BIAM seminar - "Peer Community In: A free alternative to evaluate, validate (and publish) preprints"

Abstract:

Scientific publishing is undergoing a revolution, and many international and national public institutions now recommend publishing in full open access journals (free to publish, free to read). This includes the CNRS https://www.cnrs.fr/en/cnrsinfo/cnrs-encourages-its-scientists-stop-payi... . However, the options and the process are not clear to many of us. Peer Community In will talk to us about their alternative approach to preprinting, reviewing and publishing.

The Peer Community in (PCI,https://peercommunityin.org) project offers an alternative to the current system of publication - which is particularly expensive and not transparent. PCI is a non-profit scientific organization building communities of researchers handling the evaluation (through peer-review) and recommendiation of preprints in their scientific field. Each PCI is a group of several hundred recommenders playing the role of editors who recommend preprints based on peer-reviews to make them complete, reliable and citable articles, without the need for publication in ‘traditional’ journals (although the authors can submit their recommended preprints afterwards). Evaluations and recommendations by a PCI are free of charge. When a recommender decides to recommend a preprint, they write a recommendation text that is published along with all the editorial correspondence (reviews, recommender's decisions, authors’ replies) on the PCI website. The preprint itself is not published by PCI: it remains on the preprint server where it has been posted by the authors and can therefore be submitted to a journal or published in "Peer Community Journal", an open access diamond journal launched in 2021. The first Peer Community In was created in 2017: Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology and there are now 15 thematic PCIs, including PCI Ecology, PCI Genomics, PCI Mathematical and Computational Biology.... More than 1,700 scientists from around the world have already joined as PCI recommenders. The PCI initiative won the 2020 LIBER award for library innovation of the European League of Research Libraries.

Topic: BIAM Seminar- Peer Community In