By George Currie, Content Manager at eLife
Much of what we take for granted in today’s publishing structures and systems result from the practical needs of print publication. While research publishing is now primarily digital and online, the underlying process of article review and publication is fundamentally the same. Research is submitted, reviewed, revised, and then published in what is often a slow process that leaves a lot of uncertainty for authors.
Print publication and physical dissemination of research meant it was prudent to have multiple checks and barriers ahead of publication. Once something’s in print it’s not easy to change and it might be weeks or months until corrections could be issued. But with the technology available to us today, is this how we’d choose to design research publishing?
What is publish, review, curate?
Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) is a method of publishing research that makes the most of the advances in technology and the immediacy of today’s communication.
Image credit: jcomp on Freepik
Research is published or posted as a preprint with a minimum of gatekeeping. Next, it’s reviewed by experts in the field, researchers from overlapping disciplines, anyone with knowledge or expertise to share, or some combination of these. The curation process can take multiple forms and can involve aspects of validation. Curation can be in written assessments that summarise discussion of the reviews, categorisation of the research by different factors or measures, or its placement or publication in lists and collections to better help readers discover it.
The concept of PRC coalesced in a perspective article in PLOS Biology by Bodo M. Stern and Erin K. O’Shea. The “publish first, curate second” approach could move the goalposts away from publication. It could offer more choice and control for authors and enable science communication where evaluation and discussion of the merits of research is an ongoing and nuanced process.
PRC also makes scholarly communication faster. Research can be published in days rather than months. Review and curation becomes an open and ongoing discussion about the merits and limitations of research that can bring together a wide range of expertise for the benefit of everyone. The post-publication evaluation then becomes an inextricable part of the story of that research that informs the reader as well as helping guide revisions of the work.
Momentum in publish, review, curate
PRC publishing options are growing and there are more on the way. Some journals such as eLife and Biophysics Colab have switched over from more traditional approaches to PRC models. We’ve seen “born-PRC” model journals launch such as F1000 and Peer Community Journal, or on the near horizon such as MetaROR.
PRC is the chosen model for Open Research Europe, a platform that provides a free publishing option for research funded by the European Commission – part of a wider push for Open Science practices in European research. We’ve also seen the US-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announce a PRC-friendly policy shift to come into effect next year as well as offer three years of funding to PREreview, an organisation leveraging PRC to help make scholarly publishing more equitable and transparent. Howard Hughes Medical Institute now centrally funds publication fees for research published in PRC models to help encourage authors to participate in innovative approaches by making them more convenient. And late last year, original preprint repository arXiv received $10million from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation to help modernise and improve its infrastructure.
There are many organisations in the scholarly landscape who are all playing a role to facilitate and advance PRC, by either offering solutions for individual steps of PRC, or offering PRC publishing processes such as the eLife Model.
Publish: Preprint servers
Preprints provide a convenient, affordable and equitable alternative, or complement, to traditional journal publishing. PRC provides the scaffolding to give preprinting the benefits and stature of traditional routes to publication. There is a wide range of preprint servers covering different needs. Some focus on subject areas like arXiv, bioRxiv and medRxiv, while some help create visibility of research from particular geographies such as ChinaXiv and IndiRxiv.
While preprints are an ideal starting point for PRC, not all PRC options rely on what we normally consider preprints. While this is perhaps an oddity of how processes and terminology are evolving (e.g. it’s not likely much gets printed at all anymore) articles published in PRC venues such as F1000 and Open Research Europe are not considered preprints and as such can’t be published elsewhere later.
Review: PREreview, Review Commons and PubPeer
Some organisations build on the publishing infrastructure offered by preprints and focus their efforts on the Review part of PRC. While both PREreview and Review Commons facilitate the review of preprints the approach appears slightly different. PREreview is focused on providing equitable solutions for researchers underserved by current structures and systems, whereas the Review Commons process suggests participation in those systems (traditional journal publication) as the likely end point of the journey.
It’s a positive sign that influential research funders are helping to support PRC approaches to publishing. PREreview have recently announced they will receive three year’s funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This not only allows PREreview to continue to drive innovation and cultural change in research but, combined with the Gates’ Foundations 2025 open access policy refresh, perhaps indicates a vision where PRC models are the norm.
Reviewing preprints is not the only way post publication review happens. Journal clubs have long been used to discuss and informally review research and this practice continues both on and offline. The PubPeer website offers a place for anyone to discuss any research article and its handy browser plugin lets readers know if an article they’re looking at has PubPeer comments so you can see what others are saying about it before using it in your own research.
Curate: preLights and Sciety
Curation can exist as something that builds on reviews – distilling them or using them to formally validate an article – but it can also be something that is uncoupled from the review stage. preLights and Sciety offer curation of preprints by and for communities of researchers. This curation helps highlight relevant and interesting preprints within or across communities. It can take the form of creating a list and organising content, using personal and peer recommendations to surface the preprints most likely to be of interest. Or it can also informally reengage with the Review part of the process and users can comment on research, sharing their thoughts and igniting a conversation about the research.
PRC addresses the main criticism of preprints in that they haven’t undergone the scrutiny of peer review nor been validated by publication in a journal. PRC models either present the reviews to the reader – allowing them to make their own minds up –, offer some kind of assessment or validation, or both.
Publish, Review, Curate: eLife, F1000, BioPhysics Colab and more
Organisations are also bringing these elements together and offering end-to-end Publish, Review, Curate experiences for authors.
eLife’s model is one example of a PRC-approach to publishing that still provides all the things authors need from a journal. Authors whose work is reviewed by eLife will then have their Reviewed Preprint published – a citable, DOId article that includes public reviews and an eLife Assessment that many funders accept for evaluation as part of research and researcher assessment. In 2023, BioPhysics Colab were the first group to adopt a version of eLife’s approach to PRC and later this year MetaROR is set to launch a two-year pilot for a PRC model for metaresearch.
Data- and software-focused life science journal, Gigabyte, offers a “release then review” model of publishing. The Peer Community In family of journals focuses on recommendations and published evaluations of preprints. And as mentioned earlier, the F1000 and Open Research Europe (ORE) publishing models offer PRC without preprinting.
Advocacy, Awareness and Training: ASAPbio
Not all organisations working toward PRC are focused on the process. ASAPbio (Accelerating Science And Publishing) is helping create awareness and understanding to help make preprinting and transparent review more common practice. If you’re thinking about taking your first step into PRC then they provide excellent resources and learning materials on preprinting and preprint review.
You can help accelerate change
While appetite and investment in PRC models of publication appears to be growing it is still not what we’d consider standard in research. But broadening community participation can help move the needle toward modes of research communication that are faster, fairer and more transparent.
You can get involved in PRC today: learn about ASAPbio’s FAST framework for preprint review, request a review of a preprint or share your expertise and knowledge in a PREreview, and perhaps dip your toes into PRC and post a preprint of your next paper.
