PREreview

Background: PREreview aims to serve preprint authors, reviewers, and servers from around the world. PREreview has developed open source infrastructure to enable constructive feedback to preprints at a point in time in which it is needed. However, the organization is much more than just a preprint review platform. Its mission is to bring more equity and transparency to scholarly peer review by supporting and empowering communities of researchers, particularly those at early stages of their career (ECRs) and historically excluded, to review preprints in a way that is rewarding to them. PREreview closes obvious gaps in the process to make research and how it's evaluated more equitable. They train researchers in giving and receiving feedback, engage communities of marginalized researchers, and implement measures to reflect on personal bias.

Mission: PREreview strives to bring more equity to peer review by diversifying the process, and supporting and empowering researchers, especially those early in their careers and others who are traditionally marginalized in scholarship. Its open process is designed for barrier-free access, inclusion, and recognition of reviewers' efforts.

Community over Commercialization:

Since its inception, PREreview has always been about prioritizing the needs and expectations of a diverse and global reviewing community. The review experience is designed to welcome input from anyone who has a constructive attitude and wants to help improve research outputs at a point in time when input still matters. Our preprint review platform is co-developed with the community who participate in frequently run community design sprints in which participants are invited to provide feedback to all new developments—time and expertise that is compensated.

Commercialization has never been a driving force for us. First, we intentionally operate as a non-profit via fiscal sponsorship, so we can’t be bought. Our platform is and will always be free to all users. To date, our work has been primarily funded by philanthropies, with only a handful of services for which we ask to be compensated—i.e. training and live review services run in partnership with journals and other organizations. This model is hard to sustain, which is why we are exploring membership models that can rely on collective support from organizations and entities that are value-aligned and want to continue to see our work grow.

“Even in the technology itself and how it's built, you can really bring these values to where you put a button or what color you highlight something to ensure our values are woven into the user experience. We are designing with intention with that idea of inclusion at the core.”

“The philosophy of ‘build it, and they will come,’ – that is not what we want. If you build something, the people who are building it definitely have their own biases and assumptions because we're humans. So, if we are building something, and then expect that all communities that might be very diverse from us will come—it won’t happen. Instead, communities that are already more in sync with our expectations will attract people who are similar.”

“We are trying to engage with the community at the start. As we relaunch our website, for instance, we’re doing that after months of feedback and interviews with the community—even to redesign the search.”

-Daniela Saderi, Co-Founder and Director at PREreview