In collaboration with Sciety, we are piloting PeerRef Communities to help groups of researchers engage with preprint peer review, get their reviews published, and enable the curation of reviewed preprints. 

Why form a PeerRef Community?

• Receive high-quality and trusted peer review from your community.

• Provide peer review for your community and get recognition by publishing your peer reviews with DOIs.

• Expand and improve your network by engaging in community peer review.

• Increase the value and discoverability of your community's reviewed preprints by collating them on Sciety.

• Leverage PeerRef’s platform to publish reviews and reduce administrative work.

What is a PeerRef Community?

A PeerRef Community is a group of researchers, at any stage in their careers, that are in the same field of research and want to advance open peer review of preprints. The community should have a specific research focus, which can be broad or narrow.

What does a PeerRef Community do?

A PeerRef Community provides open peer review for each other’s preprints and peer reviews preprints that are of interest to their community.

• Receive peer review for your preprints

Community members post research as a preprint and then request peer review. PeerRef organises the peer review process. Members fill in the request review form and select their community.

• Conduct open peer review

PeerRef contacts community members when a member of their community has a suitable preprint for them to peer review. Alternatively, community members use the PeerRef peer review form to review any preprint that is of interest to their community. Email the completed peer review form to elliott@peerref.com and PeerRef will publish the review on the PeerRef platform.

• Curate and discover peer reviewed preprints with Sciety

How does PeerRef help?

PeerRef publishes the communities’ signed peer review reports and assigns DOIs to them. This allows reviewers to get recognition for their peer review contributions. PeerRef takes care of administrative aspects of peer review, helps members expand their community, and provides authors of reviewed preprints with a route to publication in partner journals.

How does Sciety help?

Reviews of bioRxiv, medRxiv, ResearchGate, SciELO and OSF preprints are posted on Sciety, where communities can combine their reviewed preprints into lists so that community-reviewed preprints can be discovered together and read as a collection. To aid the discoverability of community lists, Sciety recommends lists to relevant researchers based on the articles they read.

How to form a PeerRef Community

1. Fill in the form below or email elliott@peerref.com to discuss forming a PeerRef Community (please note that Sciety will not participate in overseeing the formation of PeerRef Communities).

2. Identify at least four other researchers that would like to join your community. A community should have a minimum of five researchers. Researchers from the same institution can be part of the same community but shouldn’t peer review each other’s work. Communities should be made up of researchers from a variety of institutions.

3. PeerRef will verify and approve the community.

4. Start requesting and conducting peer review of preprints!

Do you have feedback?

Do you have any feedback on PeerRef Communities? We’d love to hear it. Email elliott@peerref.com or fill in the form below.