Introducing PREreview
We want to encourage people to provide feedback to preprints, by integrating preprints into journal club discussions. Most institutions have a journal club already. If you discuss a preprint, and you pass this feedback to the authors, they could incorporate your suggestions into the manuscript before it becomes a published version.
- Scientists are rarely trained how to review – this is an opportunity to improve our training and share best practises, without adding more burden on our PIs.
- The reviewer pool is limited, peer review is done by a small minority only. This is an opportunity to allow more voices in.
Our platform is prereview.org (here!) built on Authorea - like a Google doc, but built for researchers. On the site we have resources including guidelines for how to write a preprint review to share online.
We need your help with...
Making this work for more people. How do we shape this to be useful to all disciplines and not only biology?
One obstacle we have encountered so far is that the journal club leader has to spend time making the journal club review comments into a review that can be shared online. How can we circumvent this? How can we make it easier for people to write reviews in less time? One idea is to have every journal club attendee write their comments using tools such as hypothes.is to annotate directly on the preprint.
Would you be a beta tester?
We are currently recruiting 20 beta testers from different research fields and institutes around the world to test our resources. As a beta tester, we ask you to host two preprint journal clubs using our resources available on
PREreview.org and write a preprint review on our platform for each. To learn more, please email us at
preprintjc@gmail.com with your name, position, and affiliation.
Thank you!
We are doing a session at 11:15 in the Internet Research Hub tomorrow [MozFest Sunday]
Comments
- Peer review takes a long time, is highly emotional. A better way to do this could be via 'Adaptive comparative judgement' practises - asks people to compare and say which is better, end up with a ranking. Means you don't have to think too much, just ask "which is better"? At scale, this works. Before graded exams, Cambridge used a ranking system (until too many students). We have the technology to do this at scale now.