Why have a separate service to commenting on bioRxiv? A: You can do it both ways, but we found some people feel pressure posting it directly on the preprints if you are learning. So this is an accessible way to learn how to review preprints before commenting directly. There's some impression that non-expert reviews are not appreciated on preprint servers too, so some reviews have been posted elsewhere already (e.g. The Winnower). We are working with preprint servers to add notifications to the preprint, to take you to this separate place. Overall, we feel this helps the reviewing feel less official and therefore more welcoming to earlier stage researchers.

Who would feel comfortable reviewing a preprint today? About half.

"I'm no longer in the field" - so I don't have the expertise, the community don't want my opinions, I'm not their audience anymore. Is this ok? Should we be their audience? Maybe we don't want scientists to be communicating outside their field (sci comms is a profession in itself). How can technical minds who are no longer inside a field contribute to these discussions - e.g. discussion in the concentric circle on the edge/outside of the actual academic community. We're not providing expert reviews, but we do have some things to say to each other. I wish there was a way for people who are no longer full-time scientists to contribute, e.g. a small job that needs doing, like open source volunteering for research.

Dani has posted reviews on papers for whom the authors don't know her - the authors appreciated that. But Dani had her affiliation next to her name.

Could we do this for open data too? Some people have asked for this too.

Acknowledgements

We were funded by a Mozilla mini grant, funded by the Sloan foundation. This helped us provide snacks for beta testers to encourage attendance at the preprint journal culbs. Thank you!

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