PeerRef is changing course: moving beyond peer review

PeerRef shifts focus from peer review to exploring new challenges in academic publishing.

A year and a half ago, we began building PeerRef. The intention was to make peer review open, efficient, and researcher-centric by offering journal-independent peer review. We’ve learnt many lessons, formed partnerships, launched our platform, helped researchers get published in journals, helped others verify their preprints, and helped one researcher receive a grant. The experience of building PeerRef has been incredibly rewarding.

After 18 months of experimenting and iterating, we have not gained the traction we aimed for — we have also learnt a lot about the challenges of creating change within academic publishing. We have had to decide between pushing forward with PeerRef or shifting our focus to address another significant challenge within academic publishing. It’s important to us to continuously learn and grow, so we have decided that PeerRef will no longer offer peer review and we have started exploring a new opportunity.

While PeerRef will no longer organise peer review, we believe in the potential of a journal-independent approach to peer review. We encourage researchers and publishers to engage with platforms like Review Commons, PREreview, ScienceColab, PCI, and Sciety, which continue to make a positive impact on peer review.

I’m grateful to all the researchers that requested and provided peer review, the partner organisations that made PeerRef’s service possible and everyone that provided feedback and advice.

We’re currently exploring solutions to new challenges within academic publishing and looking forward to sharing more details soon!

If you have any questions or would like to discuss PeerRef’s pivot, feel free to email me: elliott@perref.com