PREreview

Over the course of this year we have run 6 design sprints, covering three topic areas: Rapid PREreviews, Community Features, and Search and Discovery. Each topic was covered at two different time zones to accommodate broad participation across multiple time zones. We have had a total of 90 participants across all sprints from around 20 countries. Participants were compensated with $100 for their time and expertise.

Alongside sprints we have also run 9 community calls, again at different times of day to accommodate participation from our global community. We had 13 participants to community calls.

We have run 18 Live Reviews, previously called Live Streamed Journal Clubs) collaborating with 7 different partners to run either a stand-alone Live Review or more commonly a series of Live Reviews, engaging over 135 community members to collaborate and review together to provide constructive feedback to preprint authors.

PREreview’s Open Reviewers training takes various forms ranging from 2-hour standalone workshops to a more in-depth 4-6 multi-session workshops. To date we have run 21 training interventions and worked with 12 partner organizations to provide peer review training to approximately 300 participants (this number is estimated as for some workshops the partner organization has managed registration). Alongside working with partner organizations to provide dedicated training for their cohort, we also have delivered 4 free-to-attend 2-hour community workshops including 35 participants from around the world.

Included in this figure of workshops is Open Peer Reviewers in Africa, tailored to the region-specific context of African researchers. This was a collaboration between PREreview, AfricArXiv, Eider Africa, eLife, and the Training Centre in Communication Africa (TCC Africa). Together we co-created and openly shared tools and strategies for scholarly literature evaluation, and trained the first cohort of 11 African researchers with 5 trainees moving on to be open peer review trainers themselves (https://content.prereview.org/open-peer-reviewers-in-africa-a-train-of-trainer-program).

In addition to Open Reviewers training for reviewers of manuscripts, we have also collaborated with the Open Research Funders Group & Health Research Alliance to run two Open Grant Reviewers training workshops with 34 participants representing 11 funders. This included developing a dedicated Open Grant Reviewers toolkit and a series of 7 short videos with bite-size information that are freely and openly accessible for the wider community.

Finally in addition to these activities, we have launched a dedicated PREreview Community Slack channel which now has 65 active members and growing each week. Members can provide feedback to PREreview via our #community-feedback channel, hear about our news and share their own via the #community-news channel, learn about upcoming events, contribute to the community newsletter, share a review or request one on their own preprint.

PREreview is governed by an Advisory Committee, and is a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science & Society, a US-based 501(c)3

PREreview was born in 2017 as an open science project, founded by three early-career women scientists all in volunteer capacity. From the start, we embraced a shared leadership approach, capitalizing on our diverse skills, experiences, and personalities to strengthen our team.

Our first grant in 2018 was a $2,500 Mozilla Foundation “mini-grant” which went to supporting refreshments for a number of in-person preprint review events. In March 2019, Daniela Saderi transitioned to a full-time role as the project director, supported by the Mozilla Foundation as a fellow for open science.

PREreview also became a fiscally sponsored project of the non-profit organization Code for Science and Society, firmly rooted in a non-profit model to align with our values of openness and community prioritization over commercialization.

Initial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation enabled the creation of the first prototype of PREreview.org. Subsequent support from the Wellcome Trust allowed us to develop a second iteration and introduce new tools for collaborative peer review.

From 2020 and 2022, we entered a collaboration with the non-profit journal eLife to support efforts to expand peer-review training to more communities. To date, we continue to partner with eLife to advance open evaluation of preprints. In 2022, a significant two-year grant from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, in collaboration with eLife, led to the development of the best-ever third version of PREreview.org, offering accessible tools and resources while facilitating increased community engagement and input.

Investing in PREreview means supporting an independent, non-for-profit organization dedicated to transforming scholarly evaluation through the lenses of openness, equity and collaboration.

Founded in 2017 by three early-career women scientists, PREreview primarily relies on grants and has had only one full-time employee, the director, with a volunteer leadership team for the first 3 years. In 2022, thanks to investment from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, we added three new team members who brought us to new highs. We now offer services like peer-review training workshops and collaborative review sessions to research institutions, funders, and publishers, moving from grants to a service-based model while staying true to their mission. However, we can't fully sustain ourselves with service contracts alone. We believe we are at a turning point, with strong technology and community support. We are asking for support from organizations, governments, and others who share our values to help transform research evaluation, with a focus on marginalized groups in academia.

Such support will open up new opportunities for us to partner and build trust with like-minded organizations who are active in their communities. In the next 2-3 years, we plan to improve and scale 3 pillars that support researchers' journeys towards more open, fair, and collaborative peer review: 1) inclusive and accessible training in open review practices, 2) an authoring platform integrated with the peer-review ecosystem that supports rigorous and ethical open peer review, and 3) collaborative groups we call clubs that will allow users from diverse groups to continue building their own, decentralized communities of open peer-review practice supported by our training and platform.