Public review of preprints is rapidly gaining momentum, with expert reviews, commentary and recommendations shared on various preprint platforms. In this webinar we look at the current state of preprint peer review and share our thoughts on the future of the preprint review process.

Our first speaker, Tatiana Giraud, a CNRS senior scientist at the University Paris Saclay, Professor at the Ecole Polytechnque and College de France, member of the French Academy of Science and the Peer Community In (PCI) association, will present the PCI initiative, and share her experience reviewing and recommending preprints, her involvement with the PCI initiative, and her outlook on preprint peer review. Next we will hear from Nonia Pariente, the Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Biology, will discuss how editors interact with preprints across PLOS (with some emphasis on PLOS Biology), summarising the results of the PLOS preprint commenting pilot, in which editors looked at preprint comments during the peer-review process, as well as PLOS’es interactions with preprint review initiatives such as Review Commons and Peer Community In. Following on, Thomas Lemberger, Deputy Head of Scientific Publications at EMBO, will present some of the data obtained from running the preprint peer review platform Review Commons. These results will be discussed in the broader context of a cultural shift in the practice of peer review and the role of refereed preprints in the early dissemination of peer reviewed research. Next, Paul Shannon, Head of Technology at eLife, will introduce Sciety, a new web-based tool to enable scholars to discover preprint content via a network of curation and evaluation output. Paul will talk about how Sciety brings peer review, highlights, automated screening and recommendation of preprints together from 16 diverse groups of scientists, while allowing individuals to curate and share lists of preprints to help others navigate the preprint landscape. Finally, Maria Levchenko, Europe PMC Community Manager, will talk about Europe PMC as a unified platform to discover preprints and linked preprint resources, such as community peer reviews. Maria will also look at ways to filter preprints in the absence of journal titles and the role that aggregators like Europe PMC can play to prevent information overload.

About the speakers

Tatiana Giraud is a CNRS senior scientist at the University Paris Saclay, Professor at the Ecole Polytechnque and College de France, and member of the French Academy of Science. Tatiana Giraud is an evolutionary biologist with broad scientific interests. She has contributed to the understanding of speciation, pathogen virulence, host-pathogen coevolution, biological invasions, evolution of cooperation by kin selection, mating systems, apple-tree and cheese fungi domestication, using theory, experiments, population genetics and genomics. Tatiana Giraud is also a member of the Peer Community In (PCI) association and recommender for PCI Evolutionary Biology, PCI Genomics and PCI Ecology.

Nonia Pariente is Editor-in-Chief of the not-for-profit, open access journal PLOS Biology. Nonia trained as a virologist, receiving a PhD from the Autonoma University of Madrid followed by postdoctoral research at the University of California in Los Angeles. In 2007, Nonia joined the EMBO reports editorial team and over 8 years held various editorial roles, joining the launch team of Nature Microbiology in 2015. After handling microbiology on and off at Nature for two years, Nonia became Chief Editor of Nature Microbiology in 2019 and joined PLOS as PLOS Biology Editor-in-Chief in early 2020. 

Thomas Lemberger is Deputy Head of Scientific Publications at EMBO (embo.org) in Heidelberg, Germany. Trained as a molecular biologist, Thomas received his PhD at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He joined EMBO as scientific editor to launch the open access journal Molecular Systems Biology (msb.embopress.org). He was Chief Editor of the journal for more than 10 years. Thomas is currently responsible for data and technology at EMBO Press. He heads the SourceData project (sourcedata.embo.org), developed the Early Evidence Base site (eeb.embo.org) and leads the development of the peer-review platform Review Commons (reviewcommons.org) at EMBO.

Paul Shannon is the Head of Technology at eLife, responsible for technology strategy and delivery, ensuring the team are committed to openness in the products they produce to encourage broad change across the research communication landscape. He is currently leading the development of Sciety, a new web-based tool to enable scholars to discover preprint content via a network of curation and evaluation output.

Maria Levchenko is a Community Manager for Europe PMC, an open literature database for life sciences developed by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). Europe PMC indexes over 300,000 preprints abstracts and full text COVID-19 preprints from 20 life sciences preprint servers alongside published journal articles. Before joining Europe PMC, Maria obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from Georg-August University in Goettingen, Germany, and has worked with the European Research Council (ERC) Executive Agency. Maria is passionate about innovative solutions in scholarly communications that help the research community to advance scientific knowledge.