Peer Community in Neuroscience: Making Publishing Inclusive and Efficient Through Free Preprint Peer-Review

Abstract

Incentives to have work peer-reviewed by traditional journals are problematic for a globally inclusive research community. The process of years-long delays in sharing new results, on ultimately paywalled venues, builds walls within research communities and is very costly. Many research fields could achieve much more with less through rapid, limitless sharing. In this talk, I discuss an operational solution to the peer-review component, Peer Community In (PCI) (https://peercommunityin.org/) which is a community of active researchers peer-reviewing and acting as editors to recommend publicly accessible preprints. This low-cost system is operated from core funding of the PCI organization, allowing cost of use to authors and readers to remain completely free. The resulting diamond open access, journal-independent, refereed, and recommended preprints can be submitted to journals along with the review reports, thus constituting a preprint-review-curate model.

PCI currently includes 19 subject specific platforms [https://peercommunityin.org/current-pcis/], has the support of over 200 institutions/universities, and has won several open science awards. New PCIs can be launched in fields that are not represented yet, and to give insight into this process, I discuss our experience launching PCI Neuroscience. Our usage statistics show that
the use of PCI is increasing in several fields in the sciences and humanities, demonstrating the usefulness and need for grass-roots-up communities within open research.