Transparent Review in Preprints

This collaborative initiative enables scholarly journals and accredited peer review services to post peer reviews to be displayed directly alongside a preprint in bioRxiv – regardless of whether the preprint manuscript has been accepted for formal publication yet. Several other groups plan to join the pilot later, including the American Society for Plant Biology and the Public Library of Science (PLOS). 

“This is an exciting development for everyone in open science, and for us an important complementary element in our integration with the ascendant preprint culture – direct submission of preprints from bioRxiv into peerageofscience.org became available already earlier, and now this allows us to give back to bioRxiv and help further increase the value and impact of preprints”, said Janne Seppänen, Founder of Peerage of Science.

Authors must opt in, inside Peerage of Science, before the reviews get posted to bioRxiv, but cannot exclude any reviews from the posting. The peer reviews are posted using CC-BY license, by default attributed to a unique pseudonym of the peer, so they remain anonymous. The reviewers are notified and have the right to have the attribution changed by Peerage of Science into their real names, to gain recognition for their reviewing work.

The first TRiPs are already live, see for example

https://doi.org/10.1101/129346

https://doi.org/10.1101/452276

“The new project is part of broader efforts by bioRxiv to work with other organizations to help the scholarly publishing ecosystem evolve”, said John Inglis, Co-founder of bioRxiv at CSHL.

Richard Sever, Co-founder of bioRxiv at CSHL said “bioRxiv already makes it easy for authors to submit preprints to journals and directs readers’ attention to online conversations around preprints. Transparent Review in Preprints expands this integration to peer review, promoting transparency and encouraging experiments by journals and other peer-review initiatives.”

Dan Whaley, Founder of Hypothesis, said “Using annotation to bring reviews to preprints takes full advantage of its promise, namely the ability to layer perspectives over original documents for the benefit of all. The scholarly process can only benefit when researchers can immediately know what they previously had no easy way to discover.”

Peerage of Science is an independent peer review platform and community. Its development has been supported by University of Jyväskylä, University of Eastern Finland and University of Turku.

For more information, contact

Janne Seppänen, Founder and Managing Director, Peerage of Science
Email: janne.seppanen@peerageofscience.org
Twitter: @JanneSeppänen, @peeragescience
Tel: +358-452337273

Richard Sever, Co-founder, bioRxiv
Email: sever@cshl.edu