What is_? blog series

A series of blog posts to help researchers understand the evolving world of academic publishing

With more than 30,000 academic journals, a growing number of innovative platforms to publish and share research, and evolving standards on transparency and research integrity, academic publishing can be confusing for early-career researchers and seasoned academics.

At PeerRef we are working on a new approach to peer review. We organise the journal-independent open peer review of preprints. To understand what PeerRef does, researchers need to know what open peer review is, what preprints are, and why peer review should be decoupled from journals. It's not surprising that we get a lot of questions.

To help researchers understand PeerRef and academic publishing better, we're going to post a series of blogs that demystify academic publishing. We’ll start with the basics like “what is peer review?” and move on to more complex subjects.

If you have specific questions or would like to write a blog post yourself on a specific part of academic publishing email me — elliott@peerref.com