publish preprint reviews. This effort fits into the broader goal of freeing scholarly communication from the control of a few for-profit organizations whose gatekeeping and exclusionary principles have shaped the closed, inequitable practices that dominate knowledge production, evaluation, and dissemination today.

  • GOAL 3. Account for open science activities in evaluations: All PREreviewes receive a DOI via DataCite, are licensed CC BY 4.0, and are accompanied by standard metadata that makes them discoverable in association with the preprint. Soon it will be possible for all PREreviewers to easily enable automatic addition of their PREreview contributions to ORCID profiles (which are used for PREreview sign-up), thereby enhancing the validation and recognition of their work which can be reported in their CVs, biosketches, etc. as evidence for open science activities.

  • GOAL 4. Engage underrepresented communities in the advancement of open science: The success of our organization is by design tied to the goal of not only engaging traditionally marginalized individuals, but centering their needs, expectations, and experiences in everything we do. Our commitment to diversity is primarily focused around increasing racial, ethnical, and geographical representation in the peer review pool. We advocate for diversity not only by serving marginalized communities but also in the makeup of the people with which we contract and those who serve as our advisors.

Learn more about our work by visiting our website prereview.org, and keep up to date with our progress on our blog and via our bimonthly newsletter.